Category: Interviews

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Archipelago at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Archipelago Books will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this Sunday, October 2 – we’d love to see you there! You can find us all day at Booth 411, where we’ll be selling many of the wonderful books on our backlist. We’ll also be at the Center for Brooklyn History at 12 pm EST, where Scholastique Mukasonga – whose novel Kibogo was just longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award – and Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin will discuss time, myth, and community in a conversation moderated by Publishers Weekly fiction editor David Varno.

More event details can be found on the Brooklyn Book Festival website, here.

 

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Andrea Bajani on Brad Listi’s OTHERPPL

Brad Listi hosted Andrea Bajani on his podcast Otherppl! Their conversation is available now.

On the program, they discuss Bajani’s novel If You Kept a Record of Sins, recently published by Archipelago Books, in a striking translation by Elizabeth Harris. Bajani and Listi talk about Bajani’s inspirations for the novel, the writing process, and more. You can listen to the interview on Otherppl’s website, here, or on LitHub Radio, here.

Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. He lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.

Otherppl is a podcast hosted by Brad Listi, author of the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and founder of The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community.

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Dreams Are Instruments of Liberation: José Eduardo Agualusa interviewed in Bomb Magazine

This week, Bomb Magazine published an interview of José Eduardo Agualusa by Bibi Deitz. They talk about Agualusa’s novel, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, and how dreams, social movements, and photography all affect his writing. As Deitz notes in her introduction to the interview: “To read José Eduardo Agualusa is less like being transported to another world and more like getting thrown into the very real world in which we live: The colors are brighter, the sun beats a bit hotter, and people let their dreams affect them more acutely.”

You can read the interview on Bomb’s website, here.

José Eduardo Agualusa was born in Huambo, Angola in 1960. He studied agronomy and forestry in Lisbon before he began his work as a writer. His novel Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and he received the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons in 2007. He and his translator, Daniel Hahn, won the 2017 Dublin Literary Award for A General Theory of Oblivion and in 2019, he won Angola’s most prestigious literary prize, the National Prize for Culture and Arts.

Bibi Deitz lives and writes in Brooklyn, and recently finished her first novel; more at bibideitz.com.

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Donald Nicholson-Smith and Caleb Crain converse about Treasure of the Spanish Civil War

Donald Nicholson-Smith, translator of Serge Pey’s Treasure of the Spanish Civil War, read from his translation and conversed with Caleb Crain about genre, immigration, magical realism, anarchism, and more at a recent Zoom talk hosted by Community Bookstore. Watch a recording of the conversation below.

Donald Nicholson-Smith has translated works by Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, and J. B. Pontalis, among other writers. His translation of In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laâbi was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017.

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Daniel Hahn discusses The Society of Reluctant Dreamers with Malaprop’s Bookstore

Daniel Hahn, who translated José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Society of Reluctant Dreamers from the original Portuguese, was interviewed via videoconference by Justin Souther, Malaprop’s Senior Buyer and Bookstore Manager in late April. Hahn has written numerous books of nonfiction and has translated the works of Juan Pablo Villalobos, Fernando Vilela, Julián Fuks, and Carola Saavedra, among others.  You can watch Daniel and Justin’s conversation below.

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Katherine Silver interviewed in the Believer

Katherine Silver’s translation of Juan Carlos Onetti’s short stories came out in November of this year.

“An elusive puppeteer, a wizard behind a curtain, someone heard but not seen.” Katherine Silver thus describes her work as a translator in a recent interview with The Believer. Silver translated Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Dream Come True which Archipelago published this fall.

“Language-based artistic activity is not self-expression, even if it does start with that as a spark, an initial impulse, but…it then must dive deeply into the only true commons we have, language, and from there craft something beyond the self.” Read more at the link below!

An Interview with Katherine Silver