Bøger udgivet af Open Letter

An inside look at Michael Henry Heim—one of the most prolific and culturally important translators ever.

New novel from BTBA finalist about a man obsessed with understanding the working-class via a love affair with a woman.

"The conquest of Mexico is over, and Juan de Tñoanes is just one of the many inglorious soldiers eking a small existence on the land he helped conquer. When he receives one last mission, to hunt down a renegade Indian who calls himself the Padre and preaches a dangerous heresy, Juan realizes it may be his last chance to create the future he's always dreamed of. But as he moves deep into the unexplored northern territory, hot on the Padre's trail, Juan discovers the traces of a man who appears to be, in fact, a prophet destined to transform his own time, and possibly future to come. On his quest, Juan will encounter old conquistadors on horseback and migrants riding the roofs of the trains, rebellious Indians and peasants waiting patiently for a better world, Mexican revolutionaries brandishing their rifles and women murdered in the desert of Ciudad Jáurez, all sharing the same landscape and the same hope: that the arrival of the Padre will bring ever elusive justice to the oppressed."--Back cover.

"The nights were terrible, during the day we were occupied, but at night we got to thinking, picturing food, our houses, food again, painful memories from our childhoods--that abominable era--would mix with images of food and our torture would grow and grow, I recalled my impotence before the plate I was ordered to clean, the impossibility of choice in a world into which I had been thrust unwillingly, war was indeed an extension of the torture of being born . . . Set during the difficult era of the Great War, The Silence Devastation is the story of a captain in the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps who, with no documents showing his rank, finds himself in a German prison camp forced to share the circumstances of his poorer countrymen. He is hungry, constantly plagued by the sound of incessant detonations--and trying to finish his oral account of a strange story about a German scientist and voice recordings. In all this, he must seek meaning in his observations, his dreams, and, above all, silence."--

From the author of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg and Thank You for Not ReadingFrom the story of Steffie Cvek to "The Kharms Case," the pieces in Dubravka Ugresic's collection Lend Me Your Character are always smart and endlessly entertaining. The former story paints a picture of a harassed and vulnerable typist whose life is shaped entirely by cliches. She searches endlessly for an elusive romantic love in a narrative punctuated by threadbare advice from women's magazines and constructed like a sewing pattern. The latter story is one of Ugresic's funniest and is about the strained relationship between a persistent translator and an unresponsive publisher. The stories collected in Lend Me Your Character, the novella "Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life," and a collection of short stories entitled "Life Is a Fairy Tale" solidify Ugresic's reputation as one of Eastern Europe's most playful and inventive writers."

"First published in Dutch as Goede mannen by Jijgh and Van Ditmar"-Title page verso.

From the author of Winter in Sokcho, Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long.It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents’: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlor. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlor builds.The Pachinko Parlor is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel among family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin’s writing glows with intelligence.

"Demetrio Rota, a garbage collector from Buenos Aires, sleeps in the afternoons and assembles puzzles at night before leaving for work. His daily life is mediocre and he keeps his balance through sheer exhaustion. However, through the puzzles, Demetrio inspects and sorts through his own memories. At the end of the journey through his history, the present seems to devour him, until he's left with only the emptiness of himself and his daily misery. A parable of memory and deterioration, Andrâes Neuman's Bariloche juxtaposes the astonished memories of youth with a skeptical conscience; the impossible idealization of nature or first love with the moral and physical suffocation of the big city; being uprooted with returning to one's origins, with a language fascinated by both lyricism and rottenness"--

Journalist Wojciech Tochman addresses the abandoned and lonely in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where the memory of terror persists.

Sofa is thirty-five and her husband has left her. Her father died the year before, and her mother is living in the Canary Islands with a new partner. Sofa flees the city with her young son, seeking refuge in her fathers house on the southern coast of Spain, where she spent summers as a girl. Her younger sister, with whom she has a close but uneasy relationship, joins her. Living together again, the sisters face their present as well as their childhood and tangled past.Wolfskin is an intimate meditation on ambivalence and motherhood, eroticism and disappointment, family violence and failure, and ultimately, the possibilityor impossibilityof living with those you love.

A writer about to give birth investigates the story behind a mother she knows who has just killed her own twins.

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface-subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented-or not-by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes-both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

Wacholder lives and works at Custom House No. 8 with his adopted son Aslan and a lodger named Leo. Aslan spends his days copying out the novels of Kleist, Schiller, Goethe, and Mann; Leo, never leaving his bed, mentally composes his philosophical masterwork, Placental Theory of Existence; and Wacholder's only apparent responsibility is keeping watch over a towering mountain of paper. Wacholder's consuming passion, however, is his only true friend and nemesis, Wrz. Wrz hasn't left his home in over seventeen years. He lives there, in a cocoon of cleanliness and order, with his wife Rita and Rita's two grown sons, Arnold and Arnulf. Wrz has dedicated his life to perfecting his home and eliminating every last atom of dirt. His happiness is disturbed only by the letters, 74 in all, Wacholder has sent him over the years. These lettersdictated by Wacholder, written by Aslan, and full of every kind of insanity and invectiveare intended to smoke Wrz out of his hole, both for his own good and to stop him from plotting against Wacholder. When the 74th letter seemingly has no effect, Wacholder turns to other increasingly outlandish schemes to defeat his rival, even staging a rally to declare Wrz's non-existence. A feverishly comic carnival, Ergo is Jakov Lind's most experimental work and the final novel he wrote in German. Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the 20th Century. He translated the works of Gnter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Cline, Hermann Hesse, Peter Handke, Novalis, and Martin Heidegger, among many others. In 1982, PEN American Center created an awardthe Ralph Manheim Medal for Translationin his name, which honors a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work.

A murder mystery connecting many of the earth-shaking events of the past 50 years from one of Mexico's hottest authors.

Highly anticipated conclusion to Fresán's "Part" Trilogy, which includes the Best Translated Book Award winning The Invented Part

Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girla choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women.In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them.A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.