Bøger udgivet af Archipelago Books

A dazzling portrait of a dreamy optimist filling Paris with ingenious gadgets, toys, and magical contraptions.

An extraordinary chronicle of war and an occult story of love between a father and his son from one of Iraq’s most celebrated contemporary writers“Whenever he told lies, the birds would fly away. It had been that way since he was a child. Whenever he told a lie, something strange would happen.” So begins Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate, a phantasmagoric warren of fact, fabrication, and mystical allegory, set in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rule and Iraq’s Kurdish conflict. Muzafar-i Subhdam, a peshmerga fighter, has spent the last twenty-one years imprisoned in a desert yearning for his son, Saryas, who was only a few days old when Muzafar was captured. Upon his release, Muzafar begins a frantic search, only to learn that Saryas was one of three identical boys who became enmeshed in each other’s lives as war mutilated the region. An inlet to the recesses of a terrifying historical moment, and a philosophical journey of formidable depths, The Last Pomegranate interrogates the origins and reverberations of atrocity. It also probes, with a graceful intelligence, unforgettable acts of mercy.

An acclaimed Lebanese writer speaks to the complexity of the Palestinian experience in a devastating account of resilience and loss "Gives voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages." -- Edward Said Weaving personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, Star of the Sea traces the contours of the unspeakable. Adam Dannoun's story is one of beginnings. Born in a war-torn Israel, Adam dreams of becoming a writer. He is just an infant when Jewish forces uproot and massacre thousands of Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba, including his own father. Adam's mother, crumbling with loss, takes her son to Haifa and remarries. Soon she feels stifled by her new husband. Adam flees this lifeless home and writes himself a second beginning. With nothing but his father's will and the image of his mother at the doorway, Adam is born again into the streets of Haifa. Here he spins a new life alongside an auto-shop owner, Gabriel. Adam Dannoun shapeshifts into Adam Danon, an Israeli born into the Warsaw ghetto, and Gabriel's younger brother. There are limits to this charade, lines he's forbidden to cross--and when he falls in love with Gabriel's only daughter he steps, unawares, into a third life. Life after life, Adam confronts the horrors of his past. Following My Name Is Adam, Star of the Sea is the second installment of a brilliant trilogy--an epic tale of love, survival, and ongoing devastation.

"Giono's prose is a singularly fine blend of realism and poetic sensibility." -- The Washington Post Giono's very own Moby-Dick, a sensational maritime journey that follows a crew inwards on a spiritual tale of evocative sea-glimpses An allegorical critique of modern civilization and the damages of war, Giono's oft-overlooked seafaring tale sweeps the reader along a narrative as poetic and undulating as the wind, tacking between the sea's mysteries and the intricacies of the men's conversations and inner thoughts as they attempt to grasp the sensory reality around them. "I no longer have any interest in living under the conditions that this era allows," writes the Captain of L'Indien, a ship whose radio remains packed in a crate in the hold. The men aboard won't be needing it; they have no interest in connecting with the world of ordinary men. With enough provisions to last them five years, they set sail in July of 1940 for the South Seas, leaving civilization behind in search of the unknown. Hastening onwards, Giono's men steer deeper into themselves, seeking a purpose beyond the "world in upheaval" they left behind--a moving and spiritual work written by one of Europe's most ardent 20th-century pacifists. A sensational novel that delves into the unknown reaches of the sea and soul, perfect for readers seeking a poetic escape that challenges the political and social status-quo.

A haunting, allegorical Swiss masterpiece centered around a posse of villagers as they brave dark elements to ascend a mountain, thicketed with loreTeeming 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 of the most talented translators working today, Bill Johnston captures the careful and sublime twists and turns of the original in his breathtaking translation.

"Uhart reinvigorates our desire to connect with other people, to love the world, to laugh in the face of bad intentions, and to look again, more closely: from lapwings, road-side pedicures, and the overheard conversations of nurses and their patients, to Goethe and the work of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjiéns. "It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes," Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart's oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her córnicas, Uhart's preferred method of storytelling by the end of her life. For Uhart, the córnica meant going outside, meeting others. It also allowed the mingling of precise, factual reportage and the slanted, symbolic narrative power of literature" --

"In these pages, we will find friends stuck forever in the same class at school while the world changes around them; travelers forced to seek shelter in a battered, windy hostel after a landslide; parents struggling to deal with displacement as they move away from Kashmir with their children, or loneliness as their children leave in search of better prospects; the cabin fever of living through a curfew . . ."--

"Tomasz Râoçzycki's To the Letter intensifies his idiosyncratic struggle against the plague of nonsense, banality, and lies. Set against the rise of authoritarianism, the poems contend with Eastern Europe's complex communal history to reveal the individual's yearning for an absent hero - be it angelic messenger, police detective, beloved, or the protean poem himself - who might be able to rescue us from our hopelessness." --

"The two newest moles in the forest learn to dig themselves out of their comfort zones and experience the boundless, unpredictable world around them"--

A roiling chronicle of motherhood and colonization from a writer who “alternates between a dramatic, high-octane style and a terse and humorous frankness” (Sheila Heti) Recipient of the 2021 Camões Prize, the most important award for literature in the Portuguese languageA potent whirl of history, mythology, and grapevine chatter, The Joyful Song of the Partridge absorbs readers into its many hiding places and along the wandering paths of its principal characters, whose stark words will stay with you long after the journey is done.No one knows where Maria des Dores came from. Did she ride in on the armored spines of crocodiles, was she carried many miles in the jaws of fish?The only clear fact is that she is here, sitting naked in the river bordering a town where nothing ever happens.The townspeople murmur restlessly that she is possessed by perverse impulses. They interpret her arrival as an omen of crop failure or, in more hopeful tones, a sign that womankind will soon seize power from the greedy hands of men.As The Joyful Song of the Partridge unfolds, Paulina Chiziane spirals back in time to Maria’s true origins: the days of Maria’s mother and father when the pressure to assimilate in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique formed a distorting bond on the lives of black Mozambicans.

“I could list plausible comparisons all day and night, but The Golden Pot is simply unlike anything else I have ever read.” — Justin Taylor, The Washington PostMacabre and fantastical, Hoffmann’s wildly imaginative tales offer an unflinching view of human nature and sing clearer than ever in a masterful new translationWhether a surrealist exploration of the anxieties surrounding automation, or a mystery concerning a goldsmith, missing jewels, and a spate of murders, each tale in this collection reveals the complexities of human desire and fear.Hoffman, whose most famous work is “The Nutcracker,” is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Hoffman’s massive influence qualifies him as the godfather of the German Romantic Movement which led to the horror genre.The macabre, fantastical nature of his subject matter inspired a broad swath of culture, with two of the longer stories in this collection “The Sandman” and “The Automaton” influencing Philip K. Dick’s original inspiration for Blade Runner. The murder mystery “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” is perhaps one of the earliest prototypes of the detective genre story.Music and madness flow through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s phantasmagoric stories. The ringing of crystal bells heralds the arrival of a beguiling snake, and a student’s descent into lunacy; a young man abandons his betrothed for a woman who plays the piano skillfully but seems worryingly wooden; a counselor’s daughter must choose between singing and her life.Peter Wortsman’s masterful new translation allows Hoffmann’s distinct and influential style to shine, while breathing new life into stories that seem both familiar and uncanny.

"Rosie Runs originally published as Ruusun matka by Marika Maijala & Etana Editions, Helsinki 2018."--Title page verso.

Translation of: La iluminaciâon de Katzuo Nakamatsu.

A penetrating study of passion, suffering, and loss from one of Norway's most tenacious writers: National Book Award Finalist and PEN translation prize winner Hanne Ørstavik Celebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik writes with "a compulsion for truth that feels like [her] very life force itself." Laced with a tingling frankness, Ørstavik's prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator's mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken's translation, Ørstavik's piercing story sings. Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik's own experience of losing her Italian husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes readers in an experience that many face in isolation. Written and set in the early months of 2020, its themes of loss and suffering are particularly well suited for a time of international mourning. What can be found within a gaze? What lies inside a painting or behind a handful of repeated words? These are the questions that haunt our unnamed narrator as she tends to her husband, stricken with cancer, in the final months of his life. She examines the elements of their life together: their Vietnamese rose-colored folding table where they eat their meals, each of the New Year's Eves they've shared, their friendships, and their most intimate exchanges. With everything in flux, she searches for the facets that will remain.

"First published by Forlaget Oktober AS, 2004"--Copyright page.

"Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter"--

"First published by Forlaget Oktober AS, 1953-2015"--Title page verso.

A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence. "Of course, I remember nothing from this time. It is completely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed; this is in fact so difficult it almost seems wrong to use the word 'I' when referring to it, lying in the baby bath, for instance, its skin unnaturally red, its arms and legs sprawling, and its face distorted in a scream no one remembers the reason for anymore ... Is that creature the same as the one sitting here in Malmö, writing this?"--from Book Three of My Struggle More praise for Book Three: "A superbly told childhood story ... Knausgaard writes about everyday life as a child with a flow and continuity that all hangs together ... the text has a gravitational pull that draws the reader in only further." --Dag Og Tid (Norway) "An aesthetic pleasure ... A patient, chiseled, and intense portrayal of a child's sensory experience. Book Three is a classic." --Klassekampen (Norway) "Compelling reading ... Knausgaard has an equally good eye for small and large events." --Aftenposten (Norway) "A gripping novel ... This childhood portrayal drifts off with a lightness and sensitivity that not many will associate with him ... There is no doubt that the series is worth following the author all the way." --Dagens Næringsliv (Norway) "The man can write a novel about a solid, pretty traditional upbringing too ... A sensitive, sharp depiction of growing up in the 70's." --Adresseavisen (Norway)

A Grand Prix du Roman-winning meditation on the relationship between art and power set during Louis XIV's reign.

Tinged with melancholy, Mister Blue is at once playful, understated, and deeply human.

"In Dawn, translated into English for the first time, legendary Turkish feminist Sevgi Soysal brings together dark humor, witty observations, and trenchant criticism of social injustice, militarism, and gender inequality. As night falls in Adana, kèoftes and cups of cloudy raki are passed to the dinner guests in the home of Ali - a former laborer who gives tight bear hugs, speaks with a southeastern lilt, and radiates the spirit of a child. Among the guests are a journalist named Oya, who has recently been released from prison and is living in exile on charges of leftist sympathizing, and her new acquaintance, Mustafa. A swift kick knocks down the front door and bumbling policemen converge on the guests, carting them off to holding cells, where they'll be interrogated and tortured throughout the night. Fear spools into the anxious, claustrophobic thoughts of a return to prison, just after tasting freedom. Bristling snatches of Oya's time in prison rush back - the wild curses and wilder laughter of inmates, their vicious quarrels and rapturous belly-dancing, or the quiet boon of a cup of tea. Her former inmates created fury and joy out of nothing. Their brimming resilience wills Oya to fight through the night and is fused with every word of this blazing, lucid novel"--

An intricate and exquisite tale of how bedtime fears can be transformed into wondrous dreams and magical adventures, by Hans Christian Andersen award–winning Roger Mello As João tucks under a lovingly woven quilt, he asks himself: So it’s just me now? He curls up, getting cozy in bed, and soon the world of his dreams unspools on the page. The blanket in his bed unravels into deep rivers, lakes, valleys, reservoirs, mountain ranges, fishing nets full of tadpoles and gaping holes, until what’s left is just one long thread. When he feels alone and scared in the dark, João “sews words like patchwork” into a new blanket to cover himself up. He weaves the threads of his quilt until they form one long sentence, and soon, the nighttime is peppered with his own silvery, slippery words. Roger Mello draws like a shapeshifter – to look at his illustrations is always to see something you missed before (a stingray, a crescent moon nestled into the palm of João’s hand). His breathtaking line drawings, beaming in white thread against deep red, combined with poetic and bewildered language, make João by a Thread a book to take into bed at the edge of sleep, just before you start to dream.

A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life “Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.”  —Bookforum The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.

"First published as Salka Valka in two volumes by Bâokadeild Menningarsjâoºs, Reyjavâik, 1931-1932"--Title page verso.