{"id":425352,"date":"2019-09-04T12:12:27","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T16:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=425352"},"modified":"2019-09-04T12:12:27","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T16:12:27","slug":"flash-sale-on-open-letter-preorders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/09\/04\/flash-sale-on-open-letter-preorders\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash Sale on Open Letter Preorders!"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a few different reasons\u2014mainly that I wasn’t able to get the new excerpt from Sara Mesa’s Four by Four\u00a0<\/em>online until the WITMonth discount code had expired, but also to celebrate The Dreamed Part <\/em>being on Kirkus<\/em>‘s list of “30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books<\/a>“\u2014we’ve decided to have a flash sale on\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>of our forthcoming titles.<\/p>\n

Between now and midnight on Sunday, September 15th, you can get 40% off of all ten forthcoming Open Letter titles<\/a> by using the code PREORDER at checkout.<\/p>\n

(Five of these are written by women, and two of the other five are translated by women, so think of this as a sort of general statement that promoting Women in Translation shouldn’t be limited to a single month.)<\/p>\n

Here are the titles included in the offer:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Garden by the Sea<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda, translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Rela\u00f1o and Martha Tennent (Feb 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The novel that defined Merc\u00e8 Rodoreda\u2019s most prolific period is finally available in English for the first time. Set in 1920s Spain,\u00a0Garden by the Sea<\/i>takes place over six summers at a villa by the sea inhabited by a young couple and their beautiful, rich, joyous friends. They swim, drink, tease each other, and fully enjoy themselves. All the while, the guests are observed by the villa\u2019s gardener, a widow who\u2019s been tending the garden for several decades. As the true protagonist of the novel, we get to see the dissolution of these magical summers through his eyes, as a sense of darkness and ending creeps in, precipitated by the construction of a new, larger, more glamorous villa next door. (Read an excerpt.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bluebeard’s First Wife<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Ha Seong-nan, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (June 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in\u00a0Bluebeard\u2019s First Wife<\/em>. A woman spends a night with her fianc\u00e9 and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high school. A man grows increasingly agitated by the apartment noise made by a young family living upstairs and arouses the suspicion of his own wife when the neighbors meet a string of unlucky incidents. A couple moves into a picture-perfect country house, but when their new dog is stolen, they become obsessed with finding the thief, and in the process, neglect their child. Ha\u2019s paranoia-inducing, heart-quickening stories will have you reconsidering your own neighbors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Dreamed Part <\/em><\/a>by Rodrigo Fresan, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Nov 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Following his failure to break into the Hadron Collider and merge with the so-called \u201cGod particle,\u201d The Writer from\u00a0The Invented Part<\/i>\u00a0can no longer write or sleep. Instead, he lies awake, imagining and reimagining key moments of his life, spinning out a series of insomniac visions every bit as thought-provoking as they are dreamlike. A mysterious foundation dedicated to preserving dreams, suddenly invaluable in the wake of the dream-eradicating White Plague; a psycho-lyrical-photophobic terrorist; an electric and mercurial lullaby; three lunatic sisters (and an eclipsed brother) who write from the darkest side of the most wuthering lunar heights; a hallucinating prisoner and a hallucinatory family; a genius addicted to butterflies and an FBI agent addicted to that genius; a looney and lysergic uncle and parents who model but are not model parents; a revolutionary staging of Shakespeare for the children of chic guerrillas; a city of sleepless bookshops; and a writer who might be 100 years old. Or not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Four by Four<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore (May 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Set entirely at Wybrany College\u2014a school where the wealthy keep their kids safe from the chaos erupting in the cities\u2014Four by Four<\/em>\u00a0is a novel of insinuation and gossip, in which the truth about Wybrany\u2019s \u201cprogram\u201d is always palpable, but never explicit. The mysteries populating the novel open with the disappearance of one of the \u201cspecial,\u201d scholarship students. As the first part unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not well in Wybrany, and that something more sordid lurks beneath the surface.<\/p>\n

In the second part\u2014a self-indulgent, wry diary written by an imposter who has infiltrated the school as a substitute teacher\u2014the eerie sense of what\u2019s happening in this space removed from society, becomes more acute and potentially sinister.<\/p>\n

An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless\u2014and the repetition of these patterns\u2014Mesa\u2019s “sophisticated nightmare” calls to mind great works of gothic literature (think Shirley Jackson) and social thrillers to create a unique, unsettling view of freedom and how a fear of the outside world can create monsters. (Read a sample.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Teacher<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Michal Ben-Naftali, translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir (Jan 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

No one knew the story of Elsa Weiss. She was a respected English teacher at a Tel Aviv high school, but she remained aloof and never tried to befriend her students. No one ever encountered her outside of school hours. She was a riddle, and yet the students sensed that they were all she had. When Elsa killed herself by jumping off the roof of her apartment building, she remained as unknown as she had been during her life. Thirty years later, the narrator of the novel, one of her students, decides to solve the riddle of Elsa Weiss. Expertly dovetailing explosive historical material with flights of imagination, the novel explores the impact of survivor\u2019s guilt and traces the footprints of a Holocaust survivor who did her utmost to leave no trace. (Read an excerpt.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cars on Fire<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by M\u00f3nica Ram\u00f3n R\u00edos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (Apr 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you live in an adopted country, when you\u2019re an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Cars on Fire<\/em>, M\u00f3nica Ram\u00f3n R\u00edos\u2019s electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of characters\u2014the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student\u2014whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Rios offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile\u2019s La Zona Central, the stories in\u00a0Cars on Fire<\/em> offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces\u2014xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world\u2014that shape life in Chile and the United States. (Read an excerpt.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Incompletes<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Sept 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cNow I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Incompletes<\/i>\u00a0begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day\u2019s events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour\u2014from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator\u2019s transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix\u2019s stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel\u2019s labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city\u2019s public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions.<\/p>\n

Each character carries within them a secret that they don\u2019t quite understand\u2014a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky.\u00a0The Incompletes<\/i>\u00a0is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Subimal Misra, translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy (July 2020)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Godard of literature.\u201d\u2014Jean-Luc Godard<\/strong><\/p>\n

Subimal Misra\u2014anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer\u2014is one of India’s greatest living writers. This collection of two “anti-novels” is the first of his works to appear in the U.S. “This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale” is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker’s strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant. “When Color Is a Warning Sign” goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretense of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc. Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Why, Why, Why?<\/em><\/a> by Quim Monz\u00f3, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush (Oct 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

A man tries to teach a stone to speak through sheer force of will. An engaged couple makes a pact to never lie, and their union dissolves immediately. Over the course of a phone call, a man learns that his girlfriend died months ago, and that he\u2019s been unknowingly seeing her twin sister. Prince Charming marries Cinderella, but then has an affair with the evil stepsisters. A psychopath’s liver explodes after a night of heavy drinking, but instead of killing him, it allows him to be a better drinker.<\/p>\n

These, and many more, strange and twisted characters populate the pages of\u00a0Why, Why, Why?<\/i>, a delectable brew of dark humor and biting satire on human relationships. In these stories, the characters don\u2019t start falling until they know they\u2019re off the cliff. By then, rock bottom isn\u2019t a long way off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Christiane Marks (Dec 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s fifty-five\u00a0Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em>\u00a0were written over a few days in an astonishing burst of inspiration. Described by Rilke himself as \u201ca spontaneous inner dictation,\u201d the sequence is among the most famous works of modernist literature, and Christiane Marks\u2019s fresh new translations succeed in evoking Rilke\u2019s music\u2014often sacrificed in translation\u2014opening a new window on these poems, for old and new Rilke lovers alike. The result of nearly two decades of memorization, research, and fine-tuning, Marks\u2019s translations, only the second by a woman and the first by a native German speaker, recapture Rilke\u2019s astonishingly contemporary, often colloquial style.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a few different reasons\u2014mainly that I wasn’t able to get the new excerpt from Sara Mesa’s Four by Four\u00a0online until the WITMonth discount code had expired, but also to celebrate The Dreamed Part being on Kirkus‘s list of “30 Most Anticipated Fiction Books“\u2014we’ve decided to have a flash sale on\u00a0all\u00a0of our forthcoming titles. Between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":425402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-425352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425352","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=425352"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":425432,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425352\/revisions\/425432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}