EDWARD GAUVIN

Subtropics 9, the translation issue, will be published in January 2010, featuring fiction by J. M. G. Le Clezio, Marco Denevi, Fumiko Enchi, Gyula Krudy, Ervin Lazar, and Bernard Quiriny; a memoir by Mark Girshin; and poems from the French, Catalan, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Tagalog, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, Latin, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Japanese. Translators include Alison Anderson, John Batki, Martha Collins, Fred Ellison, Michael Emmerich, Edward Gauvin, Jim Kates, Alexis Levitin, Christian Nagle, Andrea Nemeth Newhauser, Idra Novey, Jose Reyes, Marian Schwartz, and Lawrence Venuti.

Matching up names: my translation is of “A Guide to Famous Stabbings” by Bernard Quiriny, a bright star in the current Belgian Francophone firmament. Quiriny’s first book, L’Angoisse de la première phrase [Fear of the First Line], from which this story is taken, was published in 2005 by Phébus, and received the Prix Littéraire de la Vocation, a prize previously won by such notables as Christophe Bataille, Amélie Nothomb, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Didier Van Cauwelaert, and Shan Sa. His second book of short stories, Contes Carnivores (Le Seuil, 2008), won Belgium’s top literary prize, the Prix Rossel. It was prefaced by Enrique Vila-Matas, whose work is referenced in “Stabbings.” Born in 1978, Quiriny lives in Bourgogne, where he studied with political philosopher Cornélius Castoriadis, who sometimes shows up in his stories. He is a frequent contributor to Chronic’Art, Epok, and Le Magazine Littéraire.