Daša Drndić0.0 Junak novog romana Daše Drndić EEG igra svoju vlastitu partiju šaha, crnim figurama. Iako zna da ne može pobijediti, nastavlja riskirati jer ta je igra jedino što ga istinski zanima. Bez obzira na to je li u Rovinju, Rijeci, Zagrebu, Beogradu, Parizu, Toskani, Rigi ili pak Tirani, Ban pripovijeda priče onih koji ih sami nisu mogli, znali, smjeli ili htjeli ispričati, jer one su sastavni dio njegove beskonačne partije šaha.
Этель Аднан0.0 An arresting new translation of poems, originally written in French, by one of our greatest philosopher poets.
On October 27, 2003, Adnan received a post card of a palm tree from the poet Khaled Najar, who she had met in the late seventies in Tunisia, sparking a collection of poems that would unspool over the next decade in a continuous discovery of the present moment. Originally written in French, these poems collapse time into single crystallized moments then explode outward to take in the scope of human history. In Time, we see an intertwining of war and love, coffee and bombs, empathetic observation and emphatic detail taken from both memory and the present of the poem to weave a tapestry of experience in non-linear time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lúcio Cardoso0.0 "The book itself is strange—part Faulknerian meditation on the perversities, including sexual, of degenerate country folk; part Dostoevskian examination of good and evil and God—but in its strangeness lies its rare power, and in the sincerity and seriousness with which the essential questions are posed lies its greatness."—Benjamin Moser, from the introduction
Long considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century Brazilian literature, Chronicle of the Murdered House is finally available in English.
Set in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, the novel relates the dissolution of a once proud patriarchal family that blames its ruin on the marriage of its youngest son, Valdo, to Nina—a vibrant, unpredictable, and incendiary young woman whose very existence seems to depend on the destruction of the household. This family’s downfall, peppered by stories of decadence, adultery, incest, and madness, is related through a variety of narrative devices, including letters, diaries, memoirs, statements, confessions, and accounts penned by the various characters.
Lúcio Cardoso (1912–1968) turned away from the social realism fashionable in 1930s Brazil and opened the doors of Brazilian literature to introspective works such as those of Clarice Lispector—his greatest follower and admirer.
Margaret Jull Costa has translated dozens of works from both Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Javier Marías and José Saramago. Her translations have received numerous awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2014 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
Robin Patterson was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa, and has translated Our Musseque by José Luandino Vieira.
Alejandra Pizarnik4.4 Revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness, and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleet- ing presence of Lautréamont,” and to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”
Yuri Herrera, Юрі Еррера3.8 "Signs Preceding the End of the World" is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.
Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.
Angélica Freitas0.0 'Rilke shake', livro de estreia da autora, a situa na família de poetas como Adília Lopes, Paulo Leminski e Cacaso, em cuja obra o humor às vezes escrachado carrega em si uma dimensão trágica, de tristeza, deslocamento e inviabilidade.
Сюэ Цань5.0 In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”
Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.
Rocío Cerón0.0 Diorama is both a book of poems and a performance action by the poet Rocío Cerón, who guides the reader on a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, Mexican history, and soundscapes. As unrelentingly tactile as it is unapologetically cerebral, Rocío Cerón’s new book asks that we relinquish control and submit to the poet’s brutal lyricism, and to a new kind of order imposed like a penumbra between us and the waking world.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai0.0 The latest novel from “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse” (Susan Sontag)
Seiobo — a Japanese goddess — has a peach tree in her garden that blossoms once every three thousand years: its fruit brings immortality. In Seiobo There Below, we see her returning again and again to mortal realms, searching for a glimpse of perfection. Beauty, in Krasznahorkai’s new novel, reflects, however fleetingly, the sacred — even if we are mostly unable to bear it. Seiobo shows us an ancient Buddha being restored; Perugino managing his workshop; a Japanese Noh actor rehearsing; a fanatic of Baroque music lecturing a handful of old villagers; tourists intruding into the rituals of Japan’s most sacred shrine; a heron hunting.… Over these scenes and more — structured by the Fibonacci sequence — Seiobo hovers, watching it all.
Elisa Biagini0.0 The Guest in the Wood offers selections from L'ospite / The Guest (2004) and Nel Bosco / Into the Wood (2007). Cryptic, searching, probing, these are innovative poems of the mysteries of the body, of everyday life, of mortality. In the preface, Angelina Oberdan compares Biagini s concise diction to Emily Dickinson, her lines to Kay Ryan, her terseness to Ellen Bryant Voight. Oberdan writes that in her intense interaction with contemporary American poets, many of whom she has translated into Italian, Biagini "started to feel the responsibility to write about the taboo or what makes us uncomfortable." Bilingual Italian/English.
Ласло Краснахоркаи4.0 Венгрия, 80-е годы. Социалистический строй медленно, но неуклонно разваливается. Маленький поселок, затерянный бог знает где, готовится к осенним ливням, которые на несколько месяцев полностью отрежут его от ближайшего города. Поселок постепенно вымирает. Кто-то уже уехал, кто-то копит деньги, чтобы уехать, кто-то смирился со своей участью и просто катится вниз по наклонной. Большинство деревню уже покинули, а те, кто остались, в основном проводят свои дни, выпивая в корчме и жалуясь друг другу на жизнь. Но тут в городе появляется Иримиаш, которого считали мертвым. Обаятельный, активный и предприимчивый, он убеждает жителей в том, что у него есть план, как наладить жизнь. Впервые за долгое время у людей появилась надежда. Но действительно ли Иримиаш – тот самый спаситель, в котором так нуждаются жители деревни, или он просто ловкий авантюрист?
Никита Стэнеску0.0 "...The poet comes into possession of an important, essential message, one that has the prestige and mystery of eternity…." —Daniel Cristea-Enache
For the first time in English: the beloved poems of Nichita Stanescu, Romania's most influential postwar poet. In his world, angels and mysterious forces converse with the everyday and earthbound while love and a quest for truth remain central. His startling images cut deep and his grappling—making bold leaps—is full of humor. His poems seduce the reader away from the human.
Nichita Stanescu(1933-1983) towers above post-World War II Romanian poetry. His poems are written in clear language while posing profound metaphysical questions. He was born in Ploiesti in 1933 and died in 1983 in Bucharest. He is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Romanian language poets, winner of the Herder Prize and nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Wieslaw Mysliwski0.0 A lively and playful exploration of human interaction, self-knowledge and humankind's connection to the land, life, death and dreams, STONE UPON STONE is without doubt one of the most stunning achievements of modern literature and - in the English-speaking world - a hitherto unsung classic. Capturing both the playfulness and the gravitas of the Polish original, Bill Johnston's excellent translation will have readers hooked from the very first minute, as they follow Mysliwski's stubborn yet questioning country bumpkin narrator rebel against his fate.
Kiwao Nomura0.0 As stunningly original to a contemporary American audience as haiku was to the late Victorians, this collection of Japanese poetry makes unpredictable leaps of association to explore themes such as sex, loss, and memory. The poems appear in English on one page and in Japanese characters on the facing page, providing readers with a glimpse into Japanese language and culture. Full of raw energy, these pieces have a visionary quality that likens them to a literary performance, exuding an air of enchantment as well as an astute sense of the human condition.
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.
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.
Gail Hareven0.0 Acclaimed author Noa Weber has a successful ""feminist"" life: a strong career, a daughter she raised alone and she is a respected cultural figure. Yet her interior life is bound by her obsessive love for one man, the father of her child, who has drifted in and out of her life. Trying to understand this lifelong obsession, Noa turns the pen on herself and dissects her life with relentless honesty. Against the evocative setting of turbulent, modern-day Israel, this becomes a quest to transform irrational desire into a transcendent understanding of love.
Елена Фанайлова2.0 "Русская версия" Елены Фанайловой похожа на увлекательную адаптацию американского блокбастера о России, о русском языке и русских людях. Пронзительные стихи, жестокие рецензии, откровенные интервью. Диск "Русская версия" - авторское исполнение
Attila Bartis0.0 Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weér, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a cramped apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then Andor meets the beautiful and nurturing Eszter, a woman who seems to have no past, and they fall wildly in love at first sight. With a fulfilling life seemingly within reach for the first time, Andor decides that he is ready to bring Eszter home to meet Mother. Though Bartis’s characters are unrepentantly neurotic and dressed in the blackest humor, his empathy for them is profound. A political farce of the highest ironic order, concluding that "freedom is a condition unsuitable for humans," Tranquility is ultimately, at its splanchnic core, a complex psychodrama turned inside out, revealing with visceral splendor the grotesque notion that there’s nothing funnier than unhappiness.
Такаси Хираиде0.0 The radiant subway. The wall that clears up, endless. A thundering prayer of steel that fastens together the days, a brush of cloud hanging upon it, O beginning, it is there—your nest. Thus the keynotes of Hiraide’s utterly original book-length poem unfold—a mix of narrative, autobiography, minute scientific observations, poetics, rhetorical experiments, hyper-realistic images, and playful linguistic subversions—all scored with the precision of a mathematical-musical structure.
Dorothea Dieckmann0.0 At the beginning of the Afghan war, young Rashid, born in Hamburg to an Indian father and a German mother, travels to India to claim an inheritance. There, he befriends a young Afghan and continues his journey to Peshawar, where he ends up in the middle of an anti-American demonstration. He is arrested, handed over to the Americans, and taken to the notorious Guantanamo.
What ensues is a remarkable literary experiment, a novel based on meticulous research. In six scenes, it describes Rashid’s life at the camp. Sensitive yet utterly unsentimental, the novel explores the existential consequences of isolation, suppression, and uncertainty — paralyzing fear, psychotic delusions, manic identification with fellow prisoners, and ultimately, resignation. Written with fierce moral clarity and a remarkable economy of expression, Guantanamo functions as both a political statement and a fascinating examination of the prisoner/jailer relationship.
