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With the new anthology Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press; 421 pages), edited by Chicago-based writer Aleksandar Hemon, our literary world just got wider. Hemon, an award-winning author who was born in Sarajevo and did not begin writing in English until he was in his early 30s, is an excellent guide to the European sensibility. And Best European is an exhilarating read. With stories from 35 nations and regions from Albania to Wales, it's like a Eurail pass that lets you tour a continent's worth of psychological landscapes. Trying to take in all of them...
...Dalkey Archive Press hopes the 2010 edition will be the first in an annual series. That sounds good to Hemon, who says readership of foreign fiction needs to be cultivated over time. But the hunger for it is there: "There's a tradition of exceptionalism and insularity in America, but there's also a tradition of openness and interest in other parts of the world." In the book's preface, Zadie Smith writes, "I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day." Best European Fiction puts...
...health-care systems, a group of writers from both countries has attempted a similar bit of serendipity, this time to help revive the corpse of Franco-American understanding. As You Were Saying, a slim volume dreamed up by French and U.S. cultural mandarins and published by America's Dalkey Archive Press, contains seven works of short fiction - or twice that many, depending on how you count. Seven prominent French authors were asked to contribute the beginnings of a story. Each tale was then given to an American writer to complete, revise or otherwise respond...
...published in each other's countries. That puts them in a select group: only 3% of new titles appearing in the U.S. each year are translations (vs. about 20% in France). As You Were Saying is proof that foreign writers can be every bit as readable as the locals. Dalkey has printed a relatively ambitious 15,000 copies, and the organizers plan sequels, possibly in other languages. "This book was imagined as a place of discovery and dialogue between cultures," says Guy Walter, director of Lyons' government-subsidized Villa Gillet cultural center and one of the editors...
...rediscovery is the latest in a line of literary good deeds by the Dalkey Archive Press, which is becoming a major force on the global literary scene. Based in Normal, Illinois, the nonprofit publishing house has been unearthing lost treasures for two decades. Founded by American critic John O'Brien, the Dalkey Archive takes its name from a 1964 novel of that title by the late, hard-drinking Irish writer Flann O'Brien (no kin), one of the firm's early reprints. The surviving O'Brien and his team have since uncovered more than 300 new and out-of-print...