Search results for ""Archipelago Books""

A young girl with a physical handicap gazes up at a mobile of spinning horses from her little pink bed in her room filled with leafy plants. As she watches them prance about, the tufted snout of a real live horse peeks through her bedroom door. Soon enough, our bright protagonist is off and cantering on an adventure with seven majestic horses. A story about dreaming and about caring for others, In the Meadow of Fantasies will remind young readers of their own reveries and conjure new fantasies of friendly creatures in far off lands.

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In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to photographs, drawings, and paintings from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other European countries. The stories in this collection spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view. From inscrutable masks of pre-Columbian gods, stamps of bright parrots and postcars of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to these remote landscapes appear like a 'train emerging from a thick curtain of heat.'

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A mother, welcoming her tiny son into the world, tells him the story of their lives, whispering to him as she swings him gently around. With each successive page, he grows while she shrinks, until she is being held by the man he has become. Albertine's weightless strokes and billowing bodies recall the flitting procession of a flipbook or an ephermeral notebook sketch.

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Lawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life.

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Geoffrey Brock, whose translations have won him Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, finally does justice to these slim, concentrated verses in his English translation, alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti's Italian originals. Famed for his brevity, Ungaretti's early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction.

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Over twenty years after his son's death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, Gonzalez reveals the world through a painter's eyes. From one of Colombia's greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a formally daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.

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A DREAM COME TRUE collects the complex stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America s greatest author and is regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing.

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Seraphin, dreaming of gardens full of birdsongs, sunny avenues, and flowers, works as a ticket seller in a metro station underground. One day, after being scolded by the stationmaster for trying to save a butterfly that had flown into the station by accident, he learns that he has inherited an old, dilapidated house. Overjoyed by the possibilities, he and his friend Plume set about building the house of their dreams, and much more besides! In a fresh translation, Seraphin now allows a new generation to experience the wonder and inventive spectacle of the original.

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Teeming with tension, this immersive, rhapsodic story transports readers to the Swiss mountainside, bringing to mind the writing of Thomas Mann while offering character studies as vivid and bracing as Eudora Welty''s. Feed is running low in a rural village in Switzerland. The town council meets to decide whether or not to ascend a chimerical mountain in order to access the open pastures that have enough grass to ''feed seventy animals all summer long.'' The elders of the town protest, warning of the dangers and the dreadful lore that enfolds the mountain passageways like thick fog. They''ve seen it all before, reckoning with the loss of animals and men who have tried to reach the pastures nearly twenty years ago. The younger men don''t listen, making plans to set off on their journey despite all warnings. Strange things happen. Spirits wrestle with headstrong young men. As the terror of life on the mountain builds, Ramuz''s writing captures the rural dialog and mindsets of the men. One

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Hebe Uhart's Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt s house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart's work. Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet. In prose that tracks the goings on of creatures who care little what we do or say, a refreshing humility emerges, and with it a newfound pleasure in the everyday.

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A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she's building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life - when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother's newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother's funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today's Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.

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When Juan and his fellow ants gather around for storytime, he hypnotizes all with tales of his grandfather's many exploits - including his escape from an eagle's talons and the time he leapt from a tree with just a leaf for a parachute. When he's through telling these tales, Juan loves to cozy up for a nice long nap. He's such a serious napper that he takes up to ten siestas every day! Though well loved by his ant friends, Juan decides telling tales and sleeping aren't quite enough for him - it's time to set off on his own adventure.

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A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s - a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation - Jean Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions.

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The Scent of Buenos Aires offers the first book-length English translation of Uhart's work, drawing together her best vignettes of quotidian life: moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a cacophonous homeowners association meeting. She writes in unconventional, understated syntax, constructing a delightfully specific perspective on life in South America. These stories are marked by sharp humour and wit: discreet and subtle, yet filled with eccentric and insightful characters. Uhart's narrators pose endearing questions about their lives and environments - one asks 'Bees - do you know how industrious they are?' while another inquires, 'Are we perhaps going to hell in a hand basket?'

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First published in 1911, Intimate Ties is Robert Musil's second book, consisting of two novellas, 'The Culmination of Love' and 'The Temptation of Silent Veronica.' Each revolves around a troubled woman in the throes of her sexual and romantic woes, as their memories of the past return to influence their present desires. Musil tracks the psyche of his protagonists in a blurring of impressions that is reflected in his experimental prose. Intimate Ties offers the reader an early glimpse of the high modernist style Musil would perfect in his magnum opus The Man Without Qualities.

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In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.

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In a faraway land live a bright, industrious people called the Gothamites. They are known for being model citizens, so much so that other communities constantly call upon them for advice, leaving the Gothamites with no time for themselves. Fed up, they hit on a solution: they'll become the most foolish people around: after all, no one wants foolish advice. Chaos ensues, brilliantly captured by Eno Raud's wordplay and Priit Parn's crowded illustrations. From one of Estonia's most cherished children's authors comes the spirited tale of a town that decides to wreak havoc in hilarious fashion.

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By one of Colombia's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, The Storm is an atmospheric, gripping portrait of the tensions that devastate one family. Twins Mario and Jose do not know how to cope with the hatred they feel for their father, an arrogant man whose pride seems to taint everything he touches. Over the course of a fateful fishing trip straight into the heart of a storm, father and sons are confronted with the unspoken secrets and resentments that are destroying them.

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