Historian S.M. Plokhy’s narrative of the Yalta summit is the first to draw on Soviet documents declassified in the 1990s. (State Archive of The Russian Federation)
Shelf Life
Finds in translation
Historian S.M. Plokhy’s narrative of the Yalta summit is the first to draw on Soviet documents declassified in the 1990s. (State Archive of The Russian Federation)
Like foreign films, books translated into English from other languages frequently face difficulties in finding an audience. It is estimated that such works account for no more than 3 percent of the American book market.
Three Percent, an online clearinghouse affiliated with Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, has set out to raise the profile of books in translation. Every year Three Percent names its top 25 picks, judged on the quality of the original work and the translation.
This year’s list includes two Nobel Prize winners, an author living in the African nation of Djibouti, and a story collection published by Clockroot Books of Northampton. “Landscape with Dog and Other Stories” by the Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos was translated by Karen Emmerich. Sotiropoulos’s novel “Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees,” a black comedy, also published in translation by Clockroot Books, was the first work to win Greece’s national literature prize and its preeminent book critics’ award.
Hilary Plum, a cofounder of Clockroot, used words from “The Pinball King,” one of the stories in the collection, to describe the sense of mystery that permeates Sotiropoulos’s writing: It’s like “when you think you recognize a silhouette on the street and follow it for a few blocks, then turn down some other street without finding out who it was.” Plum added, “This without-finding-out is a great summary of her work: It’s not that she leaves you hanging, but that she makes you see how in fact you leave yourself hanging.”
Busy trio at BU
Over at Boston University’s graduate creative writing program, faculty members have been busy with their own works. Ha Jin has a new story collection, “A Good Fall.” Allegra Goodman’s novel “The Cookbook Collector” will be published in July.And poet Louise Glück’s “A Village Life” is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. The threesome will join their colleagues in the annual faculty readings at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the BU School of Management Auditorium, 595 Commonwealth Ave.
New view on the summit
Harvard historian S.M. Plokhy has produced a gripping narrative of the eight days in February 1945 when the Big Three - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin - convened the Yalta summit as World War II raged on.Based on voluminous research, “Yalta: The Price of Peace” (Viking) is the first history of the gathering to draw on Soviet documents that were declassified in the 1990s. At Yalta, the three leaders redrew the borders of Eastern Europe, approved a major aerial bombing campaign, established the framework for the United Nations, and partitioned Germany.
Roosevelt was criticized for his role in the talks, but Plokhy offers a more generous assessment of what he achieved two months before his death.
Coming out
■“Boston Baby: A Field Guide for Urban Parents,” by Kim Foley MacKinnon (Union Park)
■“Worst Case,” by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge (Little, Brown)
■“On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System,” by Henry M. Paulson (Business Plus)
Pick of the week
Elizabeth Merritt of Titcomb’s Bookshop in East Sandwich recommends “The Postmistress’’ by Sarah Blake (Putnam): “This compelling story is the perfect answer to that request, ‘I want a really good book I can get lost in.’ This World War II story of three memorable women has a strong sense of place - from the shores of Cape Cod to war-torn London.’’Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com. 
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
