The new Open Letter Newsletter was mailed out yesterday, and is now online (in a pretty, slick format).

Included is information about 18% Gray, next Monday’s Tirza launch party at 192 Books & The Half King, and a bit about the 2013 Preview Podcast.

If you’d like to sign up for the newsletter (and really, why wouldn’t you?), just click here and enter in all your info.

Later this week we’re going to send out the first edition of the new Open Letter newsletter. (The old version has been dormant for quite some time, for reasons both format and Google Groups related.)

Anyway, before we send this out, you should sign up. Just click here, enter your email address and name, and you’ll start receiving biweekly communiques from the Open Letter Headquarters.

We’ll be including giveaways, insider editorial info, and goofy photos in the newsletter, so don’t miss out!

We tried sending this out to all our enewsletter subscribers last week, but it seems that at least some of them didn’t receive it. (Ironically, self included.) Anyway, you can access the whole thing here for a summary of our $4.99 ebook special, info on Read This Next, on the Three Percent Podcast, and on the Guadalajara giveaway that’s wrapping up at GoodReads in 16 hours or so.

And BTW, if you want to receive our monthly newsletter (which will be pretty monthly from now on, I swear), you can sign up on the home page of our recently (as in 10 hours ago) website.

Those of you who subscribe to our newsletter or are members of our Facebook group already received this, but for those who haven’t, here’s this week’s newsletter, which also serves as the kickoff for our first ever fundraising campaign.

Hi—

There was such a great response to last week’s giveaway of Jerzy Pilch’s The Mighty Angel that we’re definitely going to do this on a regular basis . . . Copies of the book (and congratulatory e-mails) went out to the winners yesterday—for everyone else, copies are available at better bookstores everywhere, or via our website. (And yes, the book is even prettier in real life . . .)

This week, we’d like to do two things:

First off, I’d also like to officially kick off our first $10 fundraising campaign. As a nonprofit press (that does a lot of non-revenue generating activity like the Best Translated Book Award, Three Percent, and, well, publishing translations), we have to rely on grants and individual donations to keep doing what we’re doing—making great works of world literature available to readers like you (and me).

Obviously, the more money raised via this campaign, the more we’ll be able to offer, but seeing as this is our first ever online fundraising effort, the real goal is to demonstrate a broad base of support for Open Letter and Three Percent. So, although we’re more than happy to accept gifts of any level, we’re only asking for $10. It’s an affordable amount that adds up to a very significant total, and any show of support for what we do can’t be overestimated.

To contribute—and I really hope you will—simply take two minutes to fill out the online form here.

Second, our new fall/winter 2009 catalog is now available online) with lots of interesting books that I’ll be featuring on Three Percent in the near future and giving away through this newsletter.

Thanks in advance, and next week we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled newsletter. (Unless no one contributes. Kidding, kidding.)

Best,

Chad

The latest Open Letter Newsletter is now available online.

As an update: the Vilnius Poker giveaway is now closed. We received a lot of submissions and will be sending out e-mails to the three winners (and all other entries) this afternoon.

Another book featured in the newsletter is Fonseca’s The Taker and Other Stories, which was recently reviewed on Literary License, where Gwen Dawson had this to say:

The Taker and Other Stories, by Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca, is a collection of short stories examining death in all its forms: murder, suicide, road kill (animal and human), medical emergencies, sickness, and old age. One protagonist laments, “Man is a solitary animal, an unhappy animal, and only death can fix us.” This thought echoes throughout this collection.

It was also reviewed by Nancy Yanes Hoffman:

Although Fonseca steadfastly refuses to discuss the meaning of his stories, he once said of himself, “Perhaps I am ‘The Taker.’ ” He also says, “A writer should have the courage to show what most people are afraid to say.” Fonseca’s bitterly grim stories, mostly in the first person, show the skull beneath the skin in Rio’s violent world. Tough to read, they analyze Rio’s gratuitous criminality as a symptom of universal hatred among people of every class.

As mentioned in the newsletter, for the rest of the month The Taker is available through our website for only $12.00.