take a minute to it
Transcription
take a minute to it
2016 2 Qui e t C re ature o n t he Co r n e r JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL tra n sl at e d b y A DA M M O R RI S 6 A S p are Li f e LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA tra n sl at e d b y C H R I S T I NA E . KR A ME R 10 Tr ys ti ng EMMANUELLE PAGANO tra n sl at e d b y J E N N I F E R H I G G INS & SOPHIE LEWIS 14 20 24 30 32 RECENT BOOKS TWO LINES JOURNAL BACKLIST SUBSCRIBE and SUPPORT CONTAC T and ORDERS Q u i e t C r e ature on the Co rner JOÃO GILBERTO N O L L translated by ADAM MORRIS “meeting the unforgettable narrator of quiet creature on the corner felt like finding that the narrator of camus’s the stranger had s uddenly learned new and darker lessons in desire....noll’s is a captivating voice.” “noll’s literature thing. above all, — Matt Bell, author of Scrapper doesn’t seek to impart a lesson or demonstrate anyit shows the poetry in the fact that no one individual is a permanence but rather many simultaneous things.” — Sergio Chejfec, author of My Two Worlds JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL is ADAM MORRIS has received the Susan Sontag Foundation Prize in literary translation and is the translator of Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes (Melville House Books, 2014). His writing and translations have been published in BOMB magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many others. the author of nearly 20 books. He has been a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, he lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil. May 10, 2016 • Novel • $9.95 (paper) $8.99 (ebook) • 120 pgs. • 4.5” X 7” 978-1-931883-51-1 • ebook: 978-1-931883-53-3 • (World English) 3 NEW Why do we do the things we do? Might our entire lives pass by without us ever really understanding just who we are? Reminiscent of the films of David Lynch, Quiet Creature on the Corner throws us into a strange world without rational cause and effect, where everyone always seems to lack just a few necessary facts. The narrator is an unemployed poet who is thrown in jail after inexplicably raping his neighbor. But when he’s abruptly taken to a countryside manor, what do his captors really want from him? an excerpt from Quiet Creature on the Corner At breakfast Kurt was occupying his space at the table. He had his right arm in a sling, and sometimes Gerda leaned over to help him raise his cup to his lips. Otávio was talking a lot, recalling that the anniversary of his return to Brazil from the war was approaching. “It was a day like this, sunny,” he mentioned, staring at the pattern on the tablecloth. Amália was making her rounds of the table, asking if anybody needed anything, dissembling and stealing chances to wink at me furtively. The night before she’d remained for hours sitting on the ground, leaning against the bed: it was raining, there was a leak, the whole shed damp, and Amália, nude above the waist, told me that Gerda had cancer—she and Kurt had already gone to Rio de Janeiro a few times to see a famous doctor, one time Gerda stayed there for weeks, checked into a clinic—I told Amália that out here with her I didn’t want to hear anything about illness, and I went to her and started licking her breasts, sucking, started unbuttoning my pants, asked her to touch me, and she touched me, a drop of rain got through the shaft in the roof and wet my nose, I was about to cum in her hand, her breasts seemed very full, swollen, I was afraid she was pregnant, but my dread lasted only a second, and then I returned to sucking and biting her two breasts, because I remembered it had been a long time since I came inside her, so I could keep on sucking and biting her two breasts with peace of mind, the rain drumming on the zinc way up high, and suddenly Amália let out a yell, and shouted, murderer, murderer, twice, and I, who was wrapped in her arms, got up, took her hand, and saw deep in her eyes a sign of alarm, but concluded that I didn’t feel like deciphering it. 4 I passed Kurt in the hallway, and for the first time he showed me a real smile. What’s happening? I asked myself, what am I doing that would make him so decisively happy? I left the manor and went through the surrounding fields, racking my brains to see if I could understand that smile: What trait could bring such a pleasured look to his eye? I needed to discover what it was so I could broaden my access to this strange benefactor. I sat on the highest part of the low hill and looked down to see Amália throwing things on an enormous fire—papers, cardboard boxes, wood, broken springs—it was making a lot of smoke, and I got down low so that she wouldn’t be able to see me. I stayed there, lying on my belly in the tall grass, hidden in a war trench, daydreaming that I was entering an unknown world, and that to remain in it I’d need skills. The strong burning smell left me a little stupid, and into my head leaped the hypothesis that Kurt had set me up, that he’d never give anything up. I turned my belly to the sky, exhaled slowly. Overhead, an airplane was heading south. Days later I wrote a whole poem in one sitting called “Scenes of War”—the distant stamping, surrounding quake, a hemorrhage running from the nostrils of a boy as he woke. The poem, written on that paper…even if I slipped away, the poem would still be there, and I thought about how they gave me very little to do besides write poems, and that, until that day, I hadn’t really determined anything about my new situation—in that huge house, surrounded by fields. 5 A Spare Life LIDIJA DIM KOVS K A translated by CHRISTINA E. KRAMER “the truth is she’s unstoppable and will not be ignored.” — Poetry Foundation “english-language readers would be poorer without [her].” — Publishers Weekly LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA won the CHRISTINA KRAMER is a professor of Balkan and Slavic languages and linguistics at the University of Toronto. She’s the author of numerous books on the Macedonian language and the Balkans and has translated Freud’s Sister: A Novel, The Time of the Goats, and My Father’s Books. She lives in Toronto. uropean Union Prize for LitE erature for A Spare Life. She is the author of the poetry collections pH Neutral History (Copper Canyon, 2012), a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, and Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers (2006). She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. October 11, 2016 • Novel • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 432 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-55-9 • ebook: 978-1-931883-57-3 • (North America) 7 NEW Zlata and Srebra are twelve-year-old twins conjoined at the head. Treated as freaks and outcasts—even by their own family—the twins just want to be normal girls. But after an incident that almost destroys their bond as sisters, they fly to London, determined to be surgically separated. Will this be their liberation, or only more tightly ensnare them? At once extraordinary and quotidian, A Spare Life is a chronicle of two girls who are among the first generation to come of age under democracy in Eastern Europe. It is a saga about families, sisterhood, immigration, and the occult influences that shape a life. an excerpt from A Spare Life Even when we were little, if she felt she needed to pee during the night, she would throw off the comforter and jump out of bed, which meant she would, with no consideration at all, tug at me, jolt me awake from my sleep and force me to my feet even though I was still in a haze between the dream world and reality. The pain would be so intense in the spot where we were conjoined that I would scream in horror, while Srebra, teeth clenched, would already be running to the bathroom, dragging me with her. Once there, while one of us sat on the toilet seat, the other had to bend down and sit too, which most often meant plopping down on the blue plastic trashcan that we moved to the left or right of the toilet depending on which of us was sitting on the seat. In that trashcan we not only threw away the paper—which was not scented toilet paper, but typewriter paper my mother would sneak from her office and then tear into quarters so we could wipe ourselves after doing our business—but also kitchen waste, leftovers, and all manner of garbage. I was often cruel, too, yanking her suddenly in some unexpected direction, but I was aware that our heads were joined together, that we should be careful how we moved every minute so as not to hurt ourselves, because the pain at our temples where our heads were joined was unbearable whenever one of us made a sudden unanticipated movement. Srebra was also aware that we were two in one, but only physically—whenever her head started to ache—not psychologically; she would dream up great plans for her life, and she simply took no account of my desires or of our joint capabilities. She was certain that one day, when we were grown and had a lot of money, we’d be able to pay for the surgery that could separate us. She believed it so intensely that even when our heads were still conjoined, she was making plans as if we’d already been separated. 8 It was like that with the fortune-telling game, too, when she said to me in an absolutely calm voice, “I’ve told you a hundred times I want to live in London, and you haven’t written it down. Look, you put down the letter S. That must be Skopje, but I’m not staying here, not for anything in the world! In London they will surely be able to separate us. They have those kinds of doctors.” My eyes were already welling up with tears. I pinched her with my left hand on her right elbow as hard as I could. Srebra raised her left arm over her head and smacked me on the head as hard as she could. Those blows on the head she used to give me would hurt for days. Mom once said to her, “If you continue on like this, one day you’re going to punch a hole in her brain and I don’t even dare think what would happen to us then!” And, as always, our father added, “Voracious creatures, you’ve devoured the world!” Although our heads were not merely joined but shared a vein in which our blood mixed (and in moments of excitement, anxiety, or other extreme situations in our life we both felt our hearts beating in our temples), we thought differently; that is, our brains were not conjoined. I still don’t know whether this was a lucky or an unlucky circumstance of our lives. This is why whenever Srebra hit me on the head, she would hiss at me, “Don’t you dare tattle at home!” But this time, she did not manage to say anything, because I had started to cry so desperately that Roze immediately bent over us and wiped my tears away with her hand. “Come on, Zlata, don’t. Look how nicely things are going to turn out for you. Your husband will be a millionaire and you’re going to have one child, and with all those millions, you’re sure to find a doctor to have your heads separated.” I was crying and kneeling down, stock-still, sensing that in Srebra’s mind she was already leaving for London, alone, without me, and I was nowhere. I felt I was not there, that I didn’t exist. 9 Tr ys ti n g EM M ANUELLE PAG A N O translated by JENNIFER HIGGINS & SOPHIE LEWIS “emmanuelle pagano sends every reader back to familiar territory. her book is full of discreet and recognizable emotion.” — Le Monde “in this little game of references, it’s the sharp eye of duras...that must be evoked, or of violette leduc and the essential fantasy of emily d ickinson. emmanuelle pagano: remember her name!” — Le Figaro EMMANUELLE PAGANO is the HIGGINS is a freelance translator and editor based in Oxford, U.K. JENNIFER recipient of numerous awards, including the European Union Prize for Literature for her novel Les Adolescents troglodytes. The author of seven works of literature with the prestigious French publisher P.O.L, she lives in Ardèche, France. SOPHIE LEWIS’s translations include The Earth Turned Upside Down by Jules Verne and Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc. An editor at large for And Other Stories P ublishing, she lives in London. November 15, 2016 • Novel • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 224 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-56-6 • ebook: 978-1-931883-58-0 • (North America) 11 NEW Trysting creates a unity out of the unique, with glimpses into nearly three hundred distinct relationships: romances between various ages, genders, and sexualities. Anything can be a vehicle for Pagano’s imagination— amnesia, sex, throat-clearing, sign language, earplugs, antidepressants, arthritis, leather, paint, or floorboards. This potent mixture of aphorisms and compact stories inspires us to reimagine both love itself and our own, very personal, loves. an excerpt from Trysting on time because I never know exactly how late she’s going to be. Sometimes just a few minutes, sometimes more, much more. I arrive at the place we’ve arranged to meet and say to myself: here goes. I read. I always bring a book with me but after a couple of chapters I’m already worrying, despite myself. I carry on worrying for goodness knows how many pages. 13 10 He doesn’t like eating anything that still has its skin on. He gets rid of it with his tongue or his fingers before eating whatever’s inside. He scoops out the filling of black pudding, holding the skin down carefully with his fork. Even grapes and figs have to be peeled. I make fun of his fussiness. But I let him get on with it, and my teasing is gentle and affectionate. Sometimes I extract the flesh for him and put it into a little dish, then rinse my fingers. 11 His son had a birthday party this afternoon, and my son was invited. When we arrived, he was blowing up balloons. He offered me a coffee, which I drank with a few other parents who were still hanging around, and then he sent us all away, telling us to come back and collect our children around five or six o’clock. Yes, he’d cope fine by himself. My son fell asleep in the car on the way home, tired out from the games and full of sweets, the balloons he had been given as souvenirs floating around him. I didn’t wake him up straight away when we got back. I caught hold of a big, bright yellow balloon, pressed the opening to my lips, and let it deflate slowly, breathing in his air. 12 She and I have been playing a waiting game right from the start. I’m always the one waiting and she’s always late. I’ve gotten used to it. I arrive 12 He had begun his adult life by dying, as many adolescents do, but unlike most, he never stopped doing it. He would die regularly, every two or three years or so, and nothing anybody said or did ever stopped him. After each failed attempt, he would bounce back, rediscover his enthusiasm for life, and meet a new woman. Sometimes it was actually the same woman but they always seemed new to him. As far as he was concerned, it was a complete regeneration each time. With each new life, he was unashamedly joyful. I was one of those new women; the last. During his revivals, he even had children, one with me. He was alive. And then, without showing any signs of it at first, he started dying. His four children were thriving, they loved him, I loved him, he had a good job, everything was fine, and suddenly, just like that, he was dying again. Only to be reborn. As new. You might almost think that he had simply metamorphosed, shed his skin, if it weren’t for all the scars, the traces of his deaths, which were deeper and more numerous each time. He had never taken pills; his deaths were always violent. It was death by hanging, drowning, or shooting. The second-to-last time, he took off the bottom half of his face, but he still got up smiling, smiling without a chin. 14 When he was in my flat, he would constantly bang into things. He couldn’t find the doors or the switches and he kept forgetting where the furniture was. Every protruding chair leg was a potential trap. When he was in my flat he was clumsy and blind, as though he wasn’t really there. 13 T h e B o ys TONI SALA translated by MARA FAYE LETHEM “altogether brilliant.” — Kirkus (starred review) “translation-savvy readers might hear a little rodoreda and monzó in sala’s prose, but the most significant comparison could be to bolaño’s more iberian-inflected work—light-footed, death-haunted sentences that tumble along at the shuddering speed of a car crash.” — BOMB magazine “the boys is a stark tale of confused people trapped in a wrinkle in time, rendered with painful sensitivity and gut-wrenching bleakness. no sur- prise that toni sala has been praised as one of catalan’s most important — CounterPunch Already decimated by a harsh recession, the once-bucolic village of Vidreres is shocked when two young men die in a horrible car crash. Four characters, their lives and voices intertwined, grapple with their own guilt over the unfathomable loss of the boys, and perhaps their whole town. The Boys is a sinister, fast-moving tale laced with intricate meditations on everything from Internet hookups to Spain’s economic collapse to the incomprehensibility of death. TONI SALA is the author MARA FAYE LETHEM is the translator of Papers in the Wind by Eduardo Sacheri, Wonderful World by Javier Calvo, and others, and her translations have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. of over a dozen novels and works of nonfiction. In 2005 he was awarded the National Literature Prize by the Catalan government, and he has also received many other honors for his writing. November 10, 2015 • Novel • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 224 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-49-8 • ebook: 978-1-931883-50-4 • (World English) 15 RECENT TITLE writers.” T h e S l e e p o f the R ighteo u s WOLFGANG H ILB I G translated by ISABEL FARG O COLE introduction by LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI “wolfgang “...a hilbig is an artist of immense stature.” hallucinatory blend of present and past that evokes the luminous prose of w.g. sebald.” — from the introduction by László Krasznahorkai — New York Times “out of the ugliness of history and the wasted landscapes of his home, [hilbig] has created stories of disconsolate beauty, not to prettify that ugliness but to bare it to the light.” — Wall Street Journal WOLFGANG HILBIG (1941– 2007) was one of the major German writers to emerge in the postwar era. The author of over 20 books, he received virtually all of Germany’s major literary prizes, capped by the 2002 Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor. FARGO COLE’s translations include Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar, All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann. She is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant. ISABEL October 13, 2015 • Stories • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 163 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-47-4 • ebook: 978-1-931883-48-1 • (World English) 17 RECENT TITLE Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic, utterly personal account of the century-defining nation. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to surreal confrontations with wraithlike Stasi agents, Hilbig’s cipher is at once himself and anyone ensnared by the clash of cultures. Hilbig creates an original, visionary statement on the ravages of history— and the promises of the future. T h e G a me for R ea l R ICHAR D WEINE R translated by BENJAMIN PAL OFF “these novellas are intense, funny, and vivid explorations of selfhood and identity. their publication was long overdue.” “the — Electric Literature crowning achievement of richard weiner’s career and one of the most powerful works of czech modernism.“ “for me, the pinnacles — PEN America of prose are hašek, kafka, weiner, klima.” — Bohumil Hrabal, author of Harlequin’s Millions RICHARD WEINER (1884 – 1937) is widely considered to be one of the most important Czech writers of the twentieth century. His writing was suppressed during the Communist period and only became recognized after 1989. BENJAMIN PALOFF is a pro- fessor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan. The translator of several works of prose and poetry, he is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN America. May 12, 2015 • Novellas • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 296 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-44-3 • ebook: 978-1-931883-45-0 19 RECENT TITLE In two masterful novellas blending metaphysical questions with farcical humor, bizarre twists, and acute psychology, The Game for Real is a riveting exploration of who we are—and why we can’t be so sure we know. In “The Game of Quartering” an unnamed hero finds his double. Surely, he reasons, if he has a double, then his double must have a double, and so on. Then, in “The Game for the Honor of Payback,” a man known only as “Shame” is slapped, and launches a doomed crusade to return the insult. Two Lines 24 S PR IN G 2 01 6 NEW WORK BY TRANSLATED BY nobuko takagi Deborah Iwabuchi christos ikonomou Karen Emmerich medardo fraile Margaret Jull Costa rabee jaber Kareem James Abu-Zeid charles-ferdinand ramuz Olivia Baes jan wagner David Keplinger maxim amelin Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher aigerim tazhi J. Kates efraín huerta Jerome Rothenberg Eric Selland minoru yoshioka and more... Two Lines 2 5 FA L L 2 01 6 NEW WORK BY TRANSLATED BY enrique vila-matas Margaret Jull Costa ulrike almut sandig Bradley Schmidt helene uri Barbara Sjoholm kobi ovadia Yardenne Greenspan alicia kozameh Andrea G. Labinger ya shi Nick Admussen emmanuel moses Marilyn Hacker kim hyesoon Don Mee Choi jean-luc nancy Charlotte Mandell and more... September 13, 2016 • $12.00 • 192 pgs. • 5” X 8” • 978-1-931883-54-2 21 TWO LINES March 15, 2016 • $12.00 • 168 pgs. • 5” X 8” • 978-1-931883-52-8 about Tw o L i n es “the Ba c k Issu es stories and poems within two lines open the reader up to a world that would otherwise be closed entirely, and to connect with that world is truly fortunate.” — Utne Reader For over two decades, Two Lines has been at the forefront of world literature, working with translation’s best—among them: Lydia Davis, Luc Sante, Natasha Wimmer, Edith Grossman, Margaret Jull Costa, and Breon Mitchell. P ublished in the spring and fall, each issue is printed bilingually and combines prose, poetry, and creative, genre-defying essays that show the inspiring new things happening around the literary globe. yoko tawada • primo levi • roberto bolaño • yehuda amichai • ko un • césar vallejo • pablo neruda • inger christensen • vladimir m ayakovsky • alejandra pizarnik • günter grass • wolfgang hilbig • sergio chejfec • michelle grangaud • tomas transtrÖmer • taha muhammad ali • kirmen uribe • adonis • julio cortÁzar • xi chuan • yves bonnefoy • naja marie aidt • césar aira and hundreds more... “[e]ndeavors such as two lines...are on the front lines “[two TWO LINES single issue: $12 one-year subscription: $15 two-year subscription: $25 www.twolinespress.com/subscribe lines is] an a ppetite-whetting sampler of of expanding our access to authors whose work any literary voices that would serious reader cannot afford to be without.” otherwise be simply inaccessible to american readers.” — Oscar Villalon, ZYZZYVA — Los Angeles Review of Books “two lines is perhaps that mysterious foreigner moved to town—that tall, darkly dressed foreigner knowledgeable of things about which the rest of us are only dimly aware.” — Travis Kurowski, Poets & Writers get the best writers from all over the world in stellar translations, sometimes for the first time in english. a select number of back issues are available for $12 at: www.twolinespress.com 22 23 Se lf- Po rtrait i n G reen Ba b oon M AR I E N D I AYE NA JA M A R I E A I D T translated by JORDAN STUMP translated by DENISE NEWMAN “wades through feminine fear, power, and insecurity like no other book i’ve encountered.“ explosive collection.” — Los Angeles Times — Flavorwire “naja “eerie the surface of our otherwise calm and mysterious...a kind of french african elena ferrante.” — Terese Svoboda “a sort of malicious reverie where the real mingles with the imagined, marie aidt’s stories ask not only what could be hiding beneath lives, but what has been hiding there all along.... she is the writer of dark secrets.” — Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star the living with the dead, the water “[a] — L’Express (Paris) — Los Angeles Review of Books with the land.” winner of the clmp firecracker violent, beautiful, breathlessly paced collection.” winner of the pen translation prize award for creative nonfiction MARIE NDIAYE is the recipient of the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, and one of ten finalists for the 2013 Booker International Prize. She is the author of over a dozen plays and works of prose. JORDAN STUMP’s translation of NDiaye’s All My Friends was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. Who are the green women? They are powerful, mysterious, seductive, and unbearably personal. Here, in her own skewed take on the memoir, NDiaye combs through all the menacing, beguiling, and revelatory memories submerged beneath the consciousness of a singular literary talent. Mysterious, honest, and unabashedly innovative, NDiaye’s self-portrait forces us all to ask questions—about what we repress, how we discover those things, and how those obsessions become us. Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common questions of sex, love, desire, and gender relations, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations. November, 2014 • Memoir • $9.95 (paper) $7.99 (ebook) • 112 pgs. • 4.5” X 7” 978-1-931883-39-9 ebook: 978-1-931883-42-9 (N. America) October, 2014 • Stories • $12.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 200 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-38-2 ebook: 978-1-931883-41-2 (World) 24 25 NAJA MARIE AIDT is the author of over 20 books. She received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for Baboon. DENISE NEWMAN has published three collections of her own poems and translated Inger Christensen in additon to Naja Marie Aidt. She received the PEN Translation prize for her translation of Baboon. ALSO AVAILABLE ALSO AVAILABLE “an T h e Fat a Mor ga n a Books Runn in g t hrough B eiji ng JO NAT HA N L I T T E L L XU ZECHEN translated by CHARL OT TE MANDELL translated by ERIC ABRAHAMSEN “the novel captures the taste and tension of beijing better than any i’ve ever read.” — Los Angeles Review of Books “a window onto beijing’s seamy, crime-ridden underbelly...a vibrant story by one of china’s rising young writers.” “running through beijing is clean and fast, deeply felt and very smart...” — Roy Kesey nightmarish novellas...the writing is sinuous and propulsive.” — The New Yorker “here genetalia prove as amorphous as the desires they incite, and slaughter leaves only casual impressions upon its casualties.“ — BOMB magazine “these stories lead the reader on a race through the abyss...” — Paul La Farge shortlisted for the national translation award XU ZECHEN is the a uthor of the novels Midnight’s Door, Night Train, and Heaven on Earth. He was selected by People’s Literature as one of the “Future 20” best Chinese writers under 41. ERIC ABRAHAMSEN is the recipient of translation grants from PEN and the NEA, and in 2012 Penguin published his translation of The Civil Servant’s Notebook by Wang Xiaofang. Leading young Chinese author Xu Zechen guides us through an under world of constant thievery, hard-core porn, cops (both real and fake), prison, bribery, crazy landladies, rampant drinking, and the smothering, bone-dry dust storms that blanket one of the world’s largest cities in thick layers of grime. Like a literary Run Lola Run, the book follows a hustling hero rushing to stay just one step ahead of a world constantly fighting to drag him down. After the astonishing success of his Prix Goncourt–winning debut novel, The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell returns with four new novellas that offer fresh depictions of age-old obsessions. With fleet prose and Proustian self-reflection, these stories range from chaotic airlifts to bullfights under the hot sun. The Fata Morgana Books pushes through to explore the spaces between thoughts, between bodies, between hungers and their satisfactions, between eyes and the things they look at. July, 2014 • Novel • $12.95 (paper) $8.99 (ebook) • 168 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-36-8 ebook: 978-1-931883-40-5 (N. America) November, 2013 • Novellas • $14.95 (paper) $9.95 (ebook) • 192 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-34-4 ebook: 978-1-931883-35-1 (N. America) 26 27 JONATHAN LITTELL received the Prix oncourt for his novel G The Kindly Ones, called by Time magazine “unmistakably the work of a profoundly gifted writer.” CHARLOTTE MANDELL is the translator of numerous award-winning works of innovative French literature, including works by Proust, Blanchot, and Rancière. ALSO AVAILABLE ALSO AVAILABLE — Book Riot “four Hi, t h is is C on c h it a A l l My Friends SA N T I AG O R O N C AG L I O L O M AR I E N D I AYE translated by EDITH GROSSMAN translated by JORDAN STUMP “[ndiaye] brings to life an electri- fying rogue’s gallery of social outcasts, disgruntled wives, and loony strivers...stump’s perfectly calibrated translation captures the rich timbre and fearsome bite of ndiaye’s chiseled prose.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “a superb short-story collection... JORDAN STUMP’s translation of NDiaye’s All My Friends was shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. ALSO AVAILABLE “roncagliolo is an incredibly gifted storyteller who is able to execute many writing styles.... roncagliolo world writer.” are isolated by default, we are all reminds us that, although we — Rain Taxi Review of Books connected to each other in some “this book is a world.“ — SF Weekly (summer reading pick) — Three Percent French phenomenon Marie NDiaye shows the full range of her immense talents with five intricately narrated stories showcasing characters both r obustly real and emotionally unfathomable. In All My Friends a master stylist uses her unique gifts to render the personal horrors we fight every day to suppress—but in All My Friends they’re allowed to roam free. June, 2013 • Stories • $14.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 152 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-23-8 ebook: 978-1-931883-24-5 (N. America) 28 “there’s a lot to like—and laugh at—here, especially riffs on the awfulness of meg ryan movies.“ — Publishers Weekly way.” Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winner Santiago Roncagliolo returns with his acclaimed translator Edith Grossman with these raucous, dark, and entrancing tales. Peru’s heir to the literature of Mario Vargas Llosa weaves a complex tale of an office worker hiring a hitman to kill his mistress, a man leaving feverish messages on his beloved’s answering machine, and a phone sex w orker whose client is literally crazy about her. April, 2013 • Stories • $17.95 (paper) $9.99 (ebook) • 184 pgs. • 5” X 8” 978-1-931883-22-1 ebook: 978-1-931883-32-0 (N. America) 29 SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO’s first novel, Red April, won the Premio Alfaguara and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. EDITH GROSSMAN is one of English’s most renowned translators. She has translated key works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. ALSO AVAILABLE recipient of the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, and one of ten finalists for the 2013 Booker International Prize. She is the author of over a dozen plays and works of prose. cause for celebration” — Daniel AlarcÓn explains why she is increasingly— and justly—recognized as a major MARIE NDIAYE is the “a Subscr ib e a n d S up p o r t SUBSCRIBE Subscribers of Two Lines Press will receive all three titles we publish in 2016, along with the two issues of the journal, before they are available anywhere else. 2016 subscribers will also receive a limited-edition postcard set. To subscribe, visit www.twolinespress.com/subscribe, or mail in the form to the right. SUPPORT Two Lines Press relies on the support of donors to publish award-winning literature in translation. 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