Tarjei Vesaas THE BIRDS Translated from the Norwegian by Michael Barnes & Torbjørn Støverud archipelago books archipelagofall 2015 / spring books 2016 archipelago books fall 2015 /spring 2016 frontlist The Folly / Ivan Vladislavi´c . 2 Private Life / Josep Maria de Sagarra / Mary Ann Newman . 4 Tristano Dies: A Life / Antonio Tabucchi / Elizabeth Harris . 6 A General Theory of Oblivion / José Eduardo Agualusa / Daniel Hahn . 8 Broken Mirrors / Elias Khoury / Humphrey Davies . 10 Absolute Solitude / Dulce María Loynaz / James O’Connor . 12 The Child Poet / Homero Aridjis / Chloe Aridjis . 14 Newcomers / Lojze Kovacˇicˇ / Michael Biggins . 16 The Birds / Tarjei Vesaas / Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes . 18 Distant Light / Antonio Moresco / Richard Dixon . 20 Something Will Happen, You’ll See / Christos Ikonomou / Karen Emmerich . .22 My Struggle: Book Five / Karl Ove Knausgaard / Don Bartlett . 24 Wayward Heroes / Halldór Laxness / Philip Roughton . 26 recently published . 28 backlist . 40 forthcoming . 72 subscribing to archipelago books . 74 how to donate to archipelago books . 74 individual orders . 75 donors . 76 board of directors, advisory board, & staff . 80 In the tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the imagination . —André Brink Vladislavi´c is a rare, brilliant writer . His work eschews all cant . Its sheer verve, the way it burrows beneath ossified forms of writing, its discipline and the distance it places between itself and the jaded preoccupations of local fiction, distinguish it . —Sunday Times (South Africa) Vladislavi´c’s cryptic, haunting tale echoes Jorge Luís Borges and David Lynch, drawing readers into its strange depths . —Publishers Weekly The Folly is mysterious, lyrical, and wickedly funny – a masterful novel about loving and fearing your neighbor . —Katie Kitamura 2 The Folly A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas by household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with “a plan ”. Fash- ioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas’s help in clearing ivan vladislavic´ the land and planning his new home . Slowly but inevitably, the stranger’s charm and the novel’s richly inventive language draw Malgas and the reader in . Then, just as quietly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air . Grimly humorous and play- fully serious, Vladislavi´c’s classic first novel is a comic and philosophical masterpiece . IVAN VLADISLAVIC´ was born in Pretoria in 1957 and lives in Johannesburg . His September 2015 books include The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View, Double Negative, and 160 pages Flashback Hotel . In 2006, he published Johannesburg: A Portrait with Keys . He has $16 trade paperback edited and contributed to books on architecture and art, and has collaborated with visual artists . Vladislavi´c has received the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton ISBN: 978-0-914671-7-4 Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and, most recently, a 2015 Windham E-ISBN: 978-0-914671-8-1 fiction Campbell Prize for fiction . archipelago books www.archipelagobooks.org Private Life is a delightful, intelligent, and exciting novel, the best ever written about Barcelona . One of the high points of 20th century Catalan and European literature, it is an unflinching portrait of the social mores of the high and low classes, the desire to be someone, and the destruction of a way of life . —Quim Monzó Expect murder, revenge, and fallings in and out of love . Barcelona between the wars is full of tawdry vitality, much like the novel itself . —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into . Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats – and how they scheme to conceal them – fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail . The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 192 . The 4 Private Life 1960s edition was bowdlerized by Franco’s censors . Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this 5 by translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the josep maria de sagarra English-speaking public . Considered a Catalan Balzac, JOSEP MARIA DE SAGARRA – journalist, theater translated from the Catalan by critic, translator, poet, essayist, and novelist – was a force of nature and one of the most revered and loved voices of Catalan literature . His translated works include mary ann newman Dante’s Divine Comedy and plays by Shakespeare, Molière, and Gogol . He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies, the Academy of Letters, the General September 2015 Council of Authors of Spain, and the council of the Grand Cross of the Civil Order 00 pages of Alfonso X the Wise . $18 trade paperback MARY ANN NEWMAN is the former Director of the Catalan Center at New York ISBN: 978-0-914671-26-8 University, which was an affiliate of the Institut Ramon Llull . She is a translator, edi- E-ISBN: 978-0-914671-27-5 tor, and writer on Catalan culture . In addition to Sagarra, she has translated Xavier fiction Rubert de Ventós, Quim Monzó, and Josep Carner, among others . Newman is the Executive Director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the U .S . archipelago books www.archipelagobooks.org A powerfully engaging and beautifully written novel that may come in time to rank as one of this author’s best . —Charles Klopp, World Literature Today Tabucchi’s work has an almost palpable sympathy for the oppressed . —The New York Times It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying . A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life… you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away ”. Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major achievements, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero . ANTONIO TABUCCHI was born in Pisa in 194 and died in Lisbon in 2012 . A master of short fiction, he won the Prix Médicis Étranger forIndian Nocturne, the Italian PEN Prize for Requiem: A Hallucination, the Aristeion European Literature 6 Tristano Dies: A Life 7 Prize for Pereira Declares, and was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the by French Government . Together with his wife, Maria José de Lancastre, Tabucchi translated much of the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian . Tabucchi’s works include antonio tabucchi Time Ages in a Hurry, The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, The Woman of Porto Pim, Pereira Maintains, Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, Requiem, Letter from translated from the Italian by Casablanca, and The Edge of the Horizon. elizabeth harris ELIZABETH HARRIS has translated Mario Rigoni Stern (Giacomo’s Seasons) and Giulio Mozzi (This Is the Garden) . Her translations appear in numerous literary jour- September 2015 nals and in anthologies . For Tristano Dies, she received a 201 PEN/Heim Translation 160 pages Fund grant . She teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota . $18 trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-914671-24-4 E-ISBN: 978-0-914671-25-1 fiction archipelago books www.archipelagobooks.org By the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Without doubt one of the most important Portuguese-language writers of his generation . —António Lobo Antunes Agualusa has a touch and tone of such lyrical and rhythmic grace that it can make the worst horrors almost bearable . — Boyd Tonkin, The Independent On the eve of Angolan independence, an agoraphobic woman bricks herself into her Luandan apartment for 0 years, living off vegetables and pigeons, burning her fur- niture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls . Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those Ludo sees from her window . The outside world slowly seeps into her life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers, A General Theory and a note attached to a bird’s foot . One day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace, and friendship grows . 8 9 of Oblivion JOSÉ EDUARDO AGUALUSA, a writer and journalist, is one of the leading liter- by ary voices in Angola and the Portuguese language today . Also available in English are: Creole (2002), winner of the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature; The Book of josé eduardo agualusa Chameleons (2007), which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; My Father’s Wives (2008), and Rainy Season (2009) . He lives in Angola, Brazil, and Portugal . translated from the Portuguese by DANIEL HAHN is the author of a number of works of non-fiction, includingThe daniel hahn Tower Menagerie and The Ultimate Book Guide, a series of reading guides for youth, the first volume of which won the Blue Peter Book Award . He has also translated the December 2015 work of José Luís Peixoto, Philippe Claudel, María Dueñas, José Saramago, Eduardo 250 pages Halfon, Gonçalo M . Tavares, and Corsino Fortes, among others . A former chair of $18 trade paperback the UK’s Translators Association, he is currently National Programme Director of ISBN: 978-0-914671- 1 - 2 the British Centre for Literary Translation . E-ISBN: 978-0-914671-2-9 fiction archipelago books www.archipelagobooks.org Khoury’s capacious and entrancing novel, masterfully translated by the award-winning Humphrey Davies, is an extraordinary achievement . —Malcolm Forbes, The National Khoury is a writer of panoramic scope and ambition, and Broken Mirrors is rich with sly ironies, incisive political observations, and a cosmopolitan array of ideas and literary allusions .