Bøger udgivet af Open Letter

Whisky, snooker, and erotic dreams amid the smoldering racism and murders plaguing a Free State town in South Africa.

"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.

Hermann, 37 years old and listless, has his life turned upside-down when his rapier-tongued, usually intoxicated mother is diagnosed with cancer. They embark on a picaresque journey to Amsterdam to get her a special treatment, and to bond over all the booze they can imbibe. Wickedly funny and profound, this is a mother-son novel for the twenty-first century.

First time all of these charmingly literary stories—each of which has appeared in an American journal—have been collected.

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.

"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.

Collection of incredibly funny stories about, well, a bunch of morons.

An instant classic of Russian literature, Maidenhair weaves together myriad plots, all revolving around innocence and violence and escape.

Traces the evolution of Gelman's poetry, and his encounter with the political when his son and daughter-in-law were disappeared.

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.

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.

Wechsler has lost his memory; Amnon can see into people's minds. Their story collide (literally) over a "fake" holocaust memoir.

Originally published: Italy: Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, 1982.

A picaresque, absurd depiction of the perfect Nazi soldier separated from his battalion and manipulated by everybody.

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.

A novel decades ahead of its time, and the only work by Jorge Luis Borges's mentor available in English.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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;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;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.

A middle-aged lexicographer, Helena Verbloem, travels alone to Durban to assist in the creation of a dictionary of Afrikaans words that have fallen out of use. Shortly after her arrival, her apartment is burglarized, and her collection of precious shells, shells that she had been collecting for a lifetime, is stolen. Meeting with indifference from the local police, she decides to investigate the crime on her own, with the help of her new friend from the Museum of Natural History, Sof. While investigating the crime, Helena reflects on the life shes livedher ex-husband, her daughter, her lovers, her childhoodand begins to fall in love with her married boss, Theo Verway. An alternately sublime and satirical meditation on love, loss, and obsession, Ingrid Winterbachs The Book of Happenstance is an emotionally affecting masterpiece from one of South Africas most exciting authors.

"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.