Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop Nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Alex Zucker’s translation of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop, published by Portobello Books, was named yesterday as one of 142 titles in the running for the 2015 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with a prize of €100,000 [media release here]. If the winning book is a translation, €75,000 is awarded to the author and €25,000 to the translator.

The Devil’s Workshop, one of 49 translated works named to the longlist, was nominated by the Karviná Regional Library and the Třinec Municipal Library of the Czech Republic.

Books are nominated for the award by invited public libraries in cities throughout the world, on the basis of “high literary merit” as determined by the nominating library.

The shortlist will be announced April 15, 2015, and the winner will be declared by the Lord Mayor of Dublin on June 17.

Why Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop Should Win the Best Translated Book Award

As the run-up continues to the announcement of the Fiction Shortlist for the Best Translated Book Award (BTBA) on April 15, Prague-based critic Michael Stein has written a striking review explaining why Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop deserves to win. He really nails it:

“Reading The Devil’s Workshop you come up against a remarkable and frightening historical reality: that the memory of the mass killings of World War II is most flawed, faded and even purposefully obscured precisely in those places where it was the most severe.”

No other reviewer has honed in so sharply on what makes the novel unique, topical, and, yes, entertaining:

“Here you have a book that deals with genocide and totalitarianism, so you can imagine a number of stylistic approaches: stark, steely prose to reflect a cold and painful reality; or pages without paragraph breaks, breathless, an unyielding barrage of images; or labyrinthine sentences to combat the inadequacy of memory so evidently on display here. But Topol has thrown all these assumptions out the window and written a book which is both entertaining and extremely beautiful. In fact, it would be the most unlikely (and undesirable) request at a bookstore counter ever made, but if someone were to ask for a fun book about genocide The Devil’s Workshop would be my pick.”

The BTBA is presented each year by Three Percent, the online magazine of Open Letter Books, a nonprofit publisher of international literature at the University of Rochester. Prize money for the award comes from Amazon. Finalists for the fiction award will be announced on April 15.

Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop Named to BTBA 2014 Longlist

Alex Zucker’s translation of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop, published by Portobello Books, was named yesterday as one of twenty-five titles on the Best Translated Book Award Fiction Longlist. The news was also reported in the Los Angeles Times.

The BTBA is presented each year with great fanfare by Three Percent, the online magazine of Open Letter Books, a nonprofit publisher of international literature at the University of Rochester. Prize money for the award comes from Amazon.

Last fall, Daniel Medin, one of nine judges for the 2014 BTBA for Fiction, described The Devil’s Workshop as one of “three titles [he] delighted in” while reading books for the prize, writing:

“. . . in the novel’s second part, the humor grows corrosive. When Czech authorities finally shut down Lebo’s commune, the narrator flees to Belarus where he has been recruited as an expert on ‘revitalization of burial sites’. The remainder of The Devil’s Workshop comprises a surreal descent into that country’s lethal past. Topol’s narrative here is defiantly unrealistic, and many developments are intentionally improbable. But their essence remains authentic. In fact, it is these phantasmagoric passages that allow Topol to pilot the reader through treacherous historical terrain without resorting to customary pieties.”

Over the next few weeks, each of the books will be highlighted on the Three Percent blog, and the finalists will be announced on April 15.

Literalab Names Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop Best Book of 2013

Michael Stein of Literalab, a blog highlighting Central and East European writing, yesterday singled out Alex Zucker’s translation of Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Portobello Books) as his “favorite book of 2013,” topping a list of nine in his annual Best Books post.

Stein writes:

Like my favorite book of the year before, my favorite book of 2013 delves into the ultimate horrors that man inflicts on his fellow man, but does so with a surplus of imagination, suspense and humor. Whereas Selvedin Avdić’s Seven Terrors [trans. Coral Petkovich] dealt with the war in Bosnia, Topol focuses on the genocide that took place in what is now the Czech Republic, and more extremely and lesser known to the world, in Khatyn in Belarus. More than that, he shows how the dark and still often obscure chapters of history in the former Eastern Bloc have been used and distorted by westerners for their own more narrowly personal ends. In expounding very complex and provocative ideas Topol has written a novel that has a uniquely surreal effect.