Novel (excerpts) | Romania | Romanian
November, 2011Kill me! is a captivating story about the perverse power of storytelling and the way fiction can become more "real" than reality. The novel tells of the relationship between two women whose friendship begins well--an older woman makes an offer to host a younger one in her apartment. Their shared life ends three years later with a crime. What seems to be the beginning of a love story--the encounter between Vali and Ramona--imperceptibly transforms into a terrifying policier: the main character proves to be Veronica Manea, the sixty-year-old woman who behaves like a vampire and relives the passion of her youth. The web that Veronica Manea weaves around the younger Ramona surrounds both of them. Old ghostly and disquieting love interests are projected against the background of exotic sites. Ramona enters Veronica Manea's dangerous game, and the only way out is a crime; which is, of course, no way out.
Novel (excerpts) | Spain | Spanish
November, 2011Diana Blanco is the best "bait" on the Madrid police force, a woman trained to attract the most dangerous psycho-killers. But she is sick of her job and tenders her resignation. She wants to live a normal life, after spending months unsuccessfully trying to attract the attention of the "Spectator," a serial killer who has tortured, mutilated, and murdered more than fifteen women. But when the Spectator kidnaps Diana's sister, she is forced to race against the clock to save her. She doesn't know where to start, and she doesn't know that hidden behind this murderer is a terrifying plot that directly affects her closest friends and family. Diana can't trust anyone--not her mentor, her boyfriend, her best friend, not even her colleagues on the force--if she wants to save her sister and put a stop to the series of monstrous crimes that have Madrid in an uproar.
Basque | Novel (excerpts) | Spain
November, 2010When Liborio Uribe found out he was going to die, he wanted to see for the last time a certain painting of Aurelio Arteta's. He had spent his whole life in the deep-sea fisheries, plying the seas aboard the Dos Amigos and, like his son Jose, captain of the Toki Argia, was the hero of unforgettable stories that were subsequently forgotten forever. Years later and confronting that same painting, his grandson Kirmen, a writer and poet, goes seining through those family stories to write a novel. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao takes place during a flight between the airports of Bilbao and JFK in New York, and unravels the history of three generations of the same family. By means of cards, diaries, e-mails, poems, and dictionaries, it creates a mosaic of remembrances that together make up a memorial to a world that is nearly extinct, and at the same time a praise-song to the endurance of life. With this novel, Kirmen Uribe had a brilliant debut on the Hispanic literary scene. The work received the National Prize of Literature 2009, the Critics´ Prize 2008 in Basque language, the Ramón Rubial Foundation Prize, and the Booksellers Guild of Euskadi Prize. Considered to be one of the most outstanding innovators of present-day literature, Uribe delves into the waters of autobiography with a rich, complex, and evocative style that is truly moving.
Italian | Italy | Novel (excerpts)
November, 2010Antonia Arslan is a former professor of Italian modern and contemporary literature at the University of Padova. She is the author of innovative studies in nineteenth century Italian literature (Dame, droga e galline. Il romanzo popolare italiano fra Ottocento e Novecento) and the "submerged galaxy" of Italian women writers (Dame, galline e regine. La scrittura femminile italiana fra '800 e '900), and, with Gabriella Romani, the author of Writing to Delight: Italian Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Through the poetry of the great Daniel Varujan (who died during the Armenian Genocide), which she translated with Chiara Haiganush Megighian and Alfred Hemmat Siraky, she rediscovered her profound and unexpressed Armenian identity. Since then she has written and edited scores of books and articles on the topic. Among them are her edition of a brief history of the Armenian Genocide (Claude Mutafian, Metz Yeghèrn. Il genocidio degli Armeni) and a collection of memoirs of the survivors of the Genocide who lived in Italy (Hushèr. La memoria. Voci italiane di sopravvissuti armeni). She wrote her first novel, La Masseria delle Allodole (Skylark Farm), because she could not help doing so. The characters, those people whose lives had been cut short, called to her. They wanted to be heard. She wrote her second novel, La Strada di Smirne, to continue their story.
Novel (excerpts) | Spanish | Venezuela
December, 2009Described by Álvaro Mutis as “Latin America’s best-kept secret,” Juan Sánchez Peláez was born in Altagracia de Orituco in 1922. He attended university in Chile in the 1940s, where he was associated with the radical surrealist group Mandrágora. He lived in Paris in the 1950s, and in 1969, he was a Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, after which he lived in New York City for two years. He worked as a teacher, journalist, and diplomat in Venezuela, Colombia, France, and the United States. Between 1951 and 1989, he released seven collections of poetry. In 1975, he was awarded Venezuela’s highest literary prize, the Premio Nacional de Literatura. Juan Sánchez Peláez died in Caracas in November of 2003. A definitive edition of his work, Obra poética (Lumen, 2004), was published in Barcelona, Spain after his death.
France | French | Novel (excerpts)
April, 2007”Yvan Goll is a man without a country; fate made him a Jew; chance caused him to be born in France; and a rubber stamp on a piece of paper decrees that he is German.“ This was how Goll described himself in 1920 for Pinthus’s famous anthology of Expressionism. He might as well have added that Yvan Goll was a man with no name—a man living anonymously, pseudonymously. And—inasmuch as Goll was equally at home in French, German, and English—a man with no mother tongue.
(Donald Nicholson-Smith)
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