Lovely Links

Apologies for my silence - there is a reason, but I'm not revealing it quite yet.

Here's a quick round-up of links to keep you going:

Lovely Harvill Secker editor Rebecca Carter in a podcast about "the joys of doing books in translation".

Last Saturday's Guardian has a rave review of Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation (trans: Susan Bernofsky) by Michel Faber. Then yesterday, John Hopkins asked on the Guardian books blog if there is such a thing as the Great European Novel - and would we ever see it in English?

Also in the Guardian - which is fast becoming the place to go for newspaper coverage of world fiction - Maya Jaggi interviews Günter Grass. Grass' book The Box (trans: Krishna Winston) is a milder sequel to the autobiographical Peeling the Onion, this time narrated in the voices of his eight children (poor kids) and is out in the UK now.

And the New York Times has a long article by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, attempting to explain the whole awful debate over Islam and leitkultur (neatly explained by translator Ciaran Cronin as "guiding national culture"):

That we are experiencing a relapse into this ethnic understanding of our liberal constitution is bad enough. It doesn’t make things any better that today leitkultur is defined not by “German culture” but by religion. With an arrogant appropriation of Judaism — and an incredible disregard for the fate the Jews suffered in Germany — the apologists of the leitkultur now appeal to the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” which distinguishes “us” from the foreigners.

A View From This Bridge

Rebecca Carter is an editor at Harvill Secker, part of Random House and - correct me if I'm wrong - probably the only major publisher in Britain with a decent line in international fiction. And Rebecca also writes a fascinating weekly blog by the name of A View From This Bridge, revealing the ins and outs of an editor's working life. This week I've contributed a guest piece moaning about how all we ever get is German books with Nazis in them.