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Zone
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.18% Gray
By Angela Rodel, Zachary Karabashliev. 2008
After Stella disappears, Zack sets off on a trip across America with his memories, a camera, and a duffle bag…
of dope. Through the lens of the old camera, he starts rediscovering himself by photographing an America we rarely see. His journey unleashes a series of erratic, hilarious, and life-threatening events interspersed with flashbacks to his relationship with Stella.The Walk Home
By Rachel Seiffert. 2014
Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run. Just like he has. Only he's not…
so sure he was right to go. He's been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he's working as a laborer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow. But Stevie hasn't told his family--what's left of them--that he's back. Not yet. He's also not far from his uncle Eric, another one who left--for love this time. Stevie's toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his mother, Lindsey . . . well, she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie, too. Moving between Stevie's contemporary Glaswegian life and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Without your past, who are you? Where does it leave you when you go against your family, turn your back on your home; when you defy the world you grew up in? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift? Yearning to belong exerts a powerful draw, and Stevie knows there are still people waiting for him to walk home. An extraordinarily deft and humane writer, Rachel Seiffert tells us the truth about love and about hope.War, So Much War
By Martha Tennent, Mercè Rodoreda, Maruxa Relaño. 2015
We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for…
freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories--Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea--that would eventually make her internationally famous.The Hotel Years
By Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann. 2015
The first overview of all Joseph Roth's journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,"I am a hotel citizen,…
a hotel patriot." The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First World War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World War. Roth, the great journalist of his day, needed journalism to survive: in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. Beginning in 1921, Roth wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung who sent him on assignments throughout Germany - the inflation, the occupation, political assassinations - and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland and Albania. And always: "I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid."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.The Physics of Sorrow
By Angela Rodel, Georgi Gospodinov. 2011
"Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind--or maybe just provide the ultimate bathroom reader. . . . The formal playfulness…
suggests Kundera with A.D.D. and potty jokes."--Ed Park, The Village VoiceA finalist for both the Strega Europeo and Gregor von Rezzori awards (and winner of every Bulgarian honor possible), The Physics of Sorrow reaffirms Georgi Gospodinov's place as one of Europe's most inventive and daring writers.Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov's long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly moving--such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill--and extraordinarily funny--see the section on the awfulness of the question "how are you?"--Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various "side passages," getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.The Physics of Sorrow will appeal to fans of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy, and Dubravka Ugresic for its unique structure, humanitarian concerns, and stunning storytelling.Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2005 and was praised by the New Yorker, New York Times, and several other prestigious review outlets.Angela Rodel won a PEN Translation Fund Grant in 2010 for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today and received an NEA Fellowship for her translation of Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow.The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Randall A. Major, Svetislav Basara. 2008
Told through a series of "historical documents"--memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, maps--the novel details the tale of a…
secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events.The House with the Stained-Glass Window (MacLehose Press Editions #7)
By Zanna Sloniowska, Antonia Lloyd Jones. 2015
"The House with the Stained-Glass Window is remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a…
long and painful century, at once personal and political, a novel of life and survival across the ages" PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West StreetIn 1989, Marianna, the beautiful star soprano at the Lviv opera, is shot dead in the street as she leads the Ukrainian citizens in their protest against Soviet power. Only eleven years old at the time, her daughter tells the story of their family before and after that critical moment - including, ten years later, her own passionate affair with an older, married man. Just like their home city of Lviv, which stands at the crossroads of nations and cultures, the women in this family have had turbulent lives, scarred by war and political turmoil, but also by their own inability to show each other their feelings. Lyrically told, this is the story of a young girl's emotional, sexual, artistic and political awakening as she matures under the influence of her relatives, her mother's former lover, her city and its fortunes.Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-JonesThe Vampire of Ropraz
By Jacques Chessex, Donald Wilson. 1973
"Silky prose in this harrowing account of crime and punishment."--Kirkus Reviews "Using spare, effective prose, Chessex brilliantly renders both the…
inhospitable winter landscape of the mountains and the harshness of a society that makes monsters of its victims.'--London Review of Books"A superb novel, hard as a winter in these landscapes of dark forests, where an atmosphere of prejudice and violence envelops the reader."--L'Express"It's beautiful; it's pure, like a blue sky over a black forest. Giono without garlic and olives."--Le Point"Far from just telling us a simple story Chessex has had the intelligence to integrate a dose of poetry, of the aesthetics of sin, and of the metaphysics of the monster."--LireJacques Chessex, winner of the prestigious Goncourt prize, takes a true story and weaves it into a lyrical tale of fear and cruelty.1903, Ropraz, a small village near the Jura Mountains of Switzerland. On a howling December day, a lone walker discovers a recently opened tomb, the body of a young woman violated, her left hand cut off, genitals mutilated, and heart carved out. There is horror in the nearby villages: the return of atavistic superstitions and mutual suspicions. Then two more bodies are violated. A suspect must be found. Favez, a stableboy with bloodshot eyes, is arrested and placed in psychiatric care. He escapes, enlists in the Foreign Legion as the First World War begins, and is sent into battle in the trenches of the Somme.Jacques Chessex, born in 1934, won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize for his novel A Father's Love. He is considered one of Switzerland's greatest living authors. He lives in Ropraz.Marta Oulie
By Sigrid Undset, Tiina Nunnally. 2014
"I have been unfaithful to my husband." Marta Oulie's opening line scandalized Norwegian readers in 1907. And yet, Sigrid Undset…
had a gift for depicting modern women "sympathetically but with merciless truthfulness," as the Swedish Academy noted in awarding her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. At the time she was one of the youngest recipients and only the third woman so honored. It was Undset's honest story of a young woman's love life--"the immoral kind," as she herself bluntly put it--that made her first novel an instant sensation in Norway.Marta Oulie, written in the form of a diary, intimately documents the inner life of a young woman disappointed and constrained by the conventions of marriage as she longs for an all-consuming passion. Set in Kristiania (now Oslo) at the beginning of the twentieth century, Undset's book is an incomparable psychological portrait of a woman whose destiny is defined by the changing mores of her day--as she descends, inevitably, into an ever-darker reckoning. Remarkably, though Undset's other works have attracted generations of readers, Marta Oulie has never before appeared in English translation. Tiina Nunnally, whose award-winning translation of Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter captured the author's beautifully clear style, conveys the voice of Marta Oulie with all the stark poignancy of the original Norwegian.The Safe House: A Novel
By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.Vernon Subutex Two: Roman
By Frank Wynne, Virginie Despentes. 2018
Rock star Alexandre Bleach might be dead, but he has a secret. It's a secret that concerns several people, but…
the only person who can unlock it is Vernon Subutex, former record shop proprietor turned homeless messiah and guru, last seen hallucinating and feverish on a bench in the parc des Buttes Chaumont. Acha wants to know the truth behind the death of her mother, Vodka Satana. And if she finds the bastards responsible, she wants to make them pay, whatever Celeste thinks of her plan.C?leste wants Acha to get a grip and stop hanging around with Subutex's gang of disciples. The Hyena wants to find the Bleach tapes. She wants to untangle her complicated feelings about Ana?s, her boss' assistant. And speaking of her boss, she does not want Laurent Dopalet to discover how badly she has double-crossed him.Laurent Dopalet wants the Hyena to find and destroy the Bleach tapes. He wants to forget he ever knew Vodka Satana. He wants people to stop graffitiing his apartment with ludicrous allegations. Above all, he wants people to understand: NONE OF THIS IS HIS FAULT.THE SEQUEL TO VERNON SUBUTEX 1, SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2018.Translated from the French by Frank WynneThe Safe House: A Novel
By Laura Marris, Christophe Boltanski. 2017
In Paris’s exclusive Saint-Germain neighborhood is a mansion. In that mansion lives a family. Deep in that mansion. The Bolts…
are that family, and they have secrets. The Safe House tells their story. When the Nazis came, Étienne Boltanski divorced his wife and walked out the front door, never to be seen again during the war. So far as the outside world knew, the Jewish doctor had fled. The truth was that he had sneaked back to hide in a secret crawl space at the heart of the house. There he lived for the duration of the war. With the Liberation, Étienne finally emerged, but he and his family were changed forever—anxious, reclusive, yet proudly eccentric. Their lives were spent, amid Bohemian disarray and lingering wartime fears, in the mansion’s recesses or packed comically into the protective cocoon of a Fiat. That house (and its vehicular appendage) are at the heart of Christophe Boltanski’s ingeniously structured, lightly fictionalized account of his grandparents and their extended family. The novel unfolds room by room—each chapter opening with a floorplan— introducing us to the characters who occupy each room, including the narrator’s grandmother--a woman of “savage appetites”--and his uncle Christian, whose haunted artworks would one day make him famous. “The house was a palace,” Boltanski writes, “and they lived like hobos.” Rejecting convention as they’d rejected the outside world, the family never celebrated birthdays, or even marked the passage of time, living instead in permanent stasis, ever more closely bonded to the house itself. The Safe House was a literary sensation when published in France in 2015 and won the Prix de Prix, France’s most prestigious book prize. With hints of Oulipian playfulness and an atmosphere of dark humor, The Safe House is an unforgettable portrait of a self-imprisoned family.Melusine; or, The Noble History of Lusignan
By Jean D Arras, Donald Maddox, Sara Sturm. 2012
Jean d’Arras’s splendid prose romance of Melusine, written for Jean de Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France,…
is one of the most significant and complex literary works of the later Middle Ages. The author, promising to tell us “how the noble and powerful fortress of Lusignan in Poitou was founded by a fairy,” writes a ceaselessly astonishing account of the origins of the powerful feudal dynasty of the Lusignans in southwestern France, which flourished in western Europe and the Near East during the age of the Crusades. The spellbinding story of the destinies of the fairy Melusine, her mortal husband, and her extraordinary sons blends history, myth, genealogy, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, romance, and Crusade narrative.Preceded by a substantial introduction, this translation, the first in English to be amply annotated, captures the remarkable range of stylistic registers that characterizes this extravagant and captivating work.Party Headquarters
By Angela Rodel, Georgi Tenev. 2006
Winner of the Vick Foundation Novel of the Year Award in 2007, Party Headquarters takes place in the eighties and…
nineties, during Bulgaria's transition from communist rule to democracy.The book--which is a love story, a parody, and a thriller about a political hoax--opens with the main character visiting his father-in-law, an old communist party boss who is dying, and being tasked with delivering a suitcase filled with one-and-a-half million euros.It's one of Bulgaria's most popular myths: As the communist party fell apart, high ranking officials squirreled away bags and suitcases containing a significant portion of the country's wealth, and that these bags are still circulating through Europe, waiting to be delivered to various conspirators.But this is just the beginning of the corruption and inequality that plagued Bulgaria during this time. While immersing himself in pornography and prostitution, the hero of Party Headquarters reflects back on his life and the emblematic events that took place around that time--the anticommunist protests, the arson attack on the Communist Party Headquarters in Sofia, and, most tragically and crucially, the Chernobyl disaster, during which the families of party officials were sheltered away and fed special, safe food, while the regular citizens suffered.Beautiful and tragic, Party Headquarters is an engrossing testament to the struggles that haunted Bulgaria after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of which continue to resonate today.Before penning the Vick Prize-winning novel Party Headquarters, Georgi Tenev had already published four books, founded the Triumviratus Art Group, hosted The Library television program about books, and written plays that have been performed in Germany, France, and Russia. He is also a screenwriter for film and TV.Angela Rodel earned an MA in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian.Verklempt: Stories
By John Howard, Ari Roth, Peter Sichrovsky. 2016
'Verklempt’, Yiddish slang, means 'choked with emotion.’ In his latest collection of stories, internationally best-selling author Peter Sichrovsky aggressively dismantles…
post-Holocaust Jewish identity. These are love stories where love is a bitter pill, a joke, a missed chance at happiness, a secret, a ghost, or a longing to be with a person one cannot even remember. Sichrovsky writes without embellishment, spare outlines of characters that feel familiar, and infuses them with dark humor and tragedy. With characteristic inquisitiveness and provocation, Sichrovsky delivers a delightful collection that entertains and inspires us to tears, laughter, revelations.The Tin Drum
By Günter Grass, Breon Mitchell. 2009
The Tin Drum, one of the great novels of the twentieth century, was published in Ralph Manheim's outstanding translation in…
1959. It became a runaway bestseller and catapulted its young author to the forefront of world literature.To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass's publishers all over the world, is bringing out a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources: from a wealth of detailed scholarship; from a wide range of newly-available reference works; and from the author himself. The result is a translation that is more faithful to Grass's style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work.After fifty years, THE TIN DRUM has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar's midget friends-Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews-waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.Queenship and the Women of Westeros: Female Agency and Advice in Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire (Queenship and Power)
By Zita Eva Rohr, Lisa Benz. 2020
Is the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and HBO’s Game of Thrones really…
medieval? How accurately does it reflect the real Middle Ages? Historians have been addressing these questions since the book and television series exploded into a cultural phenomenon. For scholars of medieval and early modern women, they offer a unique vantage point from which to study the intersections of elite women and popular understandings of the premodern world. This volume is a wide-ranging study of those intersections. Focusing on female agency and the role of advice, it finds a wealth of continuities and contrasts between the many powerful female characters of Martin’s fantasy world and the strategies that historical women used to exert influence. Reading characters such as Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister, and Brienne of Tarth with a creative, deeply scholarly eye, Queenship and the Women of Westeros makes cutting-edge developments in queenship studies accessible to everyday readers and fans.Agatha
By Anne Cathrine Bomann. 2019
A psychiatrist is counting down towards his upcoming retirement. He lives alone in his childhood home and has neither friends…
nor family.Often, he resorts to drawing bird caricatures of his patients instead of taking notes. His social life consists of brief conversations with his meticulous secretary Madame Surrugue, who has reigned over the clinic for more than thirty years. The two of them have no relationship outside the office, where everything runs smoothly and uneventfully.Until one day, that is, when a young German woman called Agatha arrives and demands to see the doctor and he soon realizes that underneath her fragile exterior is a strong and fascinating woman. The doctor and Agatha embark upon a course of therapy together, a process that forces the doctor to confront his fear of true intimacy outside the clinic. But is it too late to reconsider your existence as a 71-year-old?