ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS

(P/B) MILTOS SACHTOURIS POEMS (1945-1971)
Karen Emmerich's poignant, eloquent versions of Sachtouris reveal not only the disturbing intensity of the original but also a remarkable diction and poetic pacing of her own. - HAROLD BLOOM I would say, 'Cut these poems and they'll bleed,' but they are already bleeding - a poet's evidence of world and civil wars, a military junta and dictatorship. We might call these poems noir, in which the poet manages to fashion a bloody and beautiful reflection of strange times. In this important translation, each poem is a house made of flesh, and w...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN, YOU'LL SEE
Something Will Happen, You'll See is a heart-wrenching elegy on the impoverished working-class Greeks populating the neighborhoods around Piraeus, the large port southwest of Athens. Ikonomou's luminous and poignant short stories center around laid-off steelworkers, warehousemen, families, pensioners, and young couples faced with sudden loss and turmoil. Between docks, in tenement buildings, and on city streets Ikonomou's men and women sustain their traumas on flickers of hope in the darkness and on their deep faith in humanity. An illumin...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) BLINDING
Part visceral dream-memoir, part fictive journey through a hallucinatory Bucharest, Mircea Cartarescu's Blinding was one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a bestseller from the day of its release. Riddled with hidden passageways, mesmerizing tapestries, and whispering butterflies, Blinding takes us on a mystical trip into the protagonist's childhood, his memories of hospitalization as a teenager, the prehistory of his family, a travelling circus, Secret police, zombie armies, American fighter pilo...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) DIARY OF EXILE
Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this volume, which presents a series of three diaries in poetry that Ritsos wrote between 1948 and 1950, during and just after the Greek Civil War, while a political prisoner first on the island of Limnos and then at the infamous camp on Makronisos. Even in this darkest of times, Ritsos dedicated his days to poetry, trusting in writing and in art as collective endeavors capable of resisting oppression ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) KONUNDRUM
In this new selection and translation, Peter Wortsman mines Franz Kafka's entire opus of short prose - including works published in the author's brief lifetime, stories published posthumously, journals, and letters - for narratives that sound the imaginative depths of the great German-Jewish scribe from Prague. It is the first volume in English to consider his deeply strange, resonantly humane letters and journal entries alongside his classic short fiction and lyrical vignettes. "Transformed" is a vivid retranslation of one of Kafka's sign...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) BOOK OF MY MOTHER
Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother's death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for "La France libre", which later grew into "Book of My Mother". Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. Cohen himself expressed, "I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother." (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE FLYING CREATURES OF FRA ANGELICO
Written by Antonio Tabucchi, one of the most renowned voices in European literature and the foremost Italian writer of his generation, this sublimely questioning, superbly imaginative collection of fragments and quasi-stories moves from impression to association to conjecture. The reader meets a delicate flying creature of ambiguous species - replete with feathers in ochre, yellow, deep blue, and emerald green - in Fra Angelico's vegetable garden; and a revolutionary who is told her incredible future by Mademoiselle Lenormand, a fortune te...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) TRANQUILITY
Tranquility is a living seismograph of the internal quakes and ruptures of a mother and son trapped within an Oedipal nightmare amidst the suffocating totalitarian embrace of Communist Hungary. Andor Weer, a thirty-six-year-old writer, lives in a small apartment with his shut-in mother, Rebeka, who was once among the most celebrated stage actresses in Budapest. Unable to withstand her maniacal tyranny but afraid to leave her alone, their bitter interdependence spirals into a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies, and appeasement. Then, Andor meets...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE EXPEDITION TO THE BAOBAB TREE
In J.M.Coetzee's stunning translation: a powerfully symbolic story in the voice of a slave that explores the depths of imagination, isolation, fear, and love. A slave woman is the only survivor of a failed expedition into the depths of Southern Africa. She shelters in the hollow trunk of a baobab tree where she relives her earlier existence in a state of increasing isolation. We are the sole witnesses to her moving history: her capture as a young child, her life in a harbor city on the eastern coast as servant to various masters, her journ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MAMA LEONE
The Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic, whose remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro - winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize - was published by Archipelago, has created a masterful collection of linked stories that draws the reader into a precocious boy's episodic, personal recounting of his war-torn homeland and childhood. Dazzling, rhapsodic, and above all compassionate, these linked stories, deeply rooted in place and history, break down stereotypes and humanize a complex cultural conflict. (From the publisher...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) STROKE BY STROKE
Stroke by Stroke is a pairing of two of Henri Michaux's most suggestive texts, Par des traits (Stroke by Stroke, 1984) and Saisir (Grasp, 1979), written toward the end of his life. The author's idiogrammic ink drawings accompany his poetic explorations of animals, humans, and the origins of language. These texts work at the borders of word and image, interior and exterior, sacred and mundane. In a series of verbal/pictorial gestures at once explosive and contemplative, Michaux emerges at his most Zen. (From the publisher)...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) MILTOS SACHTOURIS: POEMS (1945 - 1971)
Love slipped through your fingers and dropped into a glass of blood rolled into a darkened mirror a terrible rain beat down on it then it vanished into a forest full of shadows of songs of birds Poems (1945-1971) contains the nine volumes Miltos Sachtouris wrote during the most productive period of his poetic career. The collection chronicles the writer's reaction to three decades of intense social and political upheavel in a nation experiencing the successive horrors of occupation, civil war, and military dictatorship. Sachtouris' world ...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) BACACAY
First published in 1957 in Poland, Bacacay is a collection of twelve 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 with 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. (From the publisher) Grotesque, erotic, and often hila...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...