Margellos World Republic of Letters – serie

From an acclaimed Ukrainian author, snapshots of a city haunted by war The women, men, and children in Serhiy Zhadan’s new collection of stories testify to the dignity of daily life in the war-battered Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Through a series of powerful vignettes we witness the ordinary experiences of people in extraordinary times—weddings, love affairs, tense visits home from the battlefield, desperate deliveries of humanitarian aid.Highlighting the upheaval since the 2022 Russian invasion, characters from Zhadan’s Mesopotamia and The Orphanage reappear, this time with entirely different concerns: evacuating an elderly woman after the bombardment of a residential area; finding a job for someone who returned from the front with significant disabilities; attending the funeral of a colleague who had led a combat unit on the front lines.These stories, composed shortly before the author joined the Ukrainian armed forces, give voice to the vulnerability of those whose lives have been transformed by war, who have come to accept that death lurks around every corner, in every building, and on every square.

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek—a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria  “The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.”—Dustin Illingworth, Washington Post  The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria’s scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site.  Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident. As the three slip in and out of the hotel, engaging unsuspecting tourists and seeking a way to return to life, the soil begins to crack under their feet as the dead of the Holocaust awaken: zombies determined to exact their revenge.  Scrupulously rendered for the first time in English by Gitta Honegger, The Children of the Dead takes readers on a mind-bending ride through time, space, and memory. Concocted from experimental theater, splatter film, Gothic literature, philosophy, religion, and more, Jelinek’s phantasmagorical masterwork is a fierce confrontation with our fraught legacies in the name of the innocent dead.

The first full-length novel by Chinese author Can Xue to appear in English  “There’s no other writer in China like Can Xue . . . strange, surreal, and very compelling . . . [and] this novel is probably the best place to start.”—Chad Post, Publishers Weekly  Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old, others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.  Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day—whether in China or in the West—where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.

Kraus’s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time  "[A] superb translation."—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse  One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars.  Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.

The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by Richard Sieburth  “Reading Frail Riffs, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris . . . a quiet virtuoso of French prose.”—Alice Kaplan, New York Review of Books  Ex-surrealist and maverick anthropologist Michel Leiris (1901–1990) crafted his multivolume autobiography over the course of thirty-five years, profoundly influencing generations of French writers, from Sartre and Beauvoir to Modiano and Ernaux. In this fourth and final volume, Richard Sieburth completes the project of bringing Leiris’s monumental experiment in self-portraiture into English.  With wit and playfulness, Leiris assembled a scrapbook of fragments—journal extracts, travel notes, transcriptions of dreams, poems—to document the vagaries of a life committed to the difficult marriage of poetry and revolutionary politics, which he witnessed firsthand in Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and on the Paris streets in May ’68.  Frail Riffs is a jazz improvisation on the twilight of a life, at once a painstaking self-examination and a chronicle of a century. As Leiris wrote, it is “neither a private diary nor a formal work, neither an autobiographical narrative nor a work of the imagination, neither prose nor poetry, but all this at the same time. . . . A perpetual work in progress.”

The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny  “Borowski’s sharp-edged descriptions of life in Nazi concentration camps shatter the limits of even Kafka’s most surreal imaginings.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal  “The most important work of the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz.”—Timothy Snyder, from the foreword  In 1943, the twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz was innocent.  All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this. Borowski’s tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide.  Bringing together for the first time in English Borowski’s major writings and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring relevance.

A single-volume edition of Diary, Gombrowicz’s acclaimed masterpiece, now with previously unpublished pages restored  Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his Diary with one of literature’s most memorable openings:  “MondayMe.TuesdayMe.WednesdayMe.ThursdayMe.”  Gombrowicz’s Diary grew into a vast collection of essays, short notes, polemics, and confessions on myriad subjects—from political events to literature to the certainty of death. Not a traditional journal, Diary is instead the commentary of a brilliant and restless mind. Widely regarded as a masterpiece, this brilliant work compelled Gombrowicz’s attention for a decade and a half until he penned his final entry in France, shortly before his death in 1969.  Long out of print in English, Diary is now presented in a convenient single volume featuring a new preface by Rita Gombrowicz, the author’s widow and literary executor. This edition also includes ten previously unpublished pages from the 1969 portion of the diary.

The first European novel, exquisitely translated by Margaret Sayers Peden  A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina is a classic of Spanish literature. Second only to DonQuixote in its cultural importance, Rojas’s dramatic dialogue presents the elaborate tale of a star-crossed courtship between the young nobleman Calisto and the beautiful maiden Melibea in fifteenth-century Spain. Their unforgettable saga plays out in vibrant exchanges, presented here in a brilliant new translation by award-winning translator Margaret Sayers Peden.  After a chance encounter with Melibea entrances Calisto, he enlists the services of Celestina, an aged prostitute, madam, and procuress, to arrange another meeting. She promptly seizes control of the affair, guiding it through a series of mishaps before it meets its tragic end. At times a comic character and at others a self-assertive promoter of women’s sexual license, Celestina is an inimitable personality with a surprisingly modern consciousness, certain to be relished by a new generation of readers.

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators"A fine sampling of Pirandello’s world, convincingly translated by Jewiss, who negotiates the problems of bringing his vivid, colloquial prose and effortless storytelling into English with great skill.”—Tim Parks, New York Review of Books Regarded as one of Europe’s great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable ear for dialogue and a keen sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author’s birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In “The Jar,” a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. “The Dearly Departed” tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the intransigent bureaucrat, the lonely mother, the wretched peasant—Pirandello’s characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.

From the sensational Chinese author who has been called “a new world master,” a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation  Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature  “[A] mind-bending novel. . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of ‘intersecting dreamworlds.’”—Publishers Weekly  In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”  Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.

The first complete English translation of D’Annunzio’s haunting book-length prose poem  Composed during a period of extended bed rest, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Notturno is a moving prose poem in which imagination, experience, and remembrance intertwine. The somber atmosphere of the poem reflects the circumstances of its creation. With his vision threatened and his eyes completely bandaged, D’Annunzio suffered months of near-total blindness and pain-wracked infirmity in 1921, and yet he managed to write on small strips of paper, each wide enough for a single line. When the poet eventually regained his sight, he put together these strips to create the lyrical and innovative Notturno.  In Notturno, D’Annunzio forges an original prose that merges aspects of formal poetry and autobiographical narrative. He fuses the darkness and penumbra of the present with the immediate past, haunted by war memories, death, and mourning, and also with the more distant past, revolving mainly around his mother and childhood. In this remarkable translation of the work, Stephen Sartarelli preserves the antiquated style of D’Annunzio’s poetic prose and the tension of his rich and difficult harmonies, bringing to contemporary readers the full texture and complexity of a creation forged out of darkness.

The first major English translation of a masterful seriocomic theatrical work by one of the most prominent writers of the Soviet epochWalpurgis Night, by acclaimed Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev, is considered a classic in the playwright’s homeland. Erofeev’s dark and funny five-act satire of Soviet repression has been called the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era. Walpurgis Night dramatizes the outrageous trials of Lev Isakovich Gurevich, an alcoholic half-Jewish dissident poet confined by the state to a hospital for the insane. In “Ward 3”—a microcosm of repressive Soviet society—Gurevich deploys his brilliant wit and ingenuity to bedevil his jailers, defend his fellow inmates, protest his incarceration, and generally create mayhem, which ultimately leads to a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout historyAlberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.”  Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life.  Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life.  This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.

A brilliant, semiautobiographical satirical novel from one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century Polish literature, now in a new English translationConsidered by many to be among the greatest writers of the past hundred years, Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz explores the modern predicament of exile and displacement in a disintegrating world in his acclaimed classic Trans-Atlantyk. Gombrowicz’s most personal novel—and arguably his most iconoclastic—Trans-Atlantyk is written in the style of a gaweda, a tale told by the fireside in a language that originated in the seventeenth century. It recounts the often farcical adventures of a penniless young writer stranded in Argentina when the Nazis invade his homeland, and his subsequent “adoption” by the Polish embassy staff and émigré community.Based loosely on Gombrowicz’s own experiences as an expatriate, Trans-Atlantyk is steeped in humor and sharply pointed satire, interlaced with dark visions of war and its horrors, that entreats the individual and society in general to rise above the suffocating constraints of nationalistic, sexual, and patriotic mores. The novel's themes are universal and its execution ingenious—a masterwork of twentieth-century literary art from an author whom John Updike called “one of the profoundest of the late moderns.”

A Polish writer’s experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsider’s perspective on politics, culture, and life under duressWhen the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsider’s perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation.In the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocation—in a daringly untragic mode—of ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young man’s pleasure in physical movement—miles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bike—and they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.

Michon’s exquisite short narratives transport us to the heart of the Middle Ages as witnesses to the double-edged power of belief  This welcome volume brings to English-language readers two beautifully crafted works by the internationally acclaimed French author Pierre Michon. Populated by distant and little-known figures—Irish and French monks, saints, and scientists in Winter Mythologies; Benedictine monks in the Vendée region of France in Abbots—the tales frequently draw on obscure histories and other literary sources.  Michon brings his characters to life in spare, evocative prose. Each, in his or her own way, exemplifies a power of belief that brings about an achievement—or catastrophe—in the real world: monasteries are built upon impossibly muddy wastes, monks acquire the power of speech, lives are taken, books are written, saints are created on the flimsiest of evidence. Michon’s exploration in ancient archives has led him to the discovery of such often deluded figures and their deeds, and his own exceptional powers bestow upon them a renewed life on the written page. This in turn is an example of the power of belief, which for Michon is what makes literature itself possible. Winter Mythologies and Abbots are meant to be read slowly, to be savored, to be mined for the secrets Michon has to tell.

One of Pierre Michon’s most powerful works, this book imagines decisive moments in the lives of five artists of different times and places: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino, a little-remembered disciple of Piero della Francesca. Michon focuses on particular moments when artist and model collide, whether that model is a person or a landscape, inner or outer. In the five separate tales he evokes the full passion of the artist’s struggle to capture the world in images even as the world resists capture. Each story is a small masterpiece that transcends national boundaries and earns its place among the essential works of world literature.

An exploration of desire by the French master Pierre Michon  “A haunting, imagistic book, somehow both lush and spare.”—Martin Riker, Wall Street Journal  This spare, unforgettable novel is Pierre Michon’s luminous exploration of the mysteries of desire. A young teacher takes his first job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of a town resident, a woman of seductive beauty and singular charm.  Yvonne. Yvonne. “Everything about her screamed desire . . . setting something in motion while settling a fingertip to the counter, turning her head slightly, gold earrings brushing her cheek while she watched you or watched nothing at all; this desire was open, like a wound; and she knew it, wore it with valor, with passion.” Michon probes the destructive powers of passion and the consuming need for love in this heartbreaking novel.

The first major career-spanning collection of the poems of Adonis, widely acknowledged as the most important poet working in Arabic today  “Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation.”—Charles McGrath, New York Times  Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets of the Arabic-speaking world. His poems have earned international acclaim, and his influence on Arabic literature has been likened to that of T. S. Eliot’s on English-language verse. This volume serves as the first comprehensive survey of Adonis’s work, allowing English readers to admire the arc of a remarkable literary career through the labors of the poet’s own handpicked translator, Khaled Mattawa.  Daring in form and prophetic in tone, Adonis’s poetry sings of both the sweet promise of eros and the problems of the self. He writes of childhood (“Your childhood is a village. / You will never cross its boundaries / no matter how far you go”); of blood, bombs, and mutilation (“Murder has changed the city’s shape”); and of the anguish of exile (“‘I write poetry in the language of the country that sheltered me,’ said a young man who looked old”). Adonis demonstrates the poet’s affection for Arabic and European lyrical traditions even as his poems work to destabilize those sensibilities.  This collection positions the work of Adonis within the pantheon of the great poets of exile, including César Vallejo, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Celan, providing for English readers the most complete vision yet of the work of the man whom the cultural critic Edward Said called “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.”

Selections from Leopardi’s prose masterwork, Zibaldone, one of the great intellectual diaries in European literature, expertly translated by Tim ParksRevenge—Revenge is so sweet one often wishes to be insulted so as to be able to take revenge, and I don’t mean just by an old enemy, but anyone, or even (especially when in a really bad mood) by a friend.—from Passions  The extraordinary quality of Giacomo Leopardi’s writing and the innovative nature of his thought were never fully recognized in his lifetime. Zibaldone, his 4,500-page intellectual diary—a vast collection of thoughts on philosophy, civilization, literary criticism, linguistics, humankind and its vanities, and other varied topics—remained unpublished until more than a half-century after his death. But shortly before he died, Leopardi began to organize a small, thematic collection of his writings in an attempt to give structure and system to his philosophical musings. Now freshly translated into English by master translator, novelist, and critic Tim Parks, Leopardi’s Passions presents 164 entries reflecting the full breadth of human passion. The volume offers a fascinating introduction to Leopardi’s arguments and insights, as well as a glimpse of the concerns of thinkers to come, among them Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Wittgenstein, Gadda, and Beckett.

A career retrospective of poetry and prose works by one of the under-recognized giants of French literatureAndré du Bouchet, a great innovator of twentieth-century letters, has yet to be fully recognized by a wide circle of international readers. This inviting volume sets out to remedy the oversight, introducing a selection of du Bouchet’s poetry and prose to English-language readers through the brilliant translations of Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers. Openwork showcases pieces from the author’s entire trajectory, beginning with little-known pieces from the 1950s, followed by major poems from the 1960s, and concluding with works written or rewritten in the poet’s later decades.  Throughout his life, du Bouchet devoted himself to long walks in his beloved French countryside, jotting down entries in notebooks as he rambled. These notebooks—more than one hundred all together—have emerged as signal works in their own right, and their musings are well represented in this anthology.

Romanian exile Norman Manea’s internationally acclaimed memoir/novel, now available to English-language readers  “A fascinating, beguiling record of the almost incredible events that can transpire in one life, especially if that life is lived in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The Hooligan’s Return operates on so many levels that finally it eludes all classifications and reveals itself as art.”—Francine Prose  At the center of The Hooligan’s Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea’s book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the twentieth century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society.  Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan’s Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.

The first short story collection in the Margellos series, from a master of the genre and an irrepressible critic during Argentina’s brutal years of repressionAcclaimed for the gemlike perfection of her short stories, Liliana Heker has repeatedly received major literary awards in her native Argentina. Her work has some of the dark humor of Saki or Roald Dahl, and her versatility and range have earned her a wide, appreciative audience. This expertly translated volume brings to English-language readers the full compass of Heker’s stories, from her earliest published volume (1966) through her most recent (2011).Heker rejected exile during the dangerous Dirty War years and formed part of a cultural resistance that stood against repression. As a writer, she found in the microcosm of the family and everyday events subtle entry into political, historical, and social issues. Heker’s stories examine the rituals people invent to relate to one another, especially girls and women, and they reveal how the consequences of tiny acts may be enormous. With charm, economy, and a close focus on the intimate, Heker has perfected the art of the glimpse.

“Elegant. Unpretentious. Approachable. . . . He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post  “Modiano is a pure original.”—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian  “A fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.”—The Economist  “These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times  In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.  Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.  Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.

Now available for the first time in English, Manea's acclaimed novel of émigrés in America, free yet imprisoned by the pastNorman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its complexities and disorientations in this extraordinarily compelling novel, The Lair. Exile in the motherland and away from it is the shared plight of his protagonists. Nowhere at home, they move through their lives in a continuous, ever-elusive quest for national and individual identity. Manea's characters seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break.Manea's themes and narrative approach are intricate: his style fluctuates in correspondence with the instability of his characters' lives, his story is encased within an elaborate network of allusions and paradoxes. Yet in the midst of the novel's overriding disorientation, the author establishes intersections and uncovers the universal. Through the predicaments of his perpetual outsiders, he offers a poignant assessment of the conflicts of the individual in the age of globalization. He writes with unmatched intensity and a unique sensitivity to the human tragicomedy.

One of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia addresses such universal themes as exile, disorientation, and obsession  “Easily one of the finest writers of fiction today.”—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse  Displaced from his home as Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia descended into war, Serbian author David Albahari found safety in Canada, where this novel was written. In Globetrotter, Albahari deals with the bewilderments of exile and lost identity, themes he has investigated in earlier works. But in this unsettling experimental book he also enters new arenas, where sexual identity and the nature of blame and guilt attract his scrutiny.  Narrated in a single uninterrupted paragraph, the novel takes place in the late 1990s at the Banff Art Centre in the Canadian Rockies. Three men—a painter from Saskatchewan and the narrator of the tale, a writer from Serbia, and a man whose traveling Croatian grandfather long ago jotted his name in a local museum’s guest book—become acquainted, then attached, then fatally entangled. On a climactic mountain hike that seethes with jealousy, desire, shame, and guilt, each man must engage in a final struggle. Albahari seizes his reader’s attention and never yields it in this remarkable, gripping tale.

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor—to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father’s wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the circumstances of history dictate otherwise. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the economic sanctions of the 1990s destroy the socioeconomic fabric of society. The 2003 invasion and military occupation unleash sectarian violence. Corpses pile up, and Jawad returns to the inevitable washing and shrouding. Trained as an artist to shape materials to represent life aesthetically, he now must contemplate how death shapes daily life and the bodies of Baghdad’s inhabitants.  Through the struggles of a single desperate family, Sinan Antoon’s novel shows us the heart of Iraq’s complex and violent recent history. Descending into the underworld where the borders between life and death are blurred and where there is no refuge from unending nightmares, Antoon limns a world of great sorrows, a world where the winds wail.

A moving collection of poems by internationally acclaimed Greek poet Kiki Dimoula, brilliantly translated into English  Kiki Dimoula’s poetry—the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature—is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, conflating concrete and abstract, literal and metaphorical, physical and metaphysical. Exacting and oracular at once, Dimoula superimposes absurdity on rationality, caustic irony on dark melancholy.  This first English translation of a wide selection of poems from across Dimoula’s oeuvre brings together some of her most beguiling, arresting, and moving work. The demands on her translators are considerable. Dimoula plays with the Greek language, melds its levels of diction, challenges its grammar and syntax, and bends its words by twisting their very shape and meaning. Cecile Inglessis Margellos and Rika Lesser, Dimoula’s award-winning translators, have re-created her style’s uncanny effect of refraction: when plunged into the water of her poetry, all these bent words suddenly and astonishingly appear perfectly straight.

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth centuryMichel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It was the beginning of an endeavor that ultimately required 35 years and three additional volumes.  In Volume 1, Scratches, Leiris proposes to discover a savoir vivre, a mode of living that would have a place for both his poetics and his personal morality. “I can scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one’s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive," he declares. He begins the project of uncovering memories, returning to moments and images of childhood—his father’s recording machine, the letters of the alphabet coming to life—and then of his later life—Paris under the Occupation, a journey to Africa, and a troubling fear of death.