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"A moving mural of lives in the underclass of Luanda." – The Guardian In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato's flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. Alongside, disparate stories are woven into the narrative, spanning from the tragic to the comic, from the surreal to the every-day, culminating into a depiction of near-future Luanda. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki among the continent's most accomplished writers. NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD A VANITY FAIR HOT TYPE BOOK FOR APRIL 2018 A VULTURE MUST-READ TRANSLATED BOOK A LIT HUB FAVOURITE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2018
“Love is the finest,” writes Jaime Sabines, “the most shuddering, / the most unendurable, silence.” Available for the first time as a complete selection in English, Love Poems presents Jaime Sabines’ powerful erotic verse in an exceptional translation by Irish Canadian poet Colin Carberry. Jaime Sabines, Mexico’s most influential modern poet, was born in Chiapas in 1926. He received numerous literary awards and honors over the course of his career. Sabines died in Mexico City in 1999.
"Liliana Heker is one of the most remarkable voices of the Argentinean generation after Borges ... her fiction chronicles the small tragedies that take place within the vast tragedy of our history. A universal and indispensable writer." - Alberto Manguel When Diana Glass witnesses Leonora's abduction from a street in Buenos Aires, she despairs that her friend has joined the ranks of los desaparaecidos, the missing ones. She begins to write the story of their friendship, but certain memories, details, and whispered allegations about Leonora's fate consistently intrude. Leonora was born to drink life down to the bottom of the glass. But, Diana wonders, is that necessarily a virtue? Gripping, intelligent, and intricately structured, Liliana Heker's novel of an unstable revolutionary pasionaria has inflamed readers across Latin America. The End of the Story is a shocking study of the pyschology of torture, and a tragic portrait of Argentina's Dirty War.
A writer's wrenching, no-holds-barred confession about his experiences with bipolar disorder. Addicted to culture, author Thomas Melle has built up an impressive personal library. His heart is in these books, and he loves to feel them at his back, their promise and challenge, as he writes. But in the middle of a violent dissociative episode, when they become ballast to his increasingly manic self, he disperses almost overnight what had taken decades to gather. Nor is this all he loses: descending further into an incomprehensible madness, he loses friendships and his career as a novelist and celebrated playwright, but the most savage cruelty is that he no longer either knows or understands himself. Vulnerable and claustrophobic, shattering and profoundly moving, Thomas Melle's The World at My Back is a book dedicated to the impossibility of reclaiming what has been lost, its lines both a prayer and reminder that, on the other side of madness, other possibilities await.
In Montreal, a Bolivian refugee and Kurdish freedom-fighter fall in love in this experimental novel of identity, hybridity, and exile.
A RADIO FRANCE-CULTURE/TÉLÉRAMA BEST WORK OF FICTION BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 CAMÕES PRIZE AND THE WINNER OF THE 2014 NEUSTADT PRIZE “Quite unlike anything else I have read from Africa.""—Doris Lessing “By meshing the richness of African beliefs . . . into the Western framework of the novel, he creates a mysterious and surreal epic.”—Henning Mankell Mwanito was eleven when he saw a woman for the first time, and the sight so surprised him he burst into tears. Mwanito has been living in a former big-game park for eight years. The only people he knows are his father, his brother, an uncle, and a servant. He’s been told that the rest of the world is dead, that all roads are sad, ...
Rich and deceptively simple . . . one of Quebec's major poets.--Globe & Mail
Shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize Selected for Indies Introduce Summer/Fall 2016 Catherine Leroux's first novel, translated into English brilliantly by Lazer Lederhendler, ties together stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she absorbed her twin sister's body in the womb and that she has two sets of DNA; a girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train, losing her legs; and a political couple learn that they are non-identical twins separated at birth. The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America's most intelligent and innovative young authors. Catherine Leroux was born in 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, where she continues to live and write.
From French Ontario to the anarchist camps of California, three young women come of age in a tumultuous 21st century.
Winner of the 2020 Governor General's Award in Translation A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2020 Sliding doors open and close automatically, exit to the left, entrance to the right. Beyond it, cars go by, and pedestrians and cyclists. A large park behaves as if nothing has happened. The mirage of a world intact. In an instant, a life changes forever. After he falls from a scaffold on the construction site where he works, the comatose David is visited daily by his wife, Caroline, and their six-year-old son Bertrand—but despite their devoted efforts, there’s no crossing the ineffable divide between consciousness and the mysterious world David now inhabits. A moving story of love and mourning, elegantly translated by Lazer Lederhendler, If You Hear Me asks what it means to be alive and how we learn to accept the unacceptable.