Bøger udgivet af Small Stations Press

A boat with the charred body of a man crucified on its mast turns up at the mouth of the river in Romero, a town on the frontier. The boat belongs to the owner of the printing-firm that publishes the local newspaper. He engages Marqués, who is from the east coast and claims that he can write, to head upriver to find out the causes of the boatman’s death. His only deckhand is a mestizo boy called Cordel who’s learned his trade from the previous boatman (‘What you steer isn’t the boat, it’s the river’). They soon reach the mission, which is staffed by a single friar, Father Bento (‘He seemed to chew his words like a cow chewing grass before releasing them in short bursts’). The friar asks if Marqués has come to judge, to govern or to execute. ‘To tell,’ is his answer, ‘I’m a writer.’ Marqués, however, soon falls into a fever and has to be cured by the healing-woman from the local Aventurei Indian tribe. He realises that entering the world of the river is like clambering up a liquid wall on which there are no ledges or crannies for hands and feet to cling to. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the journey is an end in itself and the reader doesn’t know what secrets the river will reveal. There is also the writer’s own personal journey in search of fulfilment through his art. Marqués and Cordel will be joined on board by Rufus the Strongman and Ela, circus workers, as they struggle to come to grips with the tangle, both real and imagined, of the jungle. Xelís de Toro is a Galician performance artist, musician and award-winning writer based in the south of England. He is the author of five works of adult fiction (Feral River being the most recent), several children’s books and a book of poetry that was published by Pighog Press in a bilingual Galician-English edition, The Book of Invisible Bridges. John Rutherford is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He founded and directed the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford, which is now named after him. He has translated Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta for Penguin Classics. His other translations include The Book of Invisible Bridges by Xelís de Toro and Halos by Xosé María Díaz Castro.

Nuria Uría lives in Madrid. She designs floral motifs for a ceramics factory in Lisbon. But one August she is driven to rent an apartment overlooking a beach in the Arousa estuary in west Galicia, the selfsame beach where she made love with a boy from school, Quin, twenty years earlier.

The Roman poet Ovid's famous book of poetry Metamorphoses contains a succession of women who are changed into something else after they have been raped. One of these is Medusa, the Gorgon, daughter of the sea deities (and also siblings) Phorcys and Ceto. She is reputed to have been a ravishingly beautiful maiden, with striking hair, who received the attention of many suitors. She was raped by the god of the sea, Neptune, in Minerva's temple. In anger at this desecration of her temple, Minerva turned Medusa's hair into serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that it would turn any who looked at it into stone. The Greek hero Perseus, son of Jupiter and the mortal Danaë, was sent by the king of Seriphos, Polydectes, who desired Perseus' mother and wished to get Perseus out of the way, to behead the Gorgon. For this purpose, he received help from the gods: a shield of polished bronze, winged sandals, an adamantine sword and Hades' helm of darkness (or invisibility cloak). According to the myth, he beheaded her in her sleep and used her head as a weapon before giving it to Minerva. But who is the real victim here? Medusa suffers for her beauty. She is raped by a god and punished by another. People then avoid looking her in the eye in case they are turned to stone. And how does the myth of Medusa relate to two students in Galicia in their final year at school, Sofía and Lupe, who after a fancy-dress dinner, in the early hours of the morning, are picked up by two men and sexually assaulted? What will the reaction of their classmates be? Will they be prepared to look them in the eye? And how will the girls themselves respond to this assault in a society that may prefer to sweep its acts of indecency under the carpet and turn a blind eye? Head of Medusa is a story of wrongdoing, friendship, renewal and moral courage.

Ramón Lamote, a living representation of the city he inhabits, aged sixty-one, gives private lessons in a local dialect, Terra Chá, and augments his income by taking on commissions to draw dreams. He is a keen observer of the life that goes on around him, unfailingly polite and ever willing to lend a helping hand. On a visit to a large important house in the city centre, he comes across a book that warns of the imminent arrival of a dragon-like creature called a Noticer, which awakens every 696 years, and he hurries to inform the Lord Mayor (though getting in to see him requires all his ingenuity). On another occasion, a fat woman is blocking the stairs, and Ramón Lamote is unable to find a way past her to make it to his lesson on time. He is invited to give a lecture on a kind of domestic animal and chooses the Endomodelph, an egg-laying mammal that sings and whistles through its behind. An enormous pipe appears one day in front of his house, which seems to serve no purpose until the local children come up with a use for it, which quickly catches on. After his lessons, the teacher and drawer of dreams likes to visit the local railway station and to play at guessing people's destinations. And in July he places an advertisement in the newspaper for the first ever Cloud Race, with marmolubles for prizes, an idea that draws the Lord Mayor's attention and soon has everybody talking about it. In The Things of Ramón Lamote, a modern classic of Galician literature and one of the first works in Galician to win the Spanish National Book Award, we are invited to witness the sublime and ordinary, the comic and absurd features of life in a provincial city.

Stones Of Ithaca is a book about God in language and the environment. It looks not only at a theology of language, but also at a theology of stones. What lies beneath the surface of language, beneath the surface of the world around us? The book contains 80 black-and-white photographs of stones collected on the beaches of the Greek island of Ithaca.

There are three main branches in Karen Harrison's poetry - mythological interpretation, journeying and intimate experiences. These sometimes intertwine, sometimes stay parallel. And the crown is full of movement with falling leaves at the edge of summer (her primordial sorrow) and elegant trembling of language. The movement is often a pulse. Some poems maintain their distance, others crush you with their closeness. But this is not a feminine poetry of attraction and sentiment, anticipating and inducing, it is a traveller's poetry in which the poet floats free with her images and readers solely dependent on the river's currents. A confirmation of Heraclitus' 'Everything is one.' Where rivers are trees from above. This is Karen Harrison's first poetry collection in English, originally published in 2011 and now reprinted in 2018. Her second poetry collection, Night-Singing Bird, is also available from Small Stations Press.

Xavier Queipo's novel Kite follows the life of Francis, a Galician-born emigrant in the United States, who lives in the city of San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and works as a freelance translator and editor. At a showing of Apocalypse Now in the cinema, he meets Rose, a liberal and career-minded Irishwoman, and they start a passionate relationship. But their carefree and hedonistic relationship is threatened when Francis, who has been asked by his publisher, Martin, to complete a translation into English of the Portuguese writer José Saramago's Essay on Blindness in record time, owing to the predictions that Saramago might win the Nobel Prize, is himself diagnosed with the onset of blindness. How will Rose react? How will Francis cope with this descent into darkness? And will he be able to finish his translation of Saramago's work in time? Kite takes us on a journey into the lives of emigrants in the United States whose traditional upbringing is often in conflict with the permissive, liberal society they inhabit. Then there is Andy, Francis's ex-lover and a loyal friend, for whom he still harbours intense feelings, and a return to the Galicia of his birth, an experience Francis hopes will be balsamic, but which may prove catastrophic. We are left with the image of a Chinese boy on the beach in San Rafael, trying to fly his kite, the symbol of something (or someone) at the mercy of the wind. The boy is grateful for the help Francis offers, but unsure whether to accept. There is the gesture; we are left with the time and space to interpret it.

Long Night of Stone is the most famous book of Galician poetry published during Franco's dictatorship. The poem with this title is the result of the author's imprisonment in Celanova Monastery during the Spanish Civil War; the book is read as a metaphor for the long years of dictatorship that ensued. Celso Emilio Ferreiro, a man of unwavering commitment, who stands with the downtrodden and oppressed and refuses to give up hope on the world, was himself born in Celanova, a town in the province of Ourense, in 1912 and died in Vigo in 1979. The message the book contains is surprisingly modern, inviting us as it does to investigate the truth of our own time and find our poetry. This English edition was first published in 2012 and is now reprinted.

Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981) is one of Galicia's best loved writers. Born in the cathedral city of Mondoñedo to the north of Lugo and a short flight of the imagination from the sea, he is best known for his collection of literary sketches Folks From Here and There and for his Arthurian novel Merlin and Company, published in Colin Smith's English translation in 1996. His portraits of local characters are done with great humor and tenderness and the reader is left wondering if these characters existed in real life or were imagined. Cunqueiro was an accomplished poet, journalist and dramatist, who published also in the Spanish language. This English edition was first published in 2011 and is now reprinted.

Lois Pereiro (1958-96) was born and spent his childhood in Monforte de Lemos, an important railway hub in the east of Galicia. At the age of 17, he went to Madrid to study sociology and modern languages (English, French, German), where he was involved in editing the magazine Loia (Skylark). It was here, in 1981, that he suffered from toxic oil syndrome, traced to adulterated rapeseed oil. This had a very debilitating effect on Pereiro, who later moved to Coruña (where he helped edit another magazine, La Naval) and travelled through central and western Europe. An addiction to heroin led to the author contracting AIDS, which was the cause of his untimely death, aged only 38. Pereiro published two poetry collections in his lifetime: Poems 1981/1991 and Last Poetry of Love and Illness 1992-1995. A posthumous collection of early poems, Poems for a Skylark, appeared one year after his death. All three books are included in this volume, first published in 2011 and now reprinted.

In 2003 the Galician writer Manuel Rivas, well known for his novels The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly, published in his native Galician language his collected poems, five books of poetry and a selection of recent poems, under the title Do descoñecido ao descoñecido (From Unknown to Unknown). This anthology in English, From Unknown to Unknown, gathers together eighty of those poems and is introduced by the Scottish writer John Burnside, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, who writes, 'Again and again, as we listen to the account Rivas gives of the world, we come across the beautiful surprise, the breathtaking renewal of some process or way of seeing we normally take for granted… It is an enormous privilege to have this selection of poems in this attentive and imaginative translation… Here is an essential poet whose work illuminates the world and the condition of those who live it.' This English edition was first published in 2009 and is now reprinted.

Sam is a drug addict with a sense of humour. One particular escapade lands him in hospital, where he makes friends with the old man in the adjoining bed and becomes progressively enamoured of the nurse Miss Cowbutt's unsung qualities. In an attempt to wean him off his drug habit, his elder brother, Nico, takes him to the village, Aita, where their grandmother lives, a world far removed from the distractions of modern life, in which even the silence seems animate. He meets up with Gaby the single mother and Dombodán the collector of discarded items. He also becomes acquainted with a slippery customer named 'Sir' who takes refuge in the radio set in the attic. A host of colourful characters - from Tip and Top to the 'relentless lady' - populate this tale, which pits a victim of zero expectations against the haunting traditions of the village.

This revolutionary book sets out to persuade the reader that the English language is not the result of years of haphazard evolution, a chaotic atom-like conglomeration of words, but a carefully planned whole in which each word has its place and is connected by a consistent set of rules. It is not by chance that 'earth' is 'heart' or 'soil' is 'soul', for instance, or that 'salt' makes us 'last' ('You are the salt of the earth') but 'last' is in fact 'lst'. This book journeys from the Book of Genesis and Creation to Revelation and the Last Judgement through the English language, suggesting that language has something to tell us about the environment and that he who would be true to himself is inexorably pushed out on to the margins. First published in 2007, it is now reprinted. A later book, The Life of a Translator (2013), also looks at English word connections and discusses coincidence in translation.

A young woman, who has left Galicia to go and study marine biology in Mexico (Baja California), is recalled to Galicia when it is found out that her mother is very sick. Her aunt would like her to sign some papers agreeing to take over the family business and renouncing her Mexican studies and emotional ties that she has forged in her new life. However, returning to Galicia and renewing her family ties is not exactly what the woman wants. Her mother has shut herself in her room for the last year, and relations between them have always been strained. She received more affection from a nanny, Felisa, and better advice from her uncle, Cándido. There is also an older brother, Ramón, a larger-than-life figure who has left an indelible mark in the lives of those around him, and an absent father. Will the woman's visit to see her sick mother turn out to be permanent, and will it soothe any of the festering wounds in her psyche, wounds that she has buried beneath her marine studies and a relationship with her one-time tutor? That's How Whales Are Born is a return to our origins, a search into the usefulness of stirring up past memories and seeking reconciliation. Anxos Sumai is one of Galicia's best contemporary novelists. Her first novels, Guardian Angels and Melody of Used Days, derived from her online diaries. She has also had great success as a radio journalist. But her reputation as a novelist was enhanced by her later novels, That's How Whales Are Born (Repsol Short Fiction Prize) and Harvest Moon (Spanish Critics' Prize). In 2007, the year That's How Whales Are Born was first published in the Galician language, Anxos Sumai was voted author of the year by the Galician Publishers' Association.

Clara Soutelo is a sixteen-year-old girl who spends her summers in the town of Vilarelle in Galicia. She descends from a well-to-do family that was on the winning side in Spain's Civil War and that occupies the manor house in Vilarelle. All the local families look up to them, and Clara has taken this attitude for granted. That is until the summer of 1995, when a skeleton is discovered in the manor house during restoration work. It has been walled up for many years, perhaps since the time of the Civil War, and the skull has a bullet hole. Clara also discovers a ring bearing the initial "R". What is the identity of the victim, and who wielded the murder weapon? The search for the discovery of the truth will lead Clara into her family's inglorious past through the witness of the town's inhabitants, and will also sow the seeds of romance between her and a young mechanic by the name of Miguel, descendant of the bookbinder Ishmael, with whom she shares the secret pleasure of reading. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Heart of Jupiter" by Ledicia Costas, "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros, "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey.

'Poetry is the taste of thinking in the mouth,' writes translator Erín Moure in introducing New Leaves. In the face of so much migration and precarity, poet Rosalía de Castro sets herself to thinking and recognizes repetition as key to humanity; she views the social as intimate; she creates poems in dialogue so that subjectivity reverberates; she examines the notion of home and articulates the effects of migration on women, the widows. 'Thinking,' continues Moure, 'fills the absence when love and hope are missing.' New Leaves confronts the conundrum of human existence and the injustices suffered by those left behind in the fight (flight) for (economic) survival. As such, Rosalía de Castro is our contemporary in our own times of migration. New Leaves was her second and last major work of poetry in the Galician language, after Galician Songs, and is here presented in award-winning poet Erín Moure's memorable translation.

There are three main threads in Karen Harrison's poetry, which intertwine: nature, God and her personal life. But they are not simply ontological, they belong to each other, they widen each other, they talk amongst themselves. In Harrison's nature, there is room for many birds, but the most important are those that sing at night (hence the title of the book), just as God made darkness His home. Her God is a long pilgrimage starting with an entire belonging, but also allowing for a critical mind: she will protest in front of the United Nations about Him, who permitted such diversity in faith, but accepts only true believers. In her intimate moments, she suffered a terrible illness, but this is not a reason for closing herself off; for Harrison, it is a source of communication. The soul of this poet is open towards the other. It is a poetry - and a life - of relation. In this way, she confirms that most Christian postulate: that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. We hold in our hands a book of aesthetic poetry, a silent book that sounds more like messages than conversation. This is autobiographical poetry, but it has deeper roots in the Spirit, which Church Fathers describe as a fish swimming in the open sea, in God. "Like a fish in an aquarium, I am a thing of the Spirit," writes Harrison.

'Possibly the most impressive novel ever written in the Galician language'. With these words, the eminent critic Basilio Losada describes Suso de Toro's novel Tick-Tock in a letter to the author. Suso de Toro is alternative in everything he does, he rearranges the boundaries, surprises the reader, does the unexpected, persons, tenses change, and what could be construed as an atheistic, chaotic novel acquires hints of religiosity. Nano, the narrator, is a man of uncertain age who has never made it in the world, but who likes to hold forth all the same, to fill notebooks with his thoughts on fishing in the Gran Sol, on controlling his libido, on inventing machines that serve no purpose. The novel centres on his experiences, and on the lives of those around him: his mother, his father and half-brother, the people who occupy the building where his mother cleans. Tick-Tock, a sequel to Polaroid, received the Spanish Critics' Prize for its unconventionality and narrative expertise, and is the author's most popular work.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," writes H. P. Lovecraft at the start of his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". In real life, the author Agustín Fernández Paz, Galicia's answer to H. P. Lovecraft, is reading the newspaper and comes across a classified ad for a haunted house. He imagines what would happen if someone answered that ad. Then what would happen if they went to see the house and liked it. Then what would happen if they had enough money and decided to buy it. And finally what would happen if they went to live there and discovered that the house was really haunted. This is the plot of "Winter Letters", one of the best-selling Galician novels of all time. The house will bring to mind, for older readers, the Bates' home in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho". Inside the house is a book of prints that may remind younger readers of Tom Riddle's diary in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". However this may be, the reader is sure to be drawn in by the force and power of the narrative, which is as smooth and sinuous as the sirens' song heard by Ulysses from the sanctuary of the mast of his ship. Agustín Fernández Paz is the author of another novel in English, "Black Air", about a psychiatrist's race against time to save his patient from a malignant presence, the Great Beast. He was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2008 and is Spain's nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" and "Dragal II: The Dragon's Metamorphosis" by Elena Gallego Abad, "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros.

From the author of "Low Voices" and "The Carpenter's Pencil", the book of short stories that set him on his way and revolutionized Galician literature when it came out at the end of the 1980s. For the first time, Galician prose dealt with the Galician landscape in a modern context, uniting tradition and modernity, placing the poetry of landscape alongside the irony of modern society. In "One Million Cows", a collection of eighteen short stories by Manuel Rivas, the first he published, a boy tries to find out if his cousin is really a battery-operated robot, a sailor who has been shipwrecked at sea turns up dead in a local bar, the inhabitants of a village transport a young suicide so that he can be buried in an adjoining parish, a Galician who has recently returned from England dreams of building a golf course on the mud-flats of his childhood, and a prospective councillor is put off by the fish scales on a fishwife's hands. Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most international author, and once again the reader will be able to enjoy his striking metaphors, his commitment to what he writes, and his lingering eye for detail. Other titles in the series Small Stations Fiction include: "Polaroid" by Suso de Toro, "Soundcheck: Tales from the Balkan Conflict" by Miguel-Anxo Murado and "Vicious" by Xurxo Borrazás.

André Santomé Lobeira is a teenager whose parents divorced when he was five. He puts on a front at school to defend himself against the bullies Raúl Pernas and Héctor Solla, who do everything they can to make his life miserable. He starts deliberately getting low marks in the hope they will ignore him. This encourages his grandfather to intervene, and André goes to live with his grandparents, who run a restaurant, The Birdhouse, in the garden of which his grandfather has an orphanage for birds. André finds a baby cut-throat finch, a finch with a red line across its neck, and keeps it as a pet. He is torn between two girls - Halima, a Moroccan girl in his class whose mother died as they were crossing into Spain, who helps him stand up to the bullies; and Dove, a girl he meets on the Internet, who helps him with his homework and when his grandfather falls ill. Dove arranges for them to meet in person, but André is afraid this will ruin their friendship and feels a strange sense of betrayal to the other girl in his life, Halima. He almost wishes Dove had never arranged their meeting... Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's foremost writers of young adult fiction, with over forty works to her name. She is the recipient of the Spanish National Prize for Literature and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Black Air" by Agustín Fernández Paz, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad.

In this extraordinary account, Carys Evans-Corrales takes the reader on a cultural rollercoaster ride. As a child growing up in the Singapore, Malaysia and Jamaica of the 1950s and 1960s, the author came into contact with a host of languages and cultural influences, ranging from the Hainanese she spoke as a toddler to the Welsh counting song and English nursery rhymes she was taught by her mother to the Mandarin songs of Chinese children. In Kuala Lumpur, she came into contact with Malay, whose idioms delighted her, and in Kingston, Jamaica, with Jamaican patois, where she was shocked by the racially charged atmosphere. In Jamaica, she was introduced to Spanish, which conditioned her next move - to study Linguistics at York University in the UK, specializing in Spanish. This, in turn, led to a year abroad in Seville, where the author played the role of Andalusian novia, and, after completing her undergraduate degree, to a year of research in Salamanca. During this year, she was offered a job at the university in Santiago de Compostela, where she went in 1974, just as the Franco years were coming to an end and Galicia was recovering its language and identity. But it was in a move to America, in 1985, that the author finally acquired her own identity and laid the ghosts of her past to rest. The account of these years is littered with anecdotes about local people, school friends, linguistic conundrums and political backdrops, and offers a sweeping view of the second half of the twentieth century lived out on three continents. Carys Evans-Corrales is Professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. She has a PhD in Spanish Literature from Rutgers. She has translated work by numerous authors from Spanish and Galician into English, including Loreina Santos Silva's memoir This Eye that Looks at Me, verse plays by Pilar Enciso, Lauro Olmo and Alfonso Sastre, and the collection A Leopard Am I by the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés, also published by Small Stations Press.

How are English words connected? Is there a consistent set of rules by which words in the English language are connected not according to their etymology, their evolution over time, but according to their letters? These letters may be rearranged, read back to front, altered according to the laws of phonetics, their position in the alphabet, their physical appearance, their numerical value. So while the reverse of "live" is "evil", we can count down from I to O and find "love" instead (as "sin" gives "son"). The "ego", by taking a step back in the alphabet, can be turned into "God". Using the laws of phonetics, we can realize that the true purpose of the "self" is to "serve". In "The Life of a Translator", Jonathan Dunne offers a clear, direct introduction to the ways in which English words can be connected according to their DNA, arguing that words have something to tell us about human life, but their meaning is hidden and must be deciphered ("God" is "code"). In this sense, language is similar to the environment. We think we see what is around us, but we are spiritually blind even after we have opened our eyes, and it is this spiritual blindness causing a crisis in the world because of how we treat our world, the environment, each other and, ultimately, ourselves.