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Inga Ābele in World Literature Today

The new issue of World Literature Today is now available, and filled with great stuff (an interview with Anne Carson, feature on Naomi Shihab Nye, profile of 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner Mia Couto, a feature on Arabic books for teens), but in addition to the magazine, WLT has an outstanding blog and just today ran a feature on Open Letter author Inga Ābele:

Inga Ābele, born in 1972 in Riga, has written plays and screenplays, collections of poetry, stories and novels. Her play Dark Deer was staged in Latvia, at the Stuttgart State Theatre, the Bonner Biennale, and in Greece, being made a feature film in 2006. Iron Weed was staged in Latvia, Denmark, and Finland; Jasmine premiered in Latvia and was staged in Lucerne. Her poetry collections include Night Pragmatist and a collection of prose poems, The Horses of Atgazene Station. Her 2001 novel, Fire Will Not Wake You, was published in Lithuanian in 2007. Her story collection Notes During the Time of Snow won the Annual Award for Literature in 2004, and another collection, Still Life with Pomegranate, was published in French translation in 2005. Ābele’s 2008 novel High Tide was published in in Swedish translation in 2009 and in English translation in 2013.

I’m going to interrupt here to remind you that Open Letter was the press that published High Tide, and it was translated by our editor, Kaija Straumanis.

In other words: You should really buy this book. (You can even get the ebook directly from our site for a mere $9.99.)

This interview is as much about Inga’s life out in the country as it is about Lativan literature, but, and I’m sure Kaija can back this up, Inga’s living arrangement sounds pretty ideal:

Seven years ago Ābele left Riga to live in deep in the forest near Sigulde, site of an ancient castle, with her hot-air balloonist partner, Gunars Dukste. [. . .] They live on a smallholding that belonged to a baron in the 1800s: wild boars come at night to dig up the lush grass with their snouts and eat it. A tower is set up for a neighboring hunter who hasn’t had any luck yet. They’ve built a perfect, snug house on the foundations of what was once the cattle shed, with the weathered old outbuildings still standing about, a great stack of wood ready for winter. Gunars takes haunting photos of the countryside of Latvia while floating over it.

Another interruption: Gunars’s book of hot air balloon photos will be available in English in the not-too-distant future. (Kaija also translated this.) More info on that in a future post.

And finally, about Inga’s forthcoming books:

She is finishing up a novel titled The Wicker Monk, which has been three years in the writing. The “wicker” in the title comes from the way in Latgale, where the protagonist lives a life of celibacy, everything is woven together for strength, large families hold together. After that she has a contract to write a historical novel about collectivism in the 1950s in Latvia, due to be finished in 2015.

Maybe Open Letter will bring out one-both of these in the future . . . But for now—check out High Tide: it’s a stunning book that combines lush, provocative prose with a gripping plot about a love triangle and a killing. (Although this plot is told in semi-reverse chronological order . . . so the killing only makes sense at the end of the book. It’s like an anti-mystery novel, I suppose.)



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