Even though it’s probably way safer to stay inside and just read about Walking In Ice, you should really come down to Motto Mitte tonight (see below) and check out Sam’s reading. Here’s a review I wrote about And yet, and yet… when I first discovered his little publishing enterprise:
Fittingly enough, the first little piece in this tiny booklet is entitled “First Emotion”: When I first discovered TrueTrueTrue and this Dutch writer called Nescio at this year’s book fair at Berlin’s fine Motto store, I somehow felt immediately drawn to it: had to pick it up, had to keep myself from reading too much right on the spot (it only has 12 pages and I didn’t want to spoil it too soon), had to talk to the guy behind it (Sam de Groot, who did an amazing job translating Nescio’s work from Dutch to English), and ultimately: had to take a copy of it home (which isn’t too much of a pain since it’s only 3 Euro bucks). “When the blood sausage was through he said again: ‘Now I could well use a pipeful’,” writes Nescio, who died in 1961, and I certainly could use an entire shelfful of this, though unfortunately, his Little Titans book, a longer read also translated and published by Sam and his buddy Ian Adams, is already sold out. Truly a shame.
