New Translation From Le Guin

I uploaded a number of new books from Aqueduct Press today. I’ll get around to talking about them all in the coming days, but I want to give pride of place to a translation. The original work was presumably in Romanian, because that’s where Gheorghe Săsărman is from (he grew up in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania). I’m not sure what route the stories took to get into English, but I do know that they were selected and translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Do you need more motivation? No, of course not. But I should mention that Squaring the Circle is a collection of fictional writing about imaginary cities. It is subtitled A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony, and the Publishers Weekly review compares it to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It goes on to say, “Săsărman’s masterfully crafted prose poems feel more immediate, serving as spellbinding descriptions of architectural impossibilities as well as slyly subversive social commentary.”