Bøger udgivet af New Vessel Press

Nobody does Christmas like the Russians.

';A compelling story of the ethnic cleansing of Christian communities caught in the crossfire of the Middle East at war... Urgent and passionate' (Kirkus Reviews). In 2013, alarmed by scant attention paid to the hardships endured by the 7.5 million Christians in the Middle East, journalist Klaus Wivelwho practices no religion himselftraveled to Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories on a quest to learn more about their fate. He found an oppressed minority, constantly under threat of death and humiliation, increasingly desperate in the face of rising Islamic extremism and without hope that their situation would improve, or anyone would come to their aid. Wivel spoke with priests whose churches have been burned, citizens who feel like strangers in their own countries, and entire communities whose only hope for survival may be fleeing into exile. With the increase of religious violence in recent years, The Last Supper is a prescient and unsettling account of a severely beleaguered religious group living, so it seems, on borrowed time. In this book, Wivel recounts this humanitarian crisis in detail and asks why we have we not done more to protect these people.

"e;The Polish postwar firebrand Andrzej Bursa acquired a reputation as a quick-burning, existentially tormented rebel. . . . Yet Bursa's dark humor and deadpan satire . . . keep utter bleakness at bay."e;The Independent"e;A revolution against the banality of everyday life."e;Gazeta KrakowskaA young university student named Jurek, with no particular ambitions or talents, is adrift. After his doting aunt asks him to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. Killing Auntie follows Jurek as he seeks to dispose of the corpsea task more difficult than one might imagineand then falls in love with a girl he meets on a train. Can he tell her what he's done? Will that ruin everything?"e;I'm convincedsimplythat we are all guilty,"e; says Jurek, and his adventures with nosy neighbors, false-toothed grandmothers, and love-making lynxes shed light on how an entire society becomes involved in the murder and disposal of dear old Auntie. This is a short comedic masterpiece combining elements of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Heller, coming together in the end to produce an unforgettable tale of murder andjust mayberedemption.Andrzej Bursa was born in 1934 in Krakow, Poland, and died twenty-five years later. In his brief lifetime he composed some of the most original Polish writing of the twentieth century. Killing Auntie is his only novel. His brilliant career and tragic early death established him as a cult figure among restless and disenchanted youth.

';A powerful novel of tensionssexual, familial, religious, and political... Alexandriasensual and enchantingshimmers in these pages' (Dalia Sofer, national-bestselling author of The Septembers of Shiraz). Alexandrian Summer is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes startling sexual hypocrisies and portrays a now vanished polyglot world of horse-racing, seaside promenades, and elegant nightclubs. Hamdi-Ali senior is an old-time patriarch with more than a dash of strong Turkish blood. His handsome elder son, a promising horse jockey, can't afford sexual frustration, as it leads him to overeat and imperil his career, but the woman he lusts after won't let him get beyond undoing a few buttons. Victor, the younger son, takes his pleasure with other boys. But the true heroine of the storyrichly evoked in a pungent upstairs/downstairs mixis the raucous, seductive city of Alexandria itself. ';Helps show why postwar Alexandria inspires nostalgia and avidity in seemingly everyone who knew it... The result is what summer reading should be: fast, carefree, visceral, and incipiently lubricious.' The New Yorker ';Luminous... One of the great triumphs of Alexandrian Summer is the richness of the evocation of this city and the multiple cultures pressed within it... A sultry eroticism pervades.' The Forward ';Gormezano Goren's characters are vividly depicted as they grow up or grow older in a city of conflicting loyalties, riven by resentment, ready to revolt. Readers will be transported.' Publishers Weekly ';A profound literary experience.' Ahshav

';An existential fable' from the uncompromising Polish author of Killing the Second Dog, known as the James Dean of Eastern Europe (The New York Times). In this novel of breathtaking tension and sweltering love, two desperate friends on the edge of the lawone of them tough and gutsy, the other small and scaredtravel to the southern Israeli city of Eilat to find work. There, Dov Ben Dov, the handsome native Israeli with a reputation for causing trouble, and Israel, his sidekick, stay with Ben Dov's recently married younger brother, Little Dov, who has enough trouble of his own. Local toughs are encroaching on Little Dov's business, and he enlists his older brother to drive them away. It doesn't help that a beautiful German widow named Ursula is rooming next door. What follows is a story of passion, deception, violence, and betrayal, all conveyed in hardboiled prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a cinematic style that would make Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando green with envy. ';[A] blowtorch of a novel... Matchless and prescient.' Publishers Weekly ';A story as bleak and unrelenting as its setting, in which no one escapes the past or themselves. Nihilistic but compelling.' Kirkus Reviews Praise for Marek Hlasko ';Hlasko was an original. His novels were fearless, his vision unsparing, and decades later, his darkly brilliant work has lost none of its power to unsettle. He achieved what few other writers ever have: he turned the literary landscape into a much more interesting place than it was when he found it.' Emily St. John Mandel, author of National Book Award finalist Station Eleven

"e;Hlasko's story comes off the page at you like a pit bull."e;The Washington PostHis writing is taut and psychologically nuanced like that of the great dime-store novelist Georges Simenon, his novelistic world as profane as Isaac Babel's.Wall Street Journal"e;Spokesman for those who were angry and beat . . . turbulent, temperamental, and tortured."e;The New York Times"e;A must-read . . . piercing and compelling."e;Kirkus Reviews"e;A self-taught writer with an uncanny gift for narrative and dialogue."e;Roman Polanski Marek Hlasko lived through what he wrote and died of an overdose of solitude and not enough love. Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird and Being There"e;A glittering black comedy ... that is equally entertaining and wrenching."e; Publishers Weekly"e;The idol of Poland's young generation in 1956."e; Czeslaw Milosz, 1980 Nobel Prize in LiteratureRobert and Jacob are down-and-out Polish con men living in Israel in the 1960s. They're planning to run a scam on an American widow visiting the country. Robert, who masterminds the scheme, and Jacob, who acts it out, are tough, desperate men, adrift in the nasty underworld of Tel Aviv. Robert arranges for Jacob to run into the woman, whose heart is open; the men are hoping her wallet is too. What follows is a story of love, deception, cruelty, and shame, as Jacob pretends to fall in love with her. It's not just Jacob who's performing a role; nearly all the characters are actors in an ugly story, complete with parts for murder and suicide. Marek Hlasko's writing combines brutal realism with smoky, hardboiled dialogue in a bleak world where violence is the norm and love is often only an act.Marek Hlasko, known as the James Dean of Eastern Europe, was exiled from Communist Poland and spent his life wandering the globe. He died in 1969 of an overdose of alcohol and sleeping pills in Wiesbaden, Germany.

A new translation of the Italian novelist's cautionary comedy of excess and despair in 1920s Paris';this little romp is always a pleasurable one' (Publishers Weekly). Paris, 1920s. The City of Light is a dizzy and decadent bohemia for Tito Arnaudi, a young Italian medical student turned bon vivant journalist. To escape the moralizing of his Italian hometownor perhaps it was merely a whimTito got on a train to Paris without so much as a letter of introduction. Soon enough, he finds employment inventing lurid scandals and gruesome deaths to newspapers. But his own life becomes even more outrageous than his press reports when he acquires three demanding mistresses. Elegant, witty, and wicked, Pitigrilli's classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and captures the lure of a bygone era even as it charts the comical tragedy of a young man's downfall. The novel's descriptions of sex and drug use prompted church authorities to place Cocaine on a list of forbidden books, while filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a screenplay based on the tale. Even today, Cocaine retains its venomous bite.

An artist's sons hunt for their mysterious inheritance: ';A pleasure to read... One of the most significant Argentine writers working today' (David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes). At age nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of long rolls of canvas in which he minutely detailed six decades of life in his village on Argentina's river frontier with Uruguay. After the death of Salvatierra, his sons return to the village from Buenos Aires to deal with their inheritance: a shed packed with painted rolls of canvas stretching over two miles in length and depicting personal and communal history. Museum curators from Europe come calling to acquire this strange, gargantuan artwork. But an essential roll is missing. A search ensues that illuminates the links between art and life, as an intrigue of family secrets buried in the past cast their shadows on the present. ';Will surely leave some readers thinking of Henry James's tragicomic accounts of the artist's life.' The New Republic ';Pedro Mairal isn't your old college literature professor's idea of an Argentine novelist.' Los Angeles Times

Desire and tragedy upset the lives of an Israeli family in this ';thrilling, fresh, and surprising' debut novel from the award-winning filmmaker (ForeWord Review). On the shores of Israel's Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias. In the years between the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars, it is a place bursting with desire and longing for love. As young Shlomi develops a remarkable culinary talent, he also falls for Ella, the strange neighbor and deeply troubled new neighbor. Meanwhile, Shlomi's little brother Hilik obsessively collects words in a notebook. In the wild, selfish but magical grown-up world that swirls around them, a mother with a poet's soul mourns the deaths of literary giants while her handsome husband cheats on her both at home and abroad. In filmmaker Shemi Zarhin's dazzling debut novel, hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel's larger national story. ';Ardent, salty, whimsical, steamy, absurd... A wallop to the reader.' Ploughshares ';Masterful... haunting... sublime... Zarhin's characters are so real they fairly jump off the page.' The Jerusalem Post

A beautifully written account of a major figure in the history of European Jewry, women's emancipation and cultural patronage.

';Fabre speaks to us of luck and misfortune, of the accidents that make a man or defeat him... [He] is the discreet megaphone of the man in the crowd' (Elle). Lifelong Parisian Dominique Fabreauthor of The Waitress Was Newexposes the shadowy, anonymous lives of many who inhabit the French capital. In this quiet, subdued tale, a middle-aged office worker, divorced and alienated from his only son, meets up with two childhood friends who are similarly adrift, without passions or prospects. He's looking for a second act to his mournful life, seeking the harbor of love and a true connection with his son. Set in palpably real Paris streets that feel miles away from the City of Light, Guys Like Me is a stirring novel of regret and absence, yet not without a glimmer of hope. ';Fabre's unexpectedly touching novel has a laugh of its own behind its low-key, smoothly translated narrative voice... The city it evokes isn't the Paris of tourists but of local people.' The New York Times ';Fabre is a genius of these nuanced, interior moments... The story Fabre tells is that of every one of us: looking for meaning in the mundane, moving through our lives, our interactions, as if through the fabric of a dream.' Los Angeles Times ';A short, arresting tale that... not only offers keen insights into the mind of its middle-aged protagonist, but also provides the reader with a unique tour of what everyday life in the low-key suburbs of Paris must truly be like.' Typographical Era

After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel filled with a ';suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace' (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Cecile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she's exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it's soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cecile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journeyIn silence? What could they possibly say to one another?with the reader gaining entree to the most private of thoughts. This intense, intimate novel offers ';a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape... Gripping' (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story). ';Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read... Absorbing, intriguing, insightful.' Library Journal (starred review)

';Vividly drawn characters, history, music, birds, love, loneliness, and wisdom... A brilliant book, rich and satisfying as a Viennese torte' (Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology). In this poignant yet rollicking novel, ninety-six-year-old ornithologist Luka Levadski forgoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Marthathe last of the now-extinct passenger pigeonsdied. Levadski too has an acute sense of being the last of a species. He may have devoted much of his existence to studying birds, but now he befriends a hotel butler and another elderly guest, who also doesn't have much time left, to share in the lively escapades of his final days. This gloriously written tale is ';a book like a fantastic party, as unshakeable as a child's faith [that] astonishes to the very end' (Neue Zurcher Zeitung).

A group of adventurous villagers attempt to escape Moldova for Italy in this ';outstanding... darkly hilarious' novel of poverty and hope in Eastern Europe (The Wall Street Journal). The Moldovian village of Larga is depressed in more ways than one and its remaining citizens long for a better life. Meanwhile, just over the border in Italy, the economy is booming. But when a group of Largans decide to take fate into their own hands and attempt to cross the border, their efforts result in a tragicomic romp of post-Soviet shenanigans. In this ';simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking tale,' an Orthodox priest is deserted by his wife for an art-dealing atheist; a mechanic redesigns his tractor for travel by air and sea; thousands of villagers take to the road on a modern-day religious crusade to make it to the promised land of Italy; meanwhile, politicians remain politicians (Publishers Weekly). ';A touching and hilarious chronicle about the age-old European yearning for one more chance. A chance that may never come.' Gary Shteyngart

A stunning novel about growing up in Russia on the brink of collapse, from the preeminent storyteller of his generation.