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"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.

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami that ravaged Japan lasted a mere six minutes. But the fallout-the aftershocks, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the country-wide devastation-from this catastrophic event and the trauma experienced by those who survived it is ongoing, if not permanent.In Ganbare! Workshops on Dying, Polish writer and reporter Katarzyna Boni takes us on a journey through the experience of death and how the living-those of us left behind-learn to grieve. In Ganbare!, some learn how to scuba-dive for the sole purpose of recovering their loved one's remains; some compile foreign-language dictionaries of "e;prohibited,"e; tsunami-related words so they don't have to think of them in their mother tongue; many believe in the lingering presence of the ghosts of those whom the wave claimed for itself. Whatever their methods, whatever their mechanisms, whatever their degree of success, the survivors Boni gives voice to in Ganbare! provide an intimate, soul-aching, and above all human look at how people come to deal with loss, trauma, and death.

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.

An extraordinary meditation on experience, writing, and space, My Two Worlds is about a writer lost in an unfamiliar Brazilian city, searching for a park. Struggling to match the two-dimensional map with reality, and disturbed by the bad reviews his new book is receiving, he begins to see his thoughts, reflections, and memories mirrored in the landscape and its inhabitants.

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.

Winner of the 2015 AATSEEL Book Award for Best Translation into English"e;A sharp realist."e;Aleksandar HemonTold more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tide is the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband, and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. Taking place over three decades, High Tide functions as a sort of psychological mystery, with the full scope of Ieva's personal situationand the relationship between the three main charactersonly becoming clear at the end of the novel.One of Latvia's most notable young writers, Abele is a fresh voice in European fictionher prose is direct, evocative, and exceptionally beautiful. The combination of strikingly lush descriptive writing with the precision with which she depicts the minds of her characters elevates this novel from a simple story of a love triangle into a fascinating, philosophical, haunting book.Inga Abele is a novelist, poet, and playwright. Her novel High Tide received the 2008 Latvian Literature Award, and the 2009 Baltic Assembly Award in Literature. Her work has appeared in such anthologies as New European Poets and Best European Fiction 2010.Kaija Straumanis is a graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation at the University of Rochester, and is the editorial director of Open Letter Books. She translates from both German and Latvian.

While studying a seventeenth-century diary, the protagonist of Little Dark Room uncovers information about the first documented professional female artist. This discovery promises to change her academic career, and life in general . . . until she realizes that her "e;discovery"e; was nothing more than two pages stuck together. At this point there's no going back though, and she goes to great lengths to hide her mistakeundermining her sanity in the process. A shifty, satirical novel that's funny and colorful, while also raising essential questions about truth, research, and the very nature of belief.

By blinking his eyes and moving his pupils, a paraplegic man-the onetime vocalist in a famous rock band-composes a kind of anti-biography that is corrected and expanded upon by an unknown editor. Alternating between the vocalist's impressionistic recollections and the editor's "e;corrections,"e; an asynchronous story emerges, evoking the vocalist's childhood in southern Chile and telling of the rise and fall of the band that he grew up to lead, while hinting at a multiplicity of other narrative possibilities.

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 Confederacy of Dunces-esque family story written by one of China's most beloved women writers.

Edgy debut collection steeped in social criticism about mental illness, childhood violence, financial problems, and working in a brothel.

At its core, The Bottom of the Sky is a novel about two young boys in love with other planets and a disturbingly beautiful girl. An homage to the history of American science fiction, it's also about the Gulf War, 9/11, and a mysterious "e;incident."e; It's like a Kurt Vonnegut novel told by David Lynch through the lens of Philip K. Dick.

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