I admit it, when it comes to literature, I'm pretty anti-American. I was raised on a pretty steady diet of "the classics". Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, Hardy, and Shakespeare was the bread and butter of my literary education. My grandmother was a voracious reader, and a university librarian, who thought these writers much more appropriate than say, the Beat poets, or Hunter S. Thompson.
Not that I was reading these authors at age seven; like most American children I learned to read the Disney classics, and the infamous "Little Golden Books". But as I got older, and began to discover what I really wanted to read, as opposed to what was read to me, my Gramie sat me down in the library, and fired "the canon" at me.
In college I studied English Literature, with an emphasis in World Literature. Somehow I managed to get away with only taking one American Literature course, choosing instead to focus my undergraduate thesis on Modern Irish Literature.
When I took my first job in book publishing, in the international publicity/sales department of W. W. Norton & Company, I learned that only 6% of all books on the market in the United States are translated into English from another language. Yet around 80% of the international market are books that are translated from English into a given country's native language. Basically this means that every year there are thousands of phenomenal books being published by non-English speaking writers that will never find their way into the American reading public's hands. And this bugs me. A lot.
Fortunately I'm not the only one cheesed at this disparity, and there's a great group of people working hard to turn this situation around. They are the members, employees, and supporters of the website WordsWithoutBorders.org.
WordsWithoutBorders.org works dilligently to bring international literature to the English speaking world. I personally have discovered many great new writers as a result of this site.
I never intentionally set out to disparage American writers. As a writer, and an American myself, I hope that someone will read my books someday! I think that as Americans, we are sometimes apt to forget that there is a great big wide world out there, and that it is filled with wonderful writers. Writers who can enrich the literary market, and our minds in new and creative ways.
As international travel and cultural understanding increases with each passing year, I sincerely hope that this will also trickle down to the literary maket, and bring great international writers onto the bookshelves of American readers. Sometimes the cheapest plane ticket to an exotic new culture costs no more than a new paperback.
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