Three Percent Podcast

In this special bonus episode, Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and Effectively Wild talks with Chad about his new book, The MVP Machine . They talk about the premise of the book—how player development is the new "Moneyball" and is being driven by players and technology—about the process of co-writing, feedback loops for writing, and the mysteries of publishing and its lack of empirical data gathering....

This week, Tobias Carroll joined Chad and Brian to talk about werewolves, puns that don't exactly work in translation, evil baseball card shop owners, weird Masonic rituals, Party Down South , and Fred Durst and John Travolta's The Fanatic .  They also have a lot of praise for Sjón and the wild, fun nature of the second volume in  CoDex 1962 , and set up volume three: "I'm a Sleeping Door: A Scien...

This week's episode covers a lot of ground, from disturbing American racism circa 1917 to codswallop; from werewolves to parliamentary fights, from ghosts to crime/heist narratives. It's a really fun episode that has a good take on this section of the book mixed with some really fun segues and digressions. The next episode will focus on pages 303-344 (to the end of the second volume of the trilogy...

Chad and Tom are joined by Mark Haber from Brazos Bookstore and author of the forthcoming  Reinhardt's Garden (October 1, Coffee House Press). They talk a bit about Translation Bread Loaf (two thumbs up) and about a special poster for anyone who buys the First 100 from Open Letter, before trying their best to breakdown a nonsensical metaphor that Chad heard at this weekend's The Ladder Literary Co...

Chad and Tom took some time off on Memorial Day to bring you this little podcast about the Best Translated Book Award finalists (winner will be announced at 5pm on 5/29 at BEA/NYRF, and there will be an informal afterparty at The Brooklyneer on Houston starting at 7), about the Man Booker International winner, about the quality of book production, anchoring with regard to book prices, and Chad's n...

One of the calmest podcasts to date featuring two controversial topics: the new Open Letter cover design, and the side-effects of suddenly doubling (or quadrupling) the number of translations published every year.  In terms of recommendations, this week Chad is all about the completely wild  Bred from the Eyes of a Wolf   by Kim Kyung Ju, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine. Tom's in love wi...

Chad's just back from a 7 hour train ride. Brian is inebriated. Tom Flynn is . . . Tom Flynn? It's a classic episode of the Two Month Review about horny avenging angels, chamber pot dumps, how many books actually last for a hundred years, the name "Karl," whatever Bumble is, and much more. A fun, loose podcast about a brilliant books. As always, you can watch these episodes live on our YouTube cha...

Chad and Tom are back to talk about Independent Bookstore Day (and Free Comic Book Day and Record Store Day), the Indie Playlist Initiative , fascists storming Politics & Prose, Alex Shephard's Mueller Report article , how much money Stanford (the Duke of the West?) is wasting on their crappy football program instead of supporting their University Press, and a future of publishing article that mig...

The new season of the Two Month Review kicks off with a pretty wide-ranging discussion. Sure, there is a bit about Sjón (pronounced SYOHN , which is  not how Chad says it) and a few things about his earlier books and CoDex 1962 , but a good part of this introductory episode is about patterns in narrative, cinematic realism, the imaginative nature of international literature, boxes and small rooms,...

Best Translated Book Award fiction judge Kasia Bartoszynska joins Chad and Tom to talk about the recently released longlists . After providing some insight into the committee's thinking and discussions (and confirming that Chad had no knowledge of the lists beforehand, while not 100% confirming that Chad isn't Adam Hetherington), Kasia returns to her drive through Peoria and Chad and Tom read thro...

  As part of Nonfiction in Translation Month at Three Percent, Polish translators Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Sean Bye came on the podcast to explain Polish Reportage, talk about some key figures and forthcoming books, and more or less introduce Open Letter's new nonfiction line. Some of the titles mentioned on this podcast include: Dancing Bears by Witold Szablowski (trans. by Antonia) Foucault in Wa...

On this atypically subdued episode, Chad recounts some of his adventures in Portland at the AWP conference, and speculates about why this was his favorite one to date. Tom helps illuminate some of the mysteries behind IndieBound and what might be next for independent stores trying to capture some online sales. (And how this relates to customers and ABA's overall mission.) Finally, Chad tries to do...

Chad and Brian finish off  Radiant Terminus and talk about possible interpretation of the ending, whether anyone came out of this book OK, the balance between humor and horror, written vs. oral culture, possible readings or approaches to the novel, and a desire for a "Post-Exotic" journal. They also revisit Volodine's two-part series, " Post-Exotic Novels, Novelles, and Novelists " from The New In...

On this week's podcast, Chad and Tom talk laugh about how HarperVia conceives of itself, praise this year's National Book Award for Translation judges, give some spotty analysis of the Man Crankstart (?) Booker International longlist , the idea of an International Writers Hall of Fame (vote here ), the one NCAA Basketball Bracket Pool you should join, and Christian Lorenzen's " Like This or Die ."...

This is a jam-packed episode as Rachel Crawford joins Brian and Chad to talk about Kronauer's "trial," Hannko and Samiya in the Taiga, the lasting impact of PTSD, the post-post-apocalyptic world, Russian literature and French minimalism, New Jersey, and more. This is the penultimate episode of season seven, and sets up a lot of things to talk about next week, including these two articles by Volodi...

Following a trip to India to speak at the Seagull School of Publishing , Edwin Frank sat down to talk about Uwe Johnson's  Anniversaries  and NYRB's overall editorial history, including surprise hits, books he wishes more people read, and much more. A brilliant reader, publisher, and thinker, this episode will be of great interest to fans of NYRB's books, or to anyone interested in the industry as...

Chad and Brian go it alone through Kronauer's "night of amok" as he attempt to murder Solovyei for his myriad crimes. Then they enter into part four of the book, "Taiga," which is a collection of "narracts" set some seven hundred (or a thousand?) years in the future. Hannko is recreating the feminist post-exotic texts from before, along with her dad's crazy ramblings; Kronauer is living in oil, su...

To supplement NYRB month on Three Percent, Chad and Anthony talked to Nick During, publicist for New York Review Books, about the marketing of  Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson, the struggles to get attention for reprints, Henry Green's eternal rediscovery, and much more. (Including Nick's ratings of the impact of various conferences and awards on readership.) This episode's music is " Tall Man, Skinn...

After a brief foray into  Baseball Prospectus 2019  and  Power Ball   by Rob Neyer, Chad and Tom get down to business, analyzing Chad's statistically-based,  very lukewarm take on translation production in 2018. They come up with innumerable, very rational reasons for the dip in translations that tend to revolve around ideas of "market correction." This is probably the most level-headed—and insigh...

With just Chad and Brian on this week's episode, the show turns almost full superhero. We get Chad's weirdly specific—and unnerving—Volodine-influenced dream. We get to see Samiya Schmidt transform into a raging version of Captain Marvel/Banshee. We get to see Kronauer assume his role as the one chosen to take down Solovyei. Brian and Chad also talk about the influence of language and ideologies o...

Tobias Carroll ( Transitory ,  Reel ) joins Chad and Brian to talk about the latest installment of  Radiant Terminus . These three chapters get  wild , as Schulhoff (who mysteriously disappeared shortly after his marriage to Hannko, Solovyei's daughter) returns and tries to get Ilyushenko to kill him. And then the never-ending train finds Radiant Terminus and Solovyei launches a poetic attack . ....

After an update about Chad's computer files and subscriptions, Tom talks about Amazon leaving NYC and they both get into a long discussion about translator Molly Ringwald (who you might also recognize from  Riverdale ). Chad tries to order a book from IndieBound (where do these books process from?) and then they talk a bit about  Nirliit ,  Thunder Bay , and  Brockmire . This week's music is "Star...

Rhett McNeil joins Chad Post and pinch-hitter Kaija Straumanis to talk about the first half of part two of  Radiant Terminus , "Ode to the Camps." From recounting Chad's latest Volodine-inflected dream to a discussion of the ways various ideologies (fairy tales, anarcho-capitalism, Marxism-Leninism) play out in the novel, to the connection between these ideologies and male violence and the way in...

At the top of this episode, Tom explains why he and Chad fell off the biweekly schedule for a bit, but then they come back strong, talking about Winter Institute, the Independent Publishers Caucus , minimum wage, this wild  New Yorker  article that doesn't quite do enough, but makes Chad angry, and Hanif Abdurraqib's  Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.  And Tom talks about baseba...

From Tarkovsky to  Jessica Jones , this week's episode covers a lot of ground. Anthony and Chad are joined by Hailey Dezort to walk through the first three chapters of Antoine Volodine's  Radiant Terminus . There's a lot to unpack, from the plant names, to the nature of men, to horrible fathers, to the humor found in Gramma Ugdul talking to the core of a failed nuclear reactor. Given how plotted t...