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Nobody by contemporary Galician writer Fran Alonso is a book of ten short stories about noise (and silence), the disjunction in our lives between what we really feel and our public persona. In these stories, a man is bombarded by the noise from his neighbours and goes upstairs to have it out with the woman who is always shouting at her children, with unforeseen consequences. An Old Man lives in a semi-deserted city; his only way to mark the passing of time is to make a cut in his hand every day - that is, until he spots an Old Woman on the balcony opposite who is constantly knitting. Sick and tired of noise in the city, a woman endeavours to change her lifestyle by moving to a house on a cliff. Writer finishes a novel and leaves it on a lectern in the lobby for his neighbours to read. S. Lonely, who relies heavily on technological gadgets to keep himself entertained and prefers not to go outside, is so bored during the holidays that he decides to go on a trip... Every story in this book analyzes the relationship between the individual and society, the individualism of urban living versus the community obligations of the village, forcing the reader to reconsider the kind of world they live in and the sincerity of their relationships. This is a book for our times that draws on the powerful story-telling tradition of Galician literature. Fran Alonso is a writer of Galician fiction and poetry. Nobody is his latest work of adult fiction. He regularly takes part in anthologies and collective/online projects. He has overseen fiction and poetry collections for the Galician publishing house Edicións Xerais de Galicia, of which he is now director.

At the suggestion of a psychiatrist from Vienna called Ingrid, The Operation is recounted from the point of view of five people: Leandro Balseiro, the artist, who fills his mother's house with studies and has an affair with his art teacher, Candela Roma; the artist's mother, Clara Balseiro, who recounts the story of generations of her family, her father's obsession for flowers, and her son's involvement in an environmental protest group; Daniel Sampaio, a concert pianist who lost his memory on being run over by a car in Santiago and who was treated at the hospital by Clara; the psychiatrist herself, Ingrid Meyer; and the art teacher, Candela Roma. The book reads like a Galician version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, except that the family concerned here is not the Buendías, but the Balseiros. It is also a call to environmental activism, to a creative engagement with the world around us and with the language that we use. Teresa Moure's earlier novel, Black Nightshade, winner of the Xerais Prize for Novels, about the relationship between the French philosopher René Descartes, the herbalist Hélène Jans and Queen Christina of Sweden, is also available from Small Stations Press in Philip Krummrich's translation.

and they say is a dazzling piece of writing by contemporary galician writer susana sanches arins. suffering is a black stormcloud on a sunny day. the trouble with remembering is it can cause damage. but it can also heal. the translator of this book, the north american professor kathleen march, suggests that and they say (seique in the original galician) is its own genre and what really matters is telling (recovering) the truth. it is a story of betrayal, unspeakable cruelty, and the odd (breathless) act of compassion. it is the recuperation of the collective memory of the spanish civil war (1936-39) and its aftermath, when fugitives were caught and bodies thrown into ditches, when it was dangerous to answer your door at night. it is an essay that records testimonies, acknowledged and anonymous, of some of the dark nights that characterize this period of spanish history. it is poetic (if poetry can be cruel). it is also tragic, down to the repeated appearance of the chorus, which seems to reflect on, to reinforce, the central message: memory can be painful, but it is best acknowledged, so that the mourning can take place and the survivors can move on. this book, expertly collated, is a masterpiece of writing on the spanish civil war, an essential piece in the puzzle of those years. susana sanches arins is a high-school teacher in galicia. she is also a well-known author. the second, revised edition of seique, the one that is reproduced here in english, was awarded the narrative prize at the fifth galician book gala in 2020. kathleen march is professor emerita of the university of maine. she has also translated some of the most respected names in galician literature: rosalía de castro, álvaro cunqueiro, anxo angueira, marica campo and miguel anxo fernández among others.

Xoana is the descendant of hard-working women, starting with Pepa the Mole, her great-great-great-grandmother, who went around with a peddler, Maricallo, who played the violin and sang coplas, romantic songs, at the fairs in Galicia. At one fair, in Monterroso, she was raped under cover of night. Pepa dreamed that in actual fact she had been made love to by Einhard, Charlemagne's page, and in the manner of an oyster she wrapped an affliction with the purest of material until it was transformed into a pearl. Xoana's great-great-grandmother was Rosa, who worked in the Big House as a maid, where she was made pregnant by the lord of the manor, Don Álvaro, and likewise became a single mother. Her great-grandmother was Carolina, happy as a tinkling bell and strong as boxwood. Carolina's husband died while digging a tunnel in Asturias, only two years after they had been married, so she ended up being a single mother as well. Her grandmother was Carme, who attended a convent school in Zaragoza, where there was a strict divide between paying and non-paying pupils. This irked Carme so much she stirred up trouble and got expelled, much to her uncle Xenxo's delight, who hadn't wanted her to go there in the first place. She later became a member of the union at the local factory, where she married the clerk, Pedro. She is the woman who was determined to change the world. Xoana's mother is the narrator of this novel. She is a violinist - like Pepa the Mole, who inherited Maricallo's violin. She is pregnant with Xoana and both anxious and eager to welcome her into the world. Marica Campo grew up in Lugo. She studied theology at Salamanca's Pontifical University and then became a teacher. She has written poetry, fiction, drama and children's literature. Memoir for Xoana is her first novel. Kathleen March is a renowned Galician specialist, Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, and the translator of important Galician authors into English, some of whom are published by Small Stations Press.

Teo and Gordo have been friends since they were at school. Teo is sent by his father to study in the States but returns early because of a girl. Gordo decides what he needs is some action and they set out on a road trip in his boss's Dodge Charger. The question is how long can they keep going? And have they been entirely honest with each other?

A boat with the charred body of a man crucified on its mast turns up at the mouth of the river in Romero, a town on the frontier. The boat belongs to the owner of the printing-firm that publishes the local newspaper. He engages Marqués, who is from the east coast and claims that he can write, to head upriver to find out the causes of the boatman’s death. His only deckhand is a mestizo boy called Cordel who’s learned his trade from the previous boatman (‘What you steer isn’t the boat, it’s the river’). They soon reach the mission, which is staffed by a single friar, Father Bento (‘He seemed to chew his words like a cow chewing grass before releasing them in short bursts’). The friar asks if Marqués has come to judge, to govern or to execute. ‘To tell,’ is his answer, ‘I’m a writer.’ Marqués, however, soon falls into a fever and has to be cured by the healing-woman from the local Aventurei Indian tribe. He realises that entering the world of the river is like clambering up a liquid wall on which there are no ledges or crannies for hands and feet to cling to. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the journey is an end in itself and the reader doesn’t know what secrets the river will reveal. There is also the writer’s own personal journey in search of fulfilment through his art. Marqués and Cordel will be joined on board by Rufus the Strongman and Ela, circus workers, as they struggle to come to grips with the tangle, both real and imagined, of the jungle. Xelís de Toro is a Galician performance artist, musician and award-winning writer based in the south of England. He is the author of five works of adult fiction (Feral River being the most recent), several children’s books and a book of poetry that was published by Pighog Press in a bilingual Galician-English edition, The Book of Invisible Bridges. John Rutherford is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He founded and directed the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford, which is now named after him. He has translated Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta for Penguin Classics. His other translations include The Book of Invisible Bridges by Xelís de Toro and Halos by Xosé María Díaz Castro.

Nuria Uría lives in Madrid. She designs floral motifs for a ceramics factory in Lisbon. But one August she is driven to rent an apartment overlooking a beach in the Arousa estuary in west Galicia, the selfsame beach where she made love with a boy from school, Quin, twenty years earlier.

Ramón Lamote, a living representation of the city he inhabits, aged sixty-one, gives private lessons in a local dialect, Terra Chá, and augments his income by taking on commissions to draw dreams. He is a keen observer of the life that goes on around him, unfailingly polite and ever willing to lend a helping hand. On a visit to a large important house in the city centre, he comes across a book that warns of the imminent arrival of a dragon-like creature called a Noticer, which awakens every 696 years, and he hurries to inform the Lord Mayor (though getting in to see him requires all his ingenuity). On another occasion, a fat woman is blocking the stairs, and Ramón Lamote is unable to find a way past her to make it to his lesson on time. He is invited to give a lecture on a kind of domestic animal and chooses the Endomodelph, an egg-laying mammal that sings and whistles through its behind. An enormous pipe appears one day in front of his house, which seems to serve no purpose until the local children come up with a use for it, which quickly catches on. After his lessons, the teacher and drawer of dreams likes to visit the local railway station and to play at guessing people's destinations. And in July he places an advertisement in the newspaper for the first ever Cloud Race, with marmolubles for prizes, an idea that draws the Lord Mayor's attention and soon has everybody talking about it. In The Things of Ramón Lamote, a modern classic of Galician literature and one of the first works in Galician to win the Spanish National Book Award, we are invited to witness the sublime and ordinary, the comic and absurd features of life in a provincial city.

Xavier Queipo's novel Kite follows the life of Francis, a Galician-born emigrant in the United States, who lives in the city of San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and works as a freelance translator and editor. At a showing of Apocalypse Now in the cinema, he meets Rose, a liberal and career-minded Irishwoman, and they start a passionate relationship. But their carefree and hedonistic relationship is threatened when Francis, who has been asked by his publisher, Martin, to complete a translation into English of the Portuguese writer José Saramago's Essay on Blindness in record time, owing to the predictions that Saramago might win the Nobel Prize, is himself diagnosed with the onset of blindness. How will Rose react? How will Francis cope with this descent into darkness? And will he be able to finish his translation of Saramago's work in time? Kite takes us on a journey into the lives of emigrants in the United States whose traditional upbringing is often in conflict with the permissive, liberal society they inhabit. Then there is Andy, Francis's ex-lover and a loyal friend, for whom he still harbours intense feelings, and a return to the Galicia of his birth, an experience Francis hopes will be balsamic, but which may prove catastrophic. We are left with the image of a Chinese boy on the beach in San Rafael, trying to fly his kite, the symbol of something (or someone) at the mercy of the wind. The boy is grateful for the help Francis offers, but unsure whether to accept. There is the gesture; we are left with the time and space to interpret it.

Sam is a drug addict with a sense of humour. One particular escapade lands him in hospital, where he makes friends with the old man in the adjoining bed and becomes progressively enamoured of the nurse Miss Cowbutt's unsung qualities. In an attempt to wean him off his drug habit, his elder brother, Nico, takes him to the village, Aita, where their grandmother lives, a world far removed from the distractions of modern life, in which even the silence seems animate. He meets up with Gaby the single mother and Dombodán the collector of discarded items. He also becomes acquainted with a slippery customer named 'Sir' who takes refuge in the radio set in the attic. A host of colourful characters - from Tip and Top to the 'relentless lady' - populate this tale, which pits a victim of zero expectations against the haunting traditions of the village.

A young woman, who has left Galicia to go and study marine biology in Mexico (Baja California), is recalled to Galicia when it is found out that her mother is very sick. Her aunt would like her to sign some papers agreeing to take over the family business and renouncing her Mexican studies and emotional ties that she has forged in her new life. However, returning to Galicia and renewing her family ties is not exactly what the woman wants. Her mother has shut herself in her room for the last year, and relations between them have always been strained. She received more affection from a nanny, Felisa, and better advice from her uncle, Cándido. There is also an older brother, Ramón, a larger-than-life figure who has left an indelible mark in the lives of those around him, and an absent father. Will the woman's visit to see her sick mother turn out to be permanent, and will it soothe any of the festering wounds in her psyche, wounds that she has buried beneath her marine studies and a relationship with her one-time tutor? That's How Whales Are Born is a return to our origins, a search into the usefulness of stirring up past memories and seeking reconciliation. Anxos Sumai is one of Galicia's best contemporary novelists. Her first novels, Guardian Angels and Melody of Used Days, derived from her online diaries. She has also had great success as a radio journalist. But her reputation as a novelist was enhanced by her later novels, That's How Whales Are Born (Repsol Short Fiction Prize) and Harvest Moon (Spanish Critics' Prize). In 2007, the year That's How Whales Are Born was first published in the Galician language, Anxos Sumai was voted author of the year by the Galician Publishers' Association.

'Possibly the most impressive novel ever written in the Galician language'. With these words, the eminent critic Basilio Losada describes Suso de Toro's novel Tick-Tock in a letter to the author. Suso de Toro is alternative in everything he does, he rearranges the boundaries, surprises the reader, does the unexpected, persons, tenses change, and what could be construed as an atheistic, chaotic novel acquires hints of religiosity. Nano, the narrator, is a man of uncertain age who has never made it in the world, but who likes to hold forth all the same, to fill notebooks with his thoughts on fishing in the Gran Sol, on controlling his libido, on inventing machines that serve no purpose. The novel centres on his experiences, and on the lives of those around him: his mother, his father and half-brother, the people who occupy the building where his mother cleans. Tick-Tock, a sequel to Polaroid, received the Spanish Critics' Prize for its unconventionality and narrative expertise, and is the author's most popular work.

From the author of "Low Voices" and "The Carpenter's Pencil", the book of short stories that set him on his way and revolutionized Galician literature when it came out at the end of the 1980s. For the first time, Galician prose dealt with the Galician landscape in a modern context, uniting tradition and modernity, placing the poetry of landscape alongside the irony of modern society. In "One Million Cows", a collection of eighteen short stories by Manuel Rivas, the first he published, a boy tries to find out if his cousin is really a battery-operated robot, a sailor who has been shipwrecked at sea turns up dead in a local bar, the inhabitants of a village transport a young suicide so that he can be buried in an adjoining parish, a Galician who has recently returned from England dreams of building a golf course on the mud-flats of his childhood, and a prospective councillor is put off by the fish scales on a fishwife's hands. Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most international author, and once again the reader will be able to enjoy his striking metaphors, his commitment to what he writes, and his lingering eye for detail. Other titles in the series Small Stations Fiction include: "Polaroid" by Suso de Toro, "Soundcheck: Tales from the Balkan Conflict" by Miguel-Anxo Murado and "Vicious" by Xurxo Borrazás.