Fiction in translation

Book Synopsis‘I had seen so many men celebrated and then disgraced, and so many men disgraced and then rehabilitated, that for a long time I kept the hope of someday being held worthy of the history of our country. The wheel had turned, and would turn. Undoubtedly, I would not be there to witness it. I recited to myself the words that men condemned to die defiantly utter on the scaffold: “In twenty years, I shall be a handsome young man again, one of the brave…”’ In this enigmatic novella, one hears of the life of a litterateur before, during, and after the Great Revolution. The Peking Opera Reform was awarded Prix Décembre in 2013. This work is translated from the French, La réforme de l’opéra de Pékin (Payot & Rivages, Paris, 2013).

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Book SynopsisWhen a meteor crashes into greaser Rockabilly’s backyard, a ripple of strange events ensues. The tattoo of a pin-up girl on his back comes to life and begins to exert her murderous control over the suburb in which he lives. His precocious teenage neighbor Suicide Girl begins spontaneously lactating, and her pet lizard goes missing. A disturbed neighbor begins to pace the block to quiet his unseemly thoughts. Meanwhile, the neighborhood dog, Bones, suddenly able to think human thoughts, begins to hatch a plan. With economic language and well-crafted timing, Rockabilly leads us on a hair-raising journey, artfully deconstructing archetypes of suburban America. Taking us past garish lights of strip malls and empty strips of desert, this dystopian novel presents a unique take on trash aesthetics, the philosophy of tattoo art, and American pop culture.

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Book Synopsis"A delicious read." Aachener Zeitung Take a dilapidated castle in the Scottish Highlands; add a peacock gone rogue, a group of bankers on a teambuilding trip, an overwhelmed psychologist, a housekeeper with a broken arm, and an ingenious cook; get Lord and Lady McIntosh to try and keep it all together; and top it off with all sorts of animals – soon no one will know exactly what’s going on. Selling 500,000 copies, Isabel Bogdan’s book is a big hitter in Germany – and now it’s coming home to roost. "A peacock whodunnit meets Monarch of the Glen. Light-hearted and fun, to be enjoyed by the fire, with a whisky, of course. In Annie Rutherford’s translation, it’s hard to imagine it was originally written in German." Kari Dickson, translator of Karin Fossum "A charming, slightly madcap novel." Much Ado BooksTrade Review"he Peacock is witty, entertaining and pitch perfect from first sentence to last,with the comic timing of the final sentence particularly inspired. A week later,I’m still chuckling." Lizzy's Literary Life

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Book SynopsisTold with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in rural 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith’s Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives’ tales and young people’s ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life. ‘Reading it was like falling in love. If everyone read this book, the world would be a better place – more considerate, more liveable, more tolerant.’ 
Fatih Akın, director of The Edge of Heaven; ‘The book’s muted poetry all the way to its quiet ending warms the soul like later summer wind gently stroking through hair.’ Sächsische Zeitung; ‘The novel enchants its readers with the sincerity and love with which it assesses the weight of the simple things in life.’ Fachdienst Germanistik; ‘A mature, light, wise book.’ Kreuzer magazineTrade ReviewIt has epic simplicity. Özdoğan’s language is plain, but it carries with it the author’s sympathy with his characters, including the contradictory ones.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung

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Book SynopsisEach of us has something that feels essential to who we are. For Hans Frambach, it's the crimes of the Nazi era, which have hurt him for as long as he can remember. That's why he became an archivist at the Bureau of Past Management; now, though, he's wondering if he should make a change. For his best friend, Graziela, that past was also her focal point - until she met a man who desired her. From then on, sexual pleasure became the key to her life; a concept she's now beginning to doubt. Hans and Graziela thought the Nazi crimes were the inheritance that neither could bear, but can we really blame Nazism for everything? Iris Hanika shows how the crimes of the Nazi era hold the Germans in their clutches to this day. Can a country manage its past, or ought we to remain helpless in the face of the horrific crimes of the Holocaust? "A brave account of one man's struggle to come to terms with his nation's past, which draws an artful distinction between memory and memorial.' Michael Arditti; "A bold and absorbing novel (...) translated sensitively by Abigail Wender." Irish Times; "It's impossible to live with this guilt. Making that so emphatically clear by means of fiction, after sixty-five years of intense debate, is this novel's great achievement." Andreas Platthaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungTrade Review"A novel that opens up a window. A masterpiece." Denis Scheck, ARD druckfrisch

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Book Synopsis"You'll live out your lives in a foreign country," Gul is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you're far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return. Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gul will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home. A novel about how home is found in many places and yet still eludes us. "A modern-day fairy tale." NDR "An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader's thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home." migazin "A unique novel about the losses, sacrifices and determination of generations of migrant women; as important as it is moving." Preti TanejaTrade Review"Quietly captivating." The Monthly Booking

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Book SynopsisLove in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss. "Wow, what an incredible novel. The language! Thank you for publishing this book." Katja Schneider, stories! bookshop, Hamburg "Words and images to take your breath away." taz; "The experiences so original, the observations so sharp, the thoughts so clever." Frankfurter Rundschau; "A sound that tells of political and economic vacuums felt by people in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia to this day." MDR Kultur; "The interpersonal magic now lost, or at least forgotten, but above all: poisoned by the big bad world 'out there'. Ivana Sajko celebrates this sad state of affairs with power and intensity. Definitely worth reading." NDR Kultur; "Breathless, barely punctuated. Her heroes: a nameless couple in a Mediterranean nowhere, devoted to each other in hate. A tough, great novel." Neue PresseTrade Review"A brilliant novel: intense and poetic, exhilarating and devastating." Priya Basil

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Book SynopsisAmal shocks the whole neighbourhood by beating up her classmate Younes. Her father defends her behaviour and encourages her to assert herself. From then on everyone avoids Amal - and then her father leaves. Searching in vain for an explanation, Amal finds refuge with Younes and his mother Shahira, both outsiders like her. Years later, when the situation comes to a head and the conflict with Raffiq's gang escalates, Amal flees to Kurdistan to look for her father. Raffiq's friend Younes is the reluctant centre of attention in their neighbourhood - thanks to his free-spirited mother Shahira, who breaks all the rules. Raffiq thinks about Shahira all the time, at once fascinated and repulsed by her. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Younes plans to leave. When Raffiq's girlfriend Amal also wants to move away, Raffiq's world begins to break apart. In her kaleidoscopic novel, Karosh Taha expands our ideas of class, race and gender as she loops two stories around an invisible lynchpin: a woman who defies all expectations, a blank canvas for projections from all those around her. Deftly translated by Grashina Gabelmann, the book can be explored from either end, creating two very different narratives. "This is the tight, urgent style of an author who genuinely has something to say." Stefanie Roenneke, Neues DeutschlandTrade Review"There are two sides to every story, but this simple truth is rarely as meaningfully explored in literature as in Karosh Taha's second novel In the Belly of the Queen. Karosh Taha succeeds in making you forget the construction in the narration, so richly and dazzlingly do her sentences shine." Britta Heidemann, Westdeutsche Allgemeine

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Book Synopsis"There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee." After eight years in Turkey, Gul leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gul's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim OEzdogan's account of Gul's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds. "Selim Oezdogan's latest novel is an affectionate testament to a whole generation of women who are often overlooked. Gul has many names and many faces." Steffen Radlmaier, Nurnberger Nachrichten "A luminous conclusion to a trilogy that has no equal in any language. Through the story of one woman who insists, against the odds, on meeting the world with an open heart, it brings grace and dignity to the many unsung millions whose lives have followed the same zigzagging paths between Turkey and Germany over three generations." Maureen Freely, author of Sailing Through Byzantium and translator of Orhan PamukTrade Review"Anchored in the circumstances of this century and yet timeless, this is the story of exiles and homecomings, of silences and distances and loneliness but with a hopefulness at its heart. Above all it is a story about women and age: an old woman's careful, thoughtful, analytic eye reflecting on motherhood, friendship, marriage, survival. It is about pepper paste and aubergines and goat meat and cooking and feeding people and finding the right ingredients in a foreign place. It is about all the small daily worries of a woman which can be read as all the great difficulties of finding ourselves a place in the world that feels like home. This book is full of wisdom." Jane Campbell, author of Cat Brushing

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Book Synopsis"What Waley did create is literary art of extraordinary beauty that brings to life in English the world Murasaki Shikibu imagined. The beauty of his art has not dimmed, but like the original text itself retains the power to move and enlighten."—Dennis Washburn, from his foreword Centuries before Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji was already acknowledged as a classic of Japanese literature. Over the past century, this book has gained worldwide acceptance as not only the world's first novel but as one of the greatest works of literature of all time.The hero of the tale, Prince Genji, is a shining example of the Heian-era ideal man—accomplished in poetry, dance, music, painting, and, not least of all to the novel's many plots, romance. The Tale of Genji and the characters and world it depicts have influenced Japanese culture to its very core. This celebrated translation by Arthur Waley gives Western readers a very genuine feel for the tone of this beloved classic.This edition contains the complete Waley translation of all six books of The Tale of Genji and also contains a new foreword by Dennis Washburn with key insights into both the book and the importance of this translation for modern readers.Trade Review"While Tyler's version, which attempts to capture the social and political nuance of Murasaki's language, is the best choice for scholars, Waley's remains the most attractive and accessible for the general reader." --Library Journal"The Tale of Genji, as translated by Arthur Waley, is written with an almost miraculous naturalness, and what interests us is not the exoticism--the horrible word--but rather the human passions of the novel. Such interest is just: Murasaki's work is what one would quite precisely call a psychological novel. I dare to recommend this book to those who read me." --Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library

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Book SynopsisSitor Situmorang, one of the most celebrated Indonesian literary voices of the twentieth century, claimed that all his work dealt with a single theme—“love and wanderlust,” which are “two aspects of one and the same experience.” His remarkable short stories are celebrations of modern life, dealing with subjects such as seeking, belonging, identity, masculinity, and sensual interaction with the world at large. The characters are both introspective and physical, the settings sparse but evocative, the circumstances ordinary yet unexpected. The publication of this volume of fourteen stories is the culmination of a request Sitor once made of Harry Aveling to render his stories in English. The translation of his complete short stories now shares the exceptional creative prose of Sitor Situmorang with audiences around the world.

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Book SynopsisGeorgios Vizyenos (1849-1896) is one of Greece's best-loved writers. His stories, written in 1883-4, are set in his native Thrace, a corner of Europe where Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey meet. Each title poses an enigma: Where did Yorgis' grandfather travel on his only journey? What was Yorgis' mother's sin? Who was responsible for his brother's murder? At the end of each story the narrator possesses some knowledge that forces him - and his readers - to revise their earlier assumptions, which were based on incomplete knowledge. Because Vizyenos wants us to experience the difficult transition from ignorance to knowledge, he leaves us in suspense until the very end. Vizyenos' stories evoke a time when individual Greeks and Turks could share each other's joys and pains despite the hostile relations between their governments.Table of ContentsIntroduction; The one and only journey of his life; My mother's sin; Who was my brothers murderer?; Chronological outline.

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Book SynopsisJaroslav Hasek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read yet incomplete novel "The Good Soldier Svejk", a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant soldier in World War I. Hasek - in spite of a life of bufoonery and debauchery - was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Here, in a new English translation, is a series of short stories based on Hasek's experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia. First published in the "Prague Tribune", these nine stories are considered to be some of his best, and they provide delightful entertainment as well as important background and insight into "The Good Soldier Svejk". This collection, by a writer some refer to as a Bolshevik Mark Twain, is much more than a tool for understanding Hasek's better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. "Behind the Lines" focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma and takes aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, "Behind the Lines" is an enjoyable, fast-paced collection of great literary and historical value.

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Book SynopsisA favorite work of Czech humor, We Were a Handful depicts the adventures of five boys from a small Czech town through the diary of Petr Bajza, the grocer's son. Written by Karel Polacek at the height of World War II before his deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, this book draws on the happier years of Polacek's own childhood as inspiration. As we look upon the world through Petr's eyes, we, too, marvel at the incomprehensible world of grownups; join in fights between gangs of neighborhood kids; and laugh at the charming language of boys, a major source of the book's humor. This translation at last offers English-language readers the opportunity to share in Petr's (and Polacek's) childhood and reminds us that joy and laughter are possible even in the darkest times.

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Book SynopsisNovelist Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and he spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by the time of his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation's greatest twentieth-century writers. Hrabal's fiction blends tragedy with humor and explores the anguish of intellectuals and ordinary people alike from a slightly surreal perspective. His work ranges from novels and poems to film scripts and essays. Rambling On is a collection of stories set in Hrabal's Kersko. Several of the stories were written before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague but had to be reworked when they were rejected by Communist censorship during the 1970s. This edition features the original, uncensored versions of those stories.

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Book SynopsisJaroslav Hasek is a Czech writer most famous for his wickedly funny, widely read, yet incomplete novel The Good Soldier Schweik, a series of absurdist vignettes about a recalcitrant WWI soldier. Hasek in spite of a life of buffoonery and debauchery was remarkably prolific. He wrote hundreds of short stories that all display both his extraordinary gift for satire and his profound distrust of authority. Behind the Lines presents a series of nine short stories first published in the Prague Tribune and considered to be some of Hasek's best. Based on his experiences as a Red Commissar in the Russian Civil War and his return to Czechoslovakia, Behind the Lines focuses on the Russian town of Bugulma, taking aim, with mordant wit, at the absurdities of a revolution. Providing important background and insight into The Good Soldier Schweik, this collection by a writer some call the Bolshevik Mark Twain is nevertheless much more than a tool for understanding his better-known novel; it is a significant work in its own right. A hidden gem remarkable for its modern, ribald sense of humor, Behind the Lines is an enjoyable, fast-paced anthology of great literary and historical value.

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Book SynopsisOn its initial publication in Czech in 1942, Saturnin was a best seller, its gentle satire offering an unexpected if temporary reprieve from the grim reality of the German occupation. In the years since, the novel has been hailed as a classic of Czech literature, and this translation makes it available to English-language readers for the first time which is entirely appropriate, for author Zdenek Jirotka clearly modeled his light comedy on the English masters Jerome K. Jerome and P. G. Wodehouse. The novel's main character, Saturnin, a "gentleman's gentleman" who obviously owes a debt to Wodehouse's beloved Jeeves, wages a constant battle to protect his master from romantic disaster and intrusive relatives, such as Aunt Catherine, the "Prancing Dictionary of Slavic Proverbs." Saturnin will warm the heart of any fan of literary comedy.

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Book SynopsisSummer of Caprice, a captivating comic novel first published in 1926, is a classic of Czech literature, yet it is little known elsewhere. Commonly considered untranslatable due to the complexities of the text, which is characterized by a playful narrative and an exceptional mastery of language, and its profound cultural context, it is rendered here in English that beautifully captures Vladislav Vancura's experimental style or, as the author himself called it, his "poetism in prose." Mixing the archaic with the innovative, raw colloquialisms with biblical quotations, Summer of Caprice opens an uproarious window onto the Czech spirit, humor, and way of life.

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Book SynopsisThis is a book about collective guilt, individual fate, and repentance, a tale that explores how we can come to be responsible for crimes we neither directly commit nor have the power to prevent. Set in the Czechoslovakian borderland shortly after WWII amid the sometimes violent expulsion of the region's German population, Jaroslav Durych's poetic, deeply symbolic novel is a literary touchstone for coming to terms with the Czech Republic's difficult and taboo past of state-sanctioned violence. A leading Catholic intellectual of the early twentieth century, Durych became a literary and political throwback to the prewar Czechoslovak Republic and faced censorship under the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. As such, he was a man not unfamiliar with the ramifications of a changing society in which the minority becomes the rule-making political authority, only to end up condemned as criminals. Though Durych finished writing God's Rainbow in 1955, he could not have hoped to see it published in his lifetime. Released in a still-censored form in 1969, God's Rainbow is available here in full for the first time in English.

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Book SynopsisFor The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for his story of a mysterious wanderer, outcast, and would-be revolutionary--a dreamer typical of fin de siecle Czech literature who serves Dyk as a timely expression of the conflict between the petty concerns of bourgeois nineteenth-century society and the coming artistic generation. Impeccably rendered into English by Mark Corner, The Pied Piper retains the beautiful style of Dyk's original Czech. The inspiration for several theater and film adaptations, including a noted animated work from critically acclaimed director Jiri Barta, Dyk's classical novella is given new life by Corner's translation, proving that the piper is open to new interpretations still.

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Book SynopsisMahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures. Mother of 1084 is one of her most widely read works, written during the height of the Naxalite agitation - a militant communist uprising that was brutally repressed by the Indian government and led to the widespread murder of young rebels across Bengal. This novel focuses on the trauma of a mother who awakens one morning to the shattering news that her son is lying dead in the morgue and her struggle to understand his decision to be a Naxalite. Breast Stories is a collection of short fiction about the breast as more than a symbol of beauty, eroticism, or motherhood, but as a harsh ndictment of an exploitative social system and a weapon of resistance. At a time when violence towards women in India has escalated exponentially, Devi exposes the inherently vicious systems in Indian society. Old Women tells the touching, poignant tales of two timeworn women - Dulali, a widow since childhood, who is now an old woman preoccupied only with day-to-day survival, and Andi, who loses her eyesight due to a combination of poverty, societal indifference, and government apathy. All three volumes, written in Devi's hard-hitting yet sensitive prose, are significant milestones in India's feminist literary landscape.

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Book SynopsisMahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures. Mother of 1084 is one of her most widely read works, written during the height of the Naxalite agitation - a militant communist uprising that was brutally repressed by the Indian government and led to the widespread murder of young rebels across Bengal. This novel focuses on the trauma of a mother who awakens one morning to the shattering news that her son is lying dead in the morgue and her struggle to understand his decision to be a Naxalite. Breast Stories is a collection of short fiction about the breast as more than a symbol of beauty, eroticism, or motherhood, but as a harsh indictment of an exploitative social system and a weapon of resistance. At a time when violence towards women in India has escalated exponentially, Devi exposes the inherently vicious systems in Indian society. Old Women tells the touching, poignant tales of two timeworn women - Dulali, a widow since childhood, who is now an old woman preoccupied only with day-to-day survival, and Andi, who loses her eyesight due to a combination of poverty, societal indifference, and government apathy. All three volumes, written in Devi's hard-hitting yet sensitive prose, are significant milestones in India's feminist literary landscape.

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Book SynopsisTheir journey to retrieve the money brings together a mysterious ally, an exotic festival, a divine intervention and a con artist changing their destinies in ways no one could have predicted.

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