Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

Restless Books devotes itself to publishing books you don’t usually find in English—from Cuban science fiction and illustrated retellings of the Ramayana to doorstopper Hungarian novels. Its catalog features classics, like Don Quixote and The Souls of Black Folk, new immigrant writing from Abu Dhabi, and the mind-boggling prose of Chilean-French novelist Alejandro Jodorowsky. Only three percent of books published in English are in translation, most from European languages. So what does it take to transform a book from one language to another? To answer that question, Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison, co-founders of Restless Books, give us a crash course in Publishing 101.Go beyond the episode:Peruse the growing list of titles in the Restless Books catalogueRead an excerpt from Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing, his memoir of a whirlwind trip to every country in Latin America, and from Githa Hariharan’s Almost Home, a collection of essays about finding a place in the world when you’re not exactly fro