Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood

The nine stories comprising the collection The Last Thing depict the rise of fascism and its dangers for the Jewish community in Slovakia through the concentration camps and the partisan fight against the Germans, concluding with a devastating summation of all that had been lost and destroyed in the war. Drawing on his own experience, Leopold Lahola explores moral ambivalences, instead a simple opposition of good versus evil. He punctures the standard historical image of the partisan fighters by depicting their heroism alongside their cruelty and pettiness while also showing how often bravery and madness, kindness and stupidity can coexist. His sequence of compelling World War II stories offers starkly new perspectives on the tragedy and grandeur of that momentous time in history. Virtually uknown abroad and almost forgotten in Slovakia, these stories are finally available in an English translation.
The translation and publication of this work was supported using public funding by the Slovak Arts Council and by Slovak Literature Abroad (SLOLA).

BUY THE BOOK: https://karolinum.cz/en/books/lahola-the-last-thing-31322

Author bio
Leopold Lahola (1918-1968) managed to escape deportation to a concentration camp as a young man and fought in the anti-Nazi resistance. After the war, following the 1949 Communist takeover, his promising career as a playwright was cut short by a vicious campaign accusing him of promoting "existentialist values". In 1949 Lahola emigrated to Israel, where he worked in film before moving to West Germany, where he also worked in film and TV. He emerged from obscurity during the brief thaw of the 1968 Prague Spring, when he was able to return to his homeland and thrive as a playwright and film director. His short story collection The Last Thing finally appeared in Slovakia in early 1968, but sadly, only a few months later, he died of a heart attack just before his 50th birthday. The book was not viewed favourably by the hardline regime that followed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia and this work of Lahola’s fell into obscurity again until it was republished in 1994.

Translator bio
Julia Sherwood is a translator (with Peter Sherwood) from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German into English as well as into Slovak. She was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and studied English and Slavonic languages and literature in Cologne, London and Munich. She was editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote (2013–2023). She co-curates SlovakLiterature.com and is the editor of Seagull Books’ Slovak list. Julia and Peter have translated into English some thirty books by mostly contemporary Slovak and Czech writers. Their most recent translations are The Bonnet by Katarína Kucbelová, Seven Days to the Funeral by Ján Rozner and This Room Is Impossible To Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová.
Peter Sherwood is a translator and scholar. He taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, from 1972 to 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014, he was László Birinyi, Sr, Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter’s translations from the Hungarian include several short collections, as well novels, most recently Krisztina Tóth’s prize-winning Barcode and Krisztián Grecsó’s Vera.

‘Russian Specialities’ is a witty and thought-provoking read about the power of Russian propaganda. Dimitrij Kapitelman’s novel is a timely literary reflection on the contemporary geopolitical landscape that will appeal to fans of Marina Lewycka and Andrey Kurkov.

The novel’s narrator, Dmitrij, was born in Kyiv, but has spent most of his life in Germany. His family left Ukraine as Jewish refugees in the mid-1990s, when he was eight. His elderly parents are from the Soviet generation. They run a Russian delicatessen and wholesale business in Leipzig, making regular trips to Poland and Ukraine to stock up on produce. After scraping through lockdowns, the delicatessen is wound down as Dmitrij’s father slowly succumbs to dementia.

MORE INFO: https://www.new-books-in-german.com/recommendations/russian-specialities/

Author bio
Dmitrij Kapitelman was born in Kyiv in 1986, and came to Germany with his family at the age of eight, as a ‘quota refugee’. He studied Political Science and Sociology at Leipzig University and graduated from the German School of Journalism (DJS) in Munich. He now works as a freelance journalist. His first book, Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters (‘The Smile of my Invisible Father’) was published in 2016 to huge acclaim, earning him the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize. Eine Formalie in Kiew (‘A Formality in Kyiv’) followed in 2021, for which he was awarded the Ravensburger Verlag Family Novel Book Prize.

Translator bio
Rob Myatt is an award-winning translator from German, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Russian and Luxembourgish into English. He was the recipient of the Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation 2023 for his translation of an extract from Behzad Karim Khani’s debut novel Dog Wolf Jackal. His literary translations have appeared in journals such as Turkoslavia, Subnivean, MayDay and The Dodge and he has worked with publishers including Granta, Rowohlt, Hanser, Cyranka, Politikens Forlag and V&Q. You can find him on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/robtranslates.bsky.social or his website: https://polyglotliterature.co.uk/

For rights info contact: friederike.barakat@hanser.de

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and to share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.

‘White Clouds’ is an intimate study of a diverse and extended Black German family that addresses complex social issues. It follows three family members as they grapple with their unique stages in life and their distinct identities.

Zazie is a young Black German woman, a member of Gen-Z. She is the daughter of Ulrike, a white 68er who is as dynamic as she is unreliable, and Papis, a Senegalese academic who has settled in Germany and made a living translating Nietzsche but now often feels his daughters are foreign to him. Zazie is political, embracing her Black Diasporic identity. She feels at times that James Baldwin and Roxanne Gay understand her better than her own sister does. She has just completed her MA thesis and aspires to an academic career, but is not quite sure academia is the right place for her. She is also suffering under the weight of family problems and a white boyfriend who is woke when it comes to pop culture, but doesn’t always understand her struggles as a Black woman in a white-majority society.

Zazie’s older sister, Dieo, is less politically engaged: a child therapist, she has just started a new phase of training to allow her to become self-employed. She is struggling to balance her career with mothering her three biracial sons. She could use more support from her white husband Simon, but he is too wrapped up in his tech bro aspirations to acknowledge her needs.

Simon is the son of an absent father – a documentarian who was more concerned with art and politics than fatherhood, and a vibrant mother interested in intersectional feminism. He may not have any insight into the problems of his marriage, or why Dieo only rarely wants to sleep with him, but he is steadfast and intelligent, and Zazie feels able to confide in him about her worries about their family – especially how generational trauma has them all stuck in pre-determined roles and behaviours that are making them unhappy.

When Papis dies unexpectedly, the laboriously calibrated family structures lose their equilibrium. The sisters travel to their father’s homeland for the funeral, and saying goodbye becomes a new beginning for them. Wise, accessible and subtly humorous, Yandé Seck’s debut novel shows how intergenerational trauma and racist and sexist structures can make people act in ways they may not always be conscious of.

MORE INFO: https://www.new-books-in-german.com/recommendations/white-clouds/

"Yandé Seck’s début is a loving dissection of a black family in a city … The novel is narrated like a Netflix series about everyday city life; it is pithy and contemporary, full of beautiful dialogue and wise observations." Stern

"For all the weight of her themes – the racism experienced by her protagonist and the oppressive demands of motherhood – Yandé Seck manages to make her writing entertaining, humourous and forgiving. And for all the conflict and struggle, it is a hopeful novel." hr2-kultur

Author bio
Yandé Seck was born in 1986 and lives in Frankfurt am Main with her husband and two children. She works as a psychotherapist for children and teens, teaches at the University of Frankfurt and is studying for a doctorate on motherhood, migration and psychoanalysis. ‘White Clouds’ is her first novel.

Translator bio
Priscilla Layne is Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She translated Olivia Wenzel’s debut novel, 1000 Coils of Fear, and Rude Girl by Birgit Weyhe from German into English. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism and acritical guide to Rainer Maria Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun.

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.