The panel (top photo, l.-r.): Michael Reynolds, Judith Gurewich, Declan Spring, and Jill Schoolman. Photos by William Neumann

LJ Prepub Alert editor Barbara Hoffert moderated the "Reading the World" panel, which featured representatives from four publishers at the forefront of works in translation—Other Press, Archipelago Books, Europa Editions, and New Directions Publishing. For those not familiar with their work, Hoffert began with a brief introduction, noting that Other published Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (a 2015 LJ Best Books “More of the Best” title), while New Directions introduced American readers to Roberto Bolaño, Archipelago to Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Europa to Elena Ferrante. Judith Gurewich (publisher, Other) began the publishers' presentations. The four upcoming titles she highlighted were Jenny Rogneby’s Leona: The Die Is Cast (Aug.), Eshkol Nevo’s Three Floors Up (Oct.), Edgar Feuchtwanger’s Hitler, My Neighbor: Memories of a Jewish Childhood, 1929−1939 (Nov.), and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat (Nov.). “Through the personal, he examines the political,” she said about Israeli author Nevo’s book, a comment that could describe many of the books presented at the panel. Gurewich's titles ranged widely from Rogneby's Swedish thriller to Ali's work, a classic of modern Turkish literature getting its first translation. Jill Schoolman (publisher, Archipelago) followed, offering four titles she and the press are excited about. They were Ivailo Petrov’s Wolf Hunt (available now), Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Map Drawn by a Spy (Aug.), Antonio Tabucchi’s For Isabel: A Mandala (Sept.), and Christine Angot’s Incest (Nov.). She said that Petrov’s book, originally published in 1986 in Bulgaria, “talks about the Eastern Bloc in a new way” and explained that the works by Cabrera Infante and Angot cross the fiction/nonfiction divide. Where should they be shelved? "In both sections," she recommended. Declan Spring (vp, senior editor, & director of foreign rights, New Directions) discussed a bit of history of the press, founded by James Laughlin in 1936, before highlighting three titles: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (Sept.), László Krasznahorkai’s The World Goes On (Nov.), and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Aug.). Erpenbeck's book  is fiction dealing critically with Europe's refugee crisis, and Spring said that the story collection by Hungarian author Krasznahorkai, the 2015 Man Booker International prize winner, is one of the author’s best works. Michael Reynolds (editor in chief, Europa) finished the panel by discussing four upcoming titles. They were Hiromi Kawakami’s The Nakano Thrift Shop (June), Andrea Camilleri’s The Sacco Gang (Dec.), Nicola Lagioia’s Ferocity (Oct.), and Santiago Gamboa’s Return to the Dark Valley (Sept.). Arguing that Europa' aims toward entertaining reading, he noted that Kawakami’s book is the first that Europa has published by a Japanese author and that Italian author Lagioia’s book will likely appeal to readers of Ferrante.

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