Archipelago Books – förlag

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.This uproarious new translation of One, None, and a Hundred Grand delivers the defining work of Italian existentialism to an English speaking audience—in all its madcap glory. The novel’s hero is a wealthy twenty-four-year-old naïf who considers himself “a regular guy,” despite being cursed at birth with a surname that’s “ugly to the point of cruelty: Maggot. Destined to become a fly, with its sour, spiteful, annoying drone.” The story tracks Maggot’s reaction to an offhand act of matrimonial malice. Was he aware that his nose leans to the right? He is struck by the full force of the fact that he does not, and cannot, know how others see him. So he sets out on a quest “to coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one.” It’s a premise, played straight, that acts as an inspired metaphor for the rightward-leaning madness of the 20th century, and a catalyst for a series of absurd scenarios and comic set pieces on par with the very best of 21st century observational comedy—imagine Curb Your Enthusiasm in fascist Sicily. Pirandello splits the atom of the self and detonates a tiny moment into “a catastrophe that supervened the very machinery of the cosmos.” Perception and identity are leveled in a literary performance the Nobel laureate regarded as a “complete synthesis of everything I have done and the wellspring of what I will go on to do.”

Glimmering meditations on time, memory, imprisonment, human connection, life and death by the preeminent Italian language poet, Milo De AngelisAn arrow hits a grape and carries it through the air, a hand untangles a knot, a voice emerges from a stone to speak about life. In his poems, Milo De Angelis attends to the experience of confinement. Since 1996, he has taught poetry in a high-security prison on the outskirts of Milan. He sees poetry as a daily salvation; when the knot comes undone, it “carries back the sweet human voice of bodies in motion.” And when the stone cracks open, a voice tells of you and of me, a shared story. De Angelis never shies from the deep fears, darkness, and indeterminacy of incarceration. The characters of these poems wonder whether they will survive. They know all that stays hidden in an end, and they plan for their salvation. Milo De Angelis's language is ancient and new, transcendent, and urgent. Last Stops of the Night Journey pulses with the immensity of silence, memory, life, time, and fear. De Angelis insists that the infinite language of poetry can speak to the incarcerated person, greet them, know them, and chart a world beyond physical walls.

For readers of Thomas Pynchon, a conspiratorial adventure through a bleak future where the dead (and their political factions) never really die, from one of France’s most visionary writersBreton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor.

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

“The best book on Haiti in a very long time . . . powerful, spot on, likely the best written.” —Dany Laferrière An astonishing novel of raw beauty about gang life, sex work, and social media in HaitiCécé La Flamme, as she’s known by her loyal Facebook friends, captures photographs of still bodies. Figures scorched and bruised, left to the rubble of the Cité of Divine Power. When she posts an image of a corpse, Cécé’s followers skyrocket. “Nothing got more attention than a good corpse that was nice and warm or already rotting.” Just beside visions of rot and neglect, she posts pictures of her toes, gullies crisscrossing the cité, and her own lips painted blue. With every image, Cécé seeks control and wants to create a frank, intimate record of the terror in her cité. Cécé’s world begins and ends with the cité – a slum peopled by gangs, yelping kids, grandmothers, junkies, and preachers. The very gate that encloses the cité was constructed by militant gang members. First boss Freddy, then Joël, then Jules César rule the gang that holds the cité in a chokehold. Sharp, sincere, and desperate, Cécé cleaves life for herself out of social media, sex work, and attempts at friendship with other women. When an American journalist offers to buy the rights to Cécé’s photographs, she demands double the cash. When an abusive former client dies, she wears hot pink to his funeral. Emmelie Prophète’s novel is fierce, devastating, and suggestive – a record of a woman clawing back control.

"When wider American audiences meet Mafalda, they’ll find a girl who resembles Nancy, but whose antics are entirely her own." —The New York Times Book Two of the celebrated comic finds Mafalda surfing waves, mediating between frenemies, and schooling teachers—for kids 8 and up, plus Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts lovers of all ages.As good a place as any to enter the madcap world of Mafalda and friends, Book Two of Mafalda finds the gang up to new antics. Mafalda heads off on a beach vacation, where she meets a curious stranger: Miguelito, a mop-headed philosopher who happens to live right down the street back at home. Susanita, Manolito, and Felipe, meanwhile, continue to tussle over all manner of issues, romp around the neighborhood, and execute physical feats of great proportions (with the help of a bicycle and a space helmet, Felipe inaugurates the Argentinean Space Program). Only this time, Quino brings everyone together in an alien environment: elementary school.Following the heels of a beloved Book One, Mafalda is back again with her precocious political incisiveness, gags, and hijinks. Mafalda notes the peculiar effects of consumerism and globalization, the ironies of sexism, and the injustices of poverty. Her clear-sighted antiwar beliefs will inspire a new generation of thinkers and activists. All the while readers (young and old) will fall in love with Quino's drawings which evoke the humor, irritation, ponderousness, and energy of childhood.

From award-winning writer Miljenko Jergović—candid tales that reprise and embroider Bosnia’s rich folkloreInshallah, Madonna, Inshallah begins from a point of listening—turning up the radio, dragging a cafe chair closer to the man with the saz, dropping a record needle. In the Sarajevo of Miljenko Jergović’s childhood, folk songs permeated life. Their dusky melodies filled car rides, scored television programs, and echoed down alleyways, hummed drunkenly as daybreak glazed the city’s steeples and minarets.In these nineteen stories, Jergović imagines what might have inspired such wistful tunes, crafting a catalog of source material. The reader is loosed from her contemporary seat as relics of an old world arise. Time slows to an ancient cadence. Here lives become totemic, fate hangs like a scarf over the shoulderblades of heroes and scoundrels alike, while misfortune, hubris, and luck transform individuals into a collective cry. Like an accordion which unfolds to fill a room with sound, the book expands and compresses—by turns bawdy, brutal, funny and wise. Drawn from deep wells of folklore and collective storytelling, Jergovic weaves together an extraordinary ethnography that manages to both critique the imperial domination and strife that has marked the Balkan region for centuries, and to display, carefully and tenderly, the lives of individuals, be they Christian or Muslim. Lives that (inshallah) seem to never end, in that boundless space of myth.

Introducing the Latin American comics sensation starring a hilarious 6-year-old whose spunky self-confidence will inspire budding activists and curious readers of all ages.  Mafalda may be small—but her hopes for the world are as big as her heart!Six-year-old Mafalda loves democracy and hates soup. What democratic sector do cats fall into? she asks, then unfurls a toilet paper red carpet and gives her very own presidential address. Mafalda’s precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her. Dissident and rebellious, she refuses to abandon the world to her parents’ generation, who seem so lost. Alongside the irascible Mafalda, readers will meet her eclectic group of playmates: dreamy Felipe and gossipy Susanita, young-capitalist Manolito and rebellious Miguelito. Quino’s bright irony and intelligence bring the streets and neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to life.You can clearly see Mafalda is small, but her hopes for the world and her heart are huge and as sincere as can be. Generations of readers have discovered themselves in Mafalda, and learned to question, rebel, and hope. Since Quino first drew her in the early 1960s, Mafalda has captured public imagination in Latin America and beyond. Her wit and empathy have made her an enduring favorite.

A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war—and fragments of a home’s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.Wiesław Myśliwski’s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Myśliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle’s Eye is both a writer’s farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.

Our hero and narrator is the aging caretaker of cottages at a summer resort. A mysterious visitor inspires him to share the story of his long life: we witness a happy childhood cut short by the war, his hiding from the Nazis buried in a heap of potatoes, his plodding attempts to play the saxophone, the brutal murder of his family, loves lost but remembered, and footloose travels abroad. Told in the manner of friends and neighbors swapping stories over the mundane task of shelling beans—in the grand oral tradition of Myśliwski’s celebrated Stone Upon Stone—each anecdote, lived experience, and memory accrues cross-stitched layers of meaning. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Treatise on Shelling Beans is an epic recounting of a life that, while universal, is anything but ordinary.

Vivifying poetry of nature and the spirit — explore a mystical world of hawkmoths and elvers, skylarks and salamanders, with the shimmering grace of Gary Snyder"Lehnert's imagination is precise, patient, yearning... [it] documents the vast interconnectedness of being on earth in the mundane hydraulics of existence—sap, slime, metabolic exchange—and enacts it in a dense weave of sound." —Karen Leeder, Times Literary SupplementWickerwork traffics in details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed: the far sides of fishes, red jellyfish fraying on a tide, the way a hazel tree learns from the falling of snow how to scatter her pollen. This bilingual edition is the first comprehensive collection of Christian Lehnert’s work to appear in English, translated by the celebrated translator and scholar, Richard Sieburth.Readers can dive down into the depths of Lehnert and Sieburth’s primordial works: where slime, dirt, membranes, clay, and clouds give way to stretching summer shadows under beech trees, the clatter of a bird lifting into sky. Ever attentive to the rattle of a rhythm passing through language, Lehnert sees in the nimble scurrying of a salamander “tiny bolts of lightning driven through the dark.” He writes with singular grace of a sycamore’s sap, “the blood scabbing the wounds of its roots.”With its intense, philosophical relationship to the physical world, Wickerwork will open readers’s eyes to their own natural environment. Lehnert notes that certain trees have the power to remind us that the growth and protean spirit of things is never in doubt. Here, growth feels possible, necessary, a fact as simple as it is divine.

In The Vanishing Moon, Joseph Coulson writes with insight and beauty about the American working-class, about the strength and strain of family bonds, and about tragic incidents that haunt the human psyche over a lifetime. Set in Cleveland and Detroit, the novel chronicles two generations of the Tollman family, opening at the start of the Great Depression and moving forward through five decades to the Vietnam War. The first narrator, Stephen Tollman, looks back on his early adventures with his older brother, as both boys try to shield their siblings from the confusion and vulnerability of financial ruin. Later, as World War II approaches, Katherine Lennox, musician and political activist, offers an outsider’s view of the Tollmans, mesmerizing both Stephen and his brother with her energy and ambition. James Tollman comes of age in the 1960s, and as the youngest son in the family’s second generation, he strives to understand his father and mother amidst a summer of assassinations and civil unrest. Stephen returns to finish the story, struggling to hold his own against the currents of memory and abandoned dreams. Told with the compression and intensity of a poem, The Vanishing Moon is a novel of desire, unyielding necessity, and the people and places that inevitably disappear from our lives.

A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” (Richard Flanagan) from Croatian writer Miljenko Jergović, whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon   Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs – the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.