{"id":278736,"date":"2010-06-28T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/06\/28\/the-winter-2010-open-letter-catalog\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:31:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:31:59","slug":"the-winter-2010-open-letter-catalog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/06\/28\/the-winter-2010-open-letter-catalog\/","title":{"rendered":"The Winter 2010 Open Letter Catalog"},"content":{"rendered":"

As some people have noticed, our new Winter 2010 catalog<\/a> is now available and listed on the Open Letter website.<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Totally biased, but I think this is one of our strongest seasons yet, what with Zone<\/em>, the new Bragi Olafsson novel, the first of a million or so Juan Jose Saer books (one of my absolute favorites! If you can’t wait for our book, check out The Event<\/em> from Serpent’s Tail—absolutely incredible), and our first poetry title . . . You can download a pdf of the catalog by clicking the link above, but here are links to each of the books, along with their respective copy:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington<\/em><\/a> by Juan Jose Saer. Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Argentina)<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s October 1960, say, or 1961, in a seaside Argentinian city named Santa Fe, and The Mathematician\u2014wealthy, elegant, educated, dressed from head to toe in white\u2014is just back from a grand tour of Europe. He\u2019s on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into \u00c1ngel Leto, a relative newcomer to Rosario who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work.<\/p>\n

One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife\u2019s assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega\u2019s sixty-fifth birthday\u2014a party neither of them attended.<\/p>\n

Saer\u2019s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington<\/em> is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Zone<\/em><\/a> by Mathias Enard. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell. (France)<\/b><\/p>\n

Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French-born Croat who has been working for the French Intelligence Services for fifteen years, is traveling by train from Milan to Rome. He\u2019s carrying a briefcase whose contents he\u2019s selling to a representative from the Vatican; the briefcase contains a wealth of information about the violent history of the Zone\u2014the lands of the Mediterranean basin, Spain, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, that have become Mirkovic\u2019s specialty.<\/p>\n

Over the course of a single night, Mirkovic visits the sites of these tragedies in his memory and recalls the damage that his own participation in that violence\u2014as a soldier fighting for Croatia during the Balkan Wars\u2014has wreaked in his own life. Mirkovic hopes that this night will be his last in the Zone, that this journey will expiate his sins, and that he can disappear with Sashka, the only woman he hasn\u2019t abandoned, forever . . .<\/p>\n

One of the truly original books of the decade\u2014and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence\u2014Mathias \u00c9nard\u2019s Zone<\/em> provides an extraordinary and panoramic view of the turmoil that has long deviled the shores of the Mediterranean. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda<\/em>.<\/a> Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. (Catalonia)<\/b><\/p>\n

Collected here are thirty-one of Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda\u2019s most moving and challenging stories, presented in chronological order of their publication from three of Rodoreda\u2019s most beloved short story collections: Twenty-Two Stories<\/em>, It Seemed Like Silk and Other Stories<\/em>, and My Christina and Other Stories<\/em>. These stories capture Rodoreda\u2019s full range of expression, from quiet literary realism to fragmentary impressionism to dark symbolism. Few writers have captured so clearly, or explored so deeply, the lives of women who are stuck somewhere between senseless modernity and suffocating tradition\u2014Rodoreda\u2019s \u201cwomen are notable for their almost pathological lack of volition, but also for their acute sensitivity, a nearly painful awareness of beauty\u201d (Natasha Wimmer). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Ambassador<\/em><\/a> by Bragi Olafsson. Translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith. (Iceland)<\/b><\/p>\n

Sturla J\u00f3n J\u00f3nsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, appointed, as he sees it, as the official representative of the people of Iceland to the field of poetry. His latest poetry collection, published on the eve of his trip to Vilnius, is about to cause some controversy in his home country\u2014Sturla is publicly accused of having stolen the poems from his long-dead cousin, J\u00f3nas.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Sturla\u2019s new overcoat, the first expensive item of clothing he has ever purchased, which causes him no end of trouble. And the article he wrote for a literary journal, which points out the stupidity of literary festivals and declares the end of his career as a poet. Sturla has a lot to deal with, and that\u2019s not counting his estranged wife and their five children, nor the increasingly bizarre experiences and characters he\u2019s forced to confront at the festival in Vilnius . . .<\/p>\n

Bragi \u00d3lafsson\u2019s The Ambassador<\/em> is a quirky novel that\u2019s filled with insightful and wry observations about aging, family, love, and the mysteries of the hazelnut. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lodgings<\/em><\/a> by Andrzej Sosnowski. Translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. (Poland)<\/b><\/p>\n

Lodgings<\/em> is the first representative selection of Sosnowski\u2019s work available in English. Spanning his entire career, from the publication of Life in Korea in 1992 to his newest poems, this is a book whose approach to language, literature, and the representation of experience is simultaneously resonant and strange\u2014a cocktail party where lowlifes and sophisticates hobnob with French theorists and British glam rockers, unsettling us with the hard accuracy of their pronouncements.<\/p>\n

One of the foremost Polish poets of his generation, Andrzej Sosnowski\u2019s work demonstrates a dazzling range of influences and echoes, from Ronald Firbank and Raymond Roussel to John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop. Also an influential editor and critic, he has received most of the literary honors available to poets in Poland, including the prestigious Silesius Prize. <\/p>\n

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

As some people have noticed, our new Winter 2010 catalog is now available and listed on the Open Letter website.. Totally biased, but I think this is one of our strongest seasons yet, what with Zone, the new Bragi Olafsson novel, the first of a million or so Juan Jose Saer books (one of my […]<\/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":[33466,33476,12996,366,15316,20306,33436,33456,18236,21176,16976,4126,1866,33486,33446,32806,16966],"class_list":["post-278736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-andrzej-sosnowski","tag-benjamin-paloff","tag-bragi-olafsson","tag-catalan-literature","tag-charlotte-mandell","tag-french-fiction","tag-icelandic-fiction","tag-lodgings","tag-lytton-smith","tag-martha-tennent","tag-mathias-enard","tag-merce-rodoreda","tag-open-letter","tag-pol","tag-selected-stories-of-merce-rodoreda","tag-the-ambassador","tag-zone"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278736","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=278736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348006,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278736\/revisions\/348006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}