coming April 2012
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As Though She Were Sleeping is an homage to dreaming, "the only way of escaping oppression, be it familial, religious, or political." Milia's response to her new husband and to the Middle East of 1947 is to close her eyes and float into parallel worlds where identities and faces shift, and where she can converse with the dead and foresee the future. As the novel progresses, Milia's dreams become more navigable than the strange and obstinate "reality" she finds herself in.
Elias Khoury's latest novel returns to a golden age. Beirut in the 30s, unoccupied Palestine and a love affair recalled through a set of dream sequences: an Arab spring of a very different sort.
"—Tariq AliNo Lebanese writer has been more successful than Elias Khoury in telling the story of Lebanon . . . Khoury is one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab world.
"—Washington Post Book WorldElias Khoury is a pure storyteller. A writer who understands the hypnotic power of words, and who lets this power become the actual subject of his books. Of course, alongside the words, there is reality, palpable, sensuous, atrocious.
"—Le Nouvel ObservateurAn enchanting hymn to the Middle East, infused with the richness and beauty of classical Arabic poetry.
"—The Guardian (UK)Enthralling . . . Mesmerizing.
"—The Economist (UK)There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion.
"—New York Times Book Review
My Struggle
Complex, abundant, shocking.
A rare achievement. No one in his generation equals Knausgaard's combination of talent, style, observational skills, and original thinking.
"—Dagens NaeringslivA tremendous piece of literature.
"—Politken (Denmark)I can't stop, I want to stop, I can't stop, just one more page, then I will cook dinner, just one more page...
"—Vasterbottens-kuriren, Sweden
Wheel With a Single Spoke
While condemned to write under a plebian authoritarian regime, one that raised baseness and bad behavior to be choice attributes and socially affirmed, he rediscovered the freedom of pure poetry, which, in spite of its aura of difficult art, meant for the elite, in spite of the noble obscurity of a message accessible only to the initiated (or perhaps precisely because of this), it would have in its time a paradoxically broad impact and an unexpected success with as wide an audience as possible.
"—Alexandru CondeescuNichita Stanescu is the most important post-World War Two poet of Romania. With him, through him, the logos of the Romanian language takes revenge on its poets.
"—Stefan Augustin Doinas
Harlequin's Millions
Praise for I Served the King of England: A comic novel of great inventiveness ... charming, wise, and sad—and an unexpectedly good laugh.
"—Philadelphia InquirerPraise for I Served the King of England: A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude.
"—James Wood, The London Review of BooksCzechoslovakia's greatest living writer.
"—Milan KunderaPraise for The Little Town Where Time Stood Still: There are pages of queer magic unlike anything else currently being done with words.
"—The GuardianHrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail
"—Julian BarnesHrabal fills his pages with humanity and enchantment.
"—The Times (London)
Mama Leone
Praise for Sarajevo Marlboro: Reading Miljenko Jergovic's Sarajevo Marlboro is like wrapping yourself in a quilt of 29 patches, with each patch personalizing the horrors of the Bosnian War in ways that are engaging, humorous, and unendingly sad. If we are ever to learn to avoid carnage it will be through such acts of constant humanizing as are captured in Jergovic's amazing work.
"—Richard WileyPraise for Sarajevo Marlboro: Like all great war books, Sarajevo Marlboro is not about war—it’s about life. Jergovic is an enormously talented storyteller, so the people under siege come through in all their poignant fullness. And one more thing: this book does not belong to the literature of complaining, much too common these days—Sarajevo Marlboro is a book for the people who appreciate life.
"—Aleksander HemonPraise for Sarajevo Marlboro: Read this book. These spare tales speak of all that may yet befall us if we forget our essential fragility; by showing that while what unites us is undeniable, what we allow to divide us too easily becomes murderous. This classic of anti-war writing is a warning about the immense human cost of following those who would have us hate others.
"—Richard Flanagan
Catastrophes
As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life.
"—J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of BooksObviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of his generation… No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.
"—The New YorkerIt is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say.
"—Nadine Gordimer
A versatile and surprising poet. . . . Reminiscent of Pushkin. . . . [with] the ability to put muddled and fuzzy human articulation to higher use. . . . [He] knows melancholy but not despair, and for [him] the roundness of language is a solace.
"—Lesley Chamberlain, Times Literary SupplementOne of Europe's greatest poets and thinkers. We are all deeply indebted to him. . . . Norwid left an opus from which shines the light that lets us more deeply penetrate the truth of our being as human persons. . . . He insistently reminds us that without heroism humanity ceases to be itself. Cyprian Norwid was the man of hope.
"—Pope John Paul IIA labor of love, a painstakingly crafted instrument that resonates with melody and mystery.
"—The Guardian (UK)One of the greatest world poets of the nineteenth century.
"—Roman Jakobson
One of my favorite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin.
"—Rawi HageThis is a great and very beautiful novel.
"—Le DevoirThe writer hiding from the world in his house on the beach is as shy and charming and friendly as this light, generous, refreshing novel. . . . told with Hemingway-like sparseness and minimal melodrama. . . . Poulin earns his lump-in-the-throat ending.
"—Shelf Awareness
Beautiful . . . inescapably lyrical.
"—BookslutTo render Mahmoud Darwish's work into another language is a dangerous adventure. What Sinan has done with In the Presence of Absence is a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.
"—Saadi YousefDarwish deserves to be—needs to be—read. . . If the unorthodox volume exudes the perfume of finality, it is with the sweetness of a rich dessert.
"—The Arts FuseSo visceral and profound an experience, from page to page, that you will gratefully read it twice, maybe more. . . . More than an autobiography, it is the chronicle of a poet who begins with his discovery of letters and language as a boy.
"—The Daily Star (Lebanon)
There is much to treasure. Tulli plays with the line between unexpected and quirky very well. . . . You can't help but to want to return again and again.
"—NPRTulli strings together stories with compelling logic . . . Her evocation of a town where everything beautiful is tainted with death never feels far removed from reality.
"—The New YorkerA beautifully flowing translation. Johnston aptly captures the dreamy as well as the stark quality of the original.
"—Danuta BorchardtPowerful imagery caught in a sinewy, architectural, elegiac prose. An inner-outer dance of cityscape with the taut emotion, terror & psyche of the 'human.' Where are we? What magical zone of dream and stone? We are inhabitants of the wild, brilliant imagination of Magdalena Tulli. This book is a great pleasure to read: deeply provocative, intuitive, haunting. 'I hunt among stones' was Charles Olson's probing line, a mission manifested here with full beauty & finesse. And rendered from Polish to English in an inspired translation by Bill Johnston.
"—Anne WaldmanA startling, beautiful, powerful achievement.
"—W. S. Merwin
Archipelago’s latest offering, From the Observatory, is a slender, gorgeous thing, a photo-essay-cum-prose-poem-manifest . . . joyously slippery.
"—The NationThe photographs beautifully evoke their subject and also give some key to the genesis of the work itself... They recall the cinematic values that inspired two of the finest films of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour.
"—The Wall Street JournalVivid... Cortazar makes both science and language something utterly sensual... In a stunning translation by the talented Anne Mclean.
"—The NationalFrom the Observatory is a welcome addition to [Cortazar's] well-established English oeuvre. It exposes the intelligence and idiosyncratic connections that reflect a unique and creative mind.
"—The Quarterly ConversationA first-class literary imagination at work.
"—The New York TimesCortázar is a unique storyteller. He can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night.
"—Time Magazine
Yuri writes with passion, strength, and beauty of a world we others have never understood. A splendid book.
"—Farley MowatThis story by Yuri Rytkheu is a love song to human survival, both physical and metaphysical, a true story about change and endurance, about the Essential way to live in the world, about the eternal story while recounting the fleeting one.
"—Gioia TimpanelliA last, ringing testament to Rytkheu's people: a reworking of their myths, their history, and his own ancestry, in a poetic act of reclamation. . . Rich in the texture and detail of past lives.
"—The New York Review of BooksAn extended epitaph inscribed on the tombstone of a small nationality. . . . [with] an indigenous genesis myth, a fall from grace and fratricide legends, a Chukchi Deuteronomy, and a prophetlike figure. . . . [with] a heighened sense of nostalgia and . . . the full range of Rytkheu's style, from the lyrical prose of his myths and legends to the down-to-earth idiom of European whalers and merchants.
"—World Literature TodayBreathtaking, wild, and imaginative . . . so clear, surefooted, vivid and confident . . . They describe the marking of the seasons — the breaking ice, changing light, frost and drift . . . the training of shamans; the passing on of rituals and healing skills.
"—The Los Angeles Times
A seamless epic . . . Fresh and surprising . . . Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz said that the poem that praises beauty must swallow all of death, and Stone Upon Stone does just that: illuminating the balance of beauty and brutality that defines our existence. . . . When Szymek says, 'The whole world is one big language,' we believe it. We cup our ears to listen. . . . That Stone Upon Stone reads like the grand novel it is, not a novel in translation, is a testament to Johnston's work and Mysliwski's singular vision.
"—OrionLike a more agrarian Beckett, a less gothic Faulkner, a slightly warmer Laxness, Mysliwski masterfully renders in Johnston's gorgeous translation (Mysliwski's first into English) life in a Polish farming village before and after WWII. . . . Richly textured and wonderfully evocative, the novel renders Szymus as a distinctly memorable character, whose humor and hard-earned wisdom lend beauty to a bleak vision of a land destroyed by war and ravaged by history, and whose voice--sometimes warm, sometimes ornery, always elegiac--is undeniably original, his digressions and ruminations forming a story that reminds us that 'words are a great grace. When it comes down to it, what are you given other than words?'
"—Publishers Weekly, starredSweeping . . . irreverent . . With winning candor . . . Pietruszka chronicles the modernization of rural Poland and celebrates the persistence of desire.
"—The New YorkerA marvel of narrative seduction, a rare double masterpiece of storytelling and translation. . . . Mysliwski's prose, replete with wit and an almost casual intensity, skips nimbly from one emotional register to the next, carrying dramatic force. . . . He manages tone so finely, orchestrating a perfect continuity between the tragic and the comic and, ultimately, between life and death. . . . In his translation Bill Johnston navigates Mysliwski's modulations with skill and the lightness of touch that is generally the face of profound labour.
"—TImes Literary Supplement
Darwish is to be read with urgency, in the night, when nothing else moves but his lines.
"—The Village VoiceVery impressive. . . . Journal of an Ordinary Grief helps us understand the roots of Darwish's poetry.
"—Juan GoytisoloRewardingly contemplative. . . . Topics remain uncannily relevant. . . . Capably translated and helpfully annotated by Ibrahim Muhawi. . . . A passionate ode to his homeland. . . . [and] an intriguing . . . collection of ruminations and autobiographical fragments.
"—The Christian Science MonitorAn important anchor in the work of a poet celebrated for providing a national identity to displaced Palestinians. Darwish gives displacement a personal and deeply anguished voice . . . His artistry provides greater context for a conflict that to this day floods citizens of the world with grief.
A novel of restrained tenderness and laconic humor.
"—J.M. CoetzeeGerbrand Bakker's writing is fabulously clear, so clear that each sentence leaves a rippling wake.
"—Susan Reynolds, The Los Angeles TimesThe charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced. . . . Bakker shows a fine gift for laconic comedy. . . . The great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water.
"—Tim Parks, The New York Review of BooksBakker's considerable achievement is to take a character and location that might work in a Breughel painting and make them thoroughly relevant and contemporary. . . . All is revealed, slowly, and with a wonderfully quirky, misanthropic deliberation that we haven't seen in, well, donkey's years.
"—Minneapolis Star Tribune
Ponge, to be sure, forfeits no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention.
"—James Merrill
Blinding