 You have a blog which has two parts one is called literary saloon the others complete review But I think of them as one integrated entity you review books on a very regular basis And most of all you review books which are being translated from other languages into English Is that a fair way to put it? Yes foreign fiction dominates. Yes, and what why the appeal of Foreign language fiction to you. What what catches you there? Well in part it also came about The site I started the site in 1999. It's been around a long time and one of the reasons I started it was because I saw how many people were posting book reviews online and Suddenly you had the possibility of getting book reviews not just from your local paper or from the national magazines but from anywhere in the world and One of the things that struck me and this is also partly has to do with the timing in American publishing and in American Book reviewing is that there was very little coverage of especially translated fiction Which would be much more popular say in the 1970s And suddenly we had reached a real low point and so I made a conscious effort also to move in that direction But aside from that I also I find foreign fiction More interesting in a way. It's it's not that I find foreign fiction more interesting than American or British fiction But just I think it's better to to read from everywhere from all over the place rather than one specific locale and What's your theory of America? Where have we gone wrong? So you say correctly there was more interest in foreign fiction in the 1970s, right? We've moved away from that. Why has that happened? What's the institutional failure behind that? You could say lack of someone like you may be part of it, but you're here now. It's still the case A novel comes out in American English and they try to hide the fact that it was translated quite often I'm sure you've seen this or maybe not seen it Well, I think I think actually things have improved a lot in the time I've been running the site I think a major reason was that there was a generational shift from the especially the publishing world the publishers would come across from Europe around the World War two and Who obviously had brought a lot of international fiction who were aware of what was being written elsewhere in the world? Mainly in Europe, unfortunately, so relatively localized as well, but still And but you also had it with the interest in Japanese fiction. For example, there was that generation Which is also very much due to the sudden interest in Japan from World War two the people who learned Japanese and Then began translating the work and I think there was a generational shift which played itself out most fully in the 1990s but Yeah, I'm not I'm not sure why exactly it went as far down as it did