Bøger udgivet af Restless Books

In this deadly-funny debut novel by renowned Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, five macho friends in Rio’s Copacabana reflect on their hedonistic glory days—now supplanted by the indignities of aging—in what turn out to be their final moments.With uncanny insight into the less virtuous corners of the male psyche, Fernanda Torres brings us five friends who once milked the high life of Rio’s Bossa Nova age and are now left with memories—parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the grim realities of getting old. Álvaro lives alone and bemoans the evils of his ex-wife. Sílvio can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs. Ribeiro is a vain, Viagra-abusing beach bum. Neto is the square, a faithful husband until the end. Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die. Cutting in on these swan songs are the testimonies of those the men seduced, cheated, loved, and abandoned: their wives and children. Edgy, funny, and wise, The End is a candid tropical tragicomedy and an epitaph for a lost generation of machos. 

Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that contextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.When Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, many of the readers who quickly became obsessed with the adventure story were convinced that it was a true-life travelogue written by its protagonist. Three centuries later, the book remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. The book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about the entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized, and it stands at the beginning of a long tradition of colonial literature and representation that still resounds today. Now with a new introduction by Jamaica Kincaid and vivid illustrations by the Mexican artist Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Robinson Crusoe invites readers to reconsider this tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued.

With a new introduction by Francine Prose and stunning original artwork by Eko, the Restless Classics edition of Frankenstein brings Mary Shelley¿s paragon of horror vividly back to life¿published to coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of the infamous night of its creation.A towering masterpiece of gothic fiction, Mary Shelley¿s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus birthed the horror and science-fiction genres and spawned countless cultural offspring. Amid the pervasive images of Boris Karloff¿s flat-headed, bolt-necked monster, it¿s easy to forget how radical, insightful¿and, yes, terrifying¿the book is on its own terms.The would-be Prometheus of the book¿s title is the brilliant Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, whose studies in natural philosophy and chemistry (fields much brooded over in Shelley¿s day) lead him to become obsessed with building a being out of dead body parts and bringing it to life. But when he is miraculously successful, Victor is horrified at his creation, and the monster escapes into the night. Given life and enough reason to deduce his own terrible loneliness, Frankenstein¿s creation turns to violence and, soon enough, vengeance upon his creator. Frankenstein is the second book in the Restless Classics series: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/classics.

Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of 2016 Barnes and Noble Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016¿Intergalactic space travel meets outrageous, biting satire in Super Extra Grande¿. Its author [Yoss] is one of the most celebrated¿and controversial¿Cuban writers of science fiction¿. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams¿but even more so, the satire of Rabelais and Swift.¿ ¿The Washington PostWith the playfulness and ingenuity of Douglas Adams, the Cuban science-fiction master Yoss delivers a space opera of intergalactic proportions with Super Extra Grande, the winner of the twentieth annual UPC Science Fiction Award in 2011.In a distant future in which Latin Americans have pioneered faster-than-light space travel, Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo has a job with large and unusual responsibilities: he¿s a veterinarian who specializes in treating enormous alien animals. Mountain-sized amoebas, multisex species with bizarre reproductive processes, razor-nailed, carnivorous humanoid hunters: Dr. Sangan has seen it all. When a colonial conflict threatens the fragile peace between the galaxy¿s seven intelligent species, he must embark on a daring mission through the insides of a gigantic creature and find two swallowed ambassadors¿who also happen to be his competing love interests.Funny, witty, raunchy, and irrepressibly vivacious, Super Extra Grande is a rare specimen in the richly parodic tradition of Cuban science fiction, and could only have been written by a Cuban heavy-metal rock star with a biology degree: the inimitable Yoss.

“There could scarcely be a more opportune moment for the appearance in English of the late Cuban science fiction master Agustín de Rojas’s epic novel The Year 200…. De Rojas’s lucid fictional world intersects with many of our contemporary technological obsessions but charges them with remarkably distinct political valences..... A riveting narrative of espionage and geopolitical turmoil.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Centuries have passed since the Communist Federation defeated the capitalist Empire, but humanity is still divided. A vast artificial-intelligence network, a psychiatric bureaucracy, and a tiny egalitarian council oversee civil affairs and quash “abnormal” attitudes such as romantic love. Disillusioned civilians renounce the new society and either forego technology to live as “primitives” or enhance their brains with cybernetic implants to become “cybos.” When the Empire returns and takes over the minds of unsuspecting citizens in a scenario that terrifyingly recalls Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the world’s fate falls into the hands of two brave women. Drawing as much from the realms of the adventure novel, spy thriller, and political satire as from hard science fiction, horror, and fantasy, The Year 200 has been proven prophetic in its consideration of cryogenic freezing, artificial intelligence, and state surveillance, while its advanced weapons and robot assassins exist in an all-too-imaginable future. Originally published in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the onset of Cuba's devastating Special Period, Agustín de Rojas’s magnum opus brings contemporary trajectories to their logical extremes and boldly asks, “What does ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ really mean?”

The final literary testament of "e;one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World"e; (New York Times), Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life. In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Told in an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such tenacity.Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the lust for life, and the force of human relationships. He also writes movingly about the Holocaust survivors of his childhood neighborhood, and the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, in which he fought. Full of renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth in Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is sure to become a classic.

Winner of the Premio Planetäthe Spanish-speaking world¿s richest literary prize¿The spirit of Stieg Larsson visits Mexico City" (Kirkus): Milena, or The Most Beautiful Femur in the World is a pulse-pounding international political thriller about sex, power, and information¿and the extreme lengths people go to get them.When Milenäs lover and protector, the chief of Mexico¿s most important newspaper, dies in her arms, she knows it¿s only a matter of time before the ruthless thugs behind the human-trafficking ring that kidnapped her from her Croatian village catch her and force her back into sex slavery.Soon, three comrades bound together by childhood friendships, romantic entanglements, and a restless desire for justice are after her as well¿but for different reasons. The new chief of the newspaper, columnist Tomás Arizmendi, must retrieve Milenäs mysterious black book before the media empire he has inherited is torn asunder, while dubious intelligence expert Jaime Lemus wants to use the sensitive information the book contains about the crimes of the world¿s power elite to further his political puppeteering. Lastly, the noblest of the trio, rising politician Amelia Navarro has made it her mission to protect women and children from the abuses of men in power.Told at a heartracing pace and full of the journalistic detail and sly humor that Mexican master Jorge Zepeda Patterson has become renowned for, Milena, or The Most Beautiful Femur in the World is a romp across Europe and the Americas that traces the vast networks of capital, data, crime, and coerced labor that bind together today¿s globalized world. Yet, in the beautiful and tenacious Milena, we are reminded that the survivors of the darker facets of modernity are not mere statistics, but living, breathing, individuals.

A captivating memoir from one of jazz's most beloved practitioners, fourteen-time Grammy winner Paquito D’Rivera’s Letters to Yeyito is a fascinating tour of a life lived in music, and a useful guidebook for aspiring artists everywhere. Years after receiving a fan letter with no return address, Latin jazz legend Paquito D’Rivera began to write Letters to Yeyito in the hope of reaching its author, a would-be musician. In the course of advising his Cuban compatriot on love, life, and musicianship, D’Rivera recounts his own six-decade-long journey in the arts. After persevering under Castro’s brand of socialism for years, D’Rivera defected from Cuba and left his beloved Havana for that other great city: New York. From there, the saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer launched a dazzling—and still very active—career that has included fourteen Grammys, world tours, and extensive collaboration with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Yo-Yo Ma, and other music legends who make cameos in these pages. Full of humor, entertaining anecdotes, expert advice, and the musician’s characteristic exuberance, D’Rivera’s story is one of life on the move and finding a home in music.

"A mix of such otherworldly scenarios, pop culture references and linguistic inventiveness comes remarkably together for a brazen social and political commentary on modern Mexican reality."  —NPR BooksThe English-language debut of “one of the most original and entertaining voices in contemporary Mexican literature” (Revista Gatopardo): a collection of surreal, ironic, and madcap stories about the comedy and brutality of life in Mexico. The provocateur and cult sensation Carlos Velázquez has earned comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, and has been called “a grand storyteller” (Diario Jornada) and “an icon” (Frente). In these seven surreal and unsettling tales, he portrays the comedy and brutality of a region that has captivated the North American imagination. Akin to Márquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Velázquez’s PopSTock! is a fictional territory in a familiar but strange northern Mexico. Throughout the stories is woven the Cowboy Bible—a mystical and protean object that first appears as the talisman of a Santería-practicing luchador, DJ, and art critic, then later morphs into an unbeatable marathon drinker, a scion of a fried-chicken vendor dynasty who becomes a Communist guerilla freedom fighter, and the leather for a pair of boots so coveted that it leads a man to grant the devil a night with his wife. With such otherworldly scenarios, pop-culture panache, and Velázquez’s linguistic inventiveness, The Cowboy Bible is a brazen commentary on modern Mexican reality.

Newly introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans, this 400th Anniversary edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha¿called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel¿inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is beautifully designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and a video teaching series and live online book club discussions led by passionate experts. Described as ¿the novel that invented modernity,¿ Miguel de Cervantes¿s Don Quixote of La Mancha has become since its publication in Spain in two parts¿the first in 1605, the second in 1615¿a machine of meaning, endlessly adapted into ballet, theater, dance, film, music, and television, not to mention a veritable tourist industry. Lionel Trilling argued that ¿all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.¿ Mark Twain was a passionate fan. Flaubert modeled Madame Bovary after it. Dostoyevsky reimagined its protagonist in The Idiot. And Borges, in his story about Pierre Menard, looked at it as the gravitational center of Hispanic civilization. Milan Kundera fittingly summarized this unstoppable devotion when he said that ¿Cervantes teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.¿ Of course, Don Quixote has its detractors, too. Nabokov, for instance, maintained it was one of the cruelest narratives ever. Still, after 400 years, the book remains with us, winding improbably through history like the famous errant knight and his companion, Sancho Panza. The commemorative Restless Classics edition, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of its full release, features John Ormsby¿s canonical English translation, illustrations by award-winning Mexican artist Eko, and an insightful, thought-provoking introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost public intellectuals today. Don Quixote, Stavans writes, is ¿not only a novel but a manual of life. Yoüll find in it anything you need, from lessons on how to speak and eat and love to an exhortation of a disciplined, focused life, an argument against censorship, and a call to make lasting friends, which, in Cervantes¿s words, is `what makes bearable our long journey from birth to death¿.¿ The volume includes access to an interactive series of video lectures by Stavans, available online at restlessbooks.com/quixote. The videos serve as map to this restless classic, which speaks more eloquently than ever to our perennial desire to sacrifice for a dream in order to see its true worth.

"e;Deeply psychological and mysterious, the book will stimulate the imagination of the reader's mind to the extreme."e; -Marina Abramovic "e;In his latest novel, Jodorowsky builds on his multi-decade long assault of the public imagination.... a fantastical and genre-defying parable of love and friendship.... At its core, Albina and the Dog-Men is a love story about two people committed to one another's survival and to discovering their potential. And, as with life, it is sometimes only through the weathering of a storm that our true capacities are made clear."e; -NPR BooksWhen two women-an amnesiac goddess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby-arrive in a Chilean desert town, Albina's otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turn men into wild beasts. Chased by a clubfooted corrupt cop, evil corporate overlords, giant-hare-riding narcos, and Himalayan cultists, Albina and Crabby must find a magical cactus that will cure Albina and the men's monstrous affliction before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence.Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky's darkly funny, shocking, and surreal hybrid of mystical folktale, road novel, horror story, and social parable, ultimately uniting in a universal story of love against the odds and what makes us human.

¿Ruth Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, sets herself the task of staring at her face in a mirror for three full, uninterrupted hours; her ruminations ripple out from personal and familial memories to wise and honest meditations on families and aging, race and the body.¿ ¿Minneapolis Star TribuneWhat did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, ¿your face before your parents were born¿ is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?With these questions in mind, Ozeki challenges herself to spend three hours gazing into her own reflection, recording her thoughts, and noticing every possible detail. Those solitary hours open up a lifetime's worth of meditations on race, aging, family, death, the body, self doubt, and, finally, acceptance. In this lyrical short memoir, Ozeki calls on her experience of growing up in the wake of World War II as a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American; of having a public face as an author; of studying the intricate art of the Japanese Noh mask; of being ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest; and of her own and her parents¿ aging, to paint a rich and utterly unique portrait of a life as told through a face.Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

¿A fascinating meditation on identity that explores the novelist¿s own mixed heritage and mixed feelings¿.A true citizen of the world¿.With great insight and compassion, Abani reveals that behind his¿and every¿face are unseen scars.¿ ¿San Francisco ChronicleIn The Face: Cartography of the Void, acclaimed Nigerian-born author and poet Chris Abani has given us a profound and gorgeously wrought short memoir that navigates the stories written upon his own face. Beginning with his early childhood immersed in the Igbo culture of West Africa, Abani unfurls a lushly poetic, insightful, and funny narrative that investigates the roles that race, culture, and language play in fashioning our sense of self.As Abani so lovingly puts it, he contemplates ¿all the people who have touched my face, slapped it, punched it, kissed it, washed it, shaved it. All of that human contact must leave some trace, some of the need and anger that motivated that touch. This face is softened by it all. Made supple by all the wonder it has beheld, all the kindness, all the generosity of life.¿ The Face: Cartography of the Void is a gift to be read, re-read, shared, and treasured, from an author at the height of his artistic powers.Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

Named one of ¿the best Russian novels of the 21st Century,¿ The Underground is the unforgettable story of an abandoned mixed-race boy navigating the wondrous and terrifying city of Moscow before the Soviet Union¿s collapse.¿I am Moscow¿s underground son, the result of one too many nights on the town.¿ So begins the story of Mbobo, the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this captivating novel by exiled Uzbek author and BBC journalist Hamid Ismailov. Born to a Siberian woman and an African athlete who came to compete in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mbobo must navigate the complexities of being a fatherless, mixed-raced boy in the shaky terrain of the Soviet Union before its collapse. With echoes of Ralph Ellison¿s Invisible Man and Fyodor Dostoevsky¿s Notes from Underground, Ismailov¿s novel tackles head-on the problems of race and the relationship between the individual and society in a thoroughly modern context. While paying homage to great Russian authors of the past¿Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, Nabokov, and Pushkin¿Ismailov emerges as a master of a new kind of Russian writing that revels in the sordid reality and diversity of the country today. Named one of ¿the best Russian novels of the 21st Century" (Continent Magazine), The Underground is a dizzying and moving tour of the Soviet capital, on the surface and beneath, before its colossal fall.

¿Finally, we have the chance to read a landmark work from one of Cubäs greatest science fiction writers¿. If you like intensely psychological sci-fi that deftly piles on the suspense, this novel¿s for you¿. The boundaries between dream and reality, and then between human and machine, almost melt away as the story progresses. And it is de Rojas¿s skillful manipulation of those boundaries that makes A Legend of the Future so addictive.¿ ¿SF SignalThe first book by the father of Cuban science fiction to be translated into English, this mesmerizing novel, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke¿s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a science-fiction survival story that captures the intense pressures¿economic, ideological, and psychological¿inside Communist Cuba.A Legend of the Future takes place inside a spaceship on a groundbreaking mission to Titan, one of Saturn¿s moons; back home, a final conflict between warring superpowers threatens the fate of the Earth. When disaster strikes the ship, the crewmembers are forced into a grand experiment in psychological and emotional conditioning, in which they face not just their innermost fears, but the ultimate sacrifice¿their very humanity.

The forces of science, human error, and power run amok all collide in a wildly inventive, funny, and razor-sharp political satire about Putin¿s Russia, from one of the country¿s most fearless journalists.When a scientist experimenting on humans in a sanatorium near Moscow gives a growth serum to a dwarf oil mogul, the newly heightened businessman runs off with the experimenter¿s wife, and a series of mysterious deaths and crimes commences. Fantastical and wonderfully strange, this political parable has an uncanny resonance with today¿s Russia under Putin.Oleg Kashin is a famous Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, was beaten to within an inch of his life by unknown assailants, in an attack most likely politically motivated by his reporting. The events of Fardwor, Russia! (the title is taken from a flag with a slogan¿¿Forward, Russia!¿¿gone wrong) could seem grotesque, if they did not so eerily echo the absurd state of affairs in modern Russia. Under Putin¿s regime, authors dare to criticize the state of affairs and affairs of the state only through veiled satire¿and even then, as Kashin¿s experience shows, the threat of repercussions is real.A witty, playful, brave, and incisive work that blends science fiction with political satire, Fardwor, Russia! is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russiäor the hilarious and frightening follies of power.

¿A Planet for Rent is the English-language debut of Yoss, one of Cuba's most lauded writers of science fiction. Translated by David Frye, these linked stories craft a picture of a dystopian future: Aliens called xenoids have invaded planet Earth, and people are looking to flee the economically and socially bankrupt remains of human civilization. Yoss' smart and entertaining novel tackles themes like prostitution, immigration and political corruption. Ultimately, it serves as an empathetic yet impassioned metaphor for modern-day Cuba, where the struggle for power has complicated every facet of society¿ ¿NPR, Best Books of 2015Out of the modern-day dystopia of Cuba comes an instant classic from the island¿s most celebrated science fiction author: a raucous tale of a future in which a failing Earth is at the mercy of powerful capitalist alien colonizers.In A Planet for Rent, Yoss critiques life under Castro in the `90s by drawing parallels with a possible Earth of the not-so-distant future. Wracked by economic and environmental problems, the desperate planet is rescued, for better or worse, by alien colonizers, who remake the planet as a tourist destination. Ruled over by a brutal interstellar bureaucracy, dispossessed humans seek better lives via the few routes available¿working for the colonial police; eking out a living as black marketeers, drug dealers, or artists; prostituting themselves to exploitative extraterrestrial visitors¿or they face the cold void of space in rickety illegal ships.This inventive book marks the English-language debut of an astonishingly brave and imaginative Latin American voice.