Sunday, August 12, 2012

Among Readers in Polyglot New York, 50 Shades of Best Sellers

By SARAH MASLIN NIR - New York Times - Published: August 9, 2012


The Chinese immigrants in Flushing, Queens, devour books with titles like “Romantic Flower” and “The Heart With a Million Knots.” The Russian women in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, clamor for a diet guide advocating plenty of meat. In Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a bookseller cannot keep a tell-all by the wife of an adored Polish politician on the shelves.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Yap Anny travels from Manhattan’s Chinatown to Flushing, Queens, to check out additional Chinese-language romance novels.
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Mansoor Book Store in Queens, which caters to South Asian immigrants, keeps romances and books on Muslim topics, many in Urdu, far from each other.
Serialized romance digests are popular in Jackson Heights, Queens, in languages spoken by the area’s Indians and Pakistanis. So, too, are books on Muslim topics. Khursheed Hassan, the owner of Mansoor Book Store, has arranged the two inventories so the religious books are high on upper shelves, and the romances in a row along the floor, to keep the two genres’ very different readerships from taking offense.
In the Babel that is New York City, where nearly 200 languages are spoken and read within the public school system and nearly 40 percent of the population was born abroad, literary tastes among immigrant cultures turn out to be as different as their cuisines.
But what is popular in foreign languages is not always what is selling well back home in Bahrain or Bucharest. Sometimes they are books that are contraband under authoritarian regimes. Sometimes readers far from home seek out the classics as comforting reminders of their roots. Still others delve into their new culture with translations of school staples like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that were never on the curriculum back home.
Though American best sellers are often reprinted in many languages, many times the accompanying buzz does not translate with it. For example, on Monday there were 1,120 holds, or requests, for the entire New York Public Library’s 121 English-language hard copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the erotic novel and runaway best seller. But there was no waiting list for the library’s 20 Spanish-language e-books. (Fifty hard copies of the Spanish edition have been ordered.) 

No comments: