As a book title, The Fictions of Translation may be misleading at first glance; a layperson may think there is something fictitious with translation. But for those who are familiar with the concept of ‘pseudo-translation’ by Gideon Toury (2012: 45-59), or that of ‘self-translation’ (Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014), there is nothing new. What is rather new is the gathering of several contributions on the topic in a single book, which comes as a result of the 3^rd Transfiction Conference held in Montreal, May 2015. Edited by Judith Woodsworth, a prominent translation studies scholars and the founding chair of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies (CATS), the book is made up of sixteen chapters and is divided in two balanced parts of eight chapters each. Part I is entitled “Translators and translating: Status, identity and process,” and it scrutinizes various aspects and status of translation and translators. In chapter 1, Rainier Grutman is interested in the self-translator as author, through the works of Federman, Lakhous and De Kuyper, three contemporary bilingual writers who have translated their own books. Grutman mainly examines paratexts (a letter, an interview and an afterword) from the three authors who have in common the fact they were all raised in bilingual communities either as immigrants, or because they grew up in a bilingual country. Rainier comes to the conclusion that self-translators are not freer than translators of literature. Indeed, self-translators are also subject to the linguistic and cultural constraints of the target language in which they write (p. 27). In chapter 2, Judith Woodsworth examines the paradox of translation with insights into Gertrude Stein’s translations of Flaubert, Hugnet and Pétain, which inspired Stein to write her Autobiography. Though Stein’s translations were not successful, “her engagement with the idea and process of translation, regardless of the actual outcome, yields fruitful insights into the complexities of both the writer and her body of works” (p.46). Still in the area of biography, Brian Baer, the author of chapter 3, goes on to focus on real life stories, namely biographies, autobiographies and memoirs written for or by Russian translators and interpreters. The period covered starts with the Soviet Regime and ends with the current era of Putin. Baer presents the translator’s biography in Soviet Russia and examines the ways some political and cultural contexts have shaped the translation of these lives into writing (p. 50). Chapter 4 discusses the issue of polyglossia. As Baer did, Esther Allen delves into autobiographical analysis to examine the notion of polyglossia, taken from her personal experience as a literary translator. The notion itself is borrowed from Bakhtin (1981) who considers the polyglossia as an alternate approach to a central view of Saussurian linguistics, i.e. an arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified. From her analysis, Allen remarks that translators of English texts into Spanish have adopted a policy of distance as far as polyglossia is concerned as they want to reread the contemporary literature of Spain and Latin America. (p.80). She finally states that domestication and foreignization strategies are not adequate to explain the policy of translation in this very context. In chapter 5, Angelina Tiziana Tarantini brings transcultural conversations into practice through the analysis of Mence’s plays she translated into Italian. She considers her collaboration with the author as a third space. Therefore, she states that “the transcultural conversations between author and translator in practice can result in the author of the source text becoming the co-author of the target text, even in a language that is alien to him/her” (p. 87). Jane Coustas uses the image of selfie to …