Best European Fiction 2010

It becomes noticeable that the blog changes its mission (if one exists at all) from practical to theorical, especially starting from 2010. Of course, the blog did not have a look of place which pressumably could have been called the lab of translation. It looks, however, more like an information desk or classified pages of a newspaper. Well, frankly speaking I like it this way.

So what I'm going to write about today? I'm going to leave poetry aside (at least until tomorrow) and speak about an anthology of prose, Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), the cover of which you may observe above. The authors? There're a bunch of them - but I will speak about them later. Except for the authors and translators, the main figures are Bosnian American fiction writer, Aleksander Hemon (no, we don't have his books in Ukrainian), an editor, and British writer, Zadie Smith (yes, we do have her White Teeth in Ukrainian translation), an author of preface, who, as I understand it, took care of this valuable volume.

European poetry, the one which is not composed in English, very slowly but confidently started to move toward the expantion of English-speaking territories. Now it's a turn of prose - it's definitely worth of reading.

What is left is to name the contributors. Here they are: Ornela Vorpsi, Antonio Fian, Peter Terrin, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Igor Štiks, Georgi Gospodinov, Neven Ušumović, Naja Marie Aidt, Elo Viiding, Juhani Brander, Christine Montalbetti, George Konrád, Steinar Bragi, Julian Gough, Orna Ní Choileáin, Giulio Mozzi (AKA Carlo Dalcielo), Inga Abele, Mathias Ospelt, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, Goce Smilevski, Stephan Enter, Jon Fosse, Michal Witkowski, Valter Hugo Mãe, Cosmin Manolache, Victor Pelevin, David Albahari, Peter Krištúfek, Andrej Blatnik, Julián Ríos, Josep M. Fonalleras, Peter Stamm, Deborah Levy, Alasdair Gray, Penny Simpson.