Патрик Шамуазо0.0 From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a "writer of exceptional and original gifts" (The New York Times), whose Texaco won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau's The Old Slave is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels.
We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the creole culture of Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.
Саяка Мурата4.0 В своём провокативном, актуальном и волнующем романе Саяка Мурата исследует границы таких важных понятий, как «нормальная жизнь» и «социальный успех». Показывая жизнь женщины, упорно выстраивающей собственную судьбу поперёк всех типовых представлений о «норме», «счастье» и «достижениях», Мурата мастерски нажимает читателю на чувствительные точки и заставляет усомниться в вещах, казавшихся незыблемыми, самоочевидными и универсальными.
(Галина Юзефович, литературный обозреватель Meduza).
Кэйко Фурукура всем вокруг кажется странной: живёт одна, не хочет замуж и всю жизнь работает в комбини — мини-маркете, где знает и любит каждый товар и каждую полку. Но однажды в магазине появляется новый сотрудник, который волей случая переворачивает жизнь Кэйко с ног на голову...
Подчёркнуто японская и при этом абсолютно универсальная история о том, как жестоки написанные законы общества. Саяка Мурата исследует границы «нормальности" и то колоссальное давление, которое с детства испытывает человек: «Веди себя прилично», «Все нормальные люди давно...», «В твоём возрасте пора...» и так далее. Обыденная и от этого ещё более горькая история главной героини Кэйко — о том, какими безобидными кажутся стереотипы и как они опасны на самом деле.
(Наталья Ломыкина, литературный обозреватель Forbes.Russia).
In Koli Jean Bofane0.0 Qui sauvera le Congo, spolié par l'extérieur, pourri de l'intérieur? L'innocence et les rêves, les projets et la solidarité. La littérature, bien sûr, quand elle est comme ici servie par un conteur hors pair, doté d'un humour caustique et d'une détermination sans faille.
Ahmed Bouanani0.0 “When I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive…” So begins Ahmed Bouanani’s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani’s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator’s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital’s iron gate disappears.
Like Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the works of Franz Kafka—or perhaps like Mann’s The Magic Mountain thrown into a meat-grinder—The Hospital is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.
Virginie Despentes5.0 Pauline et Claudine sont sœurs jumelles et pourtant, tout les sépare. La première, rebelle et fidèle, refuse le compromis. La seconde, fonceuse et paumée, aime séduire et plaire. Mais quand cette dernière se suicide, Pauline prend sa place et bascule dans un monde factice et frelaté. Virginie Despentes trace le portrait de cette femme éprise de vérité, à la fois garce et martyre dont la descente aux enfers est un appel désespéré à la douceur et à l'amour.
Shahriar Mandanipour0.0 From “one of the leading novelists of our time” (The Guardian) comes a fantastically imaginative love story narrated by two angel scribes perched on the shoulders of a shell-shocked Iranian soldier searching for the mysterious woman who visits his dreams.
Before shrapnel severed his left arm during the Iran–Iraq war, Amir Khan lived the life of a carefree playboy. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in mental hospital for shell-shocked soldiers and bring him home to Tehran. His memories decimated, Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman he believes is his fiancée. He never sees her face: there is a shining crescent moon on her forehead, and he names her Moon Brow.
His sense of humor (though perhaps not his sanity) intact, Amir cajoles Reyhaneh into helping him find her. Reluctantly she agrees, if only to heal her ruptured family, reminding Amir that while he’d been tormenting their devout parents with his lovers and parties, she’d been a “headscarf-shrouded prisoner” in her powerful father’s house. Now Amir is the one who cannot escape the garden walls: his father’s guards hail him as a living martyr to the cause of Imam Khomeini and the Revolution, yet treat him as a dangerous madman. Amir decides there’s only one solution to his dilemma: return to the battlefield and find his severed arm—along with its engagement ring.
All the while, twin scribes—the angel of virtue and the angel of sin—sit on our hero’s shoulders and narrate the story in enthrallingly distinctive prose. Wildly inventive and radically empathetic, steeped in Persian folklore and contemporary Middle East history, Moon Brow is the great Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour’s unforgettable epic of love, war, morality, faith, and family.
Clemens Meyer0.0 Bricks and Mortar is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter…
In his most ambitious book to date, Clemens Meyer pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like Alfred Döblin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé and David Lynch.
Anne Serre0.0 In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children’s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book’s “deceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.”
Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.
"Each sentence evokes a dream logic both languid and circuitous as the governesses move through a fever of domesticity and sexual abandon. A sensualist, surrealist romp."—Kirkus
Ófeigur Sigurðsson0.0 Vorið 2003 kemur ungur maður örmagna og blóðugur inn í Þjónustumiðstöðina í Skaftafelli eftir hrakninga á öræfum. Hann heitir Bernharður Fingurbjörg, austurrískur örnefnafræðingur, og erindi hans til landsins var að halda í rannsóknarleiðangur inn á Vatnajökul og vitja um vettvang hroðalegs glæps sem framinn var tuttugu árum fyrr og beindist meðal annars að móður hans.
Á köflum er þessi bók nokkurs konar sálumessa yfir Íslandi. Þetta er magnaður óður um öræfi landsins, öræfi mannssálarinnar og öræfi íslenskrar menningar. Hér skiptist á fjarstæðukennt grín og kraftmikil ádeila og allt vitnar um djúpa tilfinningu höfundar fyrir íslenskri náttúru og mannlífi gegnum aldirnar.
Dubravka Ugresic0.0 Fox is the story of literary footnotes and “minor” characters—unnoticed people propelled into timelessness through the biographies and novels of others. With Ugresic’s characteristic wit, Fox takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, betrayal, and the randomness of human lives.
Хилда Хилст0.0 If life is no more than a prolonged flirtation with death, then Hilda Hilst's Of Death. Minimal Odes is the true account of a lifelong seduction. It is at once both a reverie and reliquary, as the poet imagines and reimagines that most paradoxical moment of disintegration—the corporeal flesh fusing with death's own dark corpus. With a visceral‐mystical poetic voice that is as teasingly unrestrained as it is intellectually sublime, Hilst's odes enact a baroque danse macabre, where the poet revels in the incongruities of simultaneously seeking the sacred and profane. Translating the first collection of Hilda Hilst's significant body of poetry to appear in English, Laura Cescarco Eglin renders the imagery and philosophical complexity of these minimal odes with brio, while preserving the playful tone and lush melodies that mark Of Death. Minimal Odes as uniquely Hilstian.
Kim Hyesoon4.0 Kim Hyesoon’s poems “create a seething, imaginative under-and over-world where myth and politics, the everyday and the fabulous, bleed into each other” (Sean O’Brien, The Independent)
*Winner of The Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award*
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s powerful new book, Autobiography of Death, consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls “the structure of death, that we remain living in.” Autobiography of Death, Kim’s most compelling work to date, at once reenacts trauma and narrates our historical death―how we have died and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural “you” speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with “Face of Rhythm,” a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
