Open Letter – förlag

As with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic's final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragic, covering topics such as 'Women and the Male Perspective,' 'The Culture of (Self)Harm,' and 'The Melancholy of Vanishing.' But the book is more than a simple interview: It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil - especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic's birth country - and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing. One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, whose novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.

A novel decades ahead of its time, and the only work by Jorge Luis Borges's mentor available in English.

One of the late Juan José Saer's most beloved novels, The Regal Lemon Tree shows a master stylist at his best. Set during day and night of New Year's Eve--building up a barbecue that takes on ritual significance--the novel focuses on a couple in the north of Argentina who lost their only son eight years prior. Wenceslao spends the day with his extended family and his memories while his wife--truly paralyzed by grief--refuses to leave their island, which is home to an almost magical lemon tree that blossoms at all times of the year. With the recurring phrase, "dawn breaks, and his eyes are already open," the novel takes on a dreamlike quality, manifesting the troubles the couple has suffered under with an eeriness that calls to mind the work of David Lynch.

The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugresic's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life. With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall. Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded 'a traitor' and 'a witch' in Croatia.

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence. Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwen the known and unknown, between humanity and nature. In these tales, a man tries to chase down an ellusive golden peacock, a woman communicates with mysterious, shifting forms of light, and the river that runs through a small village seems to pulse with memories of its own.Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today--and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an 'empty and futile' landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as she. Brutal and unflinching, with elements of the mythic and grotesque interspersed with hard-edged realism, Rina is a pioneering work of Korean postmodernism.

A surreal coming-of-age novel that blends Eastern and Western beliefs, from the winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award.

Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter - the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise - and tell of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a history of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son Nebuchadnezzasaurus,' ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire; and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia's wars and revolutions.'

Few Icelandic authors have mastered the concise art form of the short story as well as Svava Jakobsdottir. Her stories provide a powerful insight into Icelandic reality and strangeness, while simultaneously reflecting the multifaceted experience and complex relationship between the individual and society. They highlight the vulnerability and loneliness of humanity and are filled with existential peril as well as a unique beauty. In 12 Women (1965) & Under a Volcano (1990), Svava Jakobsdottir showcases her iconic feminism and near-mythological voice, beginning with the sparse, classical nature of her earliest work to the more folkloric later pieces. Svava uses her spare prose and incisive observations to interrogate the mundane, probing the relationship between daily life and the sacred elements of being. In these stories, a mother succors her children in a series of gruesome sacrifices, a brother loses himself to the wiles of a mysterious entity, and the disembodied voice of the wind itself guides a young girl as she enters diaspora in a new country. With an ephemeral undercurrent of folklore and myth, this collection captures the impermanence of experience and examines the many faces of the phases of life, from childhood to old age. Sleek, meditative, and bold, 12 Women & Under a Volcano celebrates Svava Jakobsdottir's talent for observation, her gentle wit, and her powerful insight.

To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream? The Clerk tells a story that happened yesterday, but still hasn't happened, and yet is happening now. A story we didn't even notice because we're too tied up in our jobs, salaries, appearances. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dosteyevsky.