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Small press or indie publishers publish titles that are not solely driven by commercial success. They have a passion to introduce literary works that connect authors that might not be published by one of the large commercial publishing houses to readers. Often these works are of the highest literary quality. Many small press publishers support works in translation and are a great source of introducing readers to international authors. Small press books should are not the same as self-published books.
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Lucky breaks
by Yevgenia Belorusets
"Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, card players, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, and a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; a private caregiver in a disputed zone saves her elderly charge from the angel of death; a woman sits down on International Women's Day and can no longer stand up; a soldier decides to marry war. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony. She also weaves in twenty-three photographs that, in lyrical and historical counterpoint, form their own remarkable visual narrative"
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Chasing Homer : good luck, and nothing else
by László Krasznahorkai
"In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed-careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed-a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation ... Krasznahorkai-celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose-outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and-reaching out of the book proper-the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes)"
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Paradais
by Fernanda Melchor
"Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor-an attractive married woman and mother-while Polo dreams aboutquitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society-with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies-and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams"
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Scattered all over the earth
by Yōko Tawada
"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork"
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Woolgathering
by Patti Smith
The National Book Award-winner Patti Smith updates her treasure box of a childhood memoir about "clear unspeakable joy" and "just the wish to know" with a radiant new afterword, written during the pandemic and reflecting on current times
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The Trojan women : a comic
by Euripides
"Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides's classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world)"
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In memory of memory : a romance
by Mariia Stepanova
"With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of an entire century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family's pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life-during such atrocious times-is itself a strange odyssey. In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history-Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory"
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Voices in the evening
by Natalia Ginzburg
"In a quiet Italian town after World War Two, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is a constant concern to her obsessive, hypochondriac mother. But her mother does not know that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the elusive youngest son of the De Francisci family, who own the textile factory that dominates the town. Over the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future with Tommasino, free from the constraints of expectations and burdensome history. But this is all threatened by exposure. An elegant and beautifully re-strained novel that scratches at the fragility of postwar consciousness, Voices in the Evening is an unforgettable story about first love and lost chances"
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Battles in the desert
by José Emilio Pacheco
"This landmark novella -one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times- offers a child's-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in 'the year of polio, foot-and- mouth disease, floods.' A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child's left to ponder 'how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness.' When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: 'So what, we are living up to our ears in shit anyway under Miguel Alemán's regime,' with 'the face of El Señor Presidente everywhere: incessant, private abuse.' Sound familiar? Woven into this coming-of-age saga is the terribly intense love Carlos cherishes for his friend's young mother, which has the effect of driving the general cruelties further under the reader's skin. The acclaimed translator Katherine Silver has greatly revised her original translation, enlivening afresh this remarkable work"
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The hour of the star
by Clarice Lispector
A new edition of Clarice Lispector’s final masterpiece, now with a vivid introduction by Colm Tóibín. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator―edge of despair to edge of despair―and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.
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Cold enough for snow
by Jessica Au
"A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city's most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here-is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey? At once a careful reckoning and an elegy, Cold Enough for Snow questions whether any of us speak a common language, which dimensions can contain love, and what claim we have to truly know another's inner world. Selected from more than 1,500 entries, Cold Enough for Snow won the Novel Prize, a new, biennial award offered by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (Australia), for any novel written in English that explores and expands the possibilities of the form"
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Box Hill : a story of low self-esteem
by Adam Mars-Jones
A young man experiences his first gay love when he meets a glamorous, older, handsome, leather-clad biker in the cruisy section of Box Hill in 1970s London in this book that won the 2019 Fitacarraldo Editions Novel Prize. Original.
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Stranger to the moon : a novel
by Evelio Rosero Diago
"The writer Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of Colombia's history and society. His magnificent Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside history and geography, but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country's harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house to serve the needs of "the vicious clothed-ones," the novel describes what ensues when a single "naked-one" privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order that its characters inhabit. Trained insects and reptiles spy on all the naked-ones, and only the most fortunate reach old age (often by taking up strategic spots near the kitchen and grabbing for the fiercely contested food). Stranger to the Moon is a powerfully brave and distinctive novel by a writer who is arguably Colombia's greatest living author"
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Antonio
by Beatriz Bracher
"In Beatriz Bracher's Antonio-her third novel and her breakout book in Brazil-Benjamin, on the verge of becoming a father, discovers a tragic family secret involving patrimony and determines to find out how it happened. Those most immediately involved are all dead, but their three closest confidantes are still alive-his grandmother, Isabel; Haroldo, his grandfather's friend; and Raul, his father's friend-and each will tell him different versions of the facts. It is by collecting these shards of memories that Benjamin will piece together the painful puzzle of his family history. As with a Faulkner novel, putting together these three perspectives leads to contradictions as often as to the truth"
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The hole
by Hiroko Oyamada
A woman experiences a bizarre series of events involving eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures that force her to question her sanity after moving to her husband’s family’s home in the rural countryside to be near his new job.
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A shock
by Keith Ridgway
"Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel. Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it's at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They're on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending. Perhaps Ridgway's most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell-he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more thanone way you don't know what time it is ..."
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The water statues
by Fleur Jaeggy
"Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with wealth's loneliness and odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life"
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The beginners
by Anne Serre
"Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. 'How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that's not named in anypoem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross.' Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd-and unforgettable"
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Sevastopol
by Emilio Fraia
"Sevastopol contains three distinct narratives, each burrowing inside a crucial turning-point in a person's life: a young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a semi-abandoned inn in the middle of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sebastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers. Partly inspired by Tolstoy's The Sevastopol Sketches, but also reminiscent of the powerfully restrained prose of Chekhov, Roberto Bolano, and Rachel Cusk, Emilio Fraia masterfully weaves together these stories of yearning and loss, obsession and madness, failure and the desire to persist"
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Novel 11, book 18
by Dag Solstad
"Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to devote himself to an amateur theater. In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjørn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous plan through to its logical conclusion. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble withhis comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he's tangled up in a game or reality. Dag Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, a concentrated uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author's remarkable gifts and wit"
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Count Luna
by Alexander Lernet-Holenia
"At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests the Nazis, and when his board of directors asks him to go along with confiscating a neighbor's large parcel of land for their thriving wartime business, Jessiersky refuses. Yet, without his knowledge, the board succeeds in sending the owner of the land, a certain Count Luna, to a Nazi concentration camp on a trumped-up charge. Years later the war is over, but after a series of mysterious events, Jessiersky, deeply paranoid, becomes convinced that Count Luna has survived and seeks vengeance; driven to kill the source of his dread, he decides to hunt down Luna-and his years-long chase after the spectral count finally takes him deep into the catacombs of Rome... The nightmare logic of Count Luna comes from deep within Jessiersky's festering fears and serves up his brooding, insanity-spiced, delicious disquisitions-on what the Etruscans knew, on cemeteries as originally "sleeping places"-before coming at last to death itself: "Well, well, well, thought Jessiersky, swallowing hard. So you do die after all. You refuse to believe that someday you will die but then you die. And you don't even notice it. And yet the fact that you don't is the best thing about dying..."
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Counternarratives
by John Keene
Summoning slavery and witchcraft, a beguiling collection of novellas and stories, spanning the 17th century to the present and crossing multiple continents, draws upon memoirs, detective stories, interrogation transcripts and more to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present.
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A far cry from Kensington
by Muriel Spark
In a post-war London boarding house, Mrs. Hawkins, a young war widow adept at handling other people's problems, finds herself a player in some very strange events.
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His name was death
by Rafael Bernal
"A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a clan of the Lacodón tribe of Chiapas, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl): when he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life-and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises the demon of alcoholism as well. Slowly recovering, weakin his hammock, our antihero discovers a curious thing about the mosquitoes' buzzing, "which to human ears seemed so irritating and pointless." Perhaps, in fact, constituted a language he might learn-and with the help of a flute and a homemade dictionary-even speak. Slowly, he masters Mosquil, with astonishing consequences... Will he harness the mosquitoes' global might? And will his new powers enable him to take over the world that's rejected him? A book far ahead of its time, His Name Was Death looks down the double-barreled shotgun of ecological disaster and colonial exploitation-and cackles a graveyard laugh"
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