Bøger udgivet af Archipelago Books

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.

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

"A number one best seller in France, Second Star is a series of lyrical meditations on life's smallest moments, from peeling a clementine, drinking a cold mojito, or washing your windows"--

"A sensitive portrait of one boy's travels from earliest consciousness through his salad days in the countryside and onward by a "genius" of "nuanced interior moments" (Los Angeles Times). Edgar loves nothing more than listening to the birds in the trees, the squeaking of moles in nearby chalk quarries, the conversations trickling out of the carpeted offices surrounding his favorite park in the suburbs of Paris. He also listens to the hushed conversations of passersby, strangers who whisper that he is "not all there." But what constitutes the supposedly insufficient character of Edgar's interior life? Dominique Fabre gives himself over to Edgar's way of seeing, his sensitivity, his innocence and wisdom, his longings and perceptions, his tentative interpolations into the social fabric of 1960s France, and in each passage we find a stirring answer"--

"In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth. Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder - can Kibogo really summon the rain?--

“Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness.”  --Marcel Reich-RanickiAppearing in English for the very first time, Brenner is a delightfully unusual novel full of dark humor tracing the childhood memories of the book's eponymous narrator, a scion of an ancient cigar dynasty.Perpetually shrouded in a thick cloud of cigar smoke, Herman Arbogast Brenner, scion of an old and famous cigar dynasty, has decided to kill himself––but not until he has written down his forty-six years of life, in a Proustian attempt to conjure the wounds, joys, and sensations of his childhood in the rolling countryside of the Aargau region of Switzerland.Estranged from his wife and two children, he decides there is no point in squirrelling away his fortune, so he buys himself a Ferrari 328 GTS, and drives around sharing cigars with his few remaining friends.In this roman à clef, writing and smoking become intertwined through the act of remembering, as Brenner, a fallible, wounded, yet lovable antihero, searches for epiphany, attempting to unearth memories just out of reach— the glimmer of a red toy car, the sound of a particular chord played on the piano, the smell of the cigars themselves.Brenner is the final work from Hermann Burger, who died by suicide in 1989. The book comes out just days before what would have been the author’s 80th birthday.

“Jessen's writing is graceful, unhurried, convincing.”  —Kirkus ReviewsIda Jessen follows the inner lives of several women on the brink, or the sidelines, of catastrophe in this prize-winning collection of stories Written with the same narrative generosity, the same belief in the dignity and voice of her characters as Marilynne RobinsonFrom the winner of the Lifetime Award from the Danish Arts Foundation and the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award, Ida Jessen’s A Postcard for Annie traces the tangled emotional lives of women facing moral dilemmas.A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother’s hands braiding their hair.In seaside tourist villages and in snowy cities, turbulence destabilizes composed lives, whether through outright violence between strangers or habitual domination between loved ones.Jessen fills each story with bracing passages that teem with the living world, only to become concentrated in the unfixed, vacillating matter of a human psyche caught between silence and speech, paralysis and action.

Caio Fernando Abreu is one of those authors who is picked up by every generation...In these surreal and gripping stories about desire, tyranny, fear, and love, one of Brazil’s greatest queer writers appears in English for the first timeIn 18 daring, scheming stories filled with tension and intimacy, Caio Fernando Abreu navigates a Brazil transformed by the AIDS epidemic and stifling military dictatorship of the 80s.Tenderly suspended between fear and longing, Abreu’s characters grasp for connection:A man speckled with Carnival glitter crosses a crowded dance floor and seeks the warmth and beauty of another body.A budding office friendship between two young men turns into a surprising love, “a strange and secret harmony." One man desires another but fears a clumsy word or gesture might tear their plot to pieces.Abreu writes the stories of people whose intimate lives are on the verge of imploding at all times. Even simple gestures—a salvaged cigarette, a knock on the door from the hazy downpour of a dream, a tight-lipped smile—are precarious offerings. Junkies, failed revolutionaries, poets, and conflicted artists face threats at every turn. But, inwardly ferocious and secretly resilient, they heal.In these stories there is luminous memory and decay, and beauty on the horizon.Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, currently an Iowa Arts Fellow and MFA candidate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa.

Claude Ponti’s nimble wordplay and punning, combined with his phantasmagorical and joyful illustrations, create an endearing gem of a book, bound to be a bedtime story favorite.From one of the world’s most beloved children’s book authors comes a story of a high-spirited flock of friends building an unusual birthday cake. A rabble of soft, golden “chicklets” are awoken one morning to a startling proclamation: they only have ten short days to prepare for their best friend Bertha Daye’s party. It’s time to get to work building a larger-than-life castle cake to house and feed the revelers. Made of chocolate scooped out of chocolate mines, “finer than fairy dust” flour from the hillsides, and fruit carried down twigs and stems in the forest, this will be the best—and kookiest—cake of all time. Oodles of distinctive chicklets fill every page, scurrying, fluttering, napping, tumbling, helping, and getting up to no good. When the party day arrives, guests pour into the pastry palace, many of them unmistakable characters from iconic stories’ past, offering a marvelous who’s-who of story-book history.

From a groundbreaking Slovenian-Austrian poet comes an evocative, captivating collection on searching for home in a landscape burdened with violent history.At its core, Distant Transit is an ode to survival, building a monument to traditions and lives lost. Infused with movement, Maja Haderlap’s Distant Transit traverses Slovenia’s scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its ever-shifting boundaries. Avoiding traditional forms and pronounced rhythms, Haderlap unleashes a flow of evocative, captivating passages whose power lies in their associative richness and precision of expression, vividly conjuring Slovenia’s natural world––its rolling meadows, snow-capped alps, and sparkling Adriatic coast. Belonging to the Slovene ethnic minority and its inherited, transgenerational trauma, Haderlap explores the burden of history and the prolonged aftershock of conflict––warm, lavish pastoral passages conceal dark memories, and musings on the way language can create and dissolve borders reveal a deep longing for a sense of home.

With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life.From its origins in the slum yard bars of Buenos Aires, Cozarinsky moves us through the rich and varied culture of tango, circling the globe to hidden milongas tucked away in the crypt of a London Church, a café in Krakow, the quays of the Seine, to the Red Square of Moscow. At neighborhood dance halls vibrant and alive in the early hours of the morning, where young and old, foreign and native, novice and master come together in a tradition that traverses borders, demographics, and social mores, "it is impossible to distinguish the dance from the dancer." A filmmaker as well as a celebrated writer, Cozarinsky opens a window into the timeless dance, celebrating its traditions, its evolution, and the individuals who give it life.

A heartfelt masterpiece about the joys of travel, reading, and companionship.In rural Canada, dotted along the coast of a vast mauve river, live villagers of different stripes: a recently divorced hydroplane pilot, a factory-worker who closely resembles her fisherman husband, a probing motorcyclist with a pet St. Bernard, a pair of beautiful blonde joggers, and other curious characters. For all their differences, each is brought together by a soft-spoken man, referred to only as “the Driver,” who travels up and down the coast each season, delivering books to areas not served by libraries and listening closely to the villager’s tales and to their woes. This summer tour is bound to be different than all the rest. The Driver has made friends with a traveling band of musicians, jugglers, artists, and acrobats who decide to come along for a ride that the Driver has privately decided will be his last. Jacques Poulin’s compassionate prose delves into the hidden pains of aging and loss without losing sight of the tremendous joy that can be found in making the world a little more livable for other people.

"The undisputed master of the modern Indian short story." -- Salman Rushdie Stories encircling the marginalized, forgotten lives of Bombay, set against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan Partition.By far the most comprehensive collection of stories by this 20th Century master available in English. A master of the short story, Saadat Hasan Manto opens a window onto Bombay's demimonde-its prostitutes, rickshaw drivers, artists, and strays as well probing the pain and bewilderment of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs ripped apart by the India-Pakistan Partition. Manto is best known for his dry-eyed examination of the violence, horrors, and reverberations from the Partition. From a stray dog caught in the crossfire at the fresh border of India and Pakistan, to friendly neighbors turned enemy soldiers pausing for tea together in a momentary cease fire-Manto shines incandescent light into hidden corners with an unflinching gaze, and a fierce humanism. With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Seshadri, these stories are essential reading for our current moment where divisiveness is erupting into violence in so many parts of the world.

One of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely livedEnnemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel. "Roads move cautiously around the High Country..." So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself. Giono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, Ennemonde will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.

Written by the winner of IBBY's Best Book Award, Mohammad Hadi Mohammadi, In the Meadow of Fantasies is one girl's luminous escapade into a land of seven mysterious horses.A young girl with a physical disability 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. The first six are easily understood: their colors, dreams, families, and origins are described and accompanied with exquisite drawings. The seventh horse, however, is an enigmatic creature with no clear hue or history, a lack that is soon filled in by the loving offerings of the other ponies. 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.

A buoyant account of the nightly tug-of-war between a sleepy father and his son, and the richly imaginative "sleepy stories" they createEach story told in Sleepy Stories drifts deeper into a beguiling dream world, telling of an elastic gentleman who stretches his body across town to effortlessly slip into bed, or of another sleepy young man who curls inside an upside-down umbrella to take a snooze. In Diego Bianki's magical universe, the waking world is made small (a French press and a red top hat shrink before our eyes), while the dream world Levrero and his son Nicolás build together (a land of sly frogs, giant apes, and smiling squids) waltzes across the page. On the last of Bianki's whimsical illustrations, Nicolás holds the book over his father's nodding head and says, "Another." This is a book to giggle with and curl up with, to take on every sleepy adventure.

A deeply humane new collection by a luminary of Bengali literatureA radiant collection of poetry about womanhood, intimacy, and the body politic that together evokes the arc of an ordinary life. Nabaneeta Dev Sen''s rhythmic lines explore the joys and agonies of first love, childbirth, and decay with a restless, tactile imagination, both picking apart and celebrating the rituals that make us human. When she warns, "know that blood can be easily drawn by lips," her words tune to the fierce and biting depths of language, to the "treachery that lingers on tongue tips." At once compassionate and unsparing, conversational and symphonic, these poems tell of a rope shivering beneath an acrobat''s nimble feet or of a twisted, blood-soaked umbilical cord -- they pluck the invisible threads that bind us together.

A small masterpiece, Pea's lyrical autobiographical novel paints a fiery and intimate portrait of an old man through the bold brushstrokes of his grandson. The passions and tensions between the old eccentric and his brothers play themselves out in mythical sketches before a vivid backdrop of the hills of Lunigiana. Moscardino, the first novella of his tetralogy, Il romanzo di Moscardino, is anarchic and haunting. Pound conducts Pea's vernacular song, allowing images to flow from the land, the flesh, and beyond.

Imagine making poems the way an architect designs buildings or an engineer builds bridges. Such was the ambition of João Cabral de Melo Neto. Though a great admirer of the thing-rich poetries of Francis Ponge and of Marianne Moore, what interested him even more, as he remarked in his acceptance speech for the 1992 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, was "the exploration of the materiality of words," the "rigorous construction of (. . .) lucid objects of language." His poetry, hard as stone and light as air, is like no other.

An epic poem in the form of a lyrical map, Fossil Sky is a remarkable creation of originality and beauty. Composed on a single large sheet, it liberates poetry from the conventions of page and book. Fossil Sky distills a year of walks taken near the poet's home, tracing the paths a mind takes through landscape, history, and ideation. The poem's formal daring is combined with an inviting and direct personal voice, an inner voice adrift-broken up by landscape, space, time and silence. David Hinton's many translations of ancient Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poetry. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as numerous fellowships from the NEA and the NEH.

A riveting family drama set on the lush and dangerous Colombian coast.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.

Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergovic peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision.Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergovic investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergovic sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.

“Hebe Uhart’s characters are made of an almost palpable material. They are alive, and they seem to emerge from the page to tell us, ‘This one here is me, that one over there could be you.’”  — Alejandra Costamagna, The Paris Review“Reading Hebe Uhart we laugh a lot, although we are never sure if what we’ve read is just a joke, because in her words there is also, above all, precision and wisdom . . .”  — Alejandro ZambraHebe 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.Watching a whistling heron, Uhart writes, “that rebellious crest gives it a lunatic air.” Birds in the park and dogs in the street will hold a different interest after reading Uhart’s blissful foray into playful zoology.