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July 2010The Private Lives of Trees tells the story of a single night: a young professor of literature named Julián is reading to his step-daughter Daniela and nervously waiting for his wife Verónica to return from her art class. As Julián becomes increasing concerned that Verónica won’t return, he reflects on their life together in minute detail, and imagines what Daniela—at twenty, at twenty-five, at thirty years old, without a mother—will think of his novel.
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August 2010Nobody 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. Only one thing is clear: Klausen was now a crime scene.
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September 2010Two scientists, Reitz Steyn and Ben Maritz, find themselves in a “transit camp for those temporarily and permanently unfit for battle” during the Boer War. Unsure whether they are to be conscripted into a commando, allowed to continue their mission, or executed for treason, the men despair at ever returning to their families, until they are sent on a bizarre mission...
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October 2010Sturla Jón Jónsson, the fifty-something building superintendent and sometimes poet, has been invited to a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, and his latest poetry collection, published on the eve of his trip to Vilnius, is about to cause some controversy in his home country—Sturla is publicly accused of having stolen the poems from his long-dead cousin, Jónas.
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November 2010Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington 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.
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Little Star excerpts A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES by Jerzy Pilch
“Little Star was thrilled to encounter A Thousand Peaceful Cities, a mind-bending romp by Polish journalist and novelist Jerzy Pilch, miraculously translated by David Frick and published this month by Open Letter. We here with pleasure offer a few choice morsels . . .”
26 July 10 | More...
Barnes & Noble Review features A THOUSAND PEACEFUL CITIES by Jerzy Pilch
“Pilch’s antic sensibility confirms that he is the compatriot of Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish maestro of absurdist pranks. But readers with a taste for the fermented Irish blarney of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and John Kennedy Toole might also savor Pilch . . .”
20 July 10 | More...
Newcity reviews THE PRIVATE LIVES OF TREES by Alejandro Zambra
“Zambra’s sentences string together like pearls, each of them perfect, fragile, and self-contained. Often, they are startlingly beautiful in their careful starkness, or hilariously deadpan . . .”
20 July 10 | More...
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In some ways, the books we publish are like having children--the newest one always smells the best, ... - English PEN, Writers in Translation
This year, Writers in Translation celebrates its fifth anniversary with the publication of an anthol...