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"e;Saer is one of the best writers of today in any language."e;Ricardo Piglia"e;What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters' attempts to write their own narratives within its excess."e;BookforumIn modern-day Paris, Pichn Garay receives a computer disk containing a manuscriptwhich might be fictional, or could be a memoirby Doctor Real, a nineteenth-century physician tasked with leading a group of five mental patients on a trip to a recently constructed asylum. Their trip, which ends in disaster and fire, is a brilliant tragicomedy thanks to the various insanities of the patients, among whom is a delusional man who greatly over-estimates his own importance and a nymphomaniac nun who tricks everyoneeven the other patientsinto sleeping with her.Fascinating as a faux historical novel and written in Saer's typically gorgeous, Proustian style, The Clouds can be read as a metaphor for exilea huge theme for Saer and a lot of Argentine writersas well as an examination of madness.Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event. Five of his novels are available from Open Letter Books.Hilary Vaughn Dobel has an MFA in poetry and translation from Columbia University. She is the author of two manuscripts and, in addition to Saer, she has translated work by Carlos Pintado.

"e;[Labbe] wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it."e;BookforumLoquela, Carlos Labbe's fourth novel and second to be translated into English, is a narrative chameleon, a shape-shifting exploration of fiction's possibilities.At a basic level, this book is like a hybrid of Julio Cortzar and Paul Auster: a distorted detective novel, a love story, and a radical statement about narrative art. Behind the silence that unites and separates Carlos and Elisa, behind the game that estranges the albino girls, Alicia and Violeta, from the best summer afternoons, behind the destiny of Neutriaa city that disappears with childhood and returns with desireand behind a literary move-ment that might be the ultimate vanguard while at the same time the greatest falsification, questions arise concerning who truly writes for whom in a novelthe author or the reader.Through an array of voices, overlapping story-lines, a kaleidoscope of literary references, and a delirious prose, Labbe carves out a space for himself among such form-defying Latin American greats as Diamela Eltit, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Jorge Luis Borges.Carlos Labbe, one of Granta's "e;Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,"e; was born in Chile and is the author of a collection of short stories and six novels, one of which, Navidad & Matanza, is available in English from Open Letter. In addition to his writings, he is a musician, and has released three albums.Will Vanderhyden received an MA in literary translation from the University of Rochester.

"e;Mariani has emerged as one of the few significant post-Montalian poets in Italy, and Molino is a graceful, experienced, thoroughly reliable translator. The result is an elegant book, an important book, bringing a distinctive voice into English."e;Rosanna WarrenCulled from his entire career, the poems in Traces of Time cover numerous themes, most prominently the poet's relationship to history and how poetry can exist outside of it. "e;Tiananmen, 20 Years Later,"e; "e;Protocols of War,"e; and "e;Checkmate"e; (about 9/11) all illustrate Lucio Mariani's concerns "e;through images both dense and porous, lines both cadenced and spasmodic,"e; and confirm his place in contemporary poetry."e;Protocols of War"e;(Baghdad is not far)Of this time you'll gather no memoriesfor your eternal hunger.Can't you see the slags in the weavethat enfolds the flesh of the living?Can't you see that the boxes and drawerswhere the silver of bygone days aboundshave no room for trinkets or seashellsof a present founded on plaster markets,lost facing a mirrorseeking itself in the halls of the world?Don't you see that for the first timeevery man erects ruins for his heirsenacting inane protocols of warwhile the future slams its shutters tightso as to celebrate on statistical altarsthe glory of mindless marionettesmaneuvered by nothingness,sprung in the bitter fields of oblivion?Of this time you'll gather no memories.Lucio Mariani is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Echoes of Memory (available in English from UPNE), as well as a volume of essays, a collection of short stories, and translations of works by Csar Vallejo, Tristan Corbire, and Yves Bonnefoy.Anthony Molino is a translator from the Italian, an anthropologist, and a psychoanalyst. In addition to Lucio Mariani's two volumes, he has also translated works by Valerio Magrelli and Antonio Porta, among others.

"e;The most important Argentinian writer since Borges."e;The IndependentThe One Before is a triptych of sorts, consisting of a series of short piecescalled "e;Arguments"e;and two longer stories"e;Half-Erased"e; and "e;The One Before"e;all of which revolve around the ideas of exile and memory.Many of the characters who populate Juan Jos Saer's other novels appear here, including Tomatis, ngel Leto, and Washington Noriega (who appear in La Grande, Scars, and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, all of which are available from Open Letter). Saer's typical themes are on display in this collection as well, as is his idiosyncratic blend of philosophical ruminations and precise storytelling.From the story of the two characters who decide to bury a message in a bottle that simply says "e;MESSAGE,"e; to Pigeon Garay's attempt to avoid the rising tides and escape Argentina for Europe, The One Before evocatively introduces readers to Saer's world and gives the already indoctrinated new material about their favorite characters.Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event.Roanne Kantor is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her translation of The One Before won the 2009 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. Her translations from Spanish have appeared in Little Star magazine, Two Lines, and Palabras Errantes.

From the 2010 winner of the Best Translated Book Award comes a harrowing, controversial novel about a woman's revenge, Jewish identity, and how to talk about Adolf Hitler in today's world.Elinor's comfortable lifepopular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kidsis totally upended when she finds out that her estranged uncle is coming to Jerusalem to give a speech asking forgiveness for his decades-old book, Hitler, First Person.A shocking novel that galvanized the Jewish diaspora, Hitler, First Person was Aaron Gotthilf's attempt to understandand explainwhat it would have been like to be Hitler. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "e;slow"e; sister.In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courageand planto avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?Gail Hareven is the author of eleven novels, including The Confessions of Noa Weber, which won both the Sapir Prize for Literature and the Best Translated Book Award.Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others.

Finalist for the 2015 PEN Literary Award for TranslationWinner of the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature"e;A quirky, compulsively readable book that deftly hints at the emptiness and sadness at its core."e;New York TimesA finalist for both the Strega Europeo and Gregor von Rezzori awards (and winner of every Bulgarian honor possible), The Physics of Sorrow reaffirms Georgi Gospodinov's place as one of Europe's most inventive and daring writers.Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov's long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly movingsuch as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a milland extraordinarily funnysee the section on the awfulness of the question "e;how are you?"e;Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various "e;side passages,"e; getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.Like the work of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy, and Dubravka Ugresic, The Physics of Sorrow draws you in with its unique structure, humanitarian concerns, and stunning storytelling.Georgi Gospodinov was born in 1968 and is one of the most translated contemporary Bulgarian writers. His first novel, Natural Novel was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2005 and was praised by the New Yorker, New York Times, and several other prestigious review outlets. A collection of his short stories, And Other Stories was published by Northwestern University Press. The Physics of Sorrow is his second novel.Angela Rodel earned an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010 she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today and received an NEA Fellowship for her translation of Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow.

At an early age, Olga Sedakova began writing poetry and, by the 1970s, had joined up with other members of Russia's underground "e;second culture"e; to create a vibrant literary movement-one that was at odds with the political powers that be. This conflict prevented Sedakova's books from being published in the U.S.S.R. Instead, they were labeled as being too "e;esoteric,"e; "e;religious,"e; and "e;bookish."e; Until 1990, the only way her collections were available in Russian were in samizdat, hand-written copies, which circulated from reader to reader, building her reputation.In the 1990s, the situation changed dramatically, and now Sedakova has published twenty-seven volumes of verse, prose, translations, and scholarly research-although her work is woefully underrepresented in English translation.In Praise of Poetry is a unique introduction to her oeuvre, bringing together a memoir-essay written about her work, and two poetic works: "e;Tristan and Isolde,"e; which is one of her most mysterious long poems, and "e;Old Songs,"e; a sequence of deceptively simple poems that mix folk and Biblical wisdom.Olga Sedakova wrote prolifically during the 1970s, one of the "e;post-Brodsky"e; poets. Her complex, allusive style of poetry-generally labeled as neo-modernist or meta-realism-didn't fit the prescribed official aesthetics, so it wasn't available until the late 1980s. She currently teaches in the department of world culture at Moscow State University.Stephanie Sandler teaches Russian literature in the Slavic department at Harvard University. She co-translated Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version, which won the Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2010.

"e;With meticulous prose, rendered by Dolph's translation into propulsive English, Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington captures the wilderness of human experience in all its variety."e;New York TimesIt's October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematicianwealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in whiteis just back from a grand tour of Europe. He's on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into ngel Leto, a relative newcomer to Santa Fe who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife's assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega's sixty-fifth birthdaya party neither of them attended.Saer's The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event.Steve Dolph is the founder of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan Jos Saer's Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.

"e;The most important Argentinian writer since Borges."e;The IndependentJuan Jose Saer's Scars explores a crime committed by Luis Fiore, a thirty-nine year old laborer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who have some connection to the crime: a young reporter, ngel, who lives with his mother and works the courthouse beat; a dissolute attorney who clings to life only for his nightly baccarat game; a misanthropic and dwindling judge who's creating a superfluous translation of The Picture Dorian Gray; and, finally, Luis Fiore himself, who, on May Day, went duck hunting with his wife, daughter, and a bottle of gin.Each of the stories in Scars explores a fragment in timebe it a day or several monthswhen the lives of these characters are altered, more or less, by a singular event. Originally published in 1969, Scars marked a watershed moment in Argentinian literature and has since become a modern classic of Latin American literature.Juan Jos Saer was the leading Argentinian writer of the post-Borges generation. The author of numerous novels and short-story collections (including Scars and La Grande), Saer was awarded Spain's prestigious Nadal Prize in 1987 for The Event.Steve Dolph is the founder of Calque, a journal of literature in translation. His translation of Juan Jos Saer's Scars was a finalist for the 2012 Best Translated Book Award.

"e;Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would approve."e;Times Literary SupplementHurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it's the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic's writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her "e;the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had."e; In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zuccotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem's Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducible nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic's raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling.Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction and several essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being label a "e;witch"e; for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands.David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav writings of Dubravka Ugresic and the idea of a "e;literature of the Eastern European ruins."e; He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.

"e;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.'"e;Gary ShteyngartIn Amanda Michalopoulou's Why I Killed My Best Friend, a young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and relocated to her native Greece. She struggles with the transition, hating everything about Athens: the food, the air, the school, her classmates, the language. Just as she resigns herself to misery, Anna arrives. Though Anna's refined, Parisian upbringing is the exact opposite of Maria's, the two girls instantly bond over their common foreignness, becoming inseparable in their relationship as each other's best friend, but also as each other's fiercest competitionbe it in relation to boys, talents, future aspirations, or political beliefs.From Maria and Anna's grade school days in '70s, post-dictatorship Greece, to their adult lives in the present, Michalopoulou charts the ups, downs, and fallings-out of the powerful self-destructive bond only true best friends can have. Simply and beautifully written, Why I Killed My Best Friend is a novel that ultimately compares and explores friendship as a political system of totalitarianism and democracy.Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of five novels, two short story collections, and a successful series of children's books. One of Greece's leading contemporary writers, Michalopoulou has won that country's highest literary awards, including the Revmata Prize and the Diavazo Award. Her story collection, I'd Like, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award.Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her recent translations include volumes by Yannis Ritsos, Margarita Karapanou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Miltos Sachtouris. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is on the faculty of the University of Oregon.

WINNER OF THE 2013 CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTESTAlbena Stambolova's idiosyncratic debut novel, Everything Happens as It Does, builds from the idea that, as the title suggests, everything happens exactly the way it must. In this case, the seven characters of the novelfrom Boris, a young boy who is only at peace when he's around bees, to Philip and Maria and their twinseach play a specific role in the lives of the others, binding them all together into a strange, yet logical, knot. As characters are picked up, explored, and then swept aside, the novel's beguiling structure becomes apparent, forcing the reader to pay attention to the patterns created by this accumulation of events and relationships. This is not a novel of reaching moral high ground; this is not a book about resolving relationships; this is a story whose mysteries are mysteries for a reason.Written with a precise, succinct tone that calls to mind Camus's The Stranger, Everything Happens as It Does is a captivating and detail-driven novel that explores how depth will never be as immediately accessible as superficiality, and how everything will run its course in the precise manner it was always meant to.Albena Stambolova is the author of three novels. She has also published a collection of short stories and a psychoanalytical study on Marguerite Duras. She currently lives in Bulgaria, where she works as a psychological and organizational consultant, and is working on a book about fairy tales.Olga Nikolova completed her PhD at Harvard University, with a dissertation on modern poetry, graphic design, and academic writing. She's been translating the works of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein in to Bulgarian.

One of the truly original books of the decadewritten as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentenceZone tells the story of a French Intelligence agent on his way to the Vatican to sell a briefcase of secrets. Over the course of his train ride, he thinks back over his life and all the damage he's caused in this violent century.

Winner of the 2015 AATSEEL Book Award for Best Translation into English"e;A sharp realist."e;Aleksandar HemonTold more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tide is the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband, and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. Taking place over three decades, High Tide functions as a sort of psychological mystery, with the full scope of Ieva's personal situationand the relationship between the three main charactersonly becoming clear at the end of the novel.One of Latvia's most notable young writers, Abele is a fresh voice in European fictionher prose is direct, evocative, and exceptionally beautiful. The combination of strikingly lush descriptive writing with the precision with which she depicts the minds of her characters elevates this novel from a simple story of a love triangle into a fascinating, philosophical, haunting book.Inga Abele is a novelist, poet, and playwright. Her novel High Tide received the 2008 Latvian Literature Award, and the 2009 Baltic Assembly Award in Literature. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as New European Poets and Best European Fiction 2010.Kaija Straumanis is a graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation at the University of Rochester, and is the editorial director of Open Letter Books. She translates from both German and Latvian.

CO-WINNER OF THE 2012 CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTESTAfter deciding to take a semester off their studies to think about future plans, long-time friends Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus decide to hitchhike to the sea. Boril Krustev, former rock star and middle-aged widower who is driving aimlessly to outrun his grief, picks them up and accompanies them on their journey. It doesn't take them long to figure out they're connected to each other by more than their need to travelspecifically through Boril's daughter, whose actions damaged each of the characters in this novel.Co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest, A Short Tale of Shame marks the arrival of a new talent in Bulgarian literature with a novel about the need to come to terms with the shame and guilt we all harbor.Angel Igov is a Bulgarian writer, literary critic, and translator. He has published two collections of short stories, the first of which won the Southern Spring award for debut fiction. Igov has also translated books by Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan into Bulgarian.Angela Rodel earned an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010 she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today.

When he reads about a mysterious explosion, the narrators thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes.

Told through a series of "e;historical documents"e;memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, mapsthe novel details the tale of a secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events.

Finalist for the NBCC award for Criticism."e;Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would approve."e;Times Literary SupplementOver the past three decades, Dubravka Ugresic has established herself as one of Europe"e;s greatestand most entertainingthinkers and creators, and it's in her essays that Ugresic is at her sharpest. With laser focus, she pierces our pop culture, dissecting the absurdity of daily life with a wit and style that's all her own.Whether it's commentary on jaded youth, the ways technology has made us soft in the head, or how wrestling a hotel minibar into a bathtub is the best way to stick it to The Man, Ugresic writes with unmatched honesty and panache. Karaoke Culture is full of candid, personal, and opinionated accounts of topics ranging from the baffling worldwide-pop-culture phenomena to the detriments of conformist nationalism. Sarcastic, biting, and, at times, even heartbreaking, this new collection of essays fully captures the outspoken brilliance of Ugresic's insights into our modern world's culture and conformism, the many ways in which it is ridiculous, and how (deep, deep down) we are all true suckers for it.Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction and several essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being label a "e;witch"e; for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands.David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav writings of Dubravka Ugresic and the idea of a "e;literature of the Eastern European ruins."e; He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.

WINNER OF THE CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTESTA humorous picaresque set in sixteenth-century Spain, Thrown into Nature tells the story of Dr. Nicols Monardes, whose medical treatise "e;Of the Tabaco and His Great Vertues"e; was partially responsible for introducing tobacco to Europe. His Portuguese assistant, Da Silva, narrates the absurd adventures of the wealthy and influential Dr. Monardes, who steadfastly believed that tobaccowhether the leaves were made into a poultice, the smoke was piped into the anus, or through some other bizarre applicationwas an infallible cure for every physical, and mental, ailment known to man. He even uses clouds of "e;cigarella"e; smoke to chase a poltergeist from a church.A blackly hilarious novel that hides its pessimistic reflections on the power of money, the evils of charlatanism, and the gullibility of humanity behind the comic observations and adventures of the always striving and forever bumbling Da Silva, Milen Ruskov's Thrown into Nature is a comic tour de force.Milen Ruskov is a Bulgarian writer and translator. He has written two novels: Pocket Encyclopaedia of Mysteries (2004), which was awarded the Bulgarian Prize for Debut Fiction, and Thrown into Nature (2008), which was awarded the prize for VIK Novel of the Year. He has translated more than twenty books from English, including work by Thomas De Quincey, Martin Amis, and Mary Shelley.Angela Rodel earned an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010 she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today.

"e;The humor in the stories, as well as their thrill of realism, comes from a Nabokovian precision of observation and transformation of plain experience into enchanting prose."e;Los Angeles TimesCollected here are thirty-one of Merce Rodoreda's most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda's most beloved short story collections: Twenty-Two Stories, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories, and My Christina and Other Stories. These stories capture Rodoreda's full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating traditionRodoreda's "e;women are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty"e; (Natasha Wimmer).Merc Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled to France during the Spanish Civil War, and only able to return to Catalonia in the mid-1960s, she wrote a number of highly praised works, including The Time of the Doves and Death in Spring.Martha Tennent was born in the U.S, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.

"e;There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue."e;Robert CooverTwo young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . .Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collectionpopulated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everydayreaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning "e;dirty snow, leftover snow."e; She learned English on her own and has written books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include, The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, and Blue Light in the Sky, among others.Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. She translates in collaboration with Chen Zeping.Chen Zeping is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Teachers' University, and has collaborated with Karen Gernant on more than ten translations.

An extraordinary meditation on experience, writing, and space, My Two Worlds is about a writer lost in an unfamiliar Brazilian city, searching for a park. Struggling to match the two-dimensional map with reality, and disturbed by the bad reviews his new book is receiving, he begins to see his thoughts, reflections, and memories mirrored in the landscape and its inhabitants.

"e;A gifted writer, he draws well on the rich tradition of Spanish surrealism . . . to sustain the lyrical, visionary quality of his imagination."e;New York TimesAll the heroes of this story collectionthe boy who refuses to follow the family tradition of having his ring finger cut off; the man who cannot escape his house, no matter what he tries; Robin Hood stealing so much from the rich that he ruins the rich and makes the poor wealthy; Gregor the cockroach, who wakes one day to discover he has become a human teenager; the prophet who can't remember any of the prophecies that have been revealed to him; Ulysses and his minions trapped in the Trojan horseare faced with a world that is always changing, where time and space move in circles, where language has become meaningless. Their stories are mazes from which they can't escape.The simultaneously dark, grotesque, and funny Guadalajara reveals Quim Monzo at his acerbic and witty best.Quim Monz was born in Barcelona in 1952. He has been awarded the National Award, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award, the Lletra d'Or Prize for the best book of the year, and the Catalan Writers' Award; he has been awarded Serra d'Ormagazine's prestigious Critics' Award four times. He has also translated numerous authors into Catalan, including Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.Peter Bush is a renowned translator from Catalan, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He was awarded the Valle-Incln Literary Translation Prize for his translation of Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga.

"e;If laughter actually is the best medicine, fortunate readers of this wonderful novel will surely enjoy perfect health for the rest of their days."e;-Kirkus ReviewsA comic gem, Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist "e;thaw."e; The narrator, Jerzyk ("e;little Jerzy"e;), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father's closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, and would-be Polish insurrectionist. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Traba and the narrator's father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka-assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme...Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.David Frick is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Merc Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless townburying 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 discover if they will be washed away by a floodthrough the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenage stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society.The horrific rituals, however, stand in stark contrast to the novel's stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions. Written over a period of twenty yearsafter Rodoreda was forced into exile following the Spanish Civil WarDeath in Spring is musical and rhythmic, and truly the work of a writer at the height of her powers.Merc Rodoreda is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled to France during the Spanish Civil War, and only able to return to Catalonia in the mid-1960s, she wrote a number of highly praised works, including The Time of the Doves and Death in Spring.Martha Tennent was born in the U.S, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.

"e;Dark, scary, and unbelievably funny."e;Los Angeles Times"e;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."e;Barnes & Noble ReviewBack 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 just put on a pot of coffee when an unexpected visitor knocks on the door. Peeking through a window, Emil spies an erstwhile friendHavard Knutsson, his one-time roommate and current resident of a Swedish mental institutionon his doorstep, and he panics, taking refuge under his bed and hoping the frightful nuisance will simply go away.Havard won't be so easily put off, however, and he breaks into Emil's apartment and decides to wait for his returnEmil couldn't have gone far; the pot of coffee is still warming on the stove. While Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unable to show himself with each passing moment, Havard discovers the booze, and he ends up hosting a bizarre party for Emil's friends, and Greta.An alternately dark and hilarious story of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity, the breezy and straightforward style of The Pets belies its narrative depth, and disguises a complexity that grows with every page.Bragi Ólafsson is the author of several books of poetry and short stories, and four novels, including Time Off, which was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize in 1999 (as was The Pets), and Party Games, for which Bragi received the DV Cultural Prize in 2004. The Ambassador, available from Open Letter, was a finalist for the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize and received the Icelandic Bookseller's Award as best novel of the year. Bragi is one of the founders of the publishing company Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and has translated Paul Auster's City of Glass into Icelandic. He is also a former bass player with The Sugarcubes, the internationally successful pop group that featured Bjurk as the lead vocalist.Janice Balfour studied literature and Italian at the University of Iceland. In addition to Bragi Ólafsson, she has translated two collections of short stories by Gydir Elíasson.

The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms. As she returns home to visit her mother who is dying of cancer, the narrator recounts a brief, intense love affair, as well as the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. The book's striking imagery and magnificent prose underpin its principal theme: the jarring contrast between the recollection of stability - your parents, your childhood home, your love - and the continual endings that we experience throughout our lives. A true-to-life, deeply poetic novel that works in the same vein as Anne Carson, One of Us Is Sleeping has won Klougart countless accolades and award nominations-including the Readers' Book Award-securing her place as a major new voice in world literature.

First novel from the winner of the Nordic Council's Literature Prize is about families, death, secrets, and failure.

A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on--bank employees are stuffing their pockets with money every day, only to have it taken every evening by the security guards who search the employees and confiscate the cash. But, there's a discrepancy between what is being confiscated and what is being returned to the bank, and our hero is beginning to fear that a secret circulation is developing, one that could undermine the whole economy. Meanwhile, the clerk and his family begin to keep guinea pigs, and at night, when everyone is asleep, our hero begins to conduct experiments with the pets, teaching them tricks, testing their intelligence and endurance, and using some rather questionable methods to encourage the animals to befriend him. Ludvi k Vaculi k's The Guinea Pigs is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.