14 minute read
On Our Shelf
ON OUR SHELF
BS
CHECK OUT What's On Our Shelf
Nobody loves books more than us. We're a team of readers with broad interests and strong feelings about the books on our shelves.
ON OUR SHELF
THE INCOMPLETES by
Sergio Chejfec (Author) Heather Cleary (Translator)
The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour--from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions.
Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite understand--a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky.
AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD
IS BLACK by David Diop (Author) Anna Moschovakis (Translator)
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land.
Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German's severed hand. IN MEMORY OF MEMORY by
Maria Stepanova (Author) Sasha Dugdale (Translator)
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents--Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
ON OUR SHELF
TRAM 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila (Author) Roland Glasser (Translator)
Two friends, one a budding writer home from abroad, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the most notorious nightclub--Tram 83--in a wartorn city-state in secession, surrounded by profitseekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.
RED DUST by Yoss
(Author) David Frye (Translator)
From beloved Cuban science fiction author Yoss comes a bitingly funny spaceopera homage to Raymond Chandler, about a positronic robot detective on the hunt for some extra-dangerous extraterrestrial criminals.
On the intergalactic trading station William S. Burroughs, profit is king and aliens are the kingmakers. Earthlings have bowed to their superior power and weaponry, though the aliens--praying-mantislike Grodos with pheromonal speech and gargantuan Collosaurs with a limited sense of humor--kindly allow them to do business through properly controlled channels.
THIS COULD HAVE BECOME RAMAYAN CHAMAR'S TALE: TWO
ANTI-NOVELS by Subimal
Misra (Author) Venkateswar Ramaswamy (Translator)
Subimal Misra--anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer--is one of India's greatest living writers. This collection of two "antinovels" is the first of his works to appear in the U.S. "This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale" is a novella about trying to write a novella about a teaestate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant.
ON OUR SHELF
LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE
DROWNING by Jawdat Fakhreddine (Author) Jayson Iwen (Translator)
Presented bilingually, this first US publication of Jawdat Fakhreddine--one of the major Lebanese names in modern Arabic poetry--establishes a revolutionary dialogue between international, modernist values and the Arabic tradition. Fakhreddine's unique voice is a breakthrough for the poetic language of his generation--an approach that presents poetry as a beacon, a lighthouse that both opposes and penetrates all forms of darkness.
THEY WILL DROWN IN THEIR MOTHERS'
TEARS by Johannes Anyuru (Author) Saskia Vogel (Translator)
In the midst of a terrorist attack on a bookstore reading by Göran Loberg, a comic book artist famous for demeaning drawings of the prophet Mohammed, one of the attackers, a young woman, has a sudden premonition that something is wrong, changing the course of history. Two years later, this unnamed woman invites a famous writer to visit her in the criminal psychiatric clinic where she's living. She then shares with him an incredible story--she is a visitor from an alternate future.
Despite discrepancies that make the writer highly skeptical, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her amazing tale: in her dystopian future, any so-called "antiSwedish" citizens are forced into a horrific ghetto called The Rabbit Yard.
FLOWERS OF MOLD &
OTHER STORIES by Seong-
Nan Ha (Author) Janet Hong (Translator)
On the surface, Ha Seong-nan's stories seem pleasant enough, yet there's something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters' lives.
A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a teambuilding retreat.
In ten captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals--male and female, young and old--who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.
ON OUR SHELF
THE HOUSE OF RUST
by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.
Caught between her grandmother’s wish to safeguard her happiness with marriage and her own desire for adventure, Aisha is pushed toward a match with a sweet local boy that she doesn’t want.
A STAB IN THE DARK
by Facundo Bernal (Author) Anthony Seidman (Translator)
Facundo Bernal's A Stab in the Dark (Palos de ciego) is a poetic chronicle of the struggles and joys of the Spanish-speaking community in Los Angeles and in the burgeoning border town of Mexicali during the early 1920s. Sharply satirical yet deeply empathetic, Bernal's poems are both a landmark of Chicano literature and a captivating read. Anthony Seidman's energetic translation -- the first into English -- preserves the prickly feel of Bernal's classic, down to the last stab. This edition also features the original Spanish text, an introduction by the prominent Mexicali writer Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, an additional introduction by critic Josh Kun, and a foreword by writer and lawyer Yxta Maya Murray.
DRUIDS by Tomaz Salamun (Author) Sonja Kravanja (Translator)
Poetry. Translated by Sonja Kravanja. Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun (1941-2014) is hailed as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, renowned for his impact on the Eastern European avant-garde movement. He authored over forty collections of poetry in Slovenian and English, and this collection exemplifies the best of what he is known for in its experiments with surrealism, polyphony, and absurdism. It's the world we know made completely anew, where City buses / resemble / quiet polite / people. Salamun's unique voice will linger on for years to come in the influence it has left with artists, writers, and readers.
This volume is gracefully unified by its commitment to enjambment as a way of rendering familiar narratives suddenly and wonderfully strange.
ON OUR SHELF
THE SILK DRAGON: TRANSLATIONS FROM
THE CHINESE by Arthur
Sze (Editor)
Arthur Sze has rare qualifications when it comes to translating Chinese: he is an award-winning poet who was raised in both languages. A second-generation ChineseAmerican, Sze has gathered over 70 poems by poets who have had a profound effect on Chinese culture, American poetics and Sze's own maturation as an artist. Also included is an informative insightful essay on the methods and processes involved in translating ideogrammic poetry.
IMPURE ACTS by Angelo
Nestore (Author) Lawrence Schimel (Translator)
Ángelo Néstore's poems in Impure Acts are both heartbreaking and an absolute joy to read. I especially love "When I Picked the Wrong Bar." --Hollie McNish
Ángelo Néstore's poetry, his "impure acts," changes the whole cartography of desire with the beautiful perfection of a modern, dream-like demiurge who knows he is in absolute possession of his glory. Poem-temples, poemtraps, gaps in the disquiet for those who will have no better illumination than that which is offered by this dialogue between poet and reader. Communion, I would say, if communion were not sometimes dangerously conflated with religiosity. Poems which, in their exquisite and innovative craftsmanship, already demand a canonical place in our collective memory and anthologies. --Carlos Pintado GROVE: A FIELD NOVEL by
Esther Kinsky (Author) Caroline Schmidt (Translator)
An unnamed narrator, recently bereaved, travels to a small village southeast of Rome. It is winter, and from her temporary residence on a hill between village and cemetery, she embarks on walks and outings, exploring the banal and the sublime with equal dedication and intensity. Seeing, describing, naming the world around her is her way of redefining her place within it. In Kinsky's Grove, winner of the 2018 Leipzig Book Prize, grief must bear the weight of the world and full of grief the narrator becomes one with the brittle manifestations of the Italian winter.
ON OUR SHELF
TROPIC OF VIOLENCE by
Nathacha Appanah, translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan
A potent novel about lost youth and migration by the author of The Last Brother and Waiting for Tomorrow
Marie, a nurse in Mayotte, a far-flung, tropical department of France in the Indian Ocean, adopts a baby abandoned at birth by his mother, a refugee from Comoros. She names him Moïse and raises him as her own-and she avoids his increasing questions about his origins as he grows up. When Marie suddenly dies, thirteen-year-old Moïse is left completely alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil. In a state of panic, he runs away from home, and sets himself on a collision course with the gangs of Gaza, the largest and most infamous slum on the island.
WHEN THE WHALES
LEAVE by by Yuri Rytkheu, translated from Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
Nau cannot remember a time when she was not one with the world around her: with the fast breeze, the green grass, the high clouds, and the endless blue sky above the Shingled Spit. But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows.
Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, sharing her story of brotherhood between the two species. But as these origins grow more distant, the old woman's tales are subsumed into myth--and her descendants turn increasingly bent on parading their dominance over the natural world. LAKE LIKE A MIRROR by
Ho Sok Fong, translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Squeezing themselves between the gaps of rabid urbanization, patriarchal structures and a theocratic government, these women find their lives twisted in disturbing ways.
In precise and disquieting prose, Ho Sok Fong draws her readers into a richly atmospheric world of naked sleepwalkers in a rehabilitation center for wayward Muslims, mysterious wooden boxes, gossip in unlicensed hairdressers, hotels with amnesiac guests, and poetry classes with accidentally charged politics-a world that is peopled with the ghosts of unsaid words, unmanaged desires and uncertain statuses, surreal and utterly true.
ON OUR SHELF
MY PART OF HER by
Javad Djavahery, translated from French by Emma Ramadan
For our unnamed confessor, the summer months spent on the Caspian Sea during the 1970s are a magically transformative experience. There, he is not the "poor relative from the North," but a welcome guest at his wealthy cousin Nilou's home and the gatekeeper of her affections. He revels in the power of orchestrating the attentions of her many admirers, granting and denying access to her would-be lovers. But in a moment of jealousy and youthful bravado, he betrays and humiliates an unlikely suitor, setting into motion a series of events that will have drastic repercussions for all of them as the country is forever transformed by the Iranian Revolution a few short years later.
FAUNA by Christiane Vadnais (Author), Pablo Strauss (Translator)
In a near-future world ravaged by climate change, who will win in the struggle between humanity and nature?
A thick fog rolls in over Shivering Heights. The river overflows, the sky is streaked with toxic green, parasites proliferate in torrential rains and once safely classified species - humans included - are evolving and behaving in unprecedented ways. Against this poetically hostile backdrop, a biologist, Laura, fights to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and the world around her.
Ten lush and bracing linked climate fictions depict a world gorgeous and terrifying in its likeness to our own.
THE SKY WEEPS FOR ME
by Sergio Ramirez (Author), Leland H. Chambers (translator) (Author)
In this Nicaraguan noir (the first in a series), Inspector Dolores Morales and Deputy Inspector Bert Dixon former Sandinista guerilla fighters now attached to the Narcotics Unit of the National Police investigate the disappearance of a young woman after the discovery of an abandoned yacht and a wedding dress. As the mystery widens the two inspectors and their ad-hoc team are brought face to face with drug smugglers from the Cali and Sinaloa cartels.
With tension and irony, Sergio Ramirez (A Thousand Deaths Plus One; Divine Punishment) portrays an unsettled and impoverished Central American country struggling in the 1990s to retain the shreds of its revolutionary ideals.
Never miss an issue!
SIGN UP FOR A FREE SUBSCRIPTION TO SHELF UNBOUND MAGAZINE.
SUBSCRIBE
Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear.”
– WALTER LIPPMANN
SHELF UNBOUND WHAT TO READ NEXT IN INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING
