Catastrophes

by

Translated from by

Published: Forthcoming

ISBN: 9781935744177
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Book Description

Reminiscent of Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas, this incandescent collection of lyrical and often nightmarish visions—now in English for the first time—is a feast for the senses and mind. At once raw, chiaroscuro, unearthly, and musical, these dreamscapes shed light on the human condition, history, isolation and connection, death and rebirth. Warning: these bite-sized pieces may detonate within.

Breytenbach's passionate desire to know and serve the truth, whatever it may be and whoever it may offend, is deeply admirable.

The Washington Post


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 Books


No white South African writer has penetrated as deeply into his own country as Breytenbach—and none has been as successful in the flowering of his art in exile.

Donald Woods


[Return to Paradise] is written with a wild heart and an unrelenting eye, and is fueled by the sort of rage that produces great literature.

The Washington Post


Obviously 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 Yorker


Breyten Breytenbach’s moving article, “Mandela’s Smile”, is available online through Harper’s.

In this interview with Democracy Now!, Breyten Breytenbach discusses the state of contemporary South Africa.

Listen to Breyten Breytenbach’s appearance on Words Without Borders’ Poeboes podcast. He discusses his work and reads from Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish, which was also proudly published by Archipelago Books.

Breyten Breytenbach reading at the Kelly Writers House at UPenn: