Melville House Books

Book buyer Robert Gray of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont weighs in on an important question in his essay “Should Americans Read More Literature in Translation?” for Words Without Borders. “‘Yes,’ is the quick answer,” Gray notes, “the answer that salves our collective conscience.” But in considering the matter further, Grey writes that he thinks “our basic approach to enticing general readers to visit foreign literary landscapes is flawed.” Grey praises online forums about translated literature and promotes the recent “Reading the World” imitative, a promotional display of translated works from five publishers (Archipelago Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Knopf, and New Directions) that will appear in US bookstores. But it isn’t that people are not exposed to foreign literature, Grey theorizes; rather, book buyers should be convinced of the “enticing prospect of literature in translation being an endless series of great reads.” The task of reading work from other countries, he writes, “is not a list. It’s a pleasure.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.