Recommendations

  • Conversation with Warm Milk Press March 18, 2010
    Conversation with Ben Spivey, editor for Warm Milk Press, a publisher of handmade chapbooks. […]
    Carrie Olivia Adams
  • Valerio Manfredi on tour March 18, 2010
    As noted on the Europa Editions website, Italian author Valerio Manfredi has a U.S. tour lined up. Nice to see this happening for Manfredi, what with all these do-it-yourself author tours going on during the recession. […]
    Matt Jakubowski
  • Extreme Acts of Literary Asceticism March 18, 2010
    Now this is why I love Borges. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Auster’s Prefaces March 18, 2010
    With all due respect, I think the answer is pretty clear–it’ll help their books sell. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Anything West of Chicago Is Not Necessary March 18, 2010
    Andrew Seal argues that “Chicago and New York are to U.S. fiction what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are to the Russians. Sorry, Boston. Sorry, L.A. Sorry, D.C. Sorry, San Fran. Sorry, the South. You have your claims, no doubt, but they are as the claims of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, or Gogol.” Discuss. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Who’s Bad? March 18, 2010
    Phelan goes on to say, "There will, I’m sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above," though he's almost wrong there. The list is pretty varied, from the morally-bankrupt to the so-bad-it's-good varieties, though gene […]
    John Lingan
  • Vollmann Interview March 18, 2010
    Wherein we learn that Imperial hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves and “Vollmann was exceptionally gracious as both host and interview subject, quite generous with his whiskey and his time.” […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Margaret Atwood + hockey movie musical = Heaven March 18, 2010
    In some of the best news ever, Margaret Atwood is going to have a cameo in a movie musical about hockey. Seriously. I am — what is the word? – giddy. Don’t believe me? Atwood discusses it on her blog. Can this news get better? Hell, yes. The movie also stars Olivia Newton-John. […]
    Matt Jakubowski
  • New NYRB March 18, 2010
    New issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with Colm Tóibín on exile lit. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • More from the NBCC Awards March 18, 2010
    With jokes from Joyce Carol Oates and "wild imaginings" from 92-year-old winner Diana Athill -- not to mention talk of a sequel from "Wolf Hall" author Hilary Mantel -- this year's NBCC Awards were noteworthy for their celebration of literature by women. […]
    Matt Jakubowski

Friday Catalogs: Archipelago Books

Friday Catalogs: Archipelago Books

cover

Just when Francois Monti’s piece on Eric Chevillard has got me wondering about contemporary French literature, I see that Archipelago Press is publishing Small Lives by Pierre Michon (April, trans. Jody Gladding and Elizabeth DeShays). The catalog describes it as:

In Small Lives, Michon explores the act of writing through the intimate portraits of eight interconnected characters. In this evocative poetic narrative, the quest to breathe life into the stories of these individuals becomes an exploration of the author’s own voice.

I’m curious about what seems like a metafictional twist to these stories, and also, so far as "poetic narratives" go, the French seem to do them well.

One cannot help but be intrigued by Hyperion (April, Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Ross Benjamin), a 200-year-old epistolary novel by a German Romantic about a Greek hermit and a German friend that won the approval of Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin.

cover

I wonder if the translator too liberties with the title of Plants Don’t Drink Coffee (August, Unai Elorriaga, trans. Amaia Gabantxo). Either way, it’s a great title, and it’s gotten me interested in the Basque tale of four crisscrossing lives. So does El Mundo’s gloss on Elorriaga—"Elorriaga seeks to explain reality outside conventional lines, he doesn’t avoid it"—which has me thinking of Witch Grass by Queneau.

cover

I’m not entirely sure about Mafeking Road (May 2008, Herman Charles Bosman). On the one hand, it would be good to read a voice out of South Africa besides Coetzee and Gordimer, but on the other hand, it’s difficult to get a read of this book from the catalog copy.

Likewise with A Mind at Peace (July, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, trans. Erdag Goknar). This novel about the Westernizing Turkey of the 1920s and ’30s sounds interesting, but I don’t know enough about what kind of writer Tanpinar is to be sure.

One last note. Though it’s a bit early to mention it, Archipelago will be publishing Halldór Laxness’s first novel, The Great Weaver from Kashmir in October.

Pass it on:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Blogplay
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter

1 comment to Friday Catalogs: Archipelago Books

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>