Brian Robert Moore

A sea of Lallas 🌊🌊 Working on this was not like translating a book, but like translating a whole human heart. Out Aug 26 in the US & Sept 11 in the UK. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to read it for a review! Fans include Jhumpa Lahiri, Ayşegül Savaş, Catherine Lacey💙

6. In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano A reflective, atmospheric memoir exploring the temporal nature of life and love, of places and people that are dearest to the heart. It was a fairly devastating book to read, many moments were viscerally raw but also incredibly touching.

3. My first of his in a while. Céline is a (largely off-screen) antagonist to All the Iron’s hero Benjamin. Does he remain a supreme stylist despite the fact that he sold his soul, or is it precisely because he sold it? After some skepticism, I found this trans. rather impressive

2. Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. The novel’s fraudster dwarf Fischerle is a big character in All the Iron. But rather than Jewish, Mari’s Fischerle is pro-Aryan. He dupes righteous artists & intellectuals like Benjamin with phony literary artifacts, & tries to push them to suicide.

Never done this before, but thought it might be fun to log some of what I read (& watch) for Michele Mari’s supernatural & hyperliterary journey through the arcades of Paris, All the Iron in the Eiffel Tower. Naturally, the work of the novel’s protagonist Walter Benjamin is key!

@kunktation Oh, never mind, I got it now

@kunktation Is it the one about both l'amour and l'après-midi, or?

Dunno but can think of a French movie

What are the best novels about 2 or 3 things?

Why's this a fun novel to do this for? As Adam Mars-Jones wrote in the TLS, it's "a phantasmagoria, closer to the Circe episode of Ulysses... both buoyed and ballasted by a remarkable circumstantial erudition" A trailer for the German ed. conveys the mood: youtube.com/watch?v=9pLWsb…

@ryanhasbadtaste Think you’ll dig this one!

Unfortunately it’s me

For Pasolini’s birthday, why not remember him the way he would’ve wanted: as someone scandalous. Walter Siti’s “The Finishing Touch”: nplusonemag.com/issue-52/ficti…

It seems Michele Mari has gone from "favorite" to "super-favorite" for this year's Strega Prize. ☝️ (And maybe we'll have some more news on his newest novel sooner rather than later!) repubblica.it/cultura/2026/0…

Not sure what's causing the MFA discourse but let me just say again that lovers/haters of writing MFAs should all be happy those classes are generally taught by actual practitioners, i.e. writers. Try looking around at who teaches many of the translation courses in this country

@lauren_wilford Thanks so much for sharing these. Fell in love with Castañeda's work a few years back (and ended up putting a painting on the cover of a book I was then editing).

recently I saw an art exhibition that truly made me both laugh and cry: a retrospective of a painter I had never heard of before, Mexican surrealist Alfredo Castañeda (1938-2010). Every painting felt like an "instant classic," as if it had always been part of the canon 1/

snow as death

Romano reviewed by @stujallen: "I feel this is maybe the sign of how male dominated the translated fiction world used to be.  Now we have these writers, and like a piece of a bigger jigsaw puzzle of 20th-century literature across Europe, they fit together" winstonsdad.blog/2026/02/14/in-…

And now Michele Mari's I CONVITATI DI PIETRA has been voted the best new Italian work of fiction 🍷🍷 A bit paradoxical for an author who's already a living legend, but Mari kind of just feels ascendant right now.

@Sciandi Intervista molto bella, grazie! (E mi ha fatto ricordare con piacere che anche a me aveva offerto una margarita verso le 10 del mattino – sempre molto generoso: tolkajournal.org/read-online/wa…)

Walter Siti: “Esiste una violenza giusta, non è vero che è sempre da condannare” lastampa.it/cultura/2026/0…

Alright, it’s happening. Let’s gooo!