This panel discusses whether or not there is a rising interest in foreign literature among English-speaking audiences. Featuring Daniel Slager from Milkweed Editions, Dennis Loy Johnson from Melville House, and Jeremy M. Davies from Dalkey Archive Press. Moderation by Annie Janusch of the Quarterly Conversation.

Daniel Slager is the Publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions. Prior to joining Milkweed as Editor-in-Chief in 2005, he was an Editor at Harcourt Trade Publishers in New York. And prior to joining Harcourt, he was the Associate Editor of Grand Street, a leading quarterly magazine of literature and fine arts. Slager is also a widely published translator from the German. His translations of texts by writers such as Marcel Beyer, Durs Grünbein, Felicitas Hoppe, Dorothea Dieckmann, and Terézia Mora have marked these authors’ first appearance in print in the United States. His most recent book-length translation was Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, which was published by Archipelago Press in 2004, and awarded the American Translator Association’s Ungar Prize in 2005. Slager serves on the Board of Directors for the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, and on the Advisory Board for Archipelago Books, an independent publishing house in New York. He lives with his wife and two sons in Minneapolis.

Dennis Loy Johnson is the founder of the legendary MobyLives, one of the first book blogs. He is also the co-founder and publisher of Melville House, named by the Association of American Publishers as the best small press of 2007, and by the Village Voice as the best small press of 2009. Johnson’s own short fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and he is the author of the book The Big Chill: The Great, Unreported Story of the Bush Inaugural Protests.

Jeremy M. Davies is senior editor at Dalkey Archive Press, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where his primary duties include the acquisition and editing of new translations. His first novel, Rose Alley, was published by Counterpath Press in 2009.

Annie Janusch is a contributing editor to the Quarterly Conversation and associate book review editor at Translation Review. Prior to her work with the Quarterly Conversation, Janusch edited the translation magazine Two Lines, managed literary programming for the Center for the Art of Translation, and taught at the University of Leipzig as a fellow of the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Her translation from Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm appeared in the Words Without Borders / Open Letter anthology The Wall in My Head; and her translation of Kleist’s Der Zweikampf (The Duel) is forthcoming in 2011 from Melville House.

Recorded Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at Goethe-Institut Chicago.