The Best Foreign Books You’ve Never Heard Of : NPR:
French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. If most Americans have never heard of this accomplished author of more than 30 novels, essays and story collections, perhaps it’s because there is so little emphasis on international books in the U.S. publishing world.
The reason why most Americans had never heard of the latest Nobel Prize winner for literature is that only about 3% of the books published in the U.S. are works that have been translated.
To remedy that situation, this piece ends with a list of some of the best foreign authors compiled by David Kipen, director of Literature and National Reading Initiatives at the National Endowment for the Arts.
