On its original publication in 2000, Pitch & Glint was widely hailed as a landmark in German poetry. Rooted in Seiler's childhood home, an East German village brutally undermined by Soviet Russian uranium extraction, these propulsive poems are highly personal, porous, twisting, cadenced, cryptic and earthy, traversing the rural sidelines of European history with undeniable evocative force. The frailty of bodies, a nearness to materials and manual work, the unknowability of our parents' suffering, and ultimately the loss of childhood innocence, all loom large in poems where sound comes first. As Seiler says in an essay, "You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story that we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound."
In Case of Loss gathers the best of Lutz Seiler's non-fiction from the last twenty-five years, revealing essays that are different to, but on a par with, his fiction and poetry. Seiler's anecdotal and associative pieces throw fascinating light on literature and his background, not least the environmental and human catastrophe of the Soviet-era mining in the community he grew up in, 'the tired villages . . . beneath which lay the ore, uranium'. Other essays focus on poetry, including his awakening to it while waiting in an army truck on his military service, and there are pieces on German poets such as Ernst Meister, Jürgen Becker and Peter Huchel. The title essay describes the poet Huchel's notebook, a kind of dictionary of images organised by mood and location.Providing a perfect entry to Seiler's work, In Case of Loss sees one of Europe's most original writers speak with openness and insight in essays full of a poet's attention to the importance of often overlooked objects and lives.
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter set out for life in the West. Their son Carl heads to Berlin where he discovers anarchy, love and poetry. Musical and incantatory, Seiler's novel Star 111 tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family which must find its way back together.
"At the tail end of the 1960s, thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however, doesn't come from a book--it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography . . . a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat. And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster."--Publisher marketing.
When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great - yet forgotten - novel written by a young woman who killed herself shortly after her book was rejected by publishers, Mersal begins to research the writer. From archives, Enayat's writing and Mersal's own interviews and observations, a remarkable portrait emerges of a woman attempting to live independently.
Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.
"Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator's imagination--from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator's own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. "No thing in the world is one thing," he declares; "some places are many more than one place." These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs--fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green--and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close"--Provided by publisher.
"Eleven stories of desire that traipse across their landscapes, rearranging the reader's expectations as they go. In Berlin, an American expatriate organizes a party, rescinds the invitations, and then finds the party thrown anyway with consequences that belie the devil-may-care attitude of the guests. In Krakow, a woman in tech with a questionable romantic past, and an even more questionable nipple piercing, runs into an old flame with a pressing problem of inheritance, atrocity, and identity that he'd love for her to help him solve. On Virginia's Jefferson Davis Highway, a woman and her husband--a newly minted citizen--travel through the legacies of American history to visit her estranged Korean War veteran uncle who's trapped by his own bitter legacies. Populated by fey expats, ardent psychiatrists, arch historians, and impossible friends who spin in and out of proximity to their narrators as they travel their enchanted orbits, Stevens' stories echo with a kind of urbane fairy-tale self-assertion that encourages the reader to stop and gaze in reverie at the articulation of the scenes, even as the stories' main characters go whirling off into their chaotic nights. Characters overlap in many of the stories. Rob the Ex in the punchy "Weimar Whore" is another character's "kinky historian" in "Ghost Pains." Sylvia who "lights up a room in her light-blue dress" in "The Party" is also Sylvia the hostile hostess in the final story of the collection, "A New Book of Grotesques." Yet, even the stories that do not share this revolving cast of acquaintances or have a gridwork of city streets in common are united by Stevens' impeccable artistry, which manages to overlay the gauzy romance of the stranger in a strange land atop the grim economic and interpersonal realities that so often accompany relative youth, relative freedom, and relative love. Erudite, eloquent, and bittersweet--these stories are like chewing on the orange rind for a last bitter taste of the drink."--Provided by publisher.
Fanciful, philosophical science fictions by the writer of Signs Preceding the End of the World, one of The Guardian's '100 Best Books of the 21st Century'.
On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she's now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse . . . C needs to put her medical debt and her sex life in order, but how to make concrete plans with this little visitor haunting her apartment, sporting a three-piece suit and delivering impromptu lectures on the vulnerability of the national grid? Moreover, what's all this computer code doing in the story of her life? And do the answers to all of C's questions lie with an eco-hacktivist cabal threatening to end modern life as we know it?
First (authorised) publication (in any language) of a wildly popular, anonymously written serial novel that started life as a blog during the US invasion of Iraq
From the author of the acclaimed Pity the Best, a collection of new stories plumbing the depths of American laughter and evil.
What Tochtli wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is growing up in his drug baron father's luxury hideout, shared with hit men and dealers. Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly-comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.
In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude.
From the author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q, a chilling fable about the necessity--and impossibility--of productivity, art, and love in an age governed by capitalist logic.
Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty backrooms of long vanished used bookstores, a love letter to bookshops and bookselling, and a browser's dream wish list of often overlooked and unloved novels, short story collections, poetry collections and works of nonfiction. In these pages, R. B. Russell, publisher of Tartarus Press, doesn't only discuss the books of his life, but explains what they have meant to him over time, charting his progress as a writer and publisher for over thirty years . . . and a bibliophile for many more. Here is living proof of how literature, books, and book collecting can be an intrinsic part of one's personal, professional and imaginative life, and as not only a solitary act, but a social one, resulting in treasured friendships, experiences, and loves one might never, otherwise, have enjoyed. Filled with a lively nostalgia for the era when finding strange new books meant pounding the pavement and not just filling in search engines, Fifty Forgotten Books is for anyone who wishes they could still browse the dusty bookshelves of their youth, and who can't wait to get back out into the world in quest of the next text liable to change their life.
In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane â¿ perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose â¿ began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnaneâ¿s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnaneâ¿s last work, as death approaches.
Ann Quin's wildest, funniest, freakiest, kinkiest, and best novel - a road-trip novel, a graphic novel, a spy novel, a Beat novel, an anti-novel - is available again, to inspire a new generation of mavericks.
A master of contemporary Arabic fiction returns to English translation with a cunningly layered dark comedy about the powers and limits of creativity in a war zone.
Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself by jumping off the roof of her building. It's a full life. Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she's offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back-leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself. Peppered with "sponsored content" providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once an old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.
Choosing as her subject four iconic homicides perpetrated by Chilean women over the 20th century, Alia Trabucco Zeran details not only the troubling tales of the murders themselves, but the story of how society, the media and men in power reacted to these killings, painting their perpetrators as femmes fatales or hysterics - evil or out of control.
An empowering feminist collection of new stories, essays and poems inspired by spring 2020, raising funds for domestic violence charities
Here in one beautiful collectorâ¿s edition are Herreraâ¿s 3 era-defining novels: Signs Preceding the End of the World, The Transmigration of Bodies, and Kingdom Cons
A major poet's fiction debut; a childhood not of screams but silence; a sensuous edge-of-danger tone, a la Deborah Levy
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