Open Letter: 64 books

"Irreducible to any single literary genre, the Volodinian cosmos is skillfully crafted, fusing elements of science fiction with magical realism and political commentary."— Music & Literature The most patently sci-fi work of Antoine Volodine's to be translated into English, Radiant...

Featured on Jeff VanderMeer's "Epic List of Favorite Books Read in 2015" "Rodoreda had bedazzled me by the sensuality with which she reveals things within the atmosphere of her novels."-Gabriel García Marquez "Rodoreda plumbs a sadness that reaches beyond historic...

In the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic—winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—was invited to Middletown, Connecticut as a guest lecturer. A world away from the brutal sieges of Sarajevo and the nationalist rhetoric of Milošević, she instead...

"The most important Argentinian writer since Borges."-The Independent Juan José Saer's Scars explores a crime committed by Luis Fiore, a thirty-nine year old laborer who shot his wife twice in the face with a shotgun; or, rather, it explores the circumstances of four characters who...

“Guðbergur Bergsson achieved success with his novel Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, which shocked Icelandic readers in innumerable ways, lashing out as it does at the Icelandic society of the post-war years for its cultural confusion, amorality, and hypocrisy. The main character is a grumpy old man...

"Bae dissolves conventional ¬linear narrative, as though it were impossible for cause and effect to exist concurrently with such repression." —Joanna Walsh, The National A writer struggles to come to terms with the death of her beloved mentor; the staging of an experimental play...

From the 2010 winner of the Best Translated Book Award comes a harrowing, controversial novel about a woman's revenge, Jewish identity, and how to talk about Adolf Hitler in today's world. Elinor's comfortable life-popular newspaper column, stable marriage, well-adjusted kids-is totally upended...

"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue."-Robert Coover Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's...

"Carlos Labbé's [Navidad & Matanza] begins to fuck with your head from its very first word-moving through journalese, financial reporting, whodunit, Joseph Conrad, Raymond Chandler, Nabokov to David Lynch."-Toby Litt It's the summer of 1999 when the two children of wealthy video...

A 2013 Best Translated Book Award Finalist When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator's thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early...

WINNER OF THE CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTEST A humorous picaresque set in sixteenth-century Spain, Thrown into Nature tells the story of Dr. Nicolás Monardes, whose medical treatise "Of the Tabaco and His Great Vertues" was partially responsible for introducing tobacco to...

"Smart, impish, and spare, Per Aage Brandt finds the physical in the metaphysical, and the fizz in the physiological."—Joanna Trzeciak A cognitive scientist by trade, Per Aage Brandt's poems resemble little puzzle boxes—all quite short with lines of almost identical length. But...

Winner of the 2014 Contemporary Bulgarian Novelist Award co-sponsored by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the America for Bulgaria Foundation. First novel of Tenev's to be published in English despite Angela Rodel winning a PEN Michael Henry Heim Translation Grant for her work on his short...

Chosen from his most recent book Farfalla e segno: Poesie scelte 1972-2009, this collection is a sort of "best of." His earlier collection—Echoes of Memory (UPNE, 2003)—was praised and reviewed by numerous poets, including Dana Gioia and Rosanna Warren.