Essential Translations

What to do when your fictional sleuth refuses to die? A detective writer's attempts at writing his masterpiece. A very successful detective fiction writer, Leo Basilius, decides to bring his popular crime series to a close and take a sabbatical on the Greek island of Nysa where, as a young man, he wrote his first books - poetry and short stories. He returns there intending to write his master piece. The one he knows he has in him. Surrounded by his wife and new island friends, he settles in to write. But unexpectedly his main character, Detective-Sargeant Vass Levonian, appears demanding that Basilius resurrect him. The hauntings multiply and inspiration doesn't come. Leo Basilius wants to find fulfilment as a writer. But can he? Is it too late? Can you leave a mark? And what should that mark be? What do we leave behind? What is our legacy? And … Is there still time to do something about it?

This is the story of a struggle between love for God and love of a woman. The reader is immersed in the whirlwind of passions, upheavals and feelings of guilt that overwhelm Stefano, the novel's protagonist. What happens when a dream becomes a nightmare? Stefano is put to the test in a series of events that toss him from the seminary to a great love story, from Italy to New York, from a humble job to the clutches of the American underworld. The emotional disturbance created in Stefano's mind pushes him to re-evaluate the meaning of things, of life itself. For him, these are times of profound and heartfelt reflections on human relationships, on one's existence, on the before and the after, on the self and on the other. He asks himself: "Am I the criminal lying in this cell, or the shy, generous and selfless boy from the seminary?"

The title character Ari could have stepped out of a traditional folk tale straight into the day before yesterday. Son of a monstrous, unscrupulous mother and a faint-hearted father, he catches a glimpse of a life that would be to his liking when he encounters a young woman who …. but you have to read the novel to find out how the rest of Ari's life pans out.

In a letter that she writes to a certain Théodore, the narrator in Images evokes a tumultuous period in her life: her adolescence. During this period, filled with anxiety and panic, she found help and comfort from Dorothée, a young woman barely older than her, who helped her escape her nightmare existence. What was the young Isaac so afraid of at the time? And why is she now remembering the terrifying events of her youth? Images is about the fear of dying, the pull death has on us, and how we seek the help and comfort of others in an effort to escape this nightmare.

With this psychological thriller, award-winning author Fulvio Caccia continues a trilogy that began in 2004 with The Gothic Line. Jonathan and Leila are two strangers who meet coincidentally in Paris. Soon, their budding romance leads them to discover that they share more than attraction. A dark episode took place between them, and will send their reality into a downward spiral.

More than the macroscopic of the surreal, Jean-Pierre Vallotton explores the microscopic of hyperreality. In fact, if there is one single element that stands out in this complex poetry, it is precisely the absence of anything obvious. Yet his idiosyncratic poetic structure never disrupts its symbolic density. Behind the irregularity of forms, there is recurrence, tempo, permanency of pursuit. Where other poets of his generation developed strategies of deconstruction, Vallotton invented a brave new mosaic with the parameters left behind by traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. If William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot are considered decadent, then so is Jean-Pierre Vallotton a decadent, however, the sort of decadent that will be viewed as being great in years to come. His neo-baroque poetry stands at the crossroads of whatever styles, forms, and contents led to this spot.

This collection of poetry is a selection of award-winning Franco-Ontarian poet Robert Dickson's various collections of poetry, including his Governor-General Award winning Humains paysages en temps de paix relative.

To read Broggiato, is to discover his devotion to the act of writing poetry that is intense, vibrant and lit from within; where the words resonate with our modern sensibility, where behind the words lies an immense pity for the human condition. His is an awareness that however imperfect our perceptions and senses are, our imaginations have freedom within the constraints of those imperfections, both latent and ever-vigilant, as in the lines: "searching for the moon/ through the iron grill of the gate".

Archives are often depicted as musty repositories, museum cellars, warehouses shoring up retaining walls against forgetfulness and the inevitable erosions of time. Objects deposited in the archives are tucked away for safekeeping. But Louise Warren? archives are not file boxes or document lockers. They are not relegated to closed cabinets in locked rooms. They are where writing goes and what writing does.

France Theoret's La femme du stalinien is the latest novel in a trilogy. It tells the story of Louise Aubert, her break from Mathieu Lord when he joins the Stalinist party, and her re-invention through language into a woman who is no longer governed by ordinary codes, conventions and commonplaces.

Kreslin's poetry is a beautiful aesthetic experience, evocative and subtle, particularly rich in natural imagery. There are clear themes that run like veins throughout it: the Mura River (which winds through Prekmurje), the ubiquitous storks of Prekmurje and other avian images, an appreciation for gypsy culture (particularly their musical traditions), trans-generational and trans-cultural inspiration, mist and stars. One might imagine the poems best read in the early morning hours, on the mist-spread banks of the Mura.

Luka Novak's The Golden Shower or What Men Want is a light-hearted but deadly serious romp through postmodern culture, mores and lifestyles. In turns, it is shallow, profound, didactic, moving and instructive. In its original Slovenian, it was a bestseller, capturing both the ailments and strengths of a world that seems to have turned upside down our normal desires and expectations.

Autumnal equinox. The End of the World sails on the Aegean Sea. Aboard is Marjolaine, a cook who recently lost her job at a greasy spoon. She rubs shoulders with chess players, a bookseller, a retired professor, a romance novelist, a blue-haired singer … Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet, people play cards, while others celebrate, read, dream or cry, and still others die. All these lives intersect, meet up again, disappear, and above all tell us that there is not only one truth. In The End of the World is Elsewhere, volume four of her Fragments of the World tetralogy, Hélène Rioux creates an intricate and complex novel filled with topical issues and references to history and literature.

Most contemporary poets wear their cultural and artistic influences on their sleeve. Picking up a book in an English language bookstore, it is easy to see where the poet is coming from, either geographically, or culturally (ironic and formal; confessional and free etc). This may seem reductive until you read a book like the one you have in your hands. Put simply, Mia Lecomte is a quietly dazzling poet on her own terms. She is fed by multiple cultures, she is widely read, but her writing is unique and absolutely genuine. You won't have read anything like this.

A bilingual English-Italian collection of poetry from one of Switzerland's widely published Italian-language poets and critics.

Kafka's writings are characterized by an extreme sensitivity manifested in absurdity, alienation, and gallows humor, and these two particular collections of short pieces, A Country Doctor (1919) and A Hunger Artist (1924), represent later works in the corpus. Poems and Songs of Love is a translation of the collection Piyyutim ve-Shirei Yedidot by Georg Mordechai Langer, which contains an elegy to Langer's friend and mentor Franz Kafka. Langer and Kafka hailed from the same middle-class, assimilated, Jewish Prague background and shared a mutual interest in Hasidic culture, literature, and Hebrew. This collaborative translation by Elana and Menachem Wolff brings the fascinating work of Langer - poems as well as an essay on Kafka - to the English-reading public for the first time, and sheds light on a hitherto unexplored relationship.

Divided into 27 chapters, the novel recounts some of the childhood experiences of Fénix, a boy who grows up in the Hungarian city of Ipolyság, within the context of the German invasion and the subsequent Russian advance and domination of Hungary. Fénix, who supposedly got his name because he was born at the "dawn" of the Second World War, which his parents believed to be "Humanity's rebirth, when technology, medicine and other sciences [would take] a great leap," lives in a loveless world, with his mother, an utterly cold materialist, and his father, at the head of his handicrafts factory by day, or at the Casino amusing himself with prostitutes by night. And so, abandoned by his natural parents, little Fénix seeks refuge in the love of Judit, daughter of the peasant family that lives behind his mansion, and tends the animals, orchard, and vegetables; she works as a servant in the home while she looks after Fénix. Judit and Fénix build a relationship that is at the same time a combination of friendship, brotherhood, motherhood, deep love, and sexuality. During the war, from the first appearance of Hungarian troops that recapture the city for Hungary from Czechoslovakia, the arrival of the Nazis who take the Jews out of the city (including Fénix's best friend) and send them to un unknown destination, up to the takeover of the city by the Russians, the love between Judit and Fénix perseveres and grows, until Judit's sudden death when she steps on a mine.

Portrait of a Husband with the Ashes of His Wife addresses themes of destiny and the repercussions of our choices. Before she dies, actress Alma Joncas instructs her husband to bury her ashes where she was happiest. He decides that was their garden. But relatives, friends and Alma's colleagues disagree. After they tell him where they think she was happiest, not only is he no longer sure about the garden, he wonders if he truly knew the woman he was married to for twenty-four years.

I have written Life Stories virtually in the space of one breath ?these stories have been imagined in such concentration, that I had to free myself from them. They came so naturally, that I am very happy to have returned to the short-story format. It seems to me that in these eight stories each individual and different life is so strikingly intense that it was not possible to place all into one novel ?Also in terms of style, I searched and found a different approach to each of the stories. I wanted to express myself more clearly and more simply. ?Nora Ikstena