A Couple Reminders, a Few Teases
And previews of what's coming in December.
Unlike 99.99% of the posts that I’ve written over the past two decades, this one has no weird rubrics, no goofy stats, no underlying listicles—honest! I’m saving all that fun stuff for later in the month . . .
Mainly, I just wanted to make a few quick announcements along with teasing what else is in the works for December.
The most important, and to some, unfortunate, bit of news is that, for reasons which will be more transparent in the last post of 2025, Open Letter won’t be having a holiday sale this year. Instead, we’ll be kicking off 2026 with a huge sale on all of our titles—which might be the best way to start a new year? So, save some of your holiday cash for a 2026 OL blowout, and in the meantime, I encourage you to order our titles via Bookshop.org, where you can peruse the entire Open Letter catalog far more easily than you can on our website, if I’m being honest.
Sticking with the most practical of stuff, a reminder: December 15th is the first deadline for applying to the MA in Literary Translation Studies program at the University of Rochester. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis, with February 1 and March 15 being the next two deadlines, but there are a limited number of slots in the program, so it’s highly recommended that you apply sooner rather than later.
MALTS is a 30-credit program, typically completed over a full calendar year, in which students take classes on translation theory, international literature, and creative writing, intern with Open Letter, and complete a full-length, publishable translation. (Which Open Letter will carefully consider for publication.) There’s a lot of flexibility baked into the program, allowing students to really shape their experience and focus on what they want to get out of it, be that academic chops, time to “do the reps” and practice the art and craft of translation in a supportive environment, or focus on gaining practical experience through Open Letter.
Click here for more information, and/or check out this post from a few weeks back.
Now, if you’re not ready to commit to grad school, but would still like to work with Open Letter, well, you’re in luck! We are looking to fill four part-time internship positions in editorial, sales & marketing, social media, and publicity for the spring term.
Each internship will last from January through April (with opportunities also available in the Summer and Fall, more info to come), requires an approximately 6 to 8-hour a week commitment, and can be done either in person or remotely.
Unfortunately, we do not currently have funding to directly pay interns for their work, however, we can offer ten free Open Letter titles and a free two-year subscription.
To apply, simply email me, Chad, by December 15th with your CV and a brief cover letter indicating which position most interests you and why. Be sure to include “INTERN” in the subject line so that it doesn’t get buried.
Now onto the preview portion of things . . .
On Thursday, the Two Month Review will return from its one-week hiatus and will resume talking about The Tunnel by William H. Gass. Episodes six through eight of this season will drop this month (we’re taking the week of Christmas off to celebrate the holidays), covering “Why Windows Are Important to Me,” with special guest Chris Via, “The First Winter of My Married Life,” with special guest Lori Feathers, and “The Curse of Colleagues.” (In other words, we’ll be talking about pages 282–437 over these three episodes). The complete schedule can be found here.
And as a bit of a teaser, we’ll be announcing the TMR titles for seasons 30 and 31 at some point during these three episodes . . . In the spirit of tease, here are a couple clues in case you want to try and guess what’s coming: both books are translations, and it’s likely that I’ll compare each one to Tristram Shandy and Twin Peaks. You can also tie them both into The Tunnel, one more in terms of theme, one other in terms of its global setting. OK, enough hints!
Sticking with podcasts for a moment, there are four other podcasts lined up for this month across the Three Percent and Mining the Dalkey Archive Substacks.
For the Three Percent Podcast, K.E. Semmel and I will be discussing The Calf by Leif Høghaug & David M. Smith, an absolutely nutso book (technical term) about a UFO (maybe), a labyrinthine underground office (like in Severence?), and something that happened on a late-summer night in Mare Cooter Canyon—all narrated by a mechanical barn gnome?
And the plot isn’t even the wildest aspect of this book! David translated this from Norwegian into an Appalachian dialect that includes elisions, mispellings, and, well reads like this:
These past few days I been thankin an’ thankin bout a late summer night I tried a long time to fergit. I’s a-settin here a-thankin an’ a-writin an’ soon enuff you like’ta realize that everthang I’s a-thankin an’ a-writin . . . naw it’s these voices, man . . . it’s these chaintooth voices, way down inside this ol’wore-out metal warsh-tub noggin o’mine, it’s them what’s talkin an’ talkin, churnin an’ rattlin, on an’ on they go.
Both Leif Høghaug and David will be joining us to talk about all these translation choices, writing in dialect in Norway, the tradition of it in English, the influence of Finnegans Wake, and much more.
George Henson and Mark Haber will also be coming on the Three Percent Podcast to talk about George’s translation of Married Life by Sergio Pitol, which just came out last week. This is the seventh work of Pitol’s that George has translated, and to celebrate, we’re going to talk about the book, Pitol’s lasting influence, and, in typical podcast fashion ca. 2025, have a draft in which we try to convince anyone who hasn’t read Pitol that they must . . .
And, as a bonus, Mark might preview his forthcoming novel, ADA, which comes out in July 2026 from Coffee House.
Over at the Mining the Dalkey Archive Podcast, Mark Polizzotti will be joining me this month to talk about the recent reissues of Harry Mathews’s works and about Mark’s translation of The Emotions by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. We’ll also likely talk about Mark’s other work, including Sympathy for the Traitor, Why Surrealism Matters, and his translation of Command Performance by Jean Echenoz.
And last but not least, this month’s installment in the Mining the Dalkey Archive Podcast: Irish Edition, Vince Francone and I will be looking at Rob Doyle’s Threshold. Although not a book published by Dalkey Archive, Doyle did edit The Other Irish Tradition for Dalkey, and John O’Brien was a big fan of his work. So, close enough.
And for those of you who don’t have time for podcasts, or prefer the written posts (which are more crafted, and less spontaneous), there are a number of really fun pieces in the works.
In a couple weeks we’ll preview Fortress of the Forgotten Ones by Fahmida Riaz & Sana Chaudry, which is the first winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation to be published. This comes out in March 2026 and is the book that convinced me that historical fiction can be both interesting and fun. (And, tangentially, was one of the reasons I’m now reading Graves’s I, Claudius.) In typical Open Letter fashion, it’s a novel about a rebellious figure trying to right the injustices of society, especially in terms of wealth. There is palace intrigue, philosophical musings, more than a hint of feminist thinking, and some bits that are pretty funny when you recount them . . .
I’ll also be kicking off a project digging into Open Letter’s backlist with a post about a sales stat I invented and Ingrid Winterbach’s To Hell with Cronjé. Spoiler: It’s been more than a decade since I last read Winterbach, and now I’m rereading everything of hers—and trying to get my hands on her latest titles, which have yet to make their way into the U.S. . . .
This month’s update to the Translation Database should be really epic, with a ton of new data added, and the post associated with this will focus, sort of, on the eight recent translations that I’ll be using in my spring class on World Literature. (LTST 206/406 if you happen to a U of R student with an open slot in your schedule.) As with other iterations of this post—been writing these class previews for quite a while now—it’ll be about more than just the books themselves . . . See this post for an example. (And for some great book recommendations!)
Finally, there’s an epic year-end post in the offing that will celebrate all things Open Letter, and kick off our next era in style.
As long as you’re subscribed to this Substack, you’ll get notifications on all of the posts and podcasts referenced above.
And if you’re interested in Dalkey Archive Press, please subscribe to Mining the Dalkey Archive to receive notifications about the MDAP podcasts referenced above, reprints of articles from CONTEXT Magazine, and lengthy features on specific Dalkey Archive titles, authors, or series, interspersed with stories from Dalkey’s past and present.