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A week-long sale and a note from our publisher on a new bookseller initiative. Check out seven award-winning titles from our Women in Translation series, all at 35% off through August 8th. Free shipping within the U.S.!

We sat down with writer and master translator Suzanne Jill Levine at the Seven Stories offices to discuss how she became a translator in the first place, her pioneering book The Subversive Scribe, literalism vs. essentialism in translation, and her work translating Guadalupe Nettel's forthcoming Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) and Luis Negrón's brilliant, outrageous Mundo Cruel. A verité interview complete with phones ringing, doors closing, and some warm-up chatter in the beginning. Hope you enjoy!

You may have heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh, but have heard of the graphic novel of the Epic of Gilgamesh? And did you know that it's actually the most up-to-date English version of the ancient text, based on new translations from a recently discovered tablet? If you didn't, now you do! And here in "The Making of the Dixon Gilgamesh" you can learn even more. Kent H. Dixon, one half of the father-son team behind this ingenious work, talks about taking courses in Akkadian by mail, becoming a "monster of memory," and the prudery of an esteemed old translator who couldn't bear to render sex scenes in anything but Latin. Enjoy! 

There’s also the question of stakes. Even before Walsh knows the stakes of what he’s doing, he conveys a kind of urgency. His encounter with this unbearable situation comes across on the page. It’s so honest.

A few years ago, I began losing many of the people I love. One of the difficult things about coming from a culture where your extended familia is considered your "nuclear" family is that you don't just lose a set of parents, a couple of aunts and uncles, but dozens upon dozens of tías, tíos, madrinas, padrinos, abuelitas, abuelitos.  A whole flank of familia is suddenly gone.

My parents joined that clan exodus, dying within five months of each other. Actually, I had been losing both incrementally to Alzheimer's over several years.  Each time I returned to the Dominican Republic to look after their care and visit with them, I'd braced myself for the day when they wouldn't know who I was.  No matter how old you get, while your parents are living, you are still somebody's "child."

Their loss, though painful, was in the natural order of things. But then came a loss I was not expecting: my older sister committed suicide.