Böcker i World Republic of Letters-serien

This grand novel encompasses nearly all of Yugoslavia's tumultuous twentieth century, from the decline of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires through two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the nation, and the terror of the shelling of Dubrovnik. Tackling universal themes on a human scale, master storyteller Miljenko Jergovic traces one Yugoslavian family's tale as history irresistibly casts the fates of five generations. What is it to live a life whose circumstances are driven by history? Jergovic investigates the experiences of a compelling heroine, Regina Delavale, and her many family members and neighbors. Telling Regina's story in reverse chronology, the author proceeds from her final days in 2002 to her birth in 1905, encountering along the way such traumas as atrocities committed by Nazi Ustashe Croats and the death of Tito. Lyrically written and unhesitatingly told, The Walnut Mansion may be read as an allegory of the tragedy of Yugoslavia's tormented twentieth century.

A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojass Celestina is a classic of Spanish literature. Second only to Don Quixote in its cultural importance, Rojass dramatic dialogue presents the elaborate tale of a star-crossed courtship between the young nobleman Calisto and the beautiful maiden Melibea in fifteenth-century Spain. Their unforgettable saga plays out in vibrant exchanges, presented here in a brilliant new translation by award-winning translator Margaret Sayers Peden. After a chance encounter with Melibea leaves Calisto entranced by her charms, he enlists the services of Celestina, an aged prostitute, madam, and procuress, to arrange another meeting. She promptly seizes control of the affair, guiding it through a series of mishaps before it meets its tragic end. At times a comic character and at others a self-assertive promoter of womens sexual license, Celestina is an inimitable personality with a surprisingly modern consciousness, certain to be relished by a new generation of readers.

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators Regarded as one of Europe's great modernists, Pirandello was also a master storyteller, a fine observer of the drama of daily life with a remarkable sense of the crushing burdens of class, gender, and social conventions. Set in the author's birthplace of Sicily, where the arid terrain and isolated villages map the fragile interior world of his characters, and in Rome, where modern life threatens centuries-old traditions, these original stories are sun baked with the deep lore of Italian folktales. In "The Jar," a broken earthenware pot pits its owner, a quarrelsome landholder, against a clever inventor of a mysterious glue. "The Dearly Departed" tells the story of a young widow and her new husband on their honeymoon, haunted at every turn by the sly visage of the deceased. The scorned lover, the despondent widow, the intransigent bureaucrat, the wretched peasant--Pirandello's characters expose the human condition in all its fatalism, injustice, and raw beauty. For lovers of Calvino and Pasolini, these picturesque stories preserve a memory of an Italy long gone, but one whose recurring concerns still speak to us today.

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature

"Originally published as La punition, copyright à âEditions Gallimard, Paris, 2018."--Title page verso.

"Now available in English for the first time, Austrian satirist and polemicist Karl Kraus's Third Walpurgis Night was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kèosel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime's corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to Kraus that, in his indictment of Nazism, "You have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language." This masterful translation, by the prizewinning translators of Kraus's The Last Days of Mankind, aims for clarity where Kraus had good reason to be cautious and obscure"--

A riveting English translation the Irish classic tale of heartache, death, and loneliness by the beloved author of The Dirty Dust

"Originally published as Libret de famille. A Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 1977."--Title page verso.

"Originally published as Corps daesirable. Copyright AZulma, 2015" -- Title page verso.

"A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book"--Title page.

A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout history

Now available in paperback, the original English-language translation of O Cadhain's raucous masterpiece

Tolea, an eccentric middle-aged intellectual who has been dismissed from his job as a high school teacher on "moral grounds", is investigating his father's death forty years after the fact, and is drawn into a web of suspicion and black humour.