Posts From Author: susan sontag
Roberto Bolaño’s Expanding Universe
The first English translation of one of Roberto Bolaño’s novels was published in 2003, the same year he died, at the age of fifty, of liver failure. Susan Sontag was his anglophone herald, referring to him, in her notes on By Night in Chile, as “the most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux published The Savage Detectives in a translation by Natasha Wimmer in 2007; it sold 22,000 copies in its first year. 2666, a colossal work unfinished at Bolaño’s death, followed in 2008. As Chris Andrews reports in his new book, “Within days of publication, Farrar, Straus rushed out a second printing, bringing the total to more than 75,000 copies.” These are exceptional figures in the realm of translated fiction, not least as only two or three percent of books published in the US each year began life in other languages. Why Bolaño? Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe (Columbia University Press, 2014) is the work of a person who can perhaps answer that question with greater authority than most. Andrews has translated six novels and four short-story collections by Bolaño, and his close readings of the work are the bedrock of this […]
Read MoreBloody Brilliant Michael Friedman
Michael Friedman is the composer and lyricist behind an astonishing range of theatrical output over the last fifteen years. He wrote his first musical for The Civilians, a downtown theatre group he helped co-found in 2001. Canard, Canard, Goose? was also The Civilians’ first show, taking as its subject alleged geese abuse on the set of the Hollywood movie Fly Away Home. The Civilians’ method of working is a little like verbatim theatre in that the shows are based on interviews with real people. What’s different is that the final product is a heightened version of what emerged from those interviews, as you can probably tell from the sublimely silly Canard (the plot of which effectively disintegrates when the Civilians team realises that the movie wasn’t in fact shot in the hamlet where it was set but in Ontario). You can hear the whole show in this podcast recording of the 10th anniversary concert performance at Joe’s Pub. Canard set the offbeat tone for an eclectic career. Friedman went on to write the music for a series of shows, some with The Civilians, some not, including In the Bubble, based on the John Travolta movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble; the children’s show Katie Couric’s The Brand […]
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