Orthofer - The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction

M. A. ORTHOFER

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

CONTENTS

More than anywhere else in the world, it is domestic fiction that dominates bookstore shelves, best-seller lists, and media and review coverage in the United States. Tens of thousands of new works of fiction are published annually here, the vast majority by American authors. Most of the rest were also originally written in English, and only a few hundred are translated works of fiction. In almost every other country, foreign literature occupies a central and prominent position, but in the United States it seems to sit far more precariously on the fringes.

Because American authors provide an enormous amount and variety of work, American readers are arguably spoiled for choice even without resorting to fiction from abroad. With novels and stories set in every imaginable localeterrestrial, cosmic, or simply in the minds eyeand styles ranging from the most accessible to the willfully experimental, American fiction could well cover it all. Yet even though the work of writers who speak and write in the same language as their readers do is more approachable than that of those with backgrounds in very different literary traditions, foreign literature can offer entirely new dimensions and perspectives. Publishers and readers may gravitate to the familiar and the local out of convenience, habit, or sheer indolence, but great literature and great books know no borders.

Over the years, there has been an ebb and flow of interest in contemprorary foreign fiction in the United States. In recent decades, writing from abroad has not garnered as much attention as it perhaps should, yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century a far greater and more interesting variety of such fiction is more readily accessible than ever before, just waiting to be discovered and read. Although the large publishers continue to be somewhat reluctant to publish works in translation, there has been an explosion of innovative new ventures exploring new models of publishing translations, complementing an established group of smaller publishers that have found success in focusing largely or exclusively on fiction in translation. The emergence of English as the undisputed lingua franca of the twenty-first century has also led to its widespread use by writers abroad, producing a greater selection of books that do not have to clear the hurdle of translation to reach English-speaking readers. As a result, we may be entering a golden age of literary dissemination and exposure, with more books than ever, from more places than ever, available in English. The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction leads readers into and through this rapidly expanding world.

The Internet has made information about foreign authors and their work, as well as a great deal of the work itself, much more readily accessible. When I founded the Complete Review (complete-review.com) in 1999, one of my goals was to take advantage of the Internets tremendous reach and connectivity. Suddenly, book reviews from print publications, new online resources, and individual readers from across the world were just a link away. Beyond reviews, an enormous amount of literary coverage, in both local languages and English, has been made available, from traditional newspaper stories to discussions in online forums to blogs devoted to every imaginable facet of reading. Professional websitespublishers foreign rights pages, the sites of national organizations promoting local literature abroad such as the French Publishers Agency or the Finnish Literature Exchange, and the sites of international literary agenciesprovide additional up-to-date information and insights into contemporary fiction from many nations. The Complete Review (website) is designed to help connect readers to much of this information. Ironically, though, one of the shortcomings of this and most other Internet resources is its tremendous scope. With reviews of well over three thousand titles on the site, each with links to additional reviews and information available online, the Complete Review provides a great deal of in-depth coverage. While this breadth is helpful when seeking precise information, the bigger picture often remains elusive.

As a print and an e-book, The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction provides an entry point and a more general overview of various nations literatures, as well as a foundation to help readers navigate what is available on the Internet. An appendix to The Complete Review Guide and the accompanying website (www.complete-review.com/guide) also offer an extensive list of additional resources, both in print and online.

Owing to the huge volume of what is published each year in America and the United Kingdom, foreign and translated fiction is easily lost. Moreover, those publishers that specialize in fiction in translation generally cannot compete with the large publishers marketing budgets, and only a few major print review outlets devote significant space to translated fiction. Although the Internet has been a boon to both those seeking information about international writing and examples of it, its greatest use is for those looking for specific rather than general information. Printed reference works on foreign fiction also abound, but most are limited to a very narrow slice of literature, from a certain country or area, period, or genre. Detailed information about specific works, authors, or national literatures is often easy to find, but surprisingly few resources supply broader overviews in manageable form. I wrote this book to fill this void.

In providing an overview of the most interesting and significant contemporary fiction from around the world, The Complete Review Guide hopes to lead readers to new stories, voices, and places.

The Complete Review Guide is organized geographically, with the books and authors arranged by nation and region. Because writers and their fiction move across many borders and languages, national origin, domicile, and language are only rudimentary categories by which to arrange writers. Designations can often be questioned, as even an author whose output is as neatly divided as Vladimir Nabokovs proves difficult to fit into any single national category: he wrote first in Russian while living in exile in Berlin and then in English after moving first to the United States and then to Switzerland. The classification of authors in