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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 They have a passion to introduce literary works that connect authors that might not be published by one of the large commercial publishing houses to readers.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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The pastor
by Hanne Ørstavik
"Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching formeaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how "language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending," and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing"
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An impossible love
by Christine Angot
"Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives"
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In the land of the cyclops : essays
by Karl Ove Knausgård
"In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. He explores art, philosophy, literature, or something as simple as a trip to the beach with his kids, with piercing candor and intelligence. Paired with full-color images throughout, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman's photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill's eye, or tussle with the inner-workings of Ingmar Bergman's workbooks. In one essay he describes the speckled figure of Francesca Woodman, arms coiled in birch bark and reaching up toward the sky - a tree. In another, he unearths Sally Mann's photographs of decomposing corpses, drawn to the point at which branches and limbs, hair and grass harmonize. Each essay bristles with Knausgaard's searing honesty and longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world"
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Milongas
by Edgardo Cozarinsky
With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life.
From tango’s origins in the gritty bars of Buenos Aires, to milongas tucked away in the crypt of a London Church, a café in Kraków, or the quays of the Seine, Cozarinsky guides us through a shape-shifting dance’s phantasmagoric past. In neighborhood dance halls vibrant and alive through the early hours of the morning, where young and old, foreign and native, novice and master come together to traverse borders, demographics, and social mores, “it is impossible to distinguish the dance from the dancer.” As conspiratorial as he is candid, Cozarinsky shares the secrets and culture of this timeless dance with us through glimmering anecdote, to celebrate its traditions, evolution, and the devotees who give it life.
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Distant transit
by Maja Haderlap
"Infused with movement, Maja Haderlap's distant transit traverses Slovenia's scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its evershifting boundaries. Avoiding traditional forms and pronounced rhythms, Haderlap unleashes a flow of evocative, captivating passages whose power lies in their associative richness and precision of expression, vividly conjuring Slovenia's natural world - its rolling meadows, snow-capped alps, and sparkling Adriatic coast. Belonging to the Slovene ethnic minority and its inherited, transgenerational trauma, Haderlap explores the burden of history and the prolonged aftershock of conflict - warm, lavish pastoral passages conceal dark memories, and musings on the way language can create and dissolve borders reveal a deep longing for a sense of home. At its core, distant transit is an ode to survival, building a monument to traditions and lives lost"
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Kin
by Miljenko Jergović
"Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović iinvestigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The workis ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era"
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If you kept a record of sins
by Andrea Bajani
Traveling to Romania for his mother’s funeral, Lorenzo, who was a young boy when his mother left him, reflects on the strangeness of today’s Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization and iniquity and exploitation run rampant.
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Autumn rounds
by Jacques Poulin
"In rural Canada, dotted along the coast of a vast mauve river, live villagers of different stripes: a recently divorced hydroplane pilot, a factory-worker who closely resembles her fisherman husband, a probing motorcyclist with a pet St. Bernard, a pairof beautiful blonde joggers, and other curious characters. For all their differences, each is brought together by a soft-spoken man, referred to only as "the Driver," who travels up and down the coast each season, delivering books to areas not served by libraries and listening closely to the villager's tales and to their woes. This summer tour is bound to be different than all the rest. The Driver has made friends with a traveling band of musicians, jugglers, artists, and acrobats who decide to come along for a ride that the Driver has privately decided will be his last"
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A useless man : selected stories
by Sait Faik
Provides a collection of Abasiyanik stories that focus on the natural world, and illustrate the trials and tribulations of Turkish characters such as priests, business owners, lovers, and writers.
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The farm
by Héctor Joaquín Abad Faciolince
Closely knit Colombian siblings' internal rifts threaten to tear apart the hard-won legacy their father fought to establish against guerilla and paramilitary violence. An intimate and transgressive novel that confirms Héctor Abad as one of the great writers of Latin American literature today.
Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land has survived several generations. It is the landscape of their happiest memories but it is also where they have had to face the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight.
In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and of a people, as well as of the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment when they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and their reality.
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A kitchen in the corner of the house
by Ambai
"In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body."--Amazon.com
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Harlequin's millions : a fairy tale
by Bohumil Hrabal
"By the writer whom Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time.
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A guardian angel recalls
by Willem Frederik Hermans
""One of the most beautiful novels that I've written." - Willem Frederik Hermans Alberegt, a public prosecutor and self-proclaimed "man of minor failings," speeds through Hook of Holland in his black Renault on May 9, 1940. His every move is guided by the cool and patient hand of a guardian angel. Flitting about from the hood of Alberegt's car to the rim of his windswept hat, the angel attempts to quell their unhappy ward's fears and secrets. (On occasion the heavenly narrator is so ashamed of Alberegt that they cover their own face with guardian wings.) The angel, musing for just a moment on the greater suffering of mankind, forgets a frenzied and lovelorn Alberegt at the wheel and Alberegt swerves into a small child crossing the road. This fatal event,on the eve of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, spins the novel into a nightmare in which even expressions of empathy and humanity are edged out by cynicism and cruelty. Reminiscent of Georges Simenon, Albert Camus, and Kurt Vonnegut, A Guardian Angel Recalls is a brilliant and unnerving masterpiece"
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Everything like before : Stories
by Kjell Askildsen
"From Kjell Askildsen comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing. A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café -- Kjell Askildsen's characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promiseof a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own"
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Igifu
by Scholastique Mukasonga
"Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival"
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