"Flawlessly translated, Amanda Michalopolou's WIKMBF uses the backdrop of Greek politics, radical protests, and the art world to explore the dangers and joys that come with BFFs. Or, as the narrator puts it, 'odiodsamato,' which translates roughly as 'frienemies.'"—Gary Shteyngart In Amanda Michalopoulou's Why I Killed My Best Friend , a young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and re ...
"Dark, scary, and unbelievably funny."—Los Angeles Times[/i] "The best short novel I've read this year. . . .Small, dark, and hard to put down, The Pets may be a classic in the literature of small enclosed spaces."—Barnes & Noble Review[/i] Back in Reykjavik after a vacation in London, Emil Halldorsson is waiting for a call from a beautiful girl, Greta, that he met on the plane ride home, and he's ju ...
"Carlos Labbé's [ Navidad & Matanza ] begins to fuck with your head from its very first word—moving through journalese, financial reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David Lynch."—Toby Litt It's the summer of 1999 when the two children of wealthy video game executive Jose Francisco Vivar, Alicia and Bruno, go missing in the beach town of Matanza. Long after their disap ...
Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Mercè Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to disco ...
"Monzó delivers drollery on nearly every page, in observations that are incisive and hilarious and horrifying, often all at once."—Publishers Weekly[/i] For the first time in his life, Heribert Juliá is unable to paint. On the eve of an important gallery exhibition, for which he's created nothing, he's bored with life: he falls asleep while making love with his mistress, wanders from bar to bar, dri ...
"A cerebral explorer of the problems of narrative in the wake of Joyce and Woolf, of Borges, of Rulfo and Arlt, Saer is also a stunning poet of place."—The Nation[/i] Saer's final novel, La Grande, is the grand culmination of his life's work, bringing together themes and characters explored throughout his career, yet presenting them in a way that is beautifully unique, and a wonderful entry-point to his literary world. ...
"Pilch's antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch."—Barnes & Noble Review[/i]Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddles the line between intimate ...
"Pilch's prose is masterful, and the bulk of The Mighty Angel[/i] evokes the same numb, floating sensation as a bottle of Zloldkowa Gorzka."—L Magazine[/i] The Mighty Angel[/i] concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been released—a sober and, more or less, healthy man—after treatment at the hands of the stern therapis ...
WINNER OF THE 2013 CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTEST[/b] Albena Stambolova's idiosyncratic debut novel, Everything Happens as It Does[/i], builds from the idea that, as the title suggests, everything happens exactly the way it must. In this case, the seven characters of the novel—from Boris, a young boy who is only at peace when he's around bees, to Philip and Maria and their twins—each play a specific role in t ...
