Small Lives (Vies minuscules), Pierre Michon’s first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d’oeuvre. A bolt of lightening." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.

Small Lives

Literature & Fiction

Michon, Pierre

Essays & Correspondence

Archipelago Books

Hailed as one of the most brilliant contributions to the literature of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism, Dreams and Stones won the prestigious Koscielski Foundation Prize in Poland in 1995. Telling the story of the growth of a great city, Tulli relates its history by entering the lives of the stones from which the buildings and monuments are constructed, as well as the dreams of people and objects interwoven with the city’s history. Revealing the inner lives of buildings, mirrors and news-paper -photographs, she explores the design of the city, its growth and its workings. Dismantling the city piece by piece, Tulli reveals a very different metaphysical landscape lying, literally, beneath and around it.

Dreams and Stones

Magdalena Tulli

Literary

An epic poem in the form of a lyrical map, Fossil Sky is a remarkable creation of originality and beauty. Composed on a single large sheet, it liberates poetry from the conventions of page and book. Fossil Sky distills a year of walks taken near the poet’s home, tracing the paths a mind takes through landscape, history, and ideation. The poem’s formal daring is combined with an inviting and direct personal voice, an inner voice adrift—broken up by landscape, space, time and silence. David Hinton’s many translations of ancient Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poetry. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as numerous fellowships from the NEA and the NEH.

Fossil Sky

Hinton, David

Genre Fiction

The Serpent of Stars (Le serpent d¢étoiles, 1993; reprinted 1999 Grasset) takes place in rural southern France in the early part of the century. The novel’s elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to an expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters a shepherding family and glimpse by glimpse, each family member and the shepherding way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds’ gathering where a traditional Shepherd’s Play—a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain—is enacted. The work’s proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form—part play, part novel—makes The Serpent of Stars astonishingly contemporary. W.S. Merwin’s "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe/in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts/of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks..." This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose.

The Serpent of Stars

GIONO, Jean

“One of the great novelists of our century.”—Milan Kundera
First published in 1957 in Poland, Bacacay(a nod to his street in Buenos Aires) is a collection of 12 short stories by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1968), one of the major European literary figures of the 20th century. Stunningly original in both style and content, these stories are often hilarious yet have an undercurrent of profound moral disquiet and horror when the respectable turns slowly but inexorably into the outrageous, conveying both the horrors of upper-class life and the deepest anguish of the human condition. Gombrowicz has perfect pitch for language; he revels in linguistic play, combining words in extraordinary ways. The commonplace and the everyday are juxtaposed with the bizarre and unsettling to make a world in which unspeakable subconscious urges have a habit of poking through the surface of ordinary life, leaving permanent scars. Bacacayis a brilliant series of satires on the limitations, quirks and phobias of the upper class. In Gombrowicz’s hands, words create worlds.
Witold Gombrowiczis the single most important Polish prose writer of the 20th century. He is best known for his novels Ferdydurke(1937), Pornografia(1960) and Cosmos(1966) and his plays Princess Ivona(1935) and The Marriage(1953). Gombrowicz left Poland in 1939, lived in Argentina for over 20 years, and died in France. In 1967, he was awarded the Prix Formentor. This is Bacacay’s first English language publication.
Bill Johnston is director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University. His translations include Gustaw Herling’s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories(New Directions, 2003), Stefan Zeromski’s The Faithful River(Northwestern, 1999), and Magdalena Tulli’s Dreams and Stones (Archipelago Books, 2004).

Bacacay

GOMBROWICZ, WITOLD

Three Generations charts the tensions in the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul. Yom's keenly observant eye reveals family tensions with profound insight. His characters are so alive that if you cut the pages they might bleed. Delving deeply into each character's history and beliefs, he illuminates the diverse pressures and impulses driving each one. This Korean classic also brings forth the larger issues at hand, revealing Korea's situation under Japanese rule, the traditional Korean familial structure, political movements of the 1930s (both national and international), and the battle between the modern and the traditional. Touted as one of Korea's most important works of fiction, Three Generations gave birth to naturalism in Korean literature. Best representing the Seoul dialect of the time, Yom is celebrated for his contributions to the Korean literary cannon; Three Generations remains a mandatory read for high school students. The long-awaited public

Three Generations

Yom Sang-seop

Diary of Andrés Fava is pure reflection: on his reading, dreams, conversations, and writing. This unpredictable journal of the protagonist of Cortázar’s posthumously published El Examen is peppered with quotes from French poets and American jazzmen. Cortázar’s brilliance and irreverence are in full power. Exploratory and honest, Diary of Andrés Fava lets us in on his own intimate reflections on literature, music, friendship, love, and the act of writing. It’s full of bold jabs and devilish claims. A late-night rap session with Cortázar–he lets down his guard and we have the impossible pleasure of watching this lovable genius think and feel out loud.

Diary of Andres Fava

CORTAZAR,JULIO

McLean, Anne

United States

A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic fable and chronicle of the Chukchi people and a breathtaking adventure story. It is the story of John MacLellan, a young Canadian sailor who is left behind by his ship, stranded among the native people of the arctic coast. It is the story of one Chukchi community that adopts a crippled stranger and teaches him to live as a “true human being.” During the long winter, John comes to know his new companions—first as untutored primitives, then in the romantic light of noble savages and finally as a real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. Tragedy strikes, and a life is lost and re-given; a man rises to take the place of a boy; wounds are healed with compassion, honesty and love. And when difficult times loom ahead, it is his new family that John will fight to preserve. Rytkheu’s empathetic voice guides us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveals all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world.
Born in Uelen, a village in the Chukotka region, Yuri Rytkheu has sailed the Bering Sea, worked on Arctic geological expeditions and hunted whale in arctic waters, in addition to authoring over 10 novels and collections of stories. In the 1950s, Rytkheu emerged as not only a writer of considerable literary talent, but as the unique voice of a small national minority—the Chukchi people. His novels and short stories about Chukotka and the Chukchi introduced generations of readers to the history and mythology of those who call one of the most majestic and inhospitable environments on earth their home. Bestsellers in Germany and Switzerland, Rytkheu’s works are also well-loved in Japan, Denmark and France.

A Dream in Polar Fog

Rytkheu, Yuri

"If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So said Thomas Mann of the work of PeterAltenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of writing, Altenberg’s signature short prose straddles the line between the poetic and the prosaic, fiction and observation, harsh verity and whimsical vignette. Inspired by the prose poems of Charles Baudelaire and the Feuilleton—a light journalistic reflection of his day—Altenberg carved out a spare, strikingly modern aesthetic that speaks with an eerie prescience to our own impatient time. Peter Wortsman’s new selection and translation reads like a sly lyrical wink from the turnof-the-century of the telegram to the turn-of-the-millennium of email.

Telegrams of the Soul: Selected Prose of Peter Altenberg

Altenberg, Peter

In My Body and I (1925), René Crevel attempts to trace with words the geography of a being, exploring the tension between body and spirit. Crevel’s meditation is a vivid personal journey through illusion and disillusion, secret desire, memory, the possibility and impossibility of life, sensuality and sexuality, poetry and the wilderness of the imagination. The narrator’s Romantic mind moves from evocative tales to frank confessions, making the reader a confidant to this great soul trapped in an awkward-fitting body. Admired greatly by André Breton and Ezra Pound, Crevel might be thought of as a surrealist Proust.
Robert Bononno’s translations include Henri Raczymow’s Swan’s Way and Herve Guibert’s Ghost Image.

My Body and I

René Crevel

Contemporary

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