Bøger udgivet af Open Letter

strange and twisted characters populate the pages of Why, Why, Why?, a delectable brew of dark humor and biting satire on human relationships. In these stories, the characters don t start falling until they know they re off the cliff. By then, rock bottom isn t a long way off. Another stunning entry from Catalan s greatest contemporary writer, Monzì s stories dust themselves off and speed on to their next catastrophe.

An instant classic of Russian literature, Maidenhair weaves together myriad plots, all revolving around innocence and violence and escape.

"e;A remarkably funny book written by a remarkable pair of collaborators."e;New York TimesOstap Bender, the "e;grand strategist,"e; is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He's obsessed with getting one last big scorea few hundred thousand will doand heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are "e;a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception."e;When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an "e;undercover millionaire"e;no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capitalthe chase is on. Koreiko has made his millions by taking advantage of the wide-spread corruption and utter chaos of the NEP, all while serving quietly as an accountant at a government office and living on 46 rubles a month. He's just waiting for the Soviet regime to collapse so he can make use of his stash, which he keeps hidden away in a suitcase.Ilya Ilf (18971937) and Evgeny Petrov (19031942) were the pseudonyms of Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny Petrovich Katayev, a pair of Soviet writers who met in Moscow in the 1920s while working on the staff of a newspaper that was distributed to railway workers. The foremost comic novelists of the early Soviet Union (invariably referred to as Ilf & Petrov), the pair collaborated together for a dozen years, writing two of the most revered and loved Russian novels, The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, as well as various humorous pieces for Pravda and other magazines. Their collaboration came to an end following the death of Ilya Ilf in 1937he had contracted tuberculosis while the pair was traveling the United States researching the book that eventually became Little Golden America.Konstantin Gurevich is a graduate of Moscow State University and the University of Texas at Austin. He translates with his wife, Helen Anderson. Both are librarians at the University of Rochester.Helen Anderson studied Russian language and literature at McGill University in Montréal. She translates with her husband, Konstantin Gurevich.

"e;Pilch's prose is masterful, and the bulk of The Mighty Angel evokes the same numb, floating sensation as a bottle of Zloldkowa Gorzka."e;L MagazineThe Mighty Angel concerns the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy. Eighteen times he's woken up in rehab. Eighteen times he's been releaseda sober and, more or less, healthy manafter treatment at the hands of the stern therapist Moses Alias I Alcohol. And eighteen times he's stopped off at the liquor store on the way home, to pick up the supplies that are necessary to help him face his return to a ruined apartment.While he's in rehab, Jerzy collects the stories of his fellow alcoholicsDon Juan the Rib, The Most Wanted Terrorist in the World, the Sugar King, the Queen of Kent, the Hero of Socialist Laborin an effort to tell the universal, and particular, story of the alcoholic, and to discover the motivations and drives that underlie the alcoholic's behavior.A simultaneously tragic, comic, and touching novel, The Mighty Angel displays Pilch's caustic humor, ferocious intelligence, and unparalleled mastery of storytelling.Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.Bill Johnston is Director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University and has translated works by Witold Gombrowicz, Magdalena Tulli, Wieslaw Mysliwski, and others. He won the Best Translated Book Award in 2012 and the inaugural Found in Translation Award in 2008.

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China’s most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence. Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwen the known and unknown, between humanity and nature. In these tales, a man tries to chase down an ellusive golden peacock, a woman communicates with mysterious, shifting forms of light,  and the river that runs through a small village seems to pulse with memories of its own.Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue’s status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today—and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Winners of the Inaugural Spain-USA Foundation Translation AwardInfused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock, The Fake Muse is a linguistic tour-de-force from the author of The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia.The book opens by introducing us, one by one, to an array of troubled characters, each with their own typographical voice. There’s Johnny (an Aries) who turns into a vampire at a showing of Nosferatu, there’s Meritxell (a Leo) who falls in love with a giant mutant hamster-philosopher, Josep (Cancer) who is also known as the “King Kong of the Bronx,” and Amanda aka Maryjane (Scorpio) who has had it with the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of the . . . author, Max Besora (Aquarius), and who is ready to take whatever action necessary.Wildly inventive, with each character’s vignette more hilarious and explosive than the last, The Fake Muse weaves these stories together into a thrilling cinema-like production à la Sonic Youth meets Quentin Tarantino, raising questions about power structures, victimization, and the role of the author in bringing it all to life.

Winner of the Inaugural Armory Square Prize for TranslationThe Kettledrum and Other Stories introduction the extraordinary voice of renowned Urdu novelist, short story writer, playwright, and critic Siddique Alam. He is considered to be a modern master, whose introduction of fantastical elements into his narratives and experimental techniques (especially in his plays) have garnered him critical acclaim and popular success. With each story in the collection he creates a unique territory revealing a deeply curious mind, and an master craftsman whose care and regard for the worlds of his stories imbues them with a rare authenticity. From the animistic tales of Adivasi tribespeople,and the interplay of complex relationships between broken people, to the complexities of lives lived on the fringe, Alam is able to create characters and events that function on the level of myth and archetype.As we navigate Alam’s complex, intricate fictional worlds, we encounter both a multitude of emotional universes imagined or drawn from keenly observed life, and nightmarish abstractions.

Sanki Saitō (1900–1962), born Keichoku Saitō in Tsuyama, Japan, was a pioneering short story writer and poet whose bold, modern haiku challenged the conventions of his time. As a key figure in the New Rising Haiku movement of the 1930s, Sanki redefined the boundaries of haiku by breaking with the strict traditionalists who insisted on “season words” and the direct observation of nature. In their place, Sanki and his peers opened haiku to imagined experience, infusing it with radical new perspectives that would forever transform the form.Writing under the pen name Sanki, meaning “Three Demons,” his reputation as a literary maverick grew rapidly. His radical, inventive approach to haiku, however, also made him a target of Japan’s militaristic government. In 1940, Sanki was imprisoned as part of the wartime crackdown on dissident artists and writers, and he was officially silenced—banned from writing or publishing his work.Three Demons brings together Sanki's most evocative haiku, meticulously curated and beautifully translated by Ryan Choi. Drawing from five of Sanki’s collections—Flags (1940), Night Peaches (1948), One Hundred Haiku (1948), Today (1952), and Transformations (1962)—this anthology introduces readers to the revolutionary spirit and emotional depth of a poet who helped redefine one of Japan’s most treasured literary traditions.

Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for LiteratureAs with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresic's final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is a conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragić, covering topics such as "Women and the Male Perspective," "The Culture of (Self)Harm," and "The Melancholy of Vanishing." But the book is more than a simple interview: It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil—especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresic's birth country—and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing. One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresic was one-of-a-kind, who novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.

Winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2023“A funerary poem about a bird flying underground; a psychodrama of two sisters drowning in the mirror of memory; a center of a necrophilic labyrinth; Virginia Woolf’s Rhoda lost in John Hawkes’s Travesty. Pilar Adon’s novel is the most haunting I have read in years.”—Mircea Cărtărescu, winner of the Dublin Literary Award Summer is ending and Coro, an artist frightened of what her paintings of her dead sister may represent, gets in her car one night and starts to drive, with no plan or destination. After a wrong turn down a narrow dirt road, she runs out of gas outside the gates of a large and isolated house called Bethany, a place inhabited exclusively by a small group of women who seem to exist in a closed, hierarchical system a world apart. The women of Bethany live closely with the natural and animal world, celebrate rites and rituals, and, like devotees of an ancestral cult, all dress the same. Most unsettlingly, they seem to know who Coro is already. In fact, they have been expecting her. How the women came to live in Bethany, why they believe Coro is destined to be there, and most pressing, why won’t they let her leave are questions Coro must face as she struggles between the instinct to escape and the sense that something larger is at work. When Bethany’s careful balance is disturbed—with violent consequences—by the appearance of a mysterious man who claims the house and land are his, Coro will find herself forced to meet her own ghosts, reckon with her choices, and accept that Bethany might just be where she belongs. Winner of Spain’s Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2023, Of Beasts and Fowls introduces a grand talent new to English audiences in a haunting novel rife with natural descriptions, signs and symbols, and a sense of the uncanny.

"A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin, and his most beautiful journey--the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River. His son, still a child, sits at the foot of the bed, attentively collecting these final, hallucinated words"--

Originally published as Una vez Argentina by Editorial Anagrama, 2003. Revised and expanded edition published by Editorial Alfaguara, 2014.

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated LiteratureTonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall. Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar. As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas. What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.Translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

"Rina is a defector from a country that might be North Korea, traversing an "empty and futile" landscape. Along the way, she is forced to work at a chemical plant, murders a few people, becomes a prostitute, runs a lucrative bar, and finds a solace in a motley family of wanderers all as disenfranchised as she. Brutal and unflinching, with elements of the mythic and grotesque interspersed with hard-edged realism, Rina is a pioneering work of Korean postmodernism"--

In the era of compulsive touch-ups and digital poses, perhaps it is time to re-read our body in order to rescue perhaps it is time to re-read our body in order to rescue it and embrace it with joy. it and embrace it with joy.The thirty brief chapters of Sensitive Anatomy form a celebration of the body in its glorious entirety, from the most obvious zones to those commonly less appreciated. This is a poetic, political, and hedonistic journey across the very matter that makes us. A book that questions how we see ourselves, how we are made to see, and what beauty really is. It playfully stands against the culture of Photoshop, against oppressive images, against all those edits and erasures which end up excluding the vast majority of real people.Uniting genres, genders, and generations through a collective voice, Neuman continues to extend the limits of short-form prose with irony and creative freedom. All bodies are welcome here.

Originally published in Spanish as La Parvâa by Sangria Publishers, 2015.

From the internationally acclaimed author of One Hundred Shadows and I’ll Go On Years and Years opens with the elderly Yi Sunil, devoted housewife and mother of three, making her annual pilgrimage to a remote village in South Korea to visit her grandfather’s grave—likely for the final time. What follows is a multigenerational exploration of desires thwarted by societal obligations and mores for the women in this family.Sejin, the middle child, keeps her sexuality closeted, while her older sister, Yeongjin, finds herself financially responsible for the rest of the family, forcing her to give up on her personal dreams. Meanwhile, the youngest, Mansu, leaves the family for New Zealand, where he is free to pursue his own career and life, ironically supported by the sacrifices of his mother and sisters.Tracing the lives of the family’s three women, Years and Years exposes the ways in which, despite the empathy we harbor for our loved ones, we inevitably trap one another in particular roles, while also illuminating our resolve to carry on through the constraints of time and tradition.

When truth is more gruesome than fiction—Ha Seong-nan is there. When people give in to their most intrusive thoughts—Ha Seong-nan is there. When man is more animal than animals themselves—Ha Seong-nan is there. In Wafers, her third short-story collection to appear in English, Ha continues to weave troublesome coincidences into the seemingly banal in her signature style of engrossing and unsettling prose. A best-seller in Korea, Ha Seong-nan is one of the stars of contemporary short fiction, writing edgy, socially conscious stories that bring to mind the novels of Han Kang and the film Parasite.

"The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life."--

"Gorgonowa, a governess having an affair with her employer, was accused of brutally murdering his daughter, the 17-year-old Lusia on New Year's Eve in 1931. Despite her claims of innocence, Gorgonowa was declared Poland's ultimate villain, and eventually convicted. But questions remain about this case--the most notorious murder trial of the Second Polish Republic--along with questions about what exactly happened to Gorgonowa post-World War II."--

"As his weapon, he developed a private investigator who is already at the scene or in the immediate vicinity when foul play takes place, so that the perp can be caught redhanded and the case quickly solved, thus offering crime fiction to people who don't have the time to read long books, or who simply hate to read, but love crime."--

Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi's experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talked about--the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humor that accompanies such desperate situations.

"At the turn of the twentieth century, Sigurlina finds herself in a hopeless situation. She is the motherless daughter of an eccentric father, who expects her to spend her life helping himcatalogue Icelandic archaeological artifacts. But Sigurlina has her own ambitions of education and excitement and after a harrowing experience, takes fate into her own hands. She disappears from Reykjavik, along with a historical relic from her father's collection. Through a series of incredible events, the artifact is unveiled at The Metropolitan Museum of New York. Meanwhile, officials in Iceland launch their own ivestigation into the theft of the artifact."--Provided by publisher.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain's interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog--a gift from the boorish landlord--her only company.

Narrated by a woman to her newborn, meandering between her enchanted present and her memories of a more difficult past, The Child is a modern exploration of the territory of motherhood.

A haunting novel of grief from one of Argentina's greatest modernist writers.