local writers and international markets

I'm almost using the same title that Ronaldo Menéndez (Cuban writer) has used in his article of today's 'Babelia'. 

(click here to read the whole article)

In this article, he explores a situation that is common to many writers from Latin America: they find it hard to get published in countries other than their own and, above all, here in Spain. 

For many of them being published in other Spanish speaking countries means leaving behind the label of 'local' writers and becoming 'international' authors (obviously, we could also use 'successful' instead of 'international'). Menéndez says that the difficulties in achieving this goal contribute to the creation of certain myths among writers. Myhts that can become painful and damaging for those writers who subscribe them. 

Myths that sustain the everlasting confrontation between a center and a periphery.

I won't comment the whole article but I wanted to stress that I believe this situation, the myth of internationalisation (or success) is not endemical of authors living in Southern America and wanting to get published in Spain (as a gate towards a wider market). I think the same happens in English, French, Portuguese, etc... speaking countries.

From my experience I've seen that it is hard that an Angolan author published in Angola will see his/her work published or distributed in Portugal.  But, and this is what I'd like to stress, many 'central' writers also find it hard to reach the so-called 'periphery'. Not all writers from Spain get published in (let's say) Argentina or Panamá. 

And not all writers from US or UK get published in New Zealand... so, at the end of the day, and as Ménendez wisely points out the danger of promoting and encouraging those myths is that they can become a source of anguish and self-marginalisation.

It is also true that as long as there are Mexicans published in Spain, and Brazilian published in Angola, and Nigerian published in Australia, etc. there is hope for books to travel abroad, and even to get translated into other languages. In a way, this is one of the reasons why we, literary agents, exist.

The literary industry has nothing to do with the individual writer who in his/her solitude strugles to put words toghether in order to deliver us a text. So, writers, get to write, publishers and agents, get to read, and the rest... get to the closest bookshop and ask for books by authors who live far away from you!

Morder-te o Coração by Patricia Reis shortlisted for the Premio Portugal Telecom de Literatura 2008

Patrícia Reis (b 1970) began her journalistic career in 1988 working in different Portuguese and international media: ‘O independente’, ‘Sábado’, ‘Marie Claire’. She moved to New York to work at ‘Time Magazine’ and back in Portugal she produced a TV show entitled ‘Sexulidades’ and collaborated with the newspapers ‘Expresso’ and ‘Público’and the magazine ‘Elle’. She now lives in Portugal and is the publisher of her own magazine ‘Egoísta’ and partner of the Design Atelier 004.

She is the author of the photo-novel Beija -me (Kiss Me, 2006), the novella Cruz das Almas (Cross of Souls, 2004), and of the novels Amor em Segunda Mão (Second Hand Love, 2006) and Morder-te o Coração (To Bite your Heart, 2007), all published by Dom Quixote. Her new novel, entitled No silencio de Deus (In God’s Silence), will be published in Portugal in September 2008 and in March 2009 in Brazil (by Lingua Geral)

Morder-te o Coração (2007) is a "hallucinating love story that takes us through the mazes of desire and solitude" (according to author Ines Pedrosa), and drags us to the limits of the conventions of genre, sex and love. Patrícia Reis' transparent and communicating writing wins body and thickness in this polyphonic narrative orchestrated by the obsession of a Great and Ideal Love (that infinite light that simultaneously blinds and enlights the intimate truth of each one of us).

The novel tells the story of a woman and a man who had been lovers, their story of accords and discords, her escape, his search and attempt to start all over in Stockholm, memories of childhood, the voice of an African lover they both shared. All in all, a hooking insight on the many faces of love and sex.

As the title suggests, this book bites our hearts with equal doses of tenderness and sharpness, of joy and pain.

“Quando te pedi para me morderes o coração era só para me certificar que ele existia no meu peito. Tu preferiste beijar-me, nunca me mordeste e, assim, fiquei sem saber."

(When I asked you to bite my heart it was just to make sure it existed in my breast. You choose kissing me, never biting, and thus I remained unsure.)

To visit the website of Premio Portugal Telecom de Literatura click here

The novel is also published in Brazil by Lingua Geral. All rights (except Portuguese) are free.

info@salmaialit.com

Antònia Vicens’ Dry Land translated into German

Valentia has published the German translation of Terra Seca (Dry Land).

Antònia Vicens is a Veteran of Catalan Literature. Since she won the Sant Jordi Award in 1967, with only 26 years of age, she has published over twenty titles characterized by her finely crafted irony and her genuine sense of aesthetics. Some of them have been translated into Spanish, German, or Italian.

Terra seca tells us about the sorrows of a failed politician with high ambitions, a dinner to which the guests will never arrive, a group of women trapped by their condition and a neurotic man that despite being the protagonist of the novel does not take part in the action.

Half way between reality and nightmare, this novel stands as a symbol of the lost dreams of a young and idealistic generation who lived the Spanish political transition into democracy back in the late 1970s.

The novel was originally published in Catalan and was shortlisted for the Ramon Llull Novel Award. It was then translated into Spanish by Planeta.

Antònia Vicens (Majorca, Spain, 1941) was born and brought up in the grey world of the Franco era and the limitations of Balearic society, Antònia Vicens astonished both public and critics alike with her first novel, 39º a l'ombra (39ºC in the Shadow, Sant Jordi prize, 1967), translated into German (Elfenbein Verlag, 2001) and reissued many times in Catalan. Vicens' prose is at once spontaneous and poetic, with a great capacity to recreate Mallorcan speech in literary form. This has been followed by further novels, and more prizes, such as the 1981 Ciutat de Palma Prize and the 1984 Ciutat de València Prize; her latest novel is Ungles perfectes (Perfect Nails, Proa, 2007).
Last year, one of her short stories was included in the anthology Willkomen in Katalonien. Eine literarische Entdeckungsreise (Germany, DTV, 2007).

Tierra seca, by Antònia Vicens
Planeta
180pp

Rights available: World (except German, Catalan and Spanish)

Mizé, by Ricardo Adolfo. German editon out

In a few days (August 9th) the translation into German of Ricardo Adolfo's 'Mizé' will come out, published by Bloomsbury Berlin.

Set in the outskirts of Lisbon this is the story of a man who loved the idea of loving a woman, and a woman who loved the idea of being loved by many men. It’s a research on living in an imaginary dimension created by ambitions and wishes, where an ensemble of suburban characters struggles to fulfil their dreams – while struggling with their petty conditions, the daily grind, and bigger aspirations than they could possibly handle.

With a very peculiar point of view, these characters take us into an exploration of double moral standards, ambiguity and into the grey zones that we all operate in. 'Mizé' is a story of fiction versus fiction, where truth doesn’t exist, but lie doesn’t either.

Mizé was originally published in Portuguese in 2006 by Dom Quixote.

Rights sold: Bloomsbury Berlin (Germany) in a pre-empt, Querido (Netherlands) and Suma – Santillana Group (Spain).

For other rights contact info@salmaialit.com

Turkish rights of 'The Transylvanian Effect', by Juan Ramón Biedma, sold to Kirmizi Kedi

I’m happy to announce the sale of Turkish rights of Juan Ramón Biedma’s ‘El efecto Transilvania’ (The Transylvanian Effect) to Kirmizi Kedi Yayincilik. The novel was published in Spanish last April 2008 by RocaEditotrial.

Intersecting fantasy, thriller and horror, Biedma transforms Seville, the book’s setting, into a surrealistic parallel of itself to tell us about schizophrenia.
The story follows Eme, a teenage boy who has just been released from the hospital but has no recollection of how or why he landed there in the first place. As a series of uncanny events unfold around him (enormous drawings appear suddenly on the ground, plants bloom living animals instead of flowers, hundreds of black kites rise from a single neighborhood), Eme begins to suspect that it all has something to do with the recently opened replica of the Peruvian pyramid of Mahuachi. As Eme attempts to solve the mystery and save his recently abducted love interest, he is continually thwarted by the Transylvanian Effect, a psychological haze inflicted by the lunar cycle.

Critics have compared the work to those by Poe, Lovecraft, Boris Vian, and Jean Ray, and in 2009, RocaEditorial will publish a sequel that finds Eme and the other characters as adults. The working title is ‘El humo en la botella’ (Smoke in a Bottle).

Rights available: World (except Spanish and Turkish). Contact info@salmaialit.com for more information.

Greek rights of The Edge of Grass, by Harkaitz Cano, sold to Konidaris Publications

I'm very happy to announce the deal for Greek rights of Harkaitz Cano's novel El filo de la hierba (The Edge of Grass), which will be published in Greece by Konidaris Publications.
The novel (123pp.) is published in Basque and in Spanish (Lettera/RocaEditorial).

Despite his youth, Harkaitz Cano (b. 1975) is consolidated as one of the best contemporary Basque writers. His mixture of modernism, poetical insight and an accurate narrative rhythm comes at equal parts from the classics of literature, the comics, the cinema and the music. His works, with echoes of Raymond Carver and Paul Auster, have received important awards such as the 2005 Critics Award (for his collection of short stories Neguzko zirkua –Winter Circus). His last published novel, El filo de la hierba (The Edge of Grass) has received the Euskadi Award for Literature. It is a Modernist fable set in New York with Adolf Hitler and Charles Chaplin as main characters.

The hipothesis of the Nazis invading the USA is nothing new in literature and it has fascinated authors such as Philip Roth in The Conspiracy Against America or, even before him, Philip K. Dick in his masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. Harkaitz Cano departs from this premise to build a short and poignant allegoric story about freedom.

The novel begins with Hitler on board of a German battleship en route to New York. Far away from dying in his bunker in 1945, the Führer has won World War II. After the conquest of Europe, his next objective is New York, and afterwards America. The British actor and filmmaker Charles Chaplin, tortured and as a prisoner of the Führer, is also a passenger of that ship. He is a victim of Hitler’s rage in revenge for his film The Great Dictator.

Many years before, in 1886, a Frenchman called Olivier Legrand travelled as a stowaway in the same ship that transported the Statue of Liberty from France to New York. The statue, of 225 tons of weight, was made out of 300 pieces that were packed in more than 200 cases. The only piece that wasn’t packed in a case was the crown of the Statue, inside of which Olivier hid during the four weeks of the journey through the Atlantic ocean.

El filo de la hierba interlocks between the lives of Chaplin and Legrand until they both meet each other in a New York occupied by the Nazis (Chaplin had managed to escape from Hitler's vessel but is severily ill) and the old Frenchman, who is now almost 90 years old, decides to hide Chaplin in his small appartment, where the actor will slowly recover. From this moment on, with Wagner’s music sounding all over the city and with Hitler trying to take control over Hollywood, the reader will be kept on tenterhooks until the end of the novel.

As the title suggests, this short novel is just like the flexible and soft grass, which edge is sharp as a knife.

Translation rights (except Greek) are available. Contact: bernat@salmaialit.com

10 short chapters about changes in the World of Books

Robert McCrum, the literary editor of 'The Observer' (UK) has left his job after ten years. The newspaper 'The Guardian/Books' publishes a very interesting decalogue written by McCrum that summarizes his experience of ten years from his privileged position.

As the article says "When he started it was a world of 'cigarettes, coffee and strong drink'. But that has all changed - new writers, big money, the internet, lucrative prizes and literary festivals have all helped revolutionise the books world".

Read it all by clicking here!

Modotti, by Ángel de la Calle - a great Graphic Novel

Tina Modotti (in the picture by Edward Weston, in 1923) was a woman of the 20th Century: photographer, actress, muse to writers and artists, politically engaged, free, poliphacetic, and witness to many important events and artistical landmarks.

Editorial SinSentido has published a graphic biography of this extraordinary character created (text & illustrations) by Ángel de la Calle: 'Modotti: Una mujer del siglo XX'

De la Calle tells us about Modotti's life, a continuing adventure. A beautiful Hoolywood star at an early age, she moved to the post-revolutionary Mexico where she became actively engaged with the communist party, took thousands of photographs and also became the lover of almost as many men... she also was friends with artists of her time such as Mayakovsky, Bernard Tavern, Antonio Machado, Neruda, Diego Rivera, John Dos Passos, Frida Khalo...

She lived her time, from the glamourous 'Belle Epoque' to the Europe of the Totalitarism in the 1930s, lived Spain during the Civil War and flew back to Mexico escaping from Franco. She died there years after, alone and in a taxi.

In 'Modotti' Ángel de la Calle becomes himself a character who incidentally finds a picture of Tina Modotti and starts investigating about her life. Thus, the book becomes not only a biography of the photographer but also a hooking voyage of discovery, admiration and devotion towards her personality and her work.

Tina Modotti's life, now revisited by Ángel de la Calle in this magnificent graphic novel, stands alone as an exampe, and a lesson, of personal freedom.

Here you have the first page of the book (in English translation). Click on it to enlarge and read it.

Translation rights have already been sold in Italy and in Brazil.

good perspectives for book sales

Last week RocaEditorial's blog pointed out that despite the warnings of a global crisis, sales figures in the Spanish book industry were not bad at all. In fact, some hints may prove that in 2008 more books will be sold in Spain than in the previous year.

All in all, this could be seen as good news for the industry (and for all those who make their living out of it, agents and authors included). However, the everlasting question remains: is this growing tendency as beneficial to small publishers as it to big groups? Are new, or not still consolidated authors, to experience an increase in sales of their titles? Or is it that a new genre, the 'Megaseller' as some have already labelled it, is emerging and it takes with him the increase in sales? The debate, as always, is open and interesting.

On Saturday, the newspaper 'El País' published an article following Roca's thesis: See both articles by clicking the highlighted items, or just follow these links:
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/libro/le/sienta/bien/crisis/elpepicul/20080524elpepicul_1/Tes

http://rocaeditorial.blogspot.com/2008/05/crisis-en-el-sector-del-libro.html

Small Publishers - Big challenges

There's a very interesting article in today's edition of 'El País' about the new independent Spanish Publishers. In a time in which the debate about reading rates, editorial saturation, crab literature vs literary quality, etc... is hot and controversial, a group of empreneurs struggle against big pubishing groups to get the most precious trophy: readers.

Amongst these independent and small publishers we can find: Libros del Asteroide, Minúscula, Periférica, Sexto Piso, Funambulista, Páginas de Espuma, Gadir, Nórdica, Barataria, Bartleby, Ediciones del Viento, Laetoli, Menoscuarto, Candaya, Global Rhythm, Cabaret Voltaire, Rey Lear, Melusina, Berenice, KRK, Bassarai, Abada, Katz, Marbot...

Read the whole article by clicking HERE.

In the meantime, another interesting article about the much-talked-about Kindle (Amazon's electronic reader device) announces that Amazon is strongly pushing efforts to promote again it's device... The article appears on 'The Mootley Fool', a website devoted to stock investments.

As the article says, "less than half of the Kindle reviewers have given the device Amazon's highest five-star rating. If these are the early adopters who didn't flinch at the $400 price tag, the reviews won't get much better until Amazon either improves the features or lowers the price".

Could this be a hint that sales of the Kindle are not as high as expected? Or is it just that it hasn't taken off yet? As they always say, the future will tell...