Shelfari

Omni Daily News

By Lauren Nemroff

Hemingway a KGB Agent?:  While a restored edition of Hemingway's classic A Moveable Feast is now available, the author's reputation might also require a bit of restoration. The newly released history Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (discussed in today's Guardian) describes how Hemingway was recruited and placed on the Soviet's list of U.S. agents. [The Guardian]

Trio of Picks from TLS Editor:  Author and editor Peter Strothard of the Times Literary Supplement calls out three unusual summer picks that have (almost) nothing to do with the UK. Think Scarlet, Simone, and Swinburne. [The Daily Beast]

Graham Greene Novel Lost and Found:  The LA Times reports that an unfinished early novel from a very green Graham Greene has resurfaced.  The 1929 manuscript "The Man Within" (written by author when he was just 22) will be serialized in the Strand Magazine. [Los Angeles Times]

Moving & Shaking:  Janet Maslin's review of The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes in yesterday's New York Times propels the book from a rank of 50,000 (or so) up to #29 in our Movers & Shakers list. We've also tapped this fascinating history of Romantic-era science as one our Best of July picks which features an exclusive Oliver Sacks bite-sized review.

--Lauren

Omni Daily News

By Brad Thomas Parsons

"Rock Stars of Yeast and Flour": Cookstr's Katie Workman catches up with urban bakers Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, owners of Brooklyn and Charleston's Baked outposts and the authors of Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. [The Daily Beast]

True Crime: Bestselling author John Grisham is working on a screenplay of the 1997 rape and murder of Navy wife Michelle Moore-Bosko and the "Norfolk four," who Grisham believes were wrongly convicted. [The Virginian-Pilot]

Another Famous Book by Nabokov?: Playboy magazine has secured first serial rights to Vladimir Nabokov's The Original Of Laura, the late author's final, unfinished novella.  [The New York Observer]

Moving & Shaking: This morning's No. 1 Mover & Shaker, Richard Hughes's 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, thanks to Andrew Sean Greer's "You Must Read This" praise on All Things Considered. "To say A High Wind in Jamaica is a novel about children who
are abducted by pirates is to make it seem like a children's book. But
that's completely wrong; its theme is actually how heartless children
are." [NPR]

--BTP

The Best Books of the Year So Far

By Tom

Every summer about this time we Amazon books editors get together and look back at the books from the first six months of the year and choose our favorites for our Best of the Year ... So Far lists. With the glut of year-end best-of lists these days (we're guilty too!), I'm surprised more folks haven't followed our lead, but it seems like we still have the midyear field to ourselves.

This year we've chosen ten overall favorites, as well as four more lists of ten in Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Readers, and the always-hazy catchall category we call "Hidden Gems" (which includes both lesser-known picks and one-of-a-kind books that don't easily fit our other categories). Given the provisional nature of the lists, and the summer-vacation timing, we don't rank the lists the way we do at the end of the year. If you're a regular Omni or Amazon reader you'll recognize a number of these choices from our Best of the Month picks, but this is a way of highlighting the books that have stuck with us the most during the year, as well as those that we may have overlooked in the monthly frenzy.

You can read short reviews of all of these on our BOTYSF pages, and on the right side of each of the category lists you can find a guide to some of the books we're most looking forward to in the next six months of the year.

Overall Top 10:

• Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
• Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann
• Let the Great World Spin by Colin McCann
• The City & The City by China Mieville
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad
• The Gamble by Thomas E. Ricks
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
• Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Fiction:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
• Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.
• Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
• Border Songs by Jim Lynch
• Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Lowboy by John Wray

Nonfiction:

• Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
• Nine Lives by Dan Baum
• Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
• Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
• How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy
• A Strange Eventful History by Michael Holroyd
• The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney
• Ratioby Michael Ruhlman
• When Skateboards Will Be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Young Readers:

• The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
• Toby Alone by Timothee de Fombelle
• Scat by Carl Hiaasen
• Down, Down, Down by Steve Jenkins
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
• The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
• Little Oink by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Jen Corace
• All in a Day by Cynthia Rylant and Nikki McClure
• Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy by David Soman and Jacky Davis

Hidden Gems:

• Genesis by Bernard Beckett
• The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
• The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert
• Sir John Hargrave's Mischief Maker's Manual by Sir John Hargraves
• The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen
• The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh
• Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel
• George Sprott: 1894-1975 by Seth
• Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton
• Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

--Tom

Omni Daily News

By Tom

The big reveal: Doubleday pulled back the curtain this morning on the Vince Flynn-ish cover of Dan Brown's long-awaited thriller,The Lost Symbol, giving us one clue to the shrouded storyline: it looks as though the rotunda through which Robert Langdon will be sprinting is not in the Vatican this time, but on Capitol Hill. (Don't run over Al Franken!) You can also see the UK cover (same dome, less cardinal-red) below.

The Best of the Booker National Book Award: Following the example of the Best of the Booker Prize (now won twice byMidnight's Children), the National Book Foundation announced today that this year they will be awarding The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction prize. Out of the 77 winners in the 60 years of the award (it's complicated), a panel of 600 writers will choose 6 books for the shortlist, and the public will get to vote on the winner, starting on September 21. (I'll be posting more on this later.)

Authors v. reviewers, part XLVII:Lev Grossman and Helen DeWitt (here and here) weigh in on the Alain de Botton/Caleb Crain "Is it appropriate to publicly wish for the death of your reviewers online?" hoo-ha. First of all, great news that DeWitt, author of one of my favorite recent books,The Last Samurai, is blogging (I'm late to the party--she's been at it since '07), and says she is "trying to finish 5 books in 2009" (!). And Grossman's piece, written as both author and reviewer, is funny, and includes this recommendation for Amazon:

When you click to post a review, a little pop-up box should come up. It
should say, PLEASE BE ADVISED, UNLESS HE OR SHE IS DEAD OR A LUDDITE,
THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK HAS A GOOGLE ALERT SET UP FOR HIM OR HERSELF
AND HIS OR HER BOOK. DO NOT BE IN ANY DOUBT, THE AUTHOR WILL READ YOUR
REVIEW, AND IF IT IS A PAN, THEY WILL FEEL BAD. ARE YOU STILL UP FOR
THIS (Y/N)?

Moving & shaking: Up into our top 100, Ian Halperin's well-timed Michael Jackson expose,Unmasked: The Final Years of Michael Jackson, which was sent to the printer the day before Jackson's death under the title Michael Jackson: Return from Exile and then pulled back for a quick rewrite. For what it's worth, here are the pedigrees of the author and publisher: Halperin is the author of, among other books,Who Killed Kurt Cobain?, while Pierre Turgeon, the Montreal publisher, recently pled guilty to fraud (not that these two facts are necessarily equivalent). (See more Movers & Shakers.)

--Tom

Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers

By Tom

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Walter Kirn on Methland by Nick Reding: "The book, wrought from old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting of a type
  that's disappearing faster than nonfranchised lunch counters on Main
  Street, isn't chiefly a tale of drugs and crime, of dysfunction and
  despair, but a recession-era tragedy scaled for an 'Our Town,' Thornton Wilder stage and seemingly based on a script by William S. Burroughs. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and
  consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of
  Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives,
  get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally,
  wasted. In the meanwhile, the traffickers fatten in their dens,
  expanding their arsenals and their private armies, some of whose troops
  are recruited from the ranks of the pale zombies their business spawns."
• Dominique Browning onThe Bolter by Frances Osborne: "Alcohol. Cocaine. Promiscuity. Nympho­mania. Wife swapping. Divorce.
  Profligate spending. ­Sixties swingers? Merely rocking in their
  cradles. The beautiful and damned of New York's Roaring Twenties?
  Neophytes vomiting on the sidewalks. It was the British colonialists in
  1920s Africa, the Happy Valley set, who took partying to mythic
  heights, or depths, depending on your perspective. They didn't stop
  until their lives were in smithereens. And the internationally
  celebrated and reviled high priestess of this crowd ... was Idina Sackville.... Out of countless trunks and boxes of letters and diaries pours the
  unremittingly sad story of a legendary woman, and an unnerving portrait
  of upper-crust London and colonial Africa in the early 20th century."
• Garner onLast Journey by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell Griffin Jr.: "Two soldiers in dress greens knocked on the door, came inside to deliver their news and then walked back out. It's
  an all-too-common scene, but it arrives at the beginning of an uncommon
  book, one in which a mourning father has scooped up a dead son's e-mail
  messages, blog posts and journal entries and combined them with his own
  observations. He's made something that is, at worst, ungainly, but at
  best raw and true and unvarnished and strange, its own kind of outsider
  art."
• Maslin on Free by Chris Anderson (andCheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell): "But after beating the drum for giveaways throughout most of his book,
  Mr. Anderson eventually acknowledges that his idea is in fact not
  viable. Such are the perils of his sloppily constructed sweeping
  argument. No, he doesn't envision an economy based entirely on
  giveaways. 'Free may be the best price, but it can't be the only one,'
  he says. He advocates the balancing of differently priced versions for
  different markets, acknowledging that this tricky balance is not easily
  achieved." [Not to keep picking on Maslin here, but what she claims as a reluctantly confessed exception to his "sweeping argument" is, in fact, his argument.]

Washington Post:

• Marie Arana onThe Ascent of George Washington by John Ferling: "Once in a while a book comes along to remind us that history has no
  gods, that the past is less fossil than textbooks suggest and America
  more vibrant than a mere list of principles. John Ferling's 'Ascent of
  George Washington' is just such a book: a fresh, clear-eyed portrait of
  the full-blooded political animal that was George Washington.... It's as if a trusted historian with ample laurels were taking us aside,
  speaking to us like adults, letting us in on the very grown-up
  information that the father of our country may have been a great man in
  very many ways, but was also as cunning and as complicated as any
  modern-day politician."
• Charles onA Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck: "Gorgeously printed by New York's premier publishing house, here is a
  baffling 500-page book about Frankenstein's creation that defies
  description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.... I'm sure somewhere there's a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough)
  to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the
  entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind. Having survived
  the encounter, though, I'm eager to brag about it, and even if 'The
  Monster's Notes' is nothing you want to experience firsthand, it's a
  remarkable creation, a baroque opera of grief, laced with lines of
  haunting beauty and profundity."

Los Angeles Times:

• Joanna Smith Rakoff onHeroic Measures by Jill Ciment: "Given that Jill Ciment's 'Heroic Measures' opens in the months
  following Sept. 11, it's hardly surprising that one of her geriatric
  heroines should find 'the anxiety of being left alone in the apartment
  became too much for her . . . particularly as dusk fell and nocturnal
  shadows grew menacing, and her sense of loneliness and old age became
  inseparable.' What is surprising -- like much in this brave, generous,
  nearly perfect novel -- is that this particular character, Dorothy, is
  a dachshund. And yet, Ciment manages to pull off this risky,
  sentiment-baiting maneuver, an accomplishment previously attained only
  by the likes of Tolstoy."
• Wendy Smith onCamus: A Romance by Elizabeth Hawes: "Misjudged first as an avatar of existentialism, then as an out-of-touch
  reactionary, he was in fact, Elizabeth Hawes reveals in her intimate
  study, a deeply private man propelled into the public arena by the
  tides of history and his sense of responsibility.... What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being: the
  charming friend, the seductive womanizer, the lifelong outsider 'from
  somewhere else.' ... We get a bit too much of Hawes in her frankly confessional narrative,
  but perhaps that's what she needed to do to give us so much of Camus
  with such perceptiveness and warmth."
  

The Globe and Mail:

• Sheila Heti onTrue to Life and Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler: "The result is two deeply engaging volumes, intimate portraits of what
  it feels like to think about art for so long, and to be on a passionate
  search. Weschler writes with the suspense and pacing of a detective
  novelist, and we intimately accompany the artists through their
  epiphanies, doubts and discoveries, wondering what corner they're
  likely to turn next.... The reader puts down these volumes with new eyes, seeing the world as
  if for the first time, or as if one has stepped out of a great art
  museum on an afternoon on which one has been particularly receptive."
• Brad McKay onA Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi: "In A Drifting Life, he attempts to transform the solitary life
  of the cartoonist into an outsized adventure story, and the creative
  process behind the form into something genuinely exciting. This is the
  cartoonist as heroic protagonist.... For anyone who has been fortunate enough to fall under the spell of
  Tatsumi's groundbreaking work of the 1960s and '70s, this book will
  prove a compelling and worthwhile read. And for those brave souls
  aspiring to become a cartoonist themselves, A Drifting Life will prove to be indispensable."

The Guardian:

• Martin Amis onMy Father's Tears by John Updike: "This piece would have gone unwritten if its subject were still alive.
  In the last three decades I have published about 15,000 words of more
  or less unqualified praise of John Updike, and his achievement remains
  immortal.... Updike's prose, that fantastic engine of euphony, of first-echelon
  perception, and of a wit both vicious and all-forgiving, has in this
  book lost its compass. Formerly, you used to reread Updike's sentences
  in a spirit of incredulous admiration. Here, too often, you reread them
  wondering a) what they mean, or b) why they're there, or c) how they
  survived composition, routine reappraisal, and proof-checking without
  causing a spasm of horrified self-correction."
• Sarah Churchwell on Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas: "All this self-conscious literariness risks becoming as solipsistic as
  the protagonist - and as pretentious. While allusions and quotations
  pile up, storylines and characters disappear.... But the book is unquestionably redeemed by its intelligence, its
  ambition - and most of all by the lovely, bluesy riffs it ceaselessly
  plays on old American standards."

The New Yorker:

• Malcolm Gladwell on Chris Anderson's Free: "'Information wants to be free,' Anderson tells us, 'in the same way
  that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.' But
  information can't actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants
  the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon
  makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful
  companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? ... The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about,
  which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which
  things are made and sold that there are no iron laws." [Anderson has responded on his blog to one of the questions that Gladwell raises.]

--Tom

Omni Daily Crush: "Nobody Move"

By Tom

How strange is it that, within a few months of each other this year, two of the most ambitious novelists around, each coming off a vast, long-in-the-works epic, have made theNo Country for Old Men move, writing a lighter, more accessible genre piece that has gotten compared to Elmore Leonard? In May, Denis Johnson, fresh off the 720-page, National Book Award-winning (and beloved by me)Tree of Smoke, released Nobody Move (which I was too timid to keep up with when it was serialized earlier in Playboy). And in August comes the new Thomas Pynchon (a phrase that has in the past sent Godzilla-like shudders through the literary earth),Inherent Vice, complete with a Tim Dorsey-style cover after the more solemn packaging of his previous book, the ambivalently received thousand-pager,Against the Day.

I've just cracked the Pynchon, but so far I'm hearing more Tom Robbins than Leonard. Nobody Move, though? Well, it's a very good Elmore Leonard book--and that's a very good thing. Like Leonard, Johnson's so spare with the words that he often leaves off the subject of a sentence. Starts right in with the verb. And like Leonard, his bad guys (and they're all bad guys) manage to be both bumbling and ingenious, brutal and charming. And best of all, like Leonard, his banter crackles (and is a reminder of how sharp Johnson's dialogue is in anything he writes, whether it's an intricate, dreamy war drama or a lean little crime thriller). Here's the little bit I read out loud to my wife the other day, which made her put down Anna Karenina and pick this one up (and swallow it whole, laughing all the way). The two main bad guys--the ones you root for--are buying a change of clothes at a JCPenney:

    She changed into the pantsuit, gray pinstripe, and made sure she had her shoulders back and her smile on before she swept aside the curtain. "Does it fit?"
    He stared, and then he went for his Camels and put one between his lips, realized where he was, dropped the cigarette into his shopping bag. "It fits."
    "You're sweet," she said, and she sort of meant it. But not as a compliment. "You're homeless, right?"
    "I have a home. I'm just not going back there, is all."
    "So right in that shopping bag is everything you own."
    "Everything I need."
    "And your white canvas bag--what's in that one?"
    "Everything else I need."
    "I know what's in it. A sawed-off shotgun."
    He seemed completely unsurprised. "It's not a sawed-off. It's a pistol grip. And it isn't mine."
    "I peeked in the bag while you were in the shower."
    "You zipped it up real nice," he said. "Good for you."

And on it goes--it goes down easy. --Tom

Omni Daily News

By Tom

1916-2009/1961-1968: Robert Strange McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and the lead architect of the first half of the Vietnam War, died today at the age of 93. You could read for decades to understand his life and works (as McNamara himself apparently did in his later years), but you could begin with the lengthy obit in the Times today (byLegacy of Ashes author Tim Weiner), and then move to his self-searching memoir (criticized by many as not self-searching enough),In Retrospect, to the Pentagon Papers, which he commissioned and which pushed his turn against the war, to Deborah Shapley's out-of-print biography, Promise and Power, and to two influential accounts, David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, and Dereliction of Duty, the harshly critical military history by future general and Petraeus advisor H.R. McMaster.

Some like it hot: The Guardian (with some help from other writers) chooses their "50 best summer reads ever," chosen apparently for their sweltering and/or exotic settings. Coincidence or not, but my most memorable summer reads (defined as books that sucked me in thoroughly in a way only possible on vacation) took place about as far as you could get from the beaches where I read them: in Russia (Anna Karenina) and on Mount Everest (Into Thin Air).

Moving and shaking: High on our current Movers & Shakers list (it was even higher yesterday) of books seeing the largest jumps in Amazon sales rank is Albert Payson Terhune's Lad: A Dog. Why the bump for a book from 1919? Nicholas Kristof's July 4 Times column about "The Best Kids' Books Ever," which called Lad "simply the best book ever about a pet." (Another Kristof canine favorite that's moving and shaking into our top 200: Farley Mowat's The Dog Who Wouldn't Be.) But after the video clip I posted last week, I've very surprised Kristof didn't choose any Beverly Cleary books, even her own dog book,Ribsy.

--Tom

Greasing the Pan: The Best of Paul T. Riddell Provides an Alternative History of SF/Fantasy

By Jeff VanderMeer

Paul T. Riddell's Greasing the Pan collects over one hundred articles, essays, polemics, and reviews connected to the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Written in the 1990s and early 2000s, these pieces constitute an alternative history of genre, and thus are extremely valuable to anyone interested in a different point of view. What do I mean by a different point of view? Riddell constantly tests and pokes at various assumptions common to the field--about the value of awards, of conventions, and much else. In that Riddell's an absurdist, he resembles Hunter S. Thompson, although with a more limited subject matter.

At times, he goes too far, his enthusiasm and his passion making his conclusions suspect. But that said, there's so much food for thought here for any fan of genre fiction. To give you an idea of how much of a gadfly Riddell seemed at the time, here are a few titles of his essays: "A Bestiary of Fan Boys," "Why Science Fiction Needs a Respite from Costume Competitions," "Tina Brown to Take Over Editorship of Asimov's [SF Magazine]," "Conventions and Other Forms of Vocational Suicide," "and "Bruce Sterling Fitted with Self-Promotion Inhibitor." At times, his confrontational approach backfired, in the sense that the heat generated tended to override measured discussion of a particular issue. But there's much to admire in the fact that very few other writers were willing to take on the sacred cows of genre. And, too, there're great essays on science in here, including "Anarchy and Palaeontology," "The Problems with Cloning Dinosaurs," and "A Study of Theropod Dinosaur Psychology and Social Habits Using Unorthodox Sources."

The almost 500 pages of text showcase a lively and inquisitive mind, one equipped with a strong sense of what's fair and what's unfair, and able to see the bitter humor in all kinds of genre-related craziness. It's often in tone like reading an unholy combination of Harlan Ellison and Joe Bob Briggs.

For those not familiar with the SF/fantasy subculture, that subculture can be a quagmire of special interests, eccentricity, and spirited argument--much like a dysfunctional family. Most of the time, this family, in the final analysis, loves its members, but Riddell often got the short end of the stick in this regard. Too many people didn't understand that his full frontal assaults came out of a love for everything connected to genre, and an inability to quietly stand by while witnessing stupidity. 

Considering that Paul T. Riddell often credits me with part of his decision to leave the world of writing about science fiction and fantasy, it may seem ironic that I'm featuring his collected nonfiction here. But the fact is, as much as I might've disagreed with Riddell on certain topics, I've always respected his willingness to put himself on the line to discuss things that other writers were too cowardly to take on. The always entertaining Greasing the Pan, then, is a great way for SF/fantasy fans to get another view of the field. (Also check out his companion volume, The Savage Pen of Onan.)

 

EotWKLRU is on vacation

By Paul

The End-o'-the-Week Kid-Lit Roundup will be back, but we've been taking it easy this weekend--as you can see here, with Silas taking a post-parade, pre-BBQ, Fourth-of-July nap:

We've been busy reading upcoming books, though, and here are a few Silas-approved recommendations:

 

 

(Little Blue and Little Yellow will also be available in October in a 50th Anniversary edition.)

Comics in Translation: A Conversation with Kim Thompson of Fantagraphics Books

By Heidi

Norwegian-born Jason has written comics and graphic novels for years in both his native Norwegian and in French. Fantagraphics first published his graphic novella Hey, Wait... in 2001, and he's been building a steady base of U.S. fans ever since.

His latest collection, Low Moon (including the chess-battle Western "Low Moon" serialized in the New York Times Magazine in 2008), has filmic moments and comic pathos that have set a new standard for me for short fiction.

None of us would ever get to enjoy the wry dialogue of Low Moon or I Killed Adolf Hitler or The Left Bank Gang without the efforts of Fantagraphics' co-publisher and translator, Kim Thompson.

Jason is just one of many cartoonists that Thompson has translated for Fantagraphics Books. In fact, he says that translations represent about 10 to 15 percent of what they publish every year.

Thompson graciously agreed to answer my translation and Jason questions:

Amazon.com: How did you first encounter Jason's work, and how did Fantagraphics decide to publish it?

Kim Thompson: To be honest, I'm not sure if his Norwegian publisher sent me copies or I saw the French edition of Hey, Wait..., but I do know that the minute I laid eyes on it I knew we wanted to publish it. Love at first sight!

Amazon.com: Was he the first comic artist you translated? What others do you translate now?

KT: No, no, not by a wide margin. I was translating Freddy Milton (Danish), Franquin and Hermann (French) and others way back in the 1980s, twenty years ago.

I translate pretty much every European foreign-language cartoonist we publish except for Matti Hagelberg who is Finnish (Finnish is well outside of my area of expertise) and a couple who do their own translations, such as Max Andersson. A more or less complete list of cartoonists whose comics I've worked on in the last couple years would be Nikoline Werdelin (Danish); Joost Swarte (Dutch); David B., Emile Bravo, Killoffer, Jacques Tardi, and Lewis Trondheim (French); Nicolas Mahler (German); Gabriella Giandelli, Igort, Leila Marzocchi, and Sergio Ponchione (Italian); Jason (Norwegian or French); Max (Spanish); and Martin Kellerman (Swedish). I also translated a bunch of captions from many of those languages in our upcoming book of ANTI-WAR CARTOONS.

In case you're wondering, I don't actually SPEAK all of those languages, but I can read them, more or less in some cases. My mother is Danish so Danish is my native language. Swedish and Norwegian are so close to Danish (they're basically almost dialects of one another -- in fact Norwegian and Danish were the same language not too long ago) that with a little work any Dane can read them pretty well, as I do. I learned Spanish in high school and kept up with it. I lived for six years in Germany and also studied German in high school, so that stuck with me too. I lived for three years in Holland. Italian is my weakest language, I sort of plow my way through that thanks to French and Spanish and use of a dictionary -- but all my Italian translations I always check with the authors anyway.

Amazon.com: Translation is such an immersive experience, even more than editing, and I wonder, do you feel differently attached or connected to the works you translate than to other works you publish?

KT: Yes, at times I feel almost like a co-creator. Which is arrogantly excessive, and the feeling fades soon enough! But I'm also more invested in these books because I work so hard on them, and in many cases, of course, such as Tardi, I'm literally fulfilling a childhood dream by translating them.

Amazon.com: What is the actual process of the Jason translations? Does he send you rough sketches with words, so you can translate them before they are typeset? Does he send you phrases that he wants translated? Does he write in English at all?

KT: Jason creates the entire story in French, draws and letters it, sends me the finished French version. (I think he sometimes actually does a draft for himself in English first from which he derives the French version, but I don't see that.) Then I translate that: We delete the French lettering in Photoshop and replace it with my translation, usually using an English Jason font. (Jason's original is hand lettered, of course.)

Jason did hand letter the English language version of Hey, Wait... himself before we developed the font, and he did hand letter the Low Moon book because the "Low Moon" story itself was done in English to begin with (since it was done for the New York Times) and he wanted a consistent look for the book. Hand lettering is always preferable but it's rare that you have a cartoonist willing to re-do all that work -- although Jason's comics are often not very wordy, so it's easier for him. We do have an excellent font, I think, which we've used on all the other four-color and two-color books we've done, as well as the anthologies Pocket Full of Rain and Meow, Baby!

Amazon.com: Jason's work is so influenced by American pop culture and films. Does that make them easier or harder to translate? (i.e., easy b/c he can communicate a lot with a familiar genre, like the Western in "Low Moon," and hard because he sometimes jokes about specific pop cultural references, although I'd say that happens more in his early work. But that must have been a challenge in putting together Pocket Full of Rain.)

KT: I have a lot more difficulty with pop-culture reference in something like Rocky, since Martin Kellerman uses a lot of Swedish references. You try translating a joke about a Swedish rapper! (Even worse, Kellerman has a lot of STOCKHOLM-specific references.) Jason's references are almost never to Norwegian pop culture, and the references to French pop culture are usually internationally well-known enough that it's no problem. In the next book he's doing there's a sequence where they discuss female French movie stars, but everyone knows Brigitte Bardot and Juliette Binoche.

As you point out some of his earlier books have references to Norwegian pop culture, but he and I worked on finding international equivalents. It was fine.

He's also cognizant that his work is being translated internationally now, so I'm guessing he'll avoid any too specific French references. But his cultural tastes are really very American, or for international work that is known in America. It's totally not a problem.

Amazon.com: Jason's comedy is pretty visual, with the deadpan two-shots and other moments of inaction that totally crack me up. But in some stories it's the dialogue that kills--for example, in Low Moon, "Early Film Noir", where the dead/resurrected husband keeps coming back with the same line again and again, or the awkward sexuality of "Emily Says Hello." I guess my question is, do those types of jokes translate pretty directly, or do they require some cultural tweaking and back-and-forth?

KT: It's pretty direct. Jason's dialogue is very straightforward (probably also because he's a native Norwegian working in French) so it's just a matter of finding a suitably deadpan equivalent in English. Any tweaking back and forth is usually finding the exact right tone, almost never with any confusion about cultural equivalents.

Amazon.com: Do you have a favorite story in Low Moon, and why is it your favorite?

KT: Each story has different qualities that I appreciate. I think the funniest moment in the book is in "&," the fat character's decision to kill one of his rivals as signaled by a microscopic, typically deadpan shift in his eyeline toward the roof above them from which he will soon dispatch a lethal projectile. Kind of Chuck Jones Wile E. Coyote moment. (See? Another U.S. reference!)

Thanks, Kim. Low Moon is on sale now.--Heidi