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Glass Grapes: and Other Stories
By Martha Ronk. 2008
Glass Grapes and Other Stories is the first full-length collection of short stories by distinguished poet and fiction writer Martha…
Ronk. Ronk's work has garnered critical accolades and numerous awards, including, most recently, a 2005 PEN USA Award in poetry, a 2007 NEA Fellowship, and a 2007 National Poetry Series Award. Glass Grapes is a collection of short, experimental stories, usually dominated by an object imbued with fetishistic qualities by an obsessive, self-involved narrator. The language of these stories is repetitive, provocative, imagistic, occasionally comic, and unnerving. Ronk's fiction moves with the same grace, beauty, and attention to language as her most accomplished poetry.Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret
By Ondjaki. 2014
BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 JOSÉ SARAMAGO PRIZEAN AFRICA39/UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2014 TOP AFRICAN WRITER UNDER 40A GUARDIAN…
TOP FIVE AFRICAN WRITER, 2012WINNER OF THE GRINZANE PRIZE FOR BEST YOUNG WRITER, 2010By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he's willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop's Beach.Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret is a charming coming-of-age story from the next rising star in African literature.Cradle Book
By Craig Morgan Teicher. 2010
Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin.…
With a poet's mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.Craig Morgan Teicher is poetry editor of Publishers Weekly and a vice president on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics
By Joe Klein, Anonymus. 2006
A brilliant and penetrating look behind the scenes of modern American politics, Primary Colors is a funny, wise, and dramatic…
story with characters and events that resemble some familiar, real-life figures. When a former congressional aide becomes part of the staff of the governor of a small Southern state, he watches in horror, admiration, and amazement, as the governor mixes calculation and sincerity in his not-so-above-board campaign for the presidency.From the Hardcover edition.The Clouds
By Juan Saer, Hilary Dobel. 2016
Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language --Ricardo Piglia What Saer presents marvelously is…
the experience of reality and the characters attempts to write their own narratives within its excess --BookforumIn modern-day Paris Pich n Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscript--which might be fictional or could be a memoir--by Doctor Real a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum Their trip which ends in disaster and fire is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyone--even the other patients--into sleeping with her Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer s typically gorgeous Proustian style The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exile--a huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writers--as well as an examination of madness Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation The author of numerous novels and short-story collections including Scars and La Grande Saer was awarded Spain s prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University She is the author of two manuscripts and in addition to Saer she has translated work by Carlos PintadoZone
By Charlotte Mandell, Brian Evenson, Mathias Énard. 2010
One of the truly original books of the decade--written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence--Zone tells the story…
of a French Intelligence agent on his way to the Vatican to sell a briefcase of secrets. Over the course of his train ride, he thinks back over his life and all the damage he's caused in this violent century.Divine Stories
By Andy Rotman. 2008
Divine Stories is the inaugural volume in a landmark translation series devoted to making the wealth of classical Indian Buddhism…
accessible to modern readers. The stories here, among the first texts to be inscribed by Buddhists, highlight the moral economy of karma, illustrating how gestures of faith, especially offerings, can bring the reward of future happiness and ultimate liberation. Originally contained in the Divyavadana, an enormous compendium of Sanskrit Buddhist narratives from the early Common Era, the stories in this collection express the moral and ethical impulses of Indian Buddhist thought and are a testament to the historical and social power of narrative. Long believed by followers to be the actual words of the Buddha himself, these divine stories are without a doubt some of the most influential stories in the history of Buddhism.And They Didn't Die
By Margaret Daymond, Lauretta Ngcobo. 1990
This is the untold story of the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, told by a woman who lived it. It…
is the story of the ordinary women of South Africa who, forced to scratch a living from the land, still found the strength to ask for respect and, in the process, made a revolution.Nuri Does Not Exist
By Sadru Jetha. 2011
Amid a sea of dystopian world literatures haunted by the fractious claims of identity politics, Nuri Does Not Exist is…
an astonishingly charming collection of linked short stories that engages us with the utterly believable innocence of its Utopian vision. Accompany Nuri from Zanzibar to Canada as he learns how servitude transcends slavery; fealty transcends servitude; and community transcends fealty.Darwin Alone in the Universe
By M.A.C. Farrant. 2003
In the Midst of Alarms
By Robert Barr, Douglas Lochhead. 1973
The Minimum Security Chronicles
By Stephanie Mcmillan. 2013
From the winner of the 2012 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a character-driven tale about our threatened environment and the…
practicality of putting contemporary revolutionary strategy into action. In The Minimum Security Chronicles, the latest long-form narrative from Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award-winning cartoonist Stephanie McMillan, lifelong friends Kranti and Bananabelle are rounded up during a protest and locked in a pen by a faraway railroad track. After their escape, when trying to gain proof of their capture, Kranti discovers the future site of a nuclear power plant. After attempting to shut it down, she learns of an even more ecologically dangerous enterprise: a massive geo-engineering project scheduled to begin in a matter of weeks. And so begins the tale of a group of friends--among them an apolitical computer programmer, an aspiring musician who joins the Occupy movement, a lovestruck community gardener, a militant bunny and a guinea pig theorist--who try to halt the plans of evil corporate overlords bent on destroying the earth for profit.From the Trade Paperback edition.Wigrum
By Daniel Canty, Oana Avasilichioaei. 2011
End of October 1944. Sebastian Wigrum absconds from his London flat. Very little is known about him, except his intense…
curiosity about the world and perhaps his disillusionment in love. The legacy of this man, who lived to collect has left in his wake an inventory of some hundred objects, which shed light on the history of our time.Abahn Sabana David
By Marguerite Duras, Kazim Ali. 2016
"Duras's language and writing shine like crystals."--The New Yorker"A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of…
her powers."--Edmund WhiteAvailable for the first time in English, Abahn Sabana David is a late-career masterpiece from one of France's greatest writers.Late one evening, David and Sabana--members of a communist group--arrive at a country house where they meet Abahn, the man they've been sent to guard and eventually kill for his perceived transgressions. A fourth man arrives (also named Abahn), and throughout the night these four characters discuss existential ideas of understanding, capitalism, violence, revolution, and dogs, while a gun lurks in the background the entire time.Suspenseful and thought-provoking, Duras's novel calls to mind the plays of Samuel Beckett in the way it explores human existence and suffering in the confusing contemporary world.Marguerite Duras wrote dozens of plays, film scripts, and novels, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Sea Wall, and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. She's most well-known for The Lover, which received the Goncourt Prize in 1984 and was made into a film in 1992. This is her third book to be published by Open Letter. Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, and novelist, and has published a translation of Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri in addition to co-translating Duras's L'Amour. He teaches at Oberlin College and the University of Southern Maine.Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
By J. T. Mahany, Antoine Volodine. 2015
"The interconnected works of Volodine--think Faulkner, but after an apocalypse--constitute the most exciting project in contemporary French literature."--Maria ClementiThat is…
what we had called post-exoticism. It was a construction connected to revolutionary shamanism and literature. . . . It was an interior construction, a withdrawal, a secret welcoming land, but also something offensive that participated in the plot of certain unarmed individuals against the capitalist world and its countless ignominies. This fight was now confined solely to Bassmann's lips.Like with Antoine Volodine's other works (Minor Angels, We Monks & Soldiers), Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven takes place in a corrupted future where a small group of radical writers--those who practice "post-exoticism"--have been jailed by those in power and are slowly dying off. But before Lutz Bassmann, the last post-exoticist writer, passes away, a couple journalists will try and pry out all the secrets of this powerful literary movement.With its explanations of several key "post-exoticist" terms that appear in Volodine's other books, Lesson Eleven provides a crucial entryway into one of the most ambitious literary projects of recent times: a project exploring the revolutionary power of literature.Antoine Volodine is the author of dozens of books under a few different pseudonyms, including Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger. These novels--several of which are available in English--articulate a post-exoticist universe filled with secrets, revolutionary writers, and spiders.J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the University of Rochester's MA in Literary Translation Studies program and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.The Strange Truth About Us
By M.A.C. Farrant. 2011
This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as "a brave iconoclast" and whose work the Globe…
& Mail has said "bristles with moral fury ... at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour," offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.A three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world."Annotations About an Absence" is a series of 115 numbered annotations to the day-long ruminations of a retired couple living in a gated community attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future: "We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life. Which is? We are afraid.""Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence" is written as a series of notes to these annotations, providing (in the utterly blank spirit of transparency) a running satiric narrative on the project. Each of these "notes" is written as if it were a description of a late-night TV movie or the content of a wet Jehovah's Witness pamphlet left on a woman's doorstep that has taken hold of her mind."Other Prose Surrounding Absence" comprises twenty-seven prose pieces that take aim at a globalized world bludgeoned by the threat of "end times"-climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics-that seem designed insofar as we are able to retain our status as "individuals."Unique in style and approach, engaging, enigmatic, controversial, and delightful, this book is an attempt to prick the bubble of our complacency in the face of the "awful atrocity" we've made for ourselves.Apples from the Desert
By Grace Paley, Savyon Liebrecht. 1992
Savyon Liebrecht's intense, lyrical, and emotionally complex stories have made her a best-selling writer in her native Israel. Her short…
fiction explores the everyday tragedies that emanate from strained relationships between Arabs and Jews, women and men, older and younger generations in present-day Israel. According to the Washington Post Book World, her "engrossing and skillful tales take you through the lives of real people, to the heart of their emotional and moral being." Liebrecht reveals the impact of larger social and political conflicts within the private world of the home with a precision and a subtle ferocity reminiscent of the work of Nadine Gordimer. "These finely wrought stories of private lives shed light on a terrifying political conflict", notes the New York Times Book Review. "[Liebrecht] takes you places you've never been before." The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Woman's SeriesWriters and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus
By Rebecca Gould. 2016
Spanning the period between the end of the Russo-Caucasian War and the death of the first female Chechen suicide bomber,…
this groundbreaking book is the first to compare Georgian, Chechen, and Daghestani depictions of anticolonial insurgency. Rebecca Gould draws from previously untapped archival sources as well as from prose, poetry, and oral narratives to assess the impact of Tsarist and Soviet rule in the Islamic Caucasus. Examining literary representations of social banditry to tell the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, Gould argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance--or "transgressive sanctity"--to colonialism.Cold Type
By Harvey Araton. 2014
Harvey Araton writes, with keen insight, of a time when power was ebbing fast from both newspapers and their unions.…
It's an especially bittersweet tale he tells of the people who had grown up in newspapers and unions, as they struggle to adapt to this evolving new order. And, of course, what makes this even more evocative, is that we're still trying to sort this all out. - Frank Deford, author of Everybody's All-American, NPR commentator"Father and son face their demons, each other, and a depressingly realistic publisher in a newspaper yarn that made me yell "Hold the Front Page" for Harvey Araton's rousing debut as a novelist." - Robert Lipsyte, author of An Accidental SportswriterIn times of change, American novelists return to old themes. In Cold Type-as in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman-a son and his father struggle to hold onto what they think is right. It's mid-1990s; and "cold type" technology, a.k.a. computerized typesetting, wreaks havoc among workers in the newspaper industry. A fabulously wealthy Briton buys the New York City Trib and immediately refuses to negotiate with the truck drivers' union. In solidarity, all the other blue collar unions take to the streets. Jamie Kramer is a reporter for the Trib. His father is a hardcore shop steward (unusual for a Jew in Irish-dominated unions) from the old day of "hot type," but who has become a typographer in a world he doesn't understand. His father expects Jamie not to cross the picket line. It would be an act of supreme disrespect. But that's not so easy for Jamie. His marriage has fallen apart, he desperately needs his paycheck for child support, and he needs to make his own life outside the shadow of his father.Harvey Araton is a celebrated sports reporter and columnist for the New York Times. He authored the New York Times best-seller Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball's Greatest Gift; plus When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks. Araton also finds time to serve as adjunct professor in sports writing at Montclair State University in New Jersey where he lives.Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus
By Rebecca Ruth Gould. 2016
Spanning the period between the end of the Russo-Caucasian War and the death of the first female Chechen suicide bomber,…
this groundbreaking book is the first to compare Georgian, Chechen, and Daghestani depictions of anticolonial insurgency. Rebecca Gould draws from previously untapped archival sources as well as from prose, poetry, and oral narratives to assess the impact of Tsarist and Soviet rule in the Islamic Caucasus. Examining literary representations of social banditry to tell the story of Russian colonialism from the vantage point of its subjects, among numerous other themes, Gould argues that the literatures of anticolonial insurgency constitute a veritable resistance--or "transgressive sanctity"--to colonialism.