In the Forest of the Metropoles, Karl-Markus Gauß
Seagull Books, December 2024
The Austrian writer Karl-Markus Gauß has distinguished himself as the foremost literary cartographer of a vanishing Europe. His wide-ranging essays chronicle the diversity and wealth of languages and cultures, predominantly in Eastern Europe, that have played a formative role in shaping contemporary European identities but now risk being forgotten.
Gauß’s lodestars are small but cosmopolitan towns on the periphery, such as Slaghenaufi, Vacaresti, Fontevraud, Dragatus, Vrzdenec and Sélestat. In these far-flung towns, Gauß assembles a canon of overlooked humanists, expelled or extinguished by political and historical forces that swept the continent. With such figures as Janus Pannonius, aka Ivan Česmički, a fifteenth-century “Italian scholar, Croatian humanist, Hungarian bishop, Austrian writer and outlaw refugee” to the exceptional twentieth-century Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon, Gauß tracks the desire to make familiar “a European culture on the same level as that of classical Greece,” a desire repeatedly thwarted both by international political movements and surges of nationalism.
A Herodotus of Mitteleuropa, cultural historian Karl-Markus Gauß is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the breadth and complexities of cultures and societies in Europe before, during, and after its decades of division in the twentieth century. His books in general, but In the Forest of the Metropoles in particular, are animated by the conviction that it is necessary to understand a region’s traditions and history to understand its place in the world at present. This view is central to the evolving idea of Europe as a whole and the European Union in particular: Gauß assembles here a study of figures who pursued in their lives and works the ideal of a progressive, enlightened, diverse, and unified Europe.
Praise for Karl-Markus Gauß
The jury for the 2018 Jean Améry Essay Prize praised Gauß as “a writer, who takes the idea of a borderless Europe literally and crosses imaginary borders between East and West with consummate ease in order to explore a continent that is still unknown to most of us. In his essays . . . he brings the margins to the center of attention . . . subjects reality to an analysis both critical and benevolent and traces the continued ramifications of traditions and contradictions. In doing so, he demonstrates that the wealth of our continent lies in its multiplicity.”
‘The Cemetery Goer’ a profile of KMGauß by Walter Grünzweig in The European Review of Books
Nevermore, Cécile Wajsbrot
Seagull Books, November 2024
Cécile Wajsbrot’s novel, Nevermore, is a meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers. An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the ‘Time Passes’ section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city to which the writer has no connections and where neither her own language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life that allows her to immerse herself more profoundly in this prose-poem of ephemerality.
The narrator delves into phrases from ‘Time Passes’ and subjects them to the “inexact science and imperfect art” of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction and recovery including the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann’s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula’s inhabitants, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographic series of seascapes, the Ville d’Ys, Debussy’s Cathédrale englouti, and Ceri Richards’ series of paintings by the same name, and others.
PRAISE FOR NEVERMORE
A TLS Book of the Year: “In Cécile Wajsbrot’s Nevermore , a writer and translator travels to Dresden to translate Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” (from To the Lighthouse) into French: “a text on time’s destruction in a city once destroyed by war”. As she translates she replays scenes from her past, including the story of a friend whose death is mysteriously connected to her desire to leave Paris for a while. Tess Lewis’s elegant translation of Nevermore adds one more layer to this intriguing book.” Beverley Bie Brahic TLS
Books We Can’t Wait to Read: Nov 2024: A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers. An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality. Write or Die Magazine
“… Wajsbrot’s narrator takes us through the conundrums of translation, struggling to balance the musicality and meaning of Woolf’s prose in French. Of course, reading the English edition, there’s the meta aspect of Tess Lewis’s masterful translation of Wajsbrot’s French into English. Lewis describes the different strategies she herself employed to replicate the narrator’s own efforts, and together, they give greater insight into the minutiae of translating—both joyful and frustrating, both the gains and the losses—than anything else I’ve seen rendered in fiction.” Eva Dunsky, Asymptote
Star 111, Lutz Seiler
And Other Stories, UK, September 2023
New York Review Books, US, October 1, 2024
Winner of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
Shortlisted for the 2022 Prix Femina étranger
#1 on the Spiegel Bestseller List
November 1989. The Berlin Wall has just fallen when the East German couple Inge und Walter, following a secret dream they’ve harboured all their lives, set out for life in the West. Carl, their son, refuses to keep watch over the family home and instead heads to Berlin, where he lives in his father’s car until he is taken in by a group of squatters. Led by a shepherd and his goat, the pack of squatters sets up the first alternative bar in East Berlin and are involved in guerrilla occupations. And it’s with them that Carl, trained as a bricklayer, finds himself an initiate of anarchy, of love, and above all of poetry.
Winner of the prestigious Leipzig Book Fair Prize and a bestseller in German already with 150,000 copies sold, Star 111, musical and incantatory, tells of the search for authentic existence and also of a family exploded by political change which must find its way back together.
Praise for Star 111
'This gorgeous [novel] offers an intimate view of a German family’s reckoning with the end of the Cold War.... It’s an exceptional story of fresh starts.' PW
'A powerfully imagined novel of the new Germany...' Kirkus
‘[Seiler’s] playful language and knack for imagery light up “Star 111” as it unfolds through the beautifully captured events of everyday life. Translator Tess Lewis has done remarkable work rendering the book in language that does credit to Seiler’s poetic sensibilities and sense of rhythm.’ Washington Post
‘The author’s shimmering, ironic and musical prose—impeccably translated by Tess Lewis—captures a moment both archaic and profoundly real. Utopian and matter-of-fact, it is both timeless and obsessed with the minutiae of its time.’ Karen Leeder, TLS
‘A rich, vivid tale about new beginnings and fractured utopias.’ Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times, ‘Best books of 2023 — Fiction in translation’
Gary Perry from Foyles Charing Cross Road, London’s Best Books of 2023
‘There aren’t many books that can be cited as the missing link between Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and still fewer that could live up to the comparison, but Lutz Seiler (with impeccable assistance from Tess Lewis) makes it look easy. Star 111 is a brilliant, immersive, sometimes funny, slyly moving book with a main character who walks through the new reality he finds himself in like an astronaut exploring alone beneath a strange, harsh, beautiful sun. A stellar achievement.’ Will Ashon
[Kruso] was a substantial novel in every sense, and was followed in 2020 by an equally weighty companion volume, Star 111, now given an American translation, as was its predecessor, by Tess Lewis. Hong Kong Review
It took Lutz Seiler, born in East Germany, thirty years to give to the moment [of the Fall of the Berlin Wall] the full richness of fertile and ambiguous human experience. With its ample narrative and powerful imagination, Star 111 is the “Wenderoman” par excellence, the great novel of the “turn”, as German reunification is called.’ Le Mondes des Livres
And Other Stories
London Review Bookshop
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Some Heads by Max Neumann
Seagull Books, October 2023
A beautifully produced volume featuring the work of a major German artist with an essay by Hubertus von Amelunxen
While a face may be considered a head, a head does not necessarily carry a face. Between 2015 and 2017, German artist Max Neuman, known for painting anonymous figures, drew a series of heads. Each head is a moment, each facing the viewer as if looking into a crowd, each distinguishable from the other. Who are they? May we call them portraits? Do they look back? Do they resemble spirits? Some Heads reproduces these haunting drawings along with an essay by cultural theorist and curator Hubertus von Amelunxen that questions the heads and faces while dwelling upon the effacement of individuality.
The Questionable Ones, Judith Keller
Seagull Books, February 2023
A brilliant collection of micro-fiction, reflecting our fragmented times.
With quirky humor and wry insight, Swiss author Judith Keller’s micro-fictions unravel the fabric of daily life. She delves into the aporia of language by taking idiomatic expressions literally, unpacking the multiple meanings of words, and confounding expectations. Seven Zurich tram stops provide the framework for these familiar yet absurd portraits of passers-by, fellow passengers on the tram, the unemployed and the overemployed, the innocent and the suspicious, young mothers and confused elderly. The characters are hapless and far-fetched, trying to find their footing on shifting ground and grateful for what happiness they can find. In just a sentence or two, Keller unlocks metaphysical trapdoors.
On the Marble Cliffs, Ernst Jünger
NYRB, January 2023
Now in a new translation, an imaginative, darkly radiant fable about a pair of brothers, formerly warriors, whose idyll is shattered by an encroaching fascistic force.
Set in a world of its own, Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs is both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism.
The narrator of the book and his brother, Otho, live in an ancient house carved out of the great marble cliffs that overlook the Marina, a great and beautiful lake that is surrounded by a peaceable land of ancient cities and temples and flourishing vineyards.
To the north of the cliffs are the grasslands of the Campagna, occupied by herders. North of that, the great forest begins. There the brutal Head Ranger rules, abetted by the warrior bands of the Mauretanians.
The brothers have seen all too much of war. Their youth was consumed in fighting. Now they have resolved to live quietly, studying botany, adding to their herbarium, consulting the books in their library, involving themselves in the timeless pursuit of knowledge.
However, rumors of dark deeds begin to reach them in their sanctuary. Agents of the Head Ranger are infiltrating the peaceful provinces he views with contempt, while peace itself, it seems, may only be a mask for heedlessness.
Praise for On the Marble Cliffs
The classical beauty of the writing, in Tess Lewis’s exquisite translation, gives a sense of the author’s sympathies. Sam Sacks WSJ
Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature… Tess Lewis’s new translation is undeniably superior. In its care for cadences and more precise renderings of even basic words—in the enrapturing first sentence of the novel she translates Schwermut as “melancholy,” whereas Hood inexplicably reaches for “grief”—her work supersedes her predecessor’s on every score. Harpers
With Europe facing a resurgence of neo-fascism, the publication of a fresh English translation of Ernst Jünger’s fictional masterpiece On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen) feels timely. Tess Lewis has admirably conjured the lustre of the imageladen prose that lends Jünger’s novella its distinctive visionary quality. TLS
The translator, Tess Lewis, is a much-honored practitioner of a difficult craft. She is admirably alert to this unusual novel’s nuanced shades of meaning, figures of speech, and implicit as well as explicit symbolism… Jünger’s book had obvious significance in 1939, at a time when the globe was about to be engulfed in wars that pitted fascism against democracy. For decades, many believed that the age of despotism was long past. But the current rise of populist demagogues and autocrats, promising a better world — if we only abandon notions of rights, individual liberties, and respect for minorities — proves otherwise. History appears to be surreal: maintaining liberty in the face of totalitarian fantasy calls for vigilance. Jünger’s cautionary tale may be more resonant now than when it was first published. The Arts Fuse
An appealing introduction from Jessi Jezewska Stevens offers two credible and conflicting interpretations (either it’s an anti-fascist anthem or a “retreat into aesthetics”), but while Jünger (1895–1998) beautifully portrays the narrator’s nostalgia for a simpler life, readers will likely feel unmoored by the hazy details of what’s going on. Fans of European classics will want to take a look at this curiosity. PW
What it is wholly, though, is a remarkable and rewarding piece of literature, in prose often poetic and lyrical that evokes a fantastic world partly resembling our own partly something other, something unclassifiable… Like the simple things whose loss the narrator laments on the book’s opening page, On the Marble Cliffs presents “a cornucopia of riches.” Open Letters Review
On the Marble Cliffs stands as the most prominent of all the fictional works ever written by Jünger. Published in the fateful year of 1939, this novel has been recently rendered into English by Tess Lewis in a superb translation that accurately captures the novel’s rich, nuanced, evocative, and at times symbolic and esoteric language. The Massachusetts Review
If an English language reader wants to make their way through this book, it absolutely has to be this edition. A Green Man Review
Epic Annette: A Heroine's Tale, Anne Weber
The Indigo Press, UK 2022, US May 2023
Epic Annette: A Heroine’s Tale is the story of real-life Anne Beaumanoir, a courageous, brilliant woman born in Brittany in 1923. Guided by a passion for justice and a fervent belief in self-determination she joined the French Resistance while studying medicine in Rennes, and then moved to Paris at the age of nineteen.
She disobeyed two key tenets of her Resistance network, by falling in love and by unilaterally deciding to save the lives of two Jewish children. Punished by being posted apart from her lover, who was subsequently murdered, she married and settled into post-war bourgeois professional success and domesticity in Marseille, giving birth to two sons.
The need to stand up for her beliefs persuaded her to put that comfortable life at risk by supporting the Algerian FLN in France, resulting in her being imprisoned in 1959 while pregnant with a third child, and tried for treachery. After making a dramatic escape she then served in the Ministry of Health under newly-independent Algeria’s first president Ben Bella until his overthrow in 1965. Exiled from her homeland, having been found guilty in absentia and sentenced to ten years in prison, she moved to Switzerland and worked in a clinic there until an amnesty allowed her to return to France.
These are the bones of Annette’s story. Anne Weber sings them brilliantly to life, showing us the drama behind the facts in supple, lyrical free verse beautifully translated into English by Tess Lewis. But she does more than that; in a series of Homeric asides she discusses the ethical and philosophical aspects of Annette’s life choices, and the emotional pain and grief trailed in their wake. Annette resembles the great heroes Odysseus and Aeneas; her character is her destiny, peripatetic, always exploring, ultimately not tragic but not without costly personal sacrifice.
The book was written in German and rewritten in French by the author. The translator, Tess Lewis, has worked with both versions, synthesizing them into a lyrical English-language novel in verse.
Praise for Epic Annette
‘A bold and moving exploration of the ethics of heroism’ — The Times Literary Supplement
‘Tess Lewis’s translation is both pitch-perfect and exact. The voice of Epic Annette rolls through history as a jaw-dropping contemporary adventure tale, now high-flown, now colloquial, with plenty of off-stage commentary from the omniscient narrator — she is unnamed and indistinct, like a Greek chorus, yet a character in this tale. Turns out to be an investigator at times. Even a judge.’ Kai Maristed, The Arts Fuse
‘Annette Beaumanoir is a rare heroine whose fierce courage almost demands an unusual, and beautiful, account of her life. She stood out in life and this epic will ensure that she is honored in death.’ — Anne Sebba, Writers Review
‘The story of the book’s origins and its rise to international success is just as surprising as that of its heroine.’ TRANSLATING EPIC ANNETTE, New Books in German
‘A nuanced, immensely moving testimony to an improbable life.’ Roisard Kiberd, The Irish Times
distant transit, Maja Haderlap
archipelago books, March, 2022
FINALIST FOR THE PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Infused with movement, Maja Haderlap’s distant transit traverses Slovenia’s scenic landscape and violent history, searching for a sense of place within its ever-shifting boundaries. Avoiding traditional forms and pronounced rhythms, Haderlap unleashes a flow of evocative, captivating passages whose power lies in their associative richness and precision of expression, vividly conjuring Slovenia’s natural world – its rolling meadows, snow-capped alps, and sparkling Adriatic coast. Belonging to the Slovene ethnic minority and its inherited, transgenerational trauma, Haderlap explores the burden of history and the prolonged aftershock of conflict – warm, lavish pastoral passages conceal dark memories, and musings on the way language can create and dissolve borders reveal a deep longing for a sense of home. At its core, distant transit is an ode to survival, building a monument to traditions and lives lost.
Praise for Maja Haderlap
Maja Haderlap's poetry and prose combine poetic brilliance with explosive political power. — 2018 Max Frisch Prize jury
The desire to abolish borders, to free confined discourse, is inscribed in these poems as an ambivalent back and forth between escape and groundedness. — Ilma Rakusa, NZZ
Poems in words without borders here, here and The Hudson Review
Also by Maja Haderlap: Angel of Oblivion
Notes, Ludwig Hohl
With a foreword by Joshua Cohen,
Yale University Press (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
October 19, 2021
Revered by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as one of Switzerland’s most commanding writers, Ludwig Hohl spent most of his waking hours with a pen in hand, collecting quotes from others and recording ruminations of his own. Composed between 1934 and 1936 during his residence in the Netherlands in a state of “extreme spiritual isolation,” The Notes is Hohl’s magnum opus: an assemblage of his epiphany-like observations, disparate in subject yet threaded together by a relentless exploration of the nature and origins of creativity.
Inspired by Spinoza, Goethe, and many others, The Notes contends with the purpose of work, the vitality of art, and the inevitability of death—a valiant, uncompromising exercise in hope against the devastating backdrop of twentieth century Europe. This abridged edition, expertly translated by Tess Lewis and with an illuminating foreword by Joshua Cohen, introduces the reader to this remarkable work and its writer.
Praise for Ludwig Hohl
“Hohl is essential, we are incidental.”—Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Notes is “as virulent now as it was decades ago and as readable as if it were written just now, esoteric-current, ‘little known’ but present, its language is urgent, [and] that, I think, is stature.”—Max Frisch
“[The word] ‘warren’ is precisely apposite to Ludwig Hohl, one of the secret masters of 20th century German prose. Hohl, who believed that creation in any fundamental sense lies outside human reach, developed acute powers of observation. He was a voyeur into the nuances and tremors of sensibility. Hohl experienced physical and psychological phenomena as interminably fragmented. With disenchanted scruple, he fitted these fragments into a language-mosaic of exceptional lucidity. Hohl did so from a literal underground, from a cellarage or below street-level cavern in Geneva. There, the teeming notes and aphorisms which constitute his opus (Die Notizen) in an always provisional mobile array, were hung on clothes-lines for inspection and revision. Hohl, whose very name [cave] is an omen, was a collector of silences and solitudes.
He came to distinguish between aloneness as suffocation, as sterility, which he identified with the flatness and dour Calvinism of his years in Holland, and the festive, fruitful solitude of the Alps. There is a solitude of the peaks and one of imprisonment, one of horizons and one of intractable confines. Out of authentic isolation, release can occur via a chance meeting, notably with a talismanic text (e.g. Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections or Spinoza’s Ethics, to Hohl the text of texts). Paradoxically, “the greatest, who are the solitary ones, have trust in the world,” a trust as in a brother. Theirs is the fraternity of the essential. This is Ludwig Hohl’s methodological point. Only solitude, difficult, humiliating, even corrosive as it is, can safeguard art and thought from corruption. The media, the lust to communicate by socially sanctioned and rewarded means, the manipulation of discourse towards approval and success, are an irreparable waste of spirit. Communication with others is a secondary, almost unavoidably suspect function. Language is true to itself only when it strives (always imperfectly) to address the “truth-functions” within itself. Echoing Kafka, whose penultimate parable of the “Warren” or “Maze” so uncannily prefigures Ludwig Hohl’s actual existence, Hohl believed that there is genuine communication only when the listener is “appalled” (entsetzt).”—George Steiner, Grammars of Creation
"Ludwig Hohl is a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author.”—Susan Bernofsky, author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser
Seedtime III, by Philippe Jaccottet
Notebooks 1995 - 1998
Seagull Books, September 2021
Philippe Jaccottet has described his notebooks as “a collection of delicate seeds with which I replant, I try to replant my ‘spiritual forest’.” Indeed, the entries consistently open windows onto new vistas, some familiar from his poems, others still moist with the dew of possibility. The natural world and particularly the landscape of Grignan has been an endless source of inspiration for his poetry. In an entry from October, 1998, written forty-five years after his first collection of poems, L’Effraie (The Screech Owl), appeared Jaccottet is still searching for l’expression juste that will capture the beauty of the world around him and to understand his aesthetic impulses.
The notebooks bring enriching facets of context and background to Jaccottet’s poetry. The entries place in sharp relief the gap between his intentions and final works. Metaphor and simile become epistemological tools, keys to understanding the mysteries of the world around us. Description is a means of perception, a way to understand not just our surroundings but our place in the world and the ‘mysterious metamorphosis of loss’ that underlies the human condition.
The animating force in Jaccottet’s writing is the drive to transcend the limitations of language and literary forms, an aspiration he has acknowledged as elusive, if not impossible. And so he returns to his starting points again and again, refining, refreshing, altering, erasing, creating, and recreating. A clump of violets, drops of rain hanging from bare, wintery branches, irises gleaming like lanterns: such images recur throughout the years as if bearing hidden messages he must decipher through writing and reflection.
What You Can See From Here, Mariana Leky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June, 2021
In this international bestseller by the award-winning novelist Mariana Leky, a heartwarming story unfolds about a small town, a grandmother whose dreams foretell a coming death, and the young woman forever changed by these losses and her loving, endearingly oddball community.
On a beautiful spring day, a small village in Western Germany wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die.
Luise, Selma’s ten-year-old granddaughter, looks on as the predictable characters of her small world begin acting strangely. Protesting that they are not superstitious, each of the villagers grapples with the buried secrets and deferred decisions that have suddenly become urgent in the face of death.
Luise’s mother struggles to decide whether to end her marriage. An old family friend, known only as the optician, tries to find the courage to tell Selma he loves her. Only Sad Marlies remains unchanged, still moping around her house and cooking terrible food. But when death finally comes, the circumstances are outside anyone’s expectations.
Across three defining moments in her life, Luise grapples with life's big questions alongside her devoted friends, young and old. A story about the absurdity of life and death, a bittersweet portrait of village life and the wider world that beckons beyond, it is also a thoughtful meditation on the way loss and love shape not just a person, but a community. Mariana Leky's What You Can See from Here is a charmer—a moving novel of grief, first love, reluctant love, late love, and finding one's place in the world, even if that place is right where you started.
Praise for What You Can See From Here
A BookRiot Must-Read Book of Summer 2021
“Leky’s international bestseller – beautifully translated by Tess Lewis – is witty, generous and optimistic … Leky’s vision of the world might sound whimsical but there’s something bigger, more bittersweet at play here.” The Guardian
“Charming… In her optimism and her playfulness, Leky aligns herself with other folklore enthusiasts like Helen Oyeyemi and Ali Smith… There is a satisfying spark to her short, declarative sentences; they induce reflection, and maybe even learning.”
—Katherine Hill, The New York Times Book Review
“[What You Can See from Here] is both funny and intensely moving, capturing the town’s memorable cast of characters, from superstitious Elsbeth to the lovesick, anxious optician. Leky’s novel is about the small phrases, moments, and memories that stick with us throughout our lives, and about finding despair, joy, and love in the smallest moments.” —Leah Rachel von Essen, BookRiot
“It's impossible to escape [Mariana Leky's] spell.... Infectious... generous and funny... We leave [her] world knowing that every ordinary day holds the potential for something wonderful.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[A] whimsical love story… peopled by eccentric-but-endearing characters… There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.” —Melissa Rodman, The Arts Fuse
“Populated by quirky characters who learn there is no way to truly prepare for death or grief, Leky's novel is for those who enjoy laconic, introspective reads.” —Booklist
A Life Through Art - Sophie Taeuber Arp
by Silvia Boadella
Skira Publishing March 2021
Published to coincide with MoMA’s major retrospective exhibition of Sophie Taeuber Arp’s work Nov. 21, 2021 - Mar 12, 2022
An intimate look at the life and career of the Dada hero known for the unique joy of her work across mediums, authored by her great-niece and buttressed with archival material
Sophie Taeuber-Arp is a pioneer of modern art. She was at the center of Zurich’s Dada movement and is considered the most important female Swiss artist of the early twentieth century. She was a modern dancer, painter, sculptor, textile artist, designer, and interior architect. She made paper, textiles, wood, and glass shine – she bound light to matter in paintings, jewelry, embroidery, rugs, marionettes, furniture, and sculptures.
This unique portrait shows how Sophie remained passionately devoted to her art despite the threat of two world wars. Through her work, she not only found and preserved her inner self and joy in extremely difficult circumstances, but also tapped enormous strength to endure the challenges in her life and remain true to herself.
The author, Silvia Boadella, is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s great-niece and grew up with Sophie’s art.
Kraft, Jonas Lüscher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, November 2020
Shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize
Jonas Lüscher, the author of Barbarian Spring—“a most humorous and convincing satire of the ridiculous excesses of those responsible for the financial crisis” (The New York Times Book Review)—returns to the topic of neoliberal arrogance in his Swiss Book Prize winning, hilarious and wicked novel about a man facing the ruins of his life, and his world.
Richard Kraft, a German professor of rhetoric and aging Reaganite and Knight Rider fan, is unhappily married and badly in debt. He sees no way out of his rut until he is invited to participate in a competition to be held in California and sponsored by a Silicon Valley tycoon and “techno-optimist.” The contest is to answer a literal “million-dollar question”: each competitor must compose an eighteen-minute lecture on why our world is still, despite all evidence, the best of all possible worlds, and how we might improve it even further through technology.
Entering into a surreal American landscape, Kraft soon finds what’s left of his life falling to pieces as he struggles to justify as “best” a planet in the hands of such blithe neoliberal cupidity as he encounters on his odyssey to California. Still, with the prize money in his pocket, perhaps Kraft could finally buy his way to a new life . . . But what contortions—physical and philosophical—will he have to subject himself to in order to claim it?
Jonas Lüscher's second novel, Kraft, is a hilarious and wicked tale about a man facing the ruins of his life, and his world.
Praise for Kraft
Swiss-German writer Lüscher delivers an arch, fascinating satire of world-weary European skepticism and irrational American hopefulness… This is a wonderfully strange novel, and one not to be missed. Publishers Weekly
An amusing study in how intellectuals become neutered and co-opted through venal self-interest . . . a finely handled, comic dramatization of the microcompromises, stifled shame and bad-faith gymnastics of sham writers who tell the Culture whatever it wants to hear . . . Lüscher is a perceptive commentator on Silicon Valley’s heady and hubristic ideological climate, with its smug boasts of “disruption” and death-denying (or rather “posthuman transtheotechnist”) longings . . . Lüscher sniffs out the fraudulence in the very roots of his characters’ political stances. The New York Times Book Review
I wouldn’t mind reading a whole book making fun of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, especially since Lüscher is so good at satirizing them. Chicago Review of Books
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Art Just Barely Survives
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz
Seagull Books, September 2019
"I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse."--Anselm Kiefer
The only visual artist to have won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Anselm Kiefer is a profoundly literary painter. In the ten conversations with the writer and theologian Klaus Dermutz collected here, Kiefer returns to the essential elements of his art, his aesthetics, and his creative processes.
Kiefer describes how the central materials of his art--lead, sand, water, fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor, and ink--influence the act of creation. No less decisive are his intellectual and artistic touchstones: the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and the innovative theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer and Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as Kiefer's own status as a controversial figure. His relentless examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering, communal memory, and the seductions of destruction have earned him equal amounts of criticism and praise. The conversations in this book offer a rare insight into the mind of a gifted creator, appealing to artists, critics, art historians, cultural journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and the literature and history of the twentieth century.
Praise for Anselm Kiefer in Conversation
This tome is an essential read that offers a rare access into a mind of a great artist – an artist that transcends confines, labels and defies classifications – and one anyone remotely interested in visual arts and the aftermath of the twentieth century would benefit from. Scene Point Blank
Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Klaus Dermutz
My Mother's Tears, Michel Layaz
by Michel Layaz
Seagull Books, August 2019
With subtle, bemused humor and an unerring eye for human frailty, Michel Layaz writes about the hidden tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, My Mother’s Tears, is his most poignant yet.
The adult narrator of My Mother’s Tears has returned to clean out his childhood home after his mother’s death. In thirty short chapters, each focused on a talismanic object or resonant episode from his childhood, the narrator tries to solve the mystery behind the flood of tears with which his strikingly beautiful, intelligent, and inscrutable mother greeted his birth. Like insects preserved in amber, these objects—an artificial orchid, a statue, a pair of green pumps, a steak knife, a fishing rod and reel, among others—are surrounded by an aura that permeates the narrator’s life. Interspersed with these chapters are fragments from the narrator’s conversation with his present lover, a woman who demands that he verbally confront his past. This difficult conversation charts his gradual liberation from the psychological wounds he suffered growing up.
Not only an account of a son’s attempt to understand his enigmatic mother, My Mother’s Tears is also a moving novel about language and memory that explores the ambivalent power of words to hurt and to heal, to revive the past and to put childhood demons to rest.
Praise for My Mother’s Tears
As Michel Leiris did in Manhood, [Layaz] recreates a primary mythology that not only marked the narrator’s childhood but also shapes his present life. At the center of this mythology, the simultaneously castrating and loving figure of his mother is revived through writing that is cruel, taut, and precise and that rarely misses its mark. With its ferocity and its secret music, Layaz’s novel releases phantoms that will haunt readers for a long time. Scène Magazine
The Storyteller Essays, Walter Benjamin
Texts by Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Johann Peter Hebel, Michel de Montaigne, and Paul Valéry.
New York Review Books, July 2019
A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s work as it pertains to his famous essay, ‘The Storyteller,’ this collection includes short stories, book reviews, parables, and a selection of writings by other authors who had an influence on Benjamin’s work.
Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’ is among the greatest and most widely-read essays of this ever-suggestive but also enigmatic master thinker. Published in 1936 in a obscure Swiss review, "The Storyteller" was the product of at least a decade's ongoing reflection and composition. What might be called the story of "The Storyteller" starts in 1926, when Benjamin wrote an essay about one of his favorite writers, the German romantic Johann Peter Hebel, and then continues in a beautiful series of short essays, book reviews (of Arnold Bennett's novel "The Old Wives' Tale", among others), short stories, parables ("The Handkerchief", written in Ibiza in 1932-33), and even radio shows for children ("The Earthquake in Lisbon"). In this new collection all these writings are brought together in one place, giving us a new appreciation of how Benjamin's thinking changed and ripened over time. Benjamin's superb and wonderfully readable writings are further accompanied by some key readings of his own--texts by his contemporaries Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, and Jean Paulhan; by Paul Valery; and by Herodotus and Montaigne--and finally, to bring things round, there are two short stories by "the incomparable Hebel" with whom Benjamin's intellectual adventure began. Tess Lewis's magnificent new translation of Benjamin's writings further refresh our understanding of the work, while editor Samuel Titan's introduction fills in the biographical and intellectual context in which Benjamin's "Storyteller" came to life.
Praise for The Storyteller Essays
These short pieces, published after his death, seem almost like notes for “The Storyteller,” and what is most remarkable and most Benjaminian about them is how uncategorizable their form is; they are simultaneously parables and literary criticism, fiction and essays; they house both character and concept, but, for the most part, and also characteristically of Benjamin, they remain “free of explanation.” Los Angeles Review of Books
The predominant feeling is not that Benjamin “holds up” but that he has (thanks to Tess Lewis’ excellent translation) finally arrived. epiphanyzine
One Another, Monique Schwitter
by Monique Schwitter
Persea Books, February 2019
One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art―erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious.
When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another. What exactly is love? How does it come and go? She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel. Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother. Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last. But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.
Praise for One Another
'The novel’s dominant mode is a style of self-talk that plays grammatical games and painfully, nervously refines: “Petrus had betrayed me with her. Or she me with Petrus, you could also look at it that way. Doubly betrayed by lover and friend, that’s how to put it.”' Jamie Fisher, The New York Times
“A romantic bildungsroman, uneven in places but refreshingly unsentimental, narrated by a woman in the middle of a marital crisis.” Kirkus Reviews
“Schwitter’s multi-layered text is enriched with frequent allusions to the Bible and literary writings. This depiction of the trials and tribulations of love and desire gives a contemporary twist to timeless themes.” New Books in German
Excerpt in LitHub
Enzensberger's Panopticon
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Seagull Books, May 2018
Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes--politics, economics, religion, society--not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by Karl Valentin. "There," writes Enzensberger, "viewers could admire, along with implements of torture, all manner of abnormalities and sensational inventions." And that's what he offers here: a wide-ranging, surprising look at all manner of strange aspects of our contemporary world.
As masterly with the essay as he is with fiction and poetry, Enzensberger here presents complicated thoughts with a light touch, tying new iterations of old ideas to their antecedents, quoting liberally from his forebears, and presenting himself unapologetically as not an expert but a seeker. Enzensberger the essayist works in the mode of Montaigne, unafraid to take his reader in unexpected directions, knowing that the process of exploration is often in itself sufficient reward for following a line of thought.
n an era that regularly laments the death of the public intellectual, Enzensberger is the real deal: a towering figure in German literature who refuses to let his mind or work be bound by the narrow world of the poetry or fiction section. Panopticon will thrill readers daring enough to accompany him.
Praise for Enzensberger’s Panopticon
“Panopticon is a brilliant read, and while not for the faint-hearted, it embraces anyone who wants light shed on subjects that we all probably lie awake thinking about, as we attempt to muddle through life’s predicaments. The nuances of these essays’ conceits are transported from the poetry of one language into the translated other with miraculous skill by Tess Lewis, who stretches the tensility of both language and ideas.” —Vayu Naidu, The Riveter
Incest, Christine Angot
by Christine Angot
Archipelago Books, 2017
The narrator is reeling after a tempestuous relationship with another woman. Delirious with love and longing, her thoughts turn increasingly wild, circling back on themselves, until the trauma underlying her pain is exposed. With then naked intimacy of confession, the narrator struggles to put long-repressed experiences into words, words that cut like double-edged swords. She exposes the ambivalence and complexities of desire, her paranoia, her self contempt and self-righteousness and, at the core of it all, incest.
Incest dares its readers to contront a taboo we too rarely acknowledge.
Christine Angot is one of the most controversial authors writing in France. today. Her novels explore a variety of taboo topics including homosexuality, incest, and sexual violence, and have continually blurred the line between autobiography and fiction.
Praise for Incest
"Given Angot's antagonism toward conventional syntax, the English translation, by Tess Lewis, is a feat of perspicuity." The New Yorker
'Incest is a thrilling book. It's a formally daring and passionate performance of the depths of human self-loathing, and the sufferings of attachment. It cut deep inside me with its truths. In every moment of reading it, I both wanted to keep reading it and wanted to write. I don't think I will ever forget this book.' Sheila Heti
New & Noteworthy: 'A sensation in France, this novel in the form of a wild confession of a life filled with trauma also recounts the narrator's incestuous relationship with her father.' NY Times ,
'In my view, the best translators are dedicated practitioners in intuition, and Tess Lewis is one such translator. Reading Incest, it feels as though Angot, so very French, is speaking directly in English.' Tsipi Keller, Asymptote
“At its core, Incest is a true testament to the subversive power of literature, in that it transmutes the violation of incest into connection with the reader. It the ultimate narrative and biographical paradox, it makes redemptive the thing that destroyed her.” Elizabeth Baird, The Millions
'Auto-fiction at its extreme does not aspire here to shock, but to give literature back its dangerous function and return to it its dignity.' Gérard Meudal
'Christine Angot's book triggered both lauding and severe criticism, creating a work worth talking about; shedding light on issues that are not easily comprehensible--taboos--not from the position of an expert but from her own particularity, her own manner of writing.' Giorgos Kassiteridis, Asymptote
'It is clear that Christine Angot has won, because we are going to be thinking for a long time about this book. Because it will need a long study written about it to examine all its hypotheses and contradictions, to understand the questions it puts forward, study its passion, disgust, insanity, the dream of controlled incest, the fantasy of incest fulfilled. ... What's at play in the work of Angot, in her force, her violence, is an idea of literature as a means of escaping from every collective, from all policing, .. to think and write in one's singularity.' Josyane Savigneau, Le Monde
Archipelago Books
IndieBound
Amazon
The Second Seedtime
by Philippe Jaccottet
Seagull Books, 2017
One of Europe’s finest contemporary poets, Philippe Jaccottet is a writer of exacting attention. Through his keen observations of the natural world, of art, literature and music, and his reflections on the human condition, he opens his readers’ eyes to the transcendent in everyday life. The Second Seedtime, a collection of ‘things seen, things read and things dreamt’, continues the project Jaccottet had begun three decades earlier in his first volume of notebooks. Here, again, he gathers flashes of beauty dispersed around him like seeds that may blossom into poems or moments of inspiration. He returns, insistently, to such literary touchstones as Dante, Montaigne, Góngora, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Michaux, Hopkins, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson as well as musical ones such as Bach, Monteverdi, Purcell and Schubert. This is the vivid chronicle of one man’s passionate engagement with the life of the mind, the spirit and the natural world.
Seagull Books
IndieBound
Amazon
Kruso, Lutz Seiler
By Lutz Seiler
Scribe Publications, UK 2017, Scribe US June 2018
The lyrical, bestselling 2014 German Book Prize winner
Named Runner Up for the 2018 Schlegel-Tieck Prize
Nominated for the 2019 International Dublin Award
In the summer of 1989, a young literature student named Ed travels to the Baltic island of Hiddensee, fleeing unspeakable tragedy. Long shrouded in myth, the island is a notorious destination for hippies, idealists, and those at odds with the East German state.
On the island, Ed finds work at the Klausner inn, despite his lack of papers. Although keen to remain on the sidelines, Ed is drawn towards Kruso, a charismatic but cryptic character, haunted by his own tragedy. K.ruso is on a mission to help the countless runaways trying to reach the West. What's more, he is on an ideological quest to unite them in the pursuit of freedom and free love.
Everyone dances to Kruso's tune--but to what end and at what cost?
Seiler's debut novel catapults him into the leading ranks of German authors. Die Zeit
Praise for KRUSO
Kruso is a novel steeped in locality – there are numerous references to the Naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, who holidayed on Hiddensee and was buried on the island – but an important work, too, in its chronicling of the final days of communism in East Germany. Tess Lewis’s excellent translation is runner-up for the Schlegel-Tieck. TLS
'German poet Lutz Seiler has brought all his art, linguistic ease, flair for dazzling images and mastery of what he describes as "the nervous systems of memory" to this extraordinary debut novel about a young man in free fall during the closing months of the old GDR. . . . Memory becomes a thematic refrain that is brilliantly sustained. The award-winning American translator, Tess Lewis, conveys the essential strangeness of the laconic, at times fantastical narrative...' Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
"An outstanding debut novel by Lutz Seiler ... Beautifully phrased and paced, Tess Lewis's translation delights on every page as she conveys 'the contagious sense of liberation' that blows through Mr. Seiler's mesmeric novel." The Economist
"...a slippery and enigmatic Bildungsroman, adapting the literary trope of the island refuge to the dying days of East German socialism. ... English readers can delight in this prizewinning translation from Tess Lewis, which renders Seiler's vision in prose of startling clarity." The Saturday Age
"Kruso is ultimately an honest meditation on grief, the ways in which people lose, find , lose (and so the cycle continues) each other, rendered beautifully by Seiler's vivid, unusual prose." The Culture Trip
Stigmata of Bliss, Klaus Merz
By Klaus Merz
Seagull Books, 2017
Celebrated as a master of concise, condensed sentences, Klaus Merz brings depth and resonance to his spare narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. These novellas, vividly grounded in Switzerland's landscape and village life strike a universal chord. It is in the tension between the ordinary and the exotic, between the familiar and the bizarre, that Merz's stories bloom.
Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness, eccentricity, and a child's death. In A Man's Fate, a moment of inattention on a mountain hike upends a teacher's life and his understanding of mortality. And The Argentine traces the fluctuations of memory and desire in a man's journey half-way around the world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and intimate journey. Read together, the novellas complement, enrich, and echo each other.
Reviews
"Rarely is the short form deployed with so much skill." Stuttgarter Zeitung
"Klaus Merz is not only a sovereign stylist, he also dares to take on the great themes of literature. From the depths of his own life he shapes what has occupied poets for millenia: love and death, hope and fear, belief and doubt." Aargauer Kulturpreis
Angel of Oblivion, Maja Haderlap
By Maja Haderlap
Archipelago Books, 2016
Winner of the Austrian Cultural Forum NY Translation Prize, the 2017 PEN Translation Prize, Nominated for the Best Translated Book Award
Angel of Oblivion is based on the experiences of Maja Haderlap’s family and the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria, many of whom fought as partisans against the Nazis during the World War II. The story centers on the experiences of a young girl learning to navigate the terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian, a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliation, and German, an escape from her stifling, rural upbringing but also the language of the camps that claimed the lives of many of her family members. Engaging with themes of tolerance and integration of minority communities, the burden of history, the effects of conflicts on survivors and their children, and language’s role in shaping identity, Haderlap’s novel strikes at problems of paramount importance to our world today.
Praise for Angel of Oblivion
"A first-person narration intimate enough to record an interior journey of self-discovery, it captures nuances of fleeting emotion thanks to Haderlap's long-exercised lyric talent while also furnishing as riveting and lucid an account of the Austrian Slovenes in their suffering during and after World War II...[Tess Lewis] shows her mastery of poetic craft everywhere in her prose narration."
— Vincent King, Translation Review
"An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Haderlap plunges readers into a morass of European history..."
— Publishers Weekly
Tess Lewis has done a fine job of translating Haderlap’s lucid and lyrical prose, particularly the dread-tinged segments: "I’m afraid that death has taken root inside me, like a small black button, like a latticework of dark moss creeping invisibly over my skin." In the end, though, Angel of Oblivion strikes a positive note, becoming a hymn to remembrance – one urging us to salvage and safeguard the shards of our past from the tide of history.
— Malcolm Forbes, The National
Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told.
— Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
"Along with everything else she accomplishes with this powerful work — a work of historical witness, a Sebaldian descent into the depths of memory, and a brave and innovative hybrid of fiction and memoir — Haderlap (and her English translator) deserve praise for breaking the silence to bring the stories of Slovenian-speaking Austrians to a much broader audience." — Brendan Driscoll, in The Millions
"[A] painstaking and emotional account of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria during and after World War II."
— Abby Sheaffer, ChicagoNow
"Haderlap’s novel seems to transcend the boundaries between languages and histories."
— Iga Nowicz, The Glossa
Angel of Oblivion is a continuous, plunging attempt to express the disorderly but urgent moment of daring to master the unmasterable. There is nothing so crass here as an ‘arc’ or a redemptive release. The reader is on the hook until the end – at which point the narrative’s underlying premises shimmer.
— Ron Slate, On the Seawall
Haderlap’s novel brings to mind the work of artist Anselm Kiefer (whose work can be seen at the SFMOMA’s “German Art After 1960” exhibition). His paintings evoke the same desolate feeling of a landscape, natural and mental, poisoned by the Holocaust. Though Kiefer’s art is influenced by foreign myths and symbols, there is that same idea that Maja Haderlap confronts in Angel of Oblivion: that even the generation born after the fall of the Third Reich is affected by its legacy.
— Devan Brettkelly, ZYZZYVA
Angel of Oblivion is an unexpected surprise. It’s a glorious feat for an author to leave her readers in a state of complacency all the while telling a difficult and poignant story. Beautiful as it were, devastating in some instances. It reminds us that we are the sum of our memories and even if we feel insignificant now, our stories could hold some influence to someone in the future.
— Joyous Reads
A sparkling and hugely sympathetic English translation.... Maja Haderlap is a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes.
— Henrietta Foster, European Literature Network
Poetic Switzerland
Edited by Anna Kulp, et. al.
edition pudelundpinscher, 2015
An anthology of new works by 26 contemporary Swiss poets, translated into Switzerland's four national languages, French, German, Italian, and Romansch, as well as Indonesian and English.
Obscurity, Philippe Jaccottet
By Philippe Jaccottet
Seagull Books, 2015
After several years abroad, a young man returns to his hometown to seek the man he calls master. This master, a brilliant philosopher, had made the young man into a disciple before sending him out into the world to put his teachings into practice. Returning three years later, the disciple finds his master has abandoned his wife and child and moved into a squalid one-room flat, cutting himself off completely from his former life. Disillusioned and reeling from the discovery, the young man spends an entire night listening to his master’s bitter denunciation of the ideals they once shared.
Obscurity, by noted thinker Philippe Jaccottet, is the story of this intense encounter between two men who were once very close and now must grapple with the fractured ideals that separate them. Written in 1960 during Jaccottet’s period of poetic paralysis, the novel seeks to harmonize the best and worst of human nature—reconciling despair, falsehood, and lethargy of spirit with the need to remain open to beauty, truth, and the essential goodness of humankind. Translated by Tess Lewis, Obscurity is Jaccottet’s only work of fiction, one that will introduce new readers to the multifaceted skills of this major poet.
Praise for the French edition
“In its haggard sobriety, the account of this tormented soul’s monologue is staggering . . . a beautiful narrative, written in a resounding, solemn style.”—La Table Ronde
Notebooks: 1998-99
By Anselm Kiefer
Seagull Books, 2015
“For a long time, it was not clear if I would become a writer or an artist,” says Anselm Kiefer, whose paintings and sculptures have made him one of the most significant and influential artists of our time. Since he was awarded the Peace Prize by the German Book Trade in 2008, his essays, speeches, and lectures have gradually received more attention, but until now his diary accounts have been almost completely unknown. The power in Kiefer’s images, however, is rivaled by his writings on nature and history, literature and antiquity, and mysticism and mythology.
The first volume of Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer’s visual works during this period. In this volume, Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, RobertMusil, and many other writers and thinkers. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading—and vice versa—and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. Translated into English for the first time by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer’s strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium.
Praise for Kiefer
" Kiefer’s expertise lies in expressing how objects accrue symbolic value . . . [he] can find symbolism and romance in a doorknob. It’s a joy to read.” –Trinie Dalton, The LA Review of Books
“His works recall, in this sense, the grand tradition of history painting, with its notion about the elevated role of art in society, except that they do not presume moral certainty. What makes Kiefer’s work so convincing . . . is precisely its ambiguity and self-doubt, its rejection of easy solutions, historical amnesia, and transcendence.”—New York Times
“Wordiness for Kiefer is painterliness. The library and the gallery, the book and the frame inseparable, even interchangeable, in his monumental archive of human memory. Not since Picasso’s Guernica have pictures demanded so urgently that we studiously reflect and recollect in their presence.”—Simon Schama
The University of Chicago Press
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Elsewhere, Doron Rabinovici
By Doron Rabinovici
Haus Publishing, 2014
Why does the Israeli academic Ethan Rosen condemn an article he himself has written? Doesn’t he recognize his own words? How can he condemn his colleague Rudi Klausinger as an anti-Semite while voicing the same criticisms of the teaching of the Holocaust himself? Rosen and Klausinger are academic rivals, competing for the same professorship. Though both distinguished scholars, they could not be more different – or could they? Ethan should feel at home in Israel and Austria, but feels he belongs in neither. Similarly displaced, high-flying Rudi has never known who his father is, and his quest to find him leads him to Israel and to the Rosens, where Ethan’s father, an old Viennese Jew and Auschwitz survivor, is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. Identity, belonging, anti-Semitism and Zionism – Elsewhere confronts complex themes through the prism of a Jewish family in which old secrets are disclosed and the truth is seemingly forever concealed. At the end of this compelling novel nothing remains certain as Ethan discovers that home is often the place that feels most unfamiliar.
Tablet
“A sophisticated, attractive book. . . . Like the best Jewish comic novelists, from Philip Roth to Howard Jacobson, Rabinovici excels at communicating the too-muchness of Jewish experience, the sensation of being bombarded by insoluble questions—about Israel, the Holocaust, religious belief, family obligation.”
Times of Israel
“A compelling story, with believable characters and a twisting narrative that grabs the reader right from the first page.”
Privy Portrait, Jean-Luc Benoziglio
By Jean-Luc Benoziglio
Seagull Books, 2014
The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio's "Privy Portrait" has fallen on hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he's blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possession: a twenty-five-volume encyclopedia. His neighbors, the Shritzkys, are vulgar, narrow-minded, and racist. And because he has no space for his encyclopedia in his cramped room, he stores it in the communal bathroom, and this becomes a major point of contention with his neighbors. The bathroom is also the only place he can find refuge from the Shritzkys' blaring television, and he barricades himself in it to read his encyclopedia, much to the chagrin of the rest of the residents of the building.
Darkly amusing, "Privy Portrait" is the monologue of a man, disoriented by the gaping void of not knowing his own nationality, recounting the final remnants of his own sanity and his life. In this buffoonish, even grotesque, yet deeply pitiful man, Benoziglio explores, with a light yet profound touch, weighty themes such as the roles of family, history, one's moral responsibility towards others, and the fragility of personal identity.
Complete Review
“There’s considerable comic relief in Privy Portrait, as the narrator recounts his sadly amusing efforts to get by and find his place—not very good efforts, which are marked by missteps and bad decisions all along the way. The humor leavens and distracts from what’s an otherwise very dark tale, a mix Benoziglio manages quite well, helped by his sharp, wry writing which Lewis captures nicely in her translation.”
On the Seawall
“A lively translation by Tess Lewis, Privy Portrait . . . is a darkly comic story. . . . It is dialogue, daydream, recalled events, and caustic self-assessment that fuel the prose.”
“Tess Lewis has provided an invigorating translation that captures the amusingly colliding layers of diction in the French prose.”
Ludwig’s Room, Alois Hotschnig
By Alois Hotschnig
Seagull Books 2014
When Kurt Weber inherits his great-uncle's lakeside house, he finds traces of the dark secrets of his family's past. The early inhabitants of the house haunt his dreams nightly. And one day a ghostlike woman appears before him, hiding herself in a room that had been kept locked throughout his childhood. Inside, Kurt finds a hidden stash of photographs, letters, and documents. As he deciphers them, he gradually understands the degree of complicity in wartime horrors by his family and among his neighbors.
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the entire village adheres to an old and widely understood agreement not to expose the many members in the community who had been involved with a nearby prison camp during World War II. This knowledge wraps the entire community--those involved, and those who know of the involvement--in inescapable guilt for generations. Translated from the original German by Tess Lewis, "Ludwig's Room" is a story of love, betrayal, honor, and cowardice, as well as the burden of history and the moral demands of the present.
Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Death and debt are the big issues of the 1959-born Austrian, who is one of the best writers of his generation. His work [. . .] is consistent. The same spirit is at work from the first stories to the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel, Leonardo’s Hands, to Ludwig’s Room."
The Vienna Press
"The secret of literature is to make the reader curious about the solution of a riddle. Hotschnig has mastered this technique like no other in his generation Austrian comrades. No word is superfluous."
Times Literary Supplement
“The book is political in a broad enough sense that, now published in English for the first time, it does not feel dated. Lewis’s excellent translation renders the intensity and aphorism of Hotschnig’s style while skilfully alternating between ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ to convey Heimat, a difficult-to-translate concept that is at the heart of Ludwig’s Room.”
Fly Away, Pigeon, Melinda Nadj Abonji
Fly Away, Pigeon
Seagull Books, 2014
Fly Away, Pigeon tells the heart-wrenching story of a family torn between emigration and immigration and paints evocative portraits of the former Yugoslavia and modern-day Switzerland. In this novel, Melinda Nadj Abonji interweaves two narrative strands, recounting the history of three generations of the Kocsis family and chronicling their hard-won assimilation. Originally part of Serbia’s Hungarian-speaking minority in the Vojvodina, the Kocsis family immigrates to Switzerland in the early 1970s when their hometown is still part of the Yugoslav republic. Parents Miklos and Rosza land in Switzerland knowing just one word—“work.” And after three years of backbreaking, menial work, both legal and illegal, they are finally able to obtain visas for their two young daughters, Ildiko and Nomi, who safely join them. However, for all their efforts to adapt and assimilate they still must endure insults and prejudice from members of their new community and helplessly stand by as the friends and family members they left behind suffer the maelstrom of the Balkan War.
With tough-minded nostalgia and compassionate realism, Fly Away, Pigeonillustrates how much pain and loss even the most successful immigrant stories contain. It is a work that is intensely local, while grounded in the histories and cultures of two distinctive communities. Its emotions and struggles are as universal as the human dilemmas it portrays.
Praise for Fly Away, Pigeon
World Literature Today
This novel repays close reading. Its lyrical nostalgia, tempered by Ildi’s tough, ironic eye, etches the fate of those displaced by history, outsiders at home and abroad, while its seemingly artless structure deftly renders this young woman’s struggle for self-discovery amid disparate cultures and fragmented histories.
World Literature Today
This novel repays close reading. Its lyrical nostalgia, tempered by Ildi’s tough, ironic eye, etches the fate of those displaced by history, outsiders at home and abroad, while its seemingly artless structure deftly renders this young woman’s struggle for self-discovery amid disparate cultures and fragmented histories.
Reading in Translation
“There is much to say about Fly Away, Pigeon besides that it is a narrative of immigration. It is a novel about family and memory, about young love and the history of post-1945 Yugoslavia, a novel written in lyrical, experimental prose.”
Seagull Books
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Seedtime
By Philippe Jaccottet
Seagull Books, 2013
Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerlands's most prominent and prolific men of letters, Jaccottet has published more than a dozen books of poetry and criticism, but none are widely available in English.
"Seedtime"—Jaccottet's notebooks—is an especially good introduction to this leading francophone Swiss author, containing the poet's observations of the natural world and his reflections on literature, art, music, and the human condition. In these explorations, he returns again and again to the fundamental, focusing his prodigious talents on describing the exact shade of light on a meadow, the sound of running water, the color of cherry and almond blossoms, or the cry of a bird in the stillness before dawn. In this translation by Tess Lewis, English readers will finally be able to join this poet as we follow in his footsteps of fifty years ago and find the still-viable seeds of his delicate and tenacious verse.
World Literature Today
“At the center of Philippe Jaccottet’s scrupulously honest writing lies the paradox of those imbricated, inextricable emotions that, on the one hand, can orient toward a sense of shame at what the world can generate, yet on the other can urge us to sing the stunning beauty of some quiet fragment of existence.”
"French writer Philippe Jaccottet’s ever-questioning poetic analyses of haunting ephemeral perceptions are carried on with such scruple and sincerity that, for his European peers, he has become the model of literary integrity." John Taylor
One Hundred Days
By Lukas Bärfuss
Granta Books, 2012
When Swiss aid worker David Hohl arrives in Rwanda in 1990, he wants to know what it feels like to make a difference.Instead, he finds himself among expats, living a life of postcolonial privilege and boredom, and he begins to suspect that the agency is more concerned with political expedience than improving lives. But are his own motives any more noble? When civil war breaks out and David goes into hiding, he is forced to examine his own relationship to the country he wants to help and to the cosmopolitan Rwandan woman he wants to possess. As the genocide rages over the course of one hundred desperate days, the clear line David has always drawn between idealism and complicity quickly begins to blur.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE OXFORD WEIDENFELD PRIZE
Reviews
‘[A] harrowing portrayal of organised slaughter... it explores the existential dilemmas that come with being Swiss - a more interesting topic than you might imagine... Magnificent’—Glasgow Herald
‘His writing is seriously good, dramatising horrific events in illuminating ways’—Peter Carty
Splithead, Julya Rabinowich
By Julya Rabinowich
Portobello Books, 2011
'My father and I head towards a nervous breakdown as he attempts to erase three years of Communist indoctrination in the course of a single evening. I simply cannot comprehend that Lenin, the friend of all children, is now allegedly an arsehole.'
When seven-year-old Mischka and her family flee the oppressive USSR for the freedom of Vienna, her world seems to divide neatly in two: there's life as she knew it before, and life as she must relearn it now. But even as she's busy dressing her new Barbie, perfecting her German and gorging on fresh fruit, Mischka is aware that there's part of her that can never escape her homeland, with its terrifying folktales, its insidious anti-Semitism and its old family secrets. As her parents' marriage splinters and her sister retreats into silence, Mischka has to find her own way of living when her head and her heart are in two places at once.
There is darkness galore in this novel. But there is also much comedy to be had in its twisted enchanted tales. It is as seductive and unsettling as similar work by Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood, while it shares a geography with Everything Is Illuminated and If I Told You Once.
Maybe This Time, Alois Hotschnig
By Alois Hotschnig
Peirene Press 2011
A spellbinding short story collection by one of Austria’s most critically acclaimed authors.
A man becomes obsessed with observing his neighbours. A large family gathers for Christmas only to wait for the one member who never turns up. An old woman lures a man into her house where he finds dolls resembling himself as a boy. Mesmerizing and haunting stories about loss of identity in the modern world.
Reviews
The Guardian Paperback of the Year 2011: "incredibly weird and unclassifiable"
"clever and enticing" Times Literary Supplement
"Not since Julio Cortazar's game of Hopscotch ... has an author so daringly undertaken to challenge the reader." Amanda Hopkinson, The Independent
"Hotschnig's stories have the weird, creepy and ambiguous quality of disturbing dreams. .. It is, though, very refreshing to be confronted by stories which so firmly refuse to yield to conventional interpretation." Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
"This award-winning collection by the Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig drew comparisons with Kafka. But Hotschnig’s quietly terrifying voice is all his own." Daily Mail
"Intriguing and powerful, Maybe This Time perfectly captures the sense of abandonment, the unpalatable truths, the trickery and the nihilism that have driven our desperate bid to find both a sense of identity and a firm footing in the bewildering and uncharted waters of the 21st century." Pamela Norfolk, Lancashire Evening Post
"These stories... demonstrate Hotschnig's impressive talent at creating and drawing the reader into psychological terrains that are at once familiar and strange." Pamela Saur, Journal of Austrian Studies, University of Nebraska Press
Once Again for Thucydides, Peter Handke
By Peter Handke
1998 New Directions
Once Again for Thucydides is a collection of seventeen "micro-epics" written by Peter Handke on trips around the world, from the Balkans to the Pyrenees, from Salzburg to the sea of Hokkaido in Japan. In each journal, Handke concentrates on small things he observes, trying to capture their essence, their "simple, unadorned validity." What results is a work of remarkable precision, in which he uncovers the general appearance of random objects––an ash tree, a shoeshine man, hats in a crowd, a boat loading on a pier––and discovers their inner workings and mystery. Always, his writing hints at the unknown. Describing the snow melting in a garden or falling during a train ride through inland Japan, the glowworms illuminating the plains in Friuli, the tidal waters flowing and receding off the Atlantic coast of Spain, these amazing little "epics" reveal a narrator obsessed with the wonders of detail and marveling, as are we, at the scope and variety of the natural world.
Reviews
“Handke delights in sublime detail.... these vignettes have the power of poetry. ”—New York Times
