Ann Kjellberg—who has not only serves as literary executor for Joseph Brodsky, but has been an editor at The New York Review of Books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Artes, the journal of the Swedish Academy—recently launched a new journal called Little Star, featuring work from a host of interesting authors and a cool distribution method.
The first issue is now available and features work form Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Derek Walcott, Durs Grünbein, Mary Jo Salter, Padgett Powell, Lydia Davis, Tim Parks, and many more. What I think is particularly cool though is that you can either order the print edition for $10.95 plus shipping, or purchase the PDF version for $3.95. (I haven’t noticed if other magazines are doing things like this—great idea though and could really help expand the audience.)
Anyway, I recommend checking out their site and “liking” them on Facebook.
Also, and the primary reason for this post, you should check out their blog which includes an excerpt from Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities, one of my favorite books from the past months, and one which I wrote a lot about back some time ago. (Yes, I love relinking to my articles about drinking.)
Pilch is amazing, and in addition to The Mighty Angel and A Thousand Peaceful Cities, we’re going to be bringing out My First Suicide and Other Stories sometime next year.
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .