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Cover of The Extinction of Irena Rey

Bloomsbury Publishing

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Jennifer Croft

€29.00

From the International Booker Prize-winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.

recommendations

Cover of Teenage Grave 2

Filthy Loot

Teenage Grave 2

Sam Richard, Jo Quenell and 2 more

Fiction €14.00

Blending splatterpunk, body horror, and transgressive fiction, Teenage Grave 2 immerses readers in a world of unrelenting terror. This masterful work of macabre fiction assaults the senses and challenges perceptions of safety, leaving readers deeply unsettled. Featuring Sam Richard, Justin Lutz, Brendan Vidito and Jo Quenell.

Cover of Bonbons à l'anis

Brook

Bonbons à l'anis

Cecilia Pavón

Poetry €18.00

Un fabuleux recueil – le premier publié en français – de poèmes et récits de l'autrice argentine Cecilia Pavón, préfacé par Chris Kraus (écrivaine dont Pavón a par ailleurs traduit des livres en espagnol).

« Cette traduction n'aurait pu voir le jour si je n'avais pas développé pendant quelques temps une obsession quasi malsaine pour l'Argentine. Cherchant à Buenos Aires les traces de lieux proches de Shanaynay que j'avais co-dirigé à Paris, je découvris au hasard sur internet l'existence d'un espace nommé Belleza y Felicidad et dirigé par Fernanda Laguna et Cecilia Pavón. Bien avant l'émergence de l'artist-run space en Europe, les deux femmes créèrent un lieu associant art et littérature. Lors d'un voyage à Buenos Aires, j'eus l'opportunité de rencontrer Cecilia Pavón qui lors d'une conversation sur l'écriture et la poésie, me proposa de traduire Licorice Candies en français. Sa poésie fut autant révélatrice qu'émancipatrice, à la fois par sa singularité et sa simplicité. Elle écrit ce qu'elle voit et ce qu'elle vit. Elle parle de certains quartiers de Buenos Aires, de ses amis, d'elle, d'un vélo qu'elle a perdu, de Timo. Il me semble qu'elle écrit comme elle parle d'amour, d'erreurs et de sexe ». Marion Vasseur Raluy, traductrice

The first collection of texts published in French by the Argentinian artist and poet.

Preface by Chris Kraus.

Translated from the English and Spanish by Marion Vasseur Raluy, Rosanna Puyol Boralevi and Mona Varichon.

Cover of The TV Sutras

Ugly Duckling Presse

The TV Sutras

Dodie Bellamy

Memoir €24.00

Inspired by visionaries like Moses, William Blake, and Joseph Smith, Bellamy spent five months in 2009 receiving transmissions from her television set and writing brief commentaries on each. The sutras and commentaries in the present volume are the beginning of an intensive investigation into the nature of religious experience. What are cults? Are they limited to wacko marginal communities, or do we enter one every time we go to work or step into a polling place? What is charisma and why are we addicted to it? Bellamy speaks candidly and intimately to her own experience as a woman, a writer, and former cult member. This commingling of memoir, fiction, collage and essay makes room for horny gurus, visitors from outer space, the tenderness of group life, and maybe the beginnings of a hard-won individualism.

Cover of Deceit

Prototype Publishing

Deceit

Yuri Felsen

Fiction €15.00

Appearing for the first time in English, Deceit is the debut novel by Yuri Felsen, a leading modernist writer of the interwar Russian diaspora. Known by his contemporaries as ‘the Russian Proust’, Felsen died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, his life and legacy destroyed by the Nazis.

Written in the form of diary, Deceit is a psychological self-portrait of an unnamed narrator, a neurasthenic and aspiring author, whose often-thwarted pursuits of his love interest and muse provide the grounds for his beautifully wrought extemporizations on love, art and human nature. Modulating between the paroxysms of his tormented romance and his quest for an aesthetic mode befitting of the novel he intends to write, Deceit is a remarkable work of introspective depth and psychoanalytic inquiry.

Quite unlike any other writer in the Russian canon, Felsen evokes in rich, poetic, idiosyncratic prose not only the Zeitgeist of interwar Europe and his émigré milieu, but also its psychology and the existential crisis of the age. What Nabokov achieves with images and the physical world, Felsen does with the emotional and metaphysical.

Translated by Bryan Karetnyk
With a Foreword by Peter Pomerantsev

Cover of Occupation

Charco Press

Occupation

Julián Fuks

Fiction €13.00

Known and celebrated in Brazil and abroad for his novel Resistance, Julián Fuks returns to his auto-fictional alter ego Sebastián in a narrative alternating between the writer’s conversations with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo, his father’s sickness, and his wife’s pregnancy. With impeccable prose, the author builds associations that go beyond the obvious, not only between glimpsing a life's beginning and end, but also between the building’s occupation and his wife's pregnancy — showcasing the various forms of occupation while exposing the frailty of life, the risk of solitude and the brutality of not belonging.