Angelo Hernandez Sias
Somewhere and Everywhere | Reading Literature in Translation
Angelo Hernandez Sias, Carey Baraka, Marta Figlerowicz, Michael Barron, Na Zhong, Siddhartha Deb, Yasmin Zaher, Zain Khalid
For too long, the American publishing industry has faced inward, bringing English-language writers to English-language readers, and sequestering everything outside the Anglosphere into a single, vague category of “world literature.” In 2007, only three percent of books put out in the U.S. were translations, and this sliver hardly offered a truly global tour: according to a study of translated titles published between 2008 and 2020, 45 percent were originally written...
And One Day the Work Dies
Angelo Hernandez Sias
A man dies while out clubbing, then watches as his body is brought to the home of a famous fashion designer, who fondles it. This is the plot of “The Return,” a late story by Roberto Bolaño. It is also the plot of Bolaño’s authorial afterlife. In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many...
Customs / Psychological | Fiction
Angelo Hernandez Sias
CUSTOMS Julio was halfway through a text to Deja when the guard scanning his passport ordered him to follow. It was a slow, excruciating text, typed into the phone bought for him after the mugging, a brick, eight bucks, courtesy of the Foundation, i.e., one blue-eyed program coordinator who had taken pity on him, him and Sadiya both — Do you need a new one, the coordinator said, come with...
