Archipelago Books – serie

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.”

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.

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.

Winner of the 2026 PEN Translation PrizeA shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality"Above all [Pavese's novels] are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." — Italo CalvinoCesare Pavese's The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese's characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor's radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

Bosnian poet Selma Asotić’s fearless debut on memory and resistanceIn a pocket, Asotić finds a brood of planets. In the wind, a cathedral of voice. And in the throat, a thorn bush hums. She slakes her thirst with briny water, and later, tucks a thorn under the tongue. Ready to speak. The poet’s voice is warm with questions, recursions, and doubts. “Do you remember nothing from your life?” she asks, observing the challenge of memory and family history in the wake of the Bosnian War. The poet recalls men returning from war, with bodies no bigger than marbles in a palm. A bullet may pierce through a door and become a peephole. Through it, Asotić can see the myths of war – that shrapnel makes men celestial – or fragments of her own mayhemmed matrilineage. Her lines, blossoming and chimeric, search for a home, and a mother, in peacetime. Her language is alchemized into the corporeal, illumining the bodies that touch and leave us, like waves washing away their gestures.