Böcker utgivna av Open Letter

A writer about to give birth investigates the story behind a mother she knows who has just killed her own twins.

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface-subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented-or not-by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes-both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girla choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women.In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them.A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.

"e;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."e;Barnes & Noble ReviewNeither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddles the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character's lyrical ode to the fate of his father's perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher's desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator's excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.Jerzy Pilch is one of Poland's most important contemporary writers and journalists. In addition to his long-running satirical newspaper column, Pilch has published several novels, and has been nominated for Poland's prestigious NIKE Literary Award four times; he finally won the Award in 2001 for The Mighty Angel. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.David Frick is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tassili, Goodmann, and Myriam. Two men and a woman dressed in rags—former poets, and former members of a dystopian military service—walk the bardo, the dark afterlife between death and rebirth. The road is monotonous and seemingly endless. To pass the time, they decide to tell each other stories: bizarre anecdotes set in a post-apocalyptic world, replete with mutant creatures, Buddhist monks, and ruthless killers. The result is a mysterious, dreamlike series of events, trapped outside of time as we know it, where all the rules of narrative are upended and remade.Lutz Bassmann is one of the heteronyms of French author Antoine Volodine. Black Village gives readers of science fiction and experimental literature another exciting look into "e;post-exoticism,"e; one of the most ambitious and original projects in contemporary literature.

In exile from his home country of Peru, Ricardo Funes embodies the ultimate starving artist. Fired from almost every job he's held-usually for paying more attention to literature than work-he sets himself up in a rundown shack where he works on writing stories to enter in regional contests across Spain, and foisting his judgements about literature on anyone who will listen as one of the last remaining members of the "e;negacionismo"e; poetry movement. Completely dedicated to an unwavering belief in his own art, Funes struggles in anonymity until he achieves unbridled success with The Aztec and becomes a legend . . . at least for a moment. Diagnosed with lung cancer a few years later, Funes will only be able to enjoy his newfound attention for a short time.Told through the voices of Funes's best friend, his wife, and himself, Last Words on Earth looks at the price-and haphazard nature-of fame through the lens of a Bolano-esque writer who persevered just long enough to be transformed out of obscurity into being a literary legend right at the end of his life.

Eleven Sooty Dreams could also have been called Meeting at Bolcho Pride, or Fire Deep Down Below, or Station in the Heart of the Flames, or Granny Holgolde's Stories, or The Liars' Bridge, or Eve of Battle After the Defeat, or Never Without My Embers, or Good-Bye to Death, or Fire Stories, or Terminal Childhoods, or Granny Holgolde's Childish Sickness, or Even the Nursing Home Is in the Line of Fire.In Manuela Draeger's poetic 'post-exotic' novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year's Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde's stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila Zykina and her melancholic, simple songs of unspeakable beauty. They remember the half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death, and as the flames get higher they hope to become them.Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children's tales, that is far less visible in the other authors' works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.

A faux-historical romp about a real-life conquistador who founded New Catalonia in the wilds of Venezuela.

The previously untold story of the plot to kick Michel Foucault out of Poland in the 1950s.

"e;When you live in an adopted country, when you're an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death."e;Cars on Fire, Monica Ramon Rios's electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters-the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student-whose 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's La Zona Central, the stories in Cars on Fire 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-xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world-that shape life in Chile and the United States.

A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on--bank employees are stuffing their pockets with money every day, only to have it taken every evening by the security guards who search the employees and confiscate the cash. But, there's a discrepancy between what is being confiscated and what is being returned to the bank, and our hero is beginning to fear that a secret circulation is developing, one that could undermine the whole economy. Meanwhile, the clerk and his family begin to keep guinea pigs, and at night, when everyone is asleep, our hero begins to conduct experiments with the pets, teaching them tricks, testing their intelligence and endurance, and using some rather questionable methods to encourage the animals to befriend him. Ludvi k Vaculi k's The Guinea Pigs is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.

At the start of The Translator''s Bride, the Translator''s bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to publish a book, and buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator''s mind as he walks around an unnamed city full of idiots, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren''t paying him, he''s trying to survive a woman''s unwanted advances, and he''s trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions - all while he struggles with his own angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Translated by the author himself, The Translator''s bride is a darkly funny meditation on life and language, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace. An incredible ride, whether you''re a translator or not.

A seductive novel of an illicit love affair and one of those summers that changes everyone's life forever.

First English-language story collection from one of Korea's most exciting young writers.

"e;Irreducible to any single literary genre, the Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary."e;-Nicholas Hauck, Music & LiteratureOne of Volodine's funniest books, Bardo or Not Bardo takes place in his universe of failed revolutions, radical shamanism, and off-kilter nomenclature.In each of these seven vignettes, someone dies and has to make his way through the Tibetan afterlife, also known as the Bardo. In the Bardo, souls wander for forty-nine days before being reborn, helped along on their journey by the teachings of the Book of the Dead.Unfortunately, Volodine's characters bungle their chances at enlightenment, with the recently dead choosing to waste away their afterlife sleeping, or choosing to be reborn as an insignificant spider. The still-living aren't much better off, making a mess of things in their own ways, such as erroneously reciting a Tibetan cookbook to a lost comrade instead of the holy book.Once again, Volodine has demonstrated his range and ambition, crafting a moving, hysterical work about transformations and the power of the book.Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French writer who has published twenty books under this name, several of which are available in English translation, such as Minor Angels, and Writers. He also publishes under the names Lutz Bassmann and Manuela Draeger.J. T. Mahany is a graduate of the Master of Arts in Literary Translation Studies program at the University of Rochester and is currently studying for his MFA at the University of Arkansas.

The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms. As she returns home to visit her mother who is dying of cancer, the narrator recounts a brief, intense love affair, as well as the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. The book's striking imagery and magnificent prose underpin its principal theme: the jarring contrast between the recollection of stability - your parents, your childhood home, your love - and the continual endings that we experience throughout our lives. A true-to-life, deeply poetic novel that works in the same vein as Anne Carson, One of Us Is Sleeping has won Klougart countless accolades and award nominations-including the Readers' Book Award-securing her place as a major new voice in world literature.

Featured on Jeff VanderMeer's "e;Epic List of Favorite Books Read in 2015"e;"e;Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels."e;Gabriel Garca Marquez"e;Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic circumstances . . . an almost voluptuous vulnerability."e;Natasha Wimmer, The Nation"e;It is a total mystery to me why [Rodoreda] isn't widely worshipped; along with Willa Cather, she's on my list of authors whose works I intend to have read all of before I die. Tremendous, tremendous writer."e;John Darnielle, The Mountain GoatsDespite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Merc Rodoreda published during her lifetime.We first meet its young protagonist, Adri Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.Merc Rodoreda (19081983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short storiesTwenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Seathat would eventually make her internationally famous.Maruxa Relao is a journalist and translator based in Barcelona. She has worked as a translator for The Wall Street Journal, a writer for NY1, and wrote articles for the New York Daily News, Newsday, and New York magazine, among other publications.Martha Tennent was born in the U.S, but has lived most of her life in Barcelona where she served as founding dean of the School of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vic. She translates from Spanish and Catalan, and received an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work on Rodoreda.