Links Roundup

My little Jiminy Cricket is shrieking at me for not posting anything all week. Boring work and personal issues, sorry.

So here's a brief list of links to people who did bother to bring you content.

English PEN promotes books in translation and has now brought out an "anthology containing extracts from the 36 books that the programme has supported since its inception. Making the World Legible contains a dazzling array of fiction, non-fiction and poetry from some of the best international writers of our time; distinct and powerful voices from every corner of the globe." Download it for free via English PEN for extracts from German-language writers Emine Sevgi Özdamar (trans. Martin Chalmers), Roger Willemsen (trans. Stefan Tobler), Senait Mehari (t. Christine Lo), Saša Stanišić (t. Anthea Bell), Ruth Maier (t. Jamie Bulloch) - and loads of other stuff. (Via Three Percent)

Tubuk is a platform for German-language books from independent publishers (I wrote about them in 2008), and they've started a blog. Over the summer they're featuring original pieces by some of their (and oddly enough, my) favourite writers. Worth checking out.

Which takes me link-hopping over to the Mairisch Verlag blog, where you really need to scroll down to about May for a German's eye view of the book world in and around San Francisco. Or go straight to the pieces about City Lights, Microcosm Publishing, McSweeney's, and loads more that I can't be bothered to link to. Tags would be nice, guys.

Los Superdemokraticos is "a blog running from June to October 2010, remembering 200 years of independency of Latin American countries. 20 German- and Spanish-speaking writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, Israel, Mexiko, Peru, Uruguay, USA and Venezuela)" write about their daily lives in international political contexts. Apparently there'll be five texts translated into English every month but they're not up there yet. The German writers are young and dynamic and good.

It'll be raining poems in Berlin on 28 August, trade mag Börsenblatt tells us. A helicopter will scatter 100,000 bookmarks printed with poetry by German and Chilean writers over the Museum Island. Don't forget your umbrella.