Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson takes a darker look at the subjects that animate the best of her work, from her sensitive tale of island life, The Summer Book, to her famous Moomin stories: solitude and community, art and life, love and hate.
Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions.
Эмиль Ажар4.1 Ромен Гари (1914 -1980)- известнейший французский писатель, русский по происхождению, участник Сопротивления, личный друг Шарля де Голля, крупный дипломат. Написав почти три десятка романов, Гари прославился как создатель самой нашумевшей и трагической литературной мистификации XX века, перевоплотившись в Эмиля Ажара и став таким образом единственным дважды лауреатом Гонкуровской премии.
"Псевдо" - самый интригующий из "ажаровских" романов, где любитель авантюр Гари поставил себя на грань разоблачения. Все раздваивается под его пером, все обращается в фантом, кошмар, фарс, сумасшествие...
Михал Айваз0.0 Heir to the philosophical-fantastical tradition of Borges, Calvino, and Perec, The Golden Age is Michal Ajvaz’s greatest and most ambitious work.
The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be “The Book,” a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in “The Book,” adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending “footnotes” in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text—but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read “in order,” and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator’s orderly treatise.
Жорж-Оливье Шаторено0.0 The celebrated career of Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud is well known to readers of French literature. This comprehensive collection--the first to be translated into English--introduces a distinct and dynamic voice to the Anglophone world. In many ways, Chateaureynaud is France's own Kurt Vonnegut, and his stories are as familiar as they are fantastic. "A Life on Paper" presents characters who struggle to communicate across the boundaries of the living and the dead, the past and the present, the real and the more-than-real. A young husband struggles with self-doubt and an ungainly set of angel wings in "Icarus Saved from the Skies," even as his wife encourages him to embrace his transformation. In the title story, a father's obsession with his daughter leads him to keep her life captured in 93,284 unchanging photographs. While Chateaureynaud's stories examine the diffidence and cruelty we are sometimes capable of, they also highlight the humanity in the strangest of us and our deep appreciation for the mysterious. Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud is the author of eight novels and almost one hundred short stories, and he is a recipient of the prestigious Prix Renaudot and the Bourse Goncourt de la nouvelle. His work has been translated into twelve languages. Edward Gauvin has published Chateaureynaud's work in "AGNI Online," "Conjunctions," "Words Without Borders," "The Cafe Irreal," and "The Brooklyn Rail." The recipient of a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, he translates graphic novels for Tokyopop, First Second Books, and Archaia Studios Press.
The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set.
The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose.
And the jokers are Karim, Omar, Heykal, Urfy, and their friends, free spirits who see the other jokers for the jokers they are and have cooked up a sophisticated and, most important, foolproof plan to enliven public life with a dash of subversive humor.
Jenny Erpenbeck3.7 By the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and trampling the garden; a young East German attempts to swim his way to freedom in the West; a couple return from brutal exile in Siberia and leave the house to their granddaughter, who is forced to relinquish her claim upon it and sell to new owners intent upon demolition. Reaching far into the past, and recovering what was lost and what was buried, Jenny Erpenbeck tells a story both beautiful and brutal, about the things that haunt a home.
Emilio Lascano Tegui0.0 The first English translation of the self-proclaimed "Viscount" Emilio Lascano Tegui - a friend of Picasso and Apollinaire, and a larger-than-life eccentric in his own right - ON ELEGANCE WHILE SLEEPING is the deliciously macabre novel, part MALDOROR and part DORIAN GRAY, that established its author's reputation as a renegade hero of Argentine literature.
Marlene Van Niekerk0.0 Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique, forty-year relationship between Milla, a sixty-seven-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. In 1950s South Africa, life for white farmers was full of promise―young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside with Agaat by her side. By the 1990s, Milla’s family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate guardian. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene van Niekerk creates a story about love and loyalty.
Ernst Weiss0.0 Written in a highly unreliable first person narrative, Ernst Weiss' unsung masterwork is an account of a crime and its aftermath. The hero - or villain - is tried, sentenced and deported to a remote island. He seeks redemption from his crimes in science, but eventually learns that in spite of himself, he is a man of feeling. Weiss' book came out of the same fertile literary ground between the wars that produced Musil's The Man Without Qualities (Picador, 1997) and, like many other modernist classics, it is a prescient description of a profoundly unsettled society.
Aleš Šteger0.0 Winner of The 2011 Best Translated Book of the Year Award
Winner of The 2011 Award for Best Literary Translation into English from the AATSEL
From his first book of poems, Chessboards of Hours (1995), Aleš Šteger has been one of Slovenia's most promising poets. The philosophical and lyrical sophistication of his poems, along with his work as a leading book editor and festival organizer, quickly spread Šteger's reputation beyond the borders of Slovenia. The Book of Things is Šteger's most widely praised book of poetry and his first American collection. The book consists of fifty poems that look at "things" (i.e. aspirin, chair, cork) which are transformed by Šteger's unique poetic alchemy.
Translator Brian Henry is a distinguished poet, translator, editor, and critic.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
Steger’s efforts sometimes bring to mind such Western European figures as Francis Ponge and Craig Raine, who also sought to make household things look new and strange. Yet Steger brings a melancholy Central European sense of history- his objects tend to remember, or cause, great pain: “It pours, this poisonous, sweet force,” Steger writes of “Saliva,” “Between teeth, when you spit your own little genocide.” (Nov.)
From Guernica, a Magazine of Art and Politics:
It is a rare treat to have an English translation before the ink has dried on the original. By which I mean, a mere five years after the book’s Slovenian publication, Brian Henry has brought these poems to life for those of us not lucky enough to read Slovenian. Henry’s translations are impressive for sheer acrobatics.
Lleshanaku belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets. Child of Nature is her second poetry collection in English. Here she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s beautiful poems, poems that Peter Constantine has called “contemporary classics of world literature.” Of her work, Albanian novelist Ridvan Dibra writes, “When you close her book, the images don’t leave you. They cleave you open like a leopard’s paw, and enter into you. Once inside they create their own life, a second life, vastly different from the original. What more can we expect from real poetry, from true art?”
