Senior reviewer
Saul Pickering
Saul Pickering has been reviewing books in three languages since 1998. He writes Threadcount's lead reviews of new British and translated fiction.
Beats
Published in Threadcount Review
The Letters of Mavis Gallant to Her Editor
A small archive at the New York Public Library holds Mavis Gallant's working correspondence with her New Yorker editor across thirty-four years. The letters are an education in how a story gets made.
The Tsundoku Problem: On the Books One Has Not Yet Read
An essay on the unread stack, the small guilt that attends it, and the slow shift in how to think about it.
The Strand Dollar Carts at Closing
An hour spent watching the closing-time ritual at the dollar carts outside the Strand Bookstore at Broadway and East 12th in Manhattan, where the day's final markdowns and the wheeling-in of the carts constitute an unsentimental piece of New York bookselling theatre.
Finishing Javier Marías: A Late Reading of the Tomás Nevinson Trilogy
A long reading of Marías's final trilogy, completed and translated after the author's death in 2022, and the question of what the late work tells us about the whole career.
The Letters Rilke Did Not Send
A new edition collects the drafts Rilke wrote and then withheld. The book complicates the figure of the great letter writer in interesting and uncomfortable ways.
A Novel of the Baltic Coast, from Fitzcarraldo
Kazimierz Linde's <em>The Long Strand</em>, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions on 2026-05-21, runs to 312 pages and crosses ninety years on a single beach. It is patient, sometimes oppressively so.
Dialect and the Translator: When Andalusian Becomes Appalachian
How do translators handle regional voice when the target language has no equivalent dialect? A look at three uneasy solutions.
The Penguin Modern Classics Rebrand and the Long Memory of a Series
Penguin Modern Classics rolled out a redesigned cover format in March 2026, the fourth such redesign since the series began in 1961. Saul Pickering examines what the new format conceals and what the long-running list still gets right.
When to Retranslate a Classic: The Case of the Sixth Madame Bovary
In October a new English Madame Bovary will appear from Penguin Classics, the sixth in a century. What does each generation think the last one missed?
What a Small-Press Editor Does in a Working Day
An eight-hour shadow at Pelham House Press in Manchester reveals an editorial role that is mostly administration interrupted by reading.
Carcanet's Poetry List at Fifty, Looked at Plainly
Michael Schmidt's Manchester poetry press has issued about nine hundred titles since 1969. Its successor editors are now in their second year of running it.
Rebecca West's Yugoslavia, Eighty-Five Years On
A return to <em>Black Lamb and Grey Falcon</em> in the spring of 2026, and the question of how much of West's 1937 Yugoslavia survives a second reading.
Daunt Books, Marylebone, by Quarter Light
An hour inside the Edwardian galleried interior of Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street, where travel is shelved by country and the oak runs to the skylight, considered as both a working bookshop and a piece of preserved retail architecture.
Annotating in Pencil: A Household Practice
A short defence of marking books with a soft pencil — and a longer one of the kind of attention the practice demands.
Pushkin Press at the Edges of the Map
Pushkin Press's translation list now spans 47 source languages. Saul Pickering walks through the imprint's 2026 catalogue and asks whether a press built on rescuing the obscure has begun to resemble its more famous neighbours.
Borges Rendered Anew by a Buenos Aires Scholar
Mariana Belgrano's new selected Borges, out from Granta Books on 2026-04-21, is the first major English retranslation in nineteen years. It is patient where Hurley was brisk and reluctant where Kerrigan was assured.