{"id":275716,"date":"2009-12-23T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/12\/23\/summer-2010-open-letter-catalog\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:41:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:41:08","slug":"summer-2010-open-letter-catalog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/12\/23\/summer-2010-open-letter-catalog\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer 2010 Open Letter Catalog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only seems appropriate that just before Christmas we should announce our summer<\/em> list of titles . . . You can click here<\/a> to download a pdf version of the new catalog (which contains excerpts from all the books), or, for those of you who are anti-pdf, the list below has the basic information for the next five Open Letter titles. <\/p>\n

All of these titles will be available through better bookstores everywhere and through the Open Letter website.<\/a> Additionally, you can subscribe<\/a> and receive a year’s worth of books (10 in total) for $100 (free shipping!). Or get a six-month subscription (5 books) for only $60 (again, with free shipping). <\/p>\n

Here are the titles from one of our best lists yet:<\/p>\n

Gasoline<\/em> by Quim Monz\u00f3<\/b><\/a> (excerpt<\/a>)
\ntranslated from the Catalan by Mary Ann Newman<\/p>\n

For the first time in his life, Heribert Juli\u00e1 is unable to paint. On the eve of an important gallery exhibition, for which he\u2019s created nothing, he\u2019s bored with life: he falls asleep while making love with his mistress, wanders from bar to bar, drinking whatever comes to his attention first, and meets the evidence of his wife Helena\u2019s infidelity with complete indifference. Humbert Herrera, an up-and-coming artist who can\u2019t stop creating, picks up the threads of Heribert\u2019s life, taking his wife, replacing him at the gallery, and pursuing his former mistress. Heribert is finally undone by a massive sculpture, while Humbert is planning the sculpture to end sculpture, the poem to end poetry, and the film to end film, all while mounting three simultaneous shows.<\/p>\n

A fun-house mirror through which he examines the creative process, the life and loves of artists, and the New York art scene, Gasoline<\/em> confirms Quim Monz\u00f3 as the foremost Catalan writer of his generation.<\/p>\n

A Thousand Peaceful Cities<\/em> by Jerzy Pilch<\/b><\/a> (excerpt<\/a>)
\ntranslated from the Polish by David Frick<\/p>\n

A comic gem, Jerzy Pilch\u2019s A Thousand Peaceful Cities<\/em> takes place in 1963, in the latter days of the Polish post-Stalinist \u201cthaw.\u201d The narrator, Jerzyk (\u201clittle Jerzy\u201d), is a teenager who is keenly interested in his father, a retired postal administrator, and his father\u2019s closest friend, Mr. Traba, a failed Lutheran clergyman, alcoholic, would-be Polish insurrectionist, and one of the wildest literary characters since Laurence Sterne\u2019s Uncle Toby. One drunken afternoon, Mr. Traba and the narrator\u2019s nameless father decide to take charge of their lives and do one final good turn for humanity: travel to distant Warsaw and assassinate the de facto Polish head of state, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers\u2019 Party, W\u0142adys\u0142aw Gomu\u0142ka\u2014assassinating Mao Tse-tung, after all, would be impractical. And they decide to involve Jerzyk in their scheme . . .<\/p>\n

The Private Lives of Trees<\/em> by Alejandro Zambra<\/b><\/a> (excerpt<\/a>)
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell<\/p>\n

The Private Lives of Trees<\/em> tells the story of a single night: a young professor of literature named Juli\u00e1n is reading to his step-daughter Daniela and nervously waiting for his wife Ver\u00f3nica to return from her art class. Each night, Juli\u00e1n has been improvising a story about trees to tell Daniela before she goes to sleep\u2014and each Sunday he works on a novel about a man tending to his bonsai\u2014but something about this night is different. As Juli\u00e1n becomes increasing concerned that Ver\u00f3nica won\u2019t return, he reflects on their life together in minute detail, and imagines what Daniela\u2014at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty years old, without a mother\u2014will think of his novel. <\/p>\n

Perhaps even more daring and dizzying than Zambra\u2019s magical Bonsai, The Private Lives of Trees<\/em> demands to be read in a single sitting, and it casts a spell that will bring you back to it again and again.<\/p>\n

Klausen<\/em> by Andreas Maier<\/b><\/a> (excerpt<\/a>)
\ntranslated from the German by Kenneth Northcott<\/p>\n

Nobody knows exactly what happened in the small town of Klausen, or rather, everyone knows: a bomb went off on the autobahn, or at a shack near the autobahn, or someone was shooting at the town from a bridge; it all stems from a fight over measuring noise pollution on the town square, or it was the work of eco-terrorists, or Italians. And while nobody knows who or what to blame\u2014although they\u2019re certainly uneasy about the Moroccan and Albanian immigrants who are squatting in an abandoned castle\u2014they all suspect that Josef Gasser, who spent several years away from Klausen, in Berlin, is behind it all. Only one thing is clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.<\/p>\n

In Klausen<\/em>, Andreas Maier has taken Thomas Bernhard\u2019s method\u2014the nested indirect speech, the repetition, the endless paragraph\u2014and pointed it at an entire town. A town where one confusion leads to the next, where everyone is living in a fog of rumor, but where everyone claims to know exactly what\u2019s going on, even if they\u2019ve changed their story several times.<\/p>\n

To Hell with Cronj\u00e9<\/em> by Ingrid Winterbach<\/b><\/a> (excerpt<\/a>)
\ntranslated from the Afrikaans by Elsa Silke<\/p>\n

Two scientists, Reitz Steyn and Ben Maritz, find themselves in a \u201ctransit camp for those temporarily and permanently unfit for battle\u201d during the Boer War. Captured on suspicion of desertion and treason\u2014during a trek across an unchanging desert of bushes, rocks, and ant hills to help transport a fellow-soldier, who has suffered debilitating shell-shock, to his mother\u2014they are forced to await the judgment of a General Bergh, unsure whether they are to be conscripted into Bergh\u2019s commando, allowed to continue their mission, or executed for treason. As the weeks pass, and the men\u2019s despair at ever returning to their families reaches its peak, they are sent on a bizarre mission . . .<\/p>\n

A South African Heart of Darkness<\/em>, Ingrid Winterbach\u2019s To Hell with Cronj\u00e9<\/em> is a poetic exploration of friendship and camaraderie, an eerie reflection on the futility of war, and a thought-provoking re-examination of the founding moments of the South African nation.<\/p>\n

As a special preview, coming up in the fall 2010 are: Mathias \u00c9nard’s Zone<\/em>, Juan Jos\u00e9 Saer’s Glosa<\/em>, Bragi \u00d3lafsson’s The Ambassadors<\/em>, and a couple more titles we’re still working on. More information as soon as we have it . . . <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only seems appropriate that just before Christmas we should announce our summer list of titles . . . You can click here to download a pdf version of the new catalog (which contains excerpts from all the books), or, for those of you who are anti-pdf, the list below has the basic information for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[9446,29696,366,27236,29666,29646,10966,11786,29706,29686,29636,9476,1866,2376,29676,3056,1646,29656],"class_list":["post-275716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alejandro-zambra","tag-andreas-maier","tag-catalan-literature","tag-chilean-literature","tag-david-frick","tag-gasoline","tag-german","tag-jerzy-pilch","tag-kenneth-northcott","tag-klausen","tag-mary-ann-newman","tag-megan-mcdowell","tag-open-letter","tag-polish-literature","tag-private-lives-of-trees","tag-quim-monzo","tag-review","tag-thousand-peaceful-cities"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322786,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275716\/revisions\/322786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}