EDWARD GAUVIN

Of my work of late at Writers No One Reads, re-posting and broadcasting far more widely my recent WFR piece on Pierre Bettencourt, and at Sequential Highway, where Peter Howard interviews mon ami, comics agent Nicolas Grivel. It was through Grivel’s graces as a tireless promoter of French material and champion of translation that I’ve gotten to translate a number of recent popular and award-winning titles, for which I’m extremely grateful. And the indefatigable Chad Post at Three Percent congratulates this year’s PEN/Heim Translation Fund winners: a most estimable cohort.

Issue #18 of The Dr. T. J. Eckleburg Review, the first print edition, is now available for purchase. It features the Pushcart-nominated  story “The Women Who Watch,” by Belgian fabulist Thomas Owen, first published in the online version of the same litmag last year. If you’d like to give it a listen instead,

Pete Milan can be heard reading it at the horror podcast Pseudopo

d, giving it all the creepiness it deserves. Here’s an excerpt:

A man was walking by: dreamy, so lost in thought that a blackbird, shooting by like a bullet, almost knocked him off-balance. He stopped, collected himself slowly. From where he stood, he could see the old lady in a sunbeam, spotlit like a person in a play…

Why had this little old stranger—banal, uninteresting, insignificant—caught his eye?  As he drew closer, she lost her hieratic aspect. Remaining still all the while, stuck on an imaginary tack like a little gunner, she began to come alive in a remarkable way. Frozen there almost ominously, her gaze fixed on his, exerting a kind of magnetism. Such that, beneath their imperious interrogation, he submitted to what could only be called a strange enthrallment.

Sometimes such gazes meet your own: they seem to know you, seek to pierce your silence. And so, anywhere at all, you might stumble across such women, who stare at you as at someone familiar.

Also up at Anomalous this month in print and audio is Jean Ferry’s “A Tear in His Eye,” which begins with these bewitching words:

Who among us, at that age when we grow curious about fantastical tales, hasn’t been captivated by the story of that character who describes himself as endowed by the creator with the face of a hyena, lips of bronze, eyes of jasper, and a reproductive organ much closer to the deadly viper than a harmless phallus?

What are you waiting for? Go read! The issue can also be downloaded in its entirety in pdf or Kindle format, or as an mp3 audiobook.

The Translations page (in the left sidebar) is now fully up to date through mid-2013, including some forthcoming publications. – ed.