Rodrigo Fresan0.0 “A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."—Jonathan Lethem
An aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically dramatic manner: traveling to the Hadron Collider, merging with the God particle, and transforming into an omnipresent deity—a meta-writer—capable of rewriting reality.
With biting humor and a propulsive, contagious style, amid the accelerated particles of his characteristic obsessions—the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the music of Pink Floyd and The Kinks, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the links between great art and the lives of the artists who create it—Fresán takes us on a whirlwind tour of writers and muses, madness and genius, friendships, broken families, and alternate realities, exploring themes of childhood, loss, memory, aging, and death.
Drawing inspiration from the scope of modern classics and the structural pyrotechnics of the postmodern masters, the Argentine once referred to as “a pop Borges” delivers a powerful defense of great literature, a celebration of reading and writing, of the invented parts—the stories we tell ourselves to give shape to our world.
Rodrigo Fresán is the author of nine books of fiction that together compose an expansive, interconnected fictional universe—a complex system of storylines, resonances, and self-reference that call to mind the works of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Roberto Bolaño.
Will Vanderhyden received fellowships from the NEA and Lannan Foundation to work on The Invented Part.
Матиас Энар4.0 Роман Матиаса Энара «Компас» (2015), принесший писателю Гонкуровскую премию, - как ковер-самолет, вольно парящий над Веной и Стамбулом, Парижем и Багдадом, - открывает нам Восток, упоительный, завораживающий, благоуханный, издавна манивший европейских художников, композиторов, поэтов. Весь этот объемный роман-эпопея заключен в рамки одной бессонной ночи, ночи воспоминаний и реальной опасности, ведь главным героям книги меланхоличному Францу и красавице Саре не понаслышке знаком иной Восток: тревожный, обагренный кровью давних войн и взрывами нынешних конфессиональных конфликтов. Этих кабинетных исследователей, рассуждающих о Дебюсси и Бартоке, Низами и Гюго, манят дальние странствия, стрелка их компаса упорно указывает на Восток, но суждено ли им совпасть в одной точке необозримого пространства или арабская вязь их судеб так и не сольется в единый текст?..
Мари Ндьяй0.0 Marie NDiaye has long been celebrated for her unrivaled ability to make us see just how little we understand about ourselves. My Heart Hemmed In is her most powerful statement on the hidden selves that we rarely glimpse—and are often shocked by.
There is something very wrong with Nadia and her husband Ange, middle-aged provincial schoolteachers who slowly realize that they are despised by everyone around them. One day a savage wound appears in Ange’s stomach, and as Nadia fights to save her husband’s life their hideous neighbor Noget—a man everyone insists is a famous author—inexplicably imposes his care upon them. While Noget fattens them with ever richer foods, Nadia embarks on a nightmarish visit to her ex-husband and estranged son—is she abandoning Ange or revisiting old grievances in an attempt to save him?
Conjuring an atmosphere of paranoia and menace, My Heart Hemmed In creates a bizarre, foggy world where strange coincidences, harsh cruelty, and constantly shifting relationships all seem part of some shadowy truth. Surreal, allegorical, and psychologically acute, My Heart Hemmed In shows a masterful author giving her readers her most complex and compelling world yet.
Anais Barbeau-Lavalette0.0 • The subject of the book, Suzanne, was the author's grandmother. Having never met her, Ana?s Barbeau-Lavalette hired a private detective to learn more about her life, and this book is a fictionalized account of her true story. • Offers a window into the world of Qu?bec's Les Automatistes, a group of Qu?b?cois artistic dissidents who helped to fuel the province's Quiet Revolution. • A translation of the acclaimed novel La femme qui fuit, winner of the Prix des libraires du Qu?bec.• Rhonda Mullins won the Governor General's Award for her 2015 translation of Jocelyne Saucier's Twenty-One Cardinals, and has been nominated two times previously. • Rhonda Mullins's translation of Jocelyne Saucier's And the Birds Rained Down was shortlisted for CBC Canada Reads (2015) and the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English Translation (2013).
Guðbergur Bergsson0.0 A retired, senile bank clerk confined to his basement apartment, Tómas Jónsson decides that, since memoirs are all the rage, he’s going to write his own—a sure bestseller—that will also right the wrongs of contemporary Icelandic society. Egoistic, cranky, and digressive, Tómas blasts away while relating pick-up techniques, meditations on chamber pot use, ways to assign monetary value to noise pollution, and much more. His rants parody and subvert the idea of the memoir—something that’s as relevant today in our memoir-obsessed society as it was when the novel was first published.
Santiago Gamboa0.0 Gritty Central and South American lives from an underground Colombian literary voice.
Santiago Gamboa is one of Colombia's most exciting young writers. In the manner of Roberto Bolano, Gamboa infuses his kaleidoscopic, cosmopolitan stories with a dose of inky dark noir that makes his novels intensely readable, his characters unforgettable, and his style influential.
Manuela Beltran, a woman haunted by a troubled childhood she tries to escape through books and poetry; Tertuliano, an Argentine preacher who claims to be the Pope's son, ready to resort to extreme methods to create a harmonious society; Ferdinand Palacios, a Colombian priest with a dark paramilitary past now confronted with his guilt; Rimbaud, the precocious, brilliant poet whose life was incessant exploration; and, Juana and the consul, central characters in Gamboa's Night Prayers, who are united in a relationship based equally on hurt and need. These characters animate Gamboa's richly imagined portrait of a hostile, turbulent world where liberation is found in perpetual movement and determined exploration.
Вольфганг Хильбиг0.0 Diese Erzählung zieht den Leser hinein in einen geheimnisvollen Bezirk, der angesiedelt ist auf der Grenzlinie zwischen literarischer Imagination und politischer Realität: »Jenseits der Kohlenbahnlinie, südöstlich eines halb unbewohnten Dorfes, tief in der verwilderten Senke, direkt an einem Zaun begann das Gebiet, welches der Osten war, und man drang nicht ungestraft in diese Gegend vor.« Sein Held erforscht auf ausschweifenden Erkundungsgängen diesen Bereich, voller Ruinen, ausgelaugter Äcker und Industrieanlagen, obwohl er immer wieder von den Erwachsenen gewarnt wurde: Denn es haben sich dort »Fremde eingenistet, Leute aus Osteuropa, die hier den Krieg überstanden hatten... je östlicher, desto gefährlicher der Menschenschlag.« Es verschwinden Menschen nach denen niemand mehr fragen, über die niemand mehr reden darf, die von heute auf morgen zu Unpersonen werden, die aber in der Erinnerung nicht auszulöschen sind: »Ein Verschwundener zu sein, hieß, eine Legende zu sein, Kämpfe überstanden zu haben, von denen nur Schatten wußten.«
Флёр Йегги0.0 A un certo punto di questi racconti si parla di una «calma violenta» – e subito si riconosce il timbro e il passo di una scrittrice per cui l’ossimoro è come l’aria che respira, quasi un segno di riconoscimento, fin dal titolo del suo romanzo più famoso, I beati anni del castigo. Del quale Iosif Brodskij scrisse: «Durata della lettura: circa quattro ore. Durata del ricordo, come per l’autrice, il resto della vita». Non diverso l’effetto di queste storie, talvolta di una brevità lancinante, talvolta dense come un romanzo. Mescolando all’estro fantastico frammenti di ricordi e apparizioni, amalgamati in uno stile dove domina quello che gli etologi chiamano Übersprung, «diversione»: quello scarto laterale, apparentemente fuori contesto, che è un segreto ancora insondato del comportamento. E, come si mostra qui, della letteratura.
Romina Paula3.0 Traveling home to rural Patagonia, a young woman grapples with herself as she makes the journey to scatter the ashes of her friend Andrea. Twenty-one-year-old Emilia might still be living, but she’s jaded by her studies and discontent with her boyfriend, and apathetic toward the idea of moving on. Despite the admiration she receives for having relocated to Buenos Aires, in reality, cosmopolitanism and a career seem like empty scams. Instead, she finds her life pathetic.
Once home, Emilia stays with Andrea’s parents, wearing the dead girl’s clothes, sleeping in her bed, and befriending her cat. Her life put on hold, she loses herself to days wondering how if what had happened—leaving an ex, leaving Patagonia, Andrea leaving her—hadn’t happened.
Both a reverse coming-of-age story and a tangled homecoming tale, this frank confession to a deceased confidante. A keen portrait of a young generation stagnating in an increasingly globalized Argentina, August considers the banality of life against the sudden changes that accompany death.
Wu He0.0 On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide.
Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the long forgotten Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. The result is Wu He's novel Remains of Life, which imagines the impetus behind this disturbing event and questions its legitimacy and accuracy. In his novel, Wu He walks a tightrope between the primitive and the civilized, beauty and violence, fact and fiction.His is a one-of-a-kind work and a milestone in Chinese literature, winning nearly every major national literary award upon its publication in Taiwan, including the Taipei Creative Writing Award for Literature, the China Times's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, the United Daily Readers's Choice Award, Ming Pao's Ten Best Books of the Year Award, and the Kingstone Award for the Most Influential Book of the Year.
Eleni Vakalo0.0 Before Lyricism includes six book-length poems: "The Forest" (1954), "Plant Upbringing" (1956), "Diary of Age" (1958), "Description of the Body" (1959), "The Meaning of the Blind" (1962), and "Our Way of Being in Danger" (1966). Each of these, apart from “Plant Upbringing,” was published as a separate book, which Vakalo herself designed. (“Plant Upbringing” was originally included in the volume Wall Painting, of which Vakalo later repudiated all but this single long poem.) For Vakalo, these poems formed a larger, accretive whole, which she titled Prin Apo Ton Lyrismo (Before Lyricism). By bringing these poems together under a single cover, Before Lyricism allows us to see the complex web of intertextual relations that bind these books together. Meanwhile, by bringing these poems into English, this volume will enrich not only our knowledge of this key period in Vakalo’s career, but English-language readers’ understanding of modern Greek poetry as a whole.
Eleni Vakalo (1921-2001) was a Greek poet, art critic, and art historian. She authored nine volumes of art history and art theory, and had regular columns of art criticism from 1955 to 1975 (with a two-year hiatus during the period of the junta’s strictest censorship); she also produced a radio broadcast of art criticism, and organized art-related teach-ins at factories. In 1958, she and her husband, the painter and stage designer Yiorgos Vakalo, founded the Vakalo School of Arts and Design, where she taught until 1990. Vakalo published fourteen books of poetry, and was intimately involved with the design and production of her early books. Indeed, Vakalo’s training as an art historian pushed her to initiate new poetic uses of the page, drawing on her knowledge of modern and contemporary art to rethink the role of the visual in the printed text. She received the State Poetry Prize in 1991, and the prestigious Academy of Athens Prize in 1997.
Ана Ристович0.0 Ana Ristovic's erotic, wry, feminist poems concern daily routines (washing laundry, doing crossword puzzles). In her writing she explores inner and outer worlds, sex, and relationships. This bilingual (Serbian and English) selection unveils a rich embroidery of frank sexuality and lyric images.
Born in 1972 in Belgrade, Ristovic studied comparative literature at the philological faculty there. She has published six books of poetry and won the Hubert Burda Prize for young Eastern European poets in 2005. She also has translated eighteen books of poetry and prose from Slovenian into Serbian, and her own poems have been translated into almost a dozen languages.
On the surface, Ristovic's poems read smoothly and almost easily as she wittily and winkingly banters about polishing her nails or doing laundry as she opens the door to her New Belgrade world on the Danube quay. Before one knows, one is seduced into a light-hearted conversation about daily chores and salad-making as "[o]utside, the blizzard howls, with ease and without a care, buries our mutual threshold."
In 2014, the Guardian announced Southbank Centre's list of the fifty greatest love poems of the past fifty years. On that list, Ana Ristovic's "Circling Zero" appeared together with the likes of Margaret Atwood, Frank O'Hara, and Chinua Achebe, among many other luminous giants of literature.
Steven Teref's and Maja Teref's translations of Ana Ristovic's poems have appeared in Asymptote, Conduit, and Rhino (winner of their 2012 Translation Prize). Their translation of her poem "Circling Zero" was published in the international poetry anthology The World Record (Bloodaxe Books).
