A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind. In his family, mental illness has shaped lives for generations, and time in psychiatric wards has become almost a rite of passage. His battle to avoid inheriting his grandmother’s suicidal behavior, his mother’s bipolar disorder, or his father’s bouts with alcoholism and depression spurs him to flee Germany for New York, via Paris and Vienna, only to end up in just the kind of mental institution that so terrified him. But he works there as a psychologist rather than undergo treatment as a patient himself, and learns that a person is always more than a diagnosis. In this picaresque novel, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, the protagonist is forced to confront the question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

“Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.” — Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves and Ghost Stories

“Illuminating . . . moves at a roving pace . . . Botany of Madness is a riveting novel in which a man weighs mental illness with prismatic precision, his work involving scientific classifications, autofiction, and memory.” — Foreword Reviews

Translator bio
Alexandra Roesch has translated twelve works of fiction and nonfiction including writings by Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler, and Stefanie vor Schulte, and has been awarded the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize. Based in Frankfurt, she holds an MA in translation from the University of Bristol.

Author bio
Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theater, film, and psychology in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has published several plays and short stories and works as an author, psychologist, and lecturer in psychology and creative writing. Botany of Madness is his first novel.

BUY THE BOOK: www.newvesselpress.com

Gottland opens an unusual window on the history of Central Europe, in particular the part of it occupied by the Czechs. Mariusz Szczygieł presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Czechs as a nation, gathering together a wide-ranging cast of characters: the sculptor commissioned to build the world’s biggest statue of Stalin; the stage star who was Goebbels’ lover; Franz Kafka’s niece; Karel Gott, who won the “Most Popular Male Singer” award a record thirty-six times; and the Bata brothers, founders of a shoe empire that shod half the world. Many of these people’s lives were marked by tragedy as they fell victim to the historical events that engulfed twentieth-century Europe. One of Europe’s preeminent investigative journalists and a devoted Czechophile, Szczygieł is uniquely placed to capture this country and its people through these bizarre, tragic stories. Built from meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Gottland is a mesmerising and offbeat tour of the nation that gave us Franz Kafka, Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard.

“One of those delightfully unclassifiable books... Szczygieł is strange and funny, constantly off at jaunty tangents.” Julian Barnes, Book of the Year, The Guardian

”Extraordinary... Gottland is one of the funniest books I have read and one of the shrewdest about what it was like to live under fascism and communism, the experience of so much of Europe in the last century. It is not about Czechoslovakia or Poland or even limited to Mitteleuropa, but about how one copes with tyranny and corruption and preserves a conscience... Important and enjoyable.” The Spectator

”Many of the stories in Mariusz Szczygieł's portrait of Czechoslovakia could have come from the pages of Kafka... Absorbing, offbeat history.” The Financial Times

”Non-fiction stories from Czechoslovakia, which show a country more fantastical than even its wildest literature led us to believe.” The Guardian

”Gottland offers an indelible account of the ravages of 20th-century totalitarianism and the way it continues to pollute human thought and behavior in the 21st century.” New York Times

Translator bio
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent published translations include Not There by Mariusz Szczygieł, reportage about (broadly understood) loss, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.

Author bio
Mariusz Szczygieł is one of Europe’s most celebrated journalists. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of a number of books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His books have been published in twenty-one countries and have been awarded the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi, among other honours. From 1995–2001, he hosted a popular talk show on Polish television. Szczygieł runs the Institute of Reportage in Warsaw, a creative writing reportage school, and Dowody na Isnienie, an independent publishing house. Not There won the Nike Award and Nike Readers' Award in Poland on publication in 2019.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.lindeneditions.com/shop/p/gottland-exploding-stalin-and-other-true-tales-from-the-heart-of-europe-by-mariusz-szczygie-translated-by-antonia-lloyd-jones

A comic, irreverent and mournful romp of a book, set in 2016 with flashbacks to the '40s, '70s and '90s, and one quick journey all the way back to Ancient Greece.

The hero Aris is a young man, early 20s, sinking into a quicksand of confusion and of angst. As a baby he was adopted by a German couple, a sort of act of reparation for atrocities committed by Germany in Greece in World War II. A dying Greek woman in the nursing home where he works in southern Germany sends him on an odyssey to Greece to find and deliver a secret briefcase to her granddaughter. Tales of Aris’s absurd adventures in modern-day down-and-out Athens are interwoven with the experiences of a young Greek boy named Stylanios during the German occupation of World War II Greece, who flees to a monastery in Mount Athos, narrowly missing explosions and atrocities around him. We ultimately learn that the two stories are entwined.

The writing is informal and engaging, the dialogue is raw and hilarious, and the novel has a wonderful sense of place, with scenes set in the taverns and greasy spoons of small-town Germany and contemporary Athens, as well as in the villages and monasteries of the countryside in war-time Greece.

“…The trip is beset with all sorts of unpleasantness, hilarious twists and turns, and harsh reality, softened only by the fact that Bekas tells the story with such zest and affection for his characters, that you simply fall in love with them all as the story progresses.” Marcus Weingärtner, Berliner Zeitung, December 10, 2018 “A bold, spirited book that shows how one’s homeland is a blend of the past and the present.” Rainer Moritz, Chrismon.de, January 17, 2019

Sylvia Franke translates fiction and creative non-fiction from German to English. Her translations have appeared in "The Malahat Review" and "The Antigonish Review".
- 2025 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Recipient
- 2023 Long-listed for the John Dryden Translation Competition

Gerasimos Bekas is a writer, playwright and theatre producer. He grew up in Greece and southern Germany. Past winner of a literary stipend from the Bavarian Academy of Writing, he won the 2014 taz Audience Award at Germany’s annual Open Mike event. His theatre productions include “The Dogs” (Athens Epidavros Festival 2024), “Republik of Baklava” (Athens Epidavros Festival 2021), “Das große Wundenlecken” (Staatstheater Augsburg 2016), “Glitsch-Gott” (Maxim Gorki Theatre 2015), “G for Gademis” (Greek National Theatre 2015). “All The Good Guys Were Dead” is his debut novel. Visit him at https://www.gerasimosbekas.com/.

Publisher's website: https://www.rowohlt.de/verlag/rights/book/gerasimos-bekas-alle-guten-waren-tot-9783498006846?srsltid=AfmBOopQ2IkoH5CWl8O2JLfykZcPVKaQRbeT6rMYrrj5RB1FVMFrqXDB

These are examples of pairs of rhyming lines, translated into rhyming lines - for music or publishing clients, matching meaning, style and form as the clients requested.
Aside from the four projects quoted from, other projects mentioned in the video are:

Kistehén: albums “Picsába az urhajókkal,” EMI Music, “A Man in a Tree,” Yonas Media, “I’m in Love with Every Lady,” Eastblok Music.

Loui: "Solid Solo Songs," released by Brooks Kiadó.

Vilmos Gryllus: "Maszkabál" cartoon DVD, Cinemon (Hungary).

European Romanticism, published by Bloomsbury

New Order, published by Arc Publications

Gregory Vajda: "Gulliver in Faremido," released by BMC Records

David Houston-Hill is the co-writer or translator of songs released by Kistehén (EMI Music), Gregory Vajda (BMC Records), Vilmos Gryllus (Cinemon) and Loui (Brooks). He has translated scripts for ContentLab&Factory and the Baltazar Theatre and literature for De Gruyter and Bloomsbury, working from German, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian. He has also authored verse collections under contract with KenArnoldBooks and the National Poetry Foundation. As a journalist, he has edited the Anti-Corruption Report and the Budapest Business Journal and been a Mergermarket stringer and Oxford Business Group analyst.

Connect with David Houston-Hill at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhillwriter/.

More about David Houston-Hill:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/David-Hill/author/B0034OOGCC?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=a015be0c-bc83-4dee-b906-23d64934106c

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4799903.David_Hill

Summary of David's work published on the Northwest Translators' Association site:
https://www.notisnet.org/Blog/13556878

Summary of David's work published on Hungarian Literature Online:
https://hlo.hu/zoom/david-houston-hill-learning-singability-on-the-job.html

Profile on Twine:
https://www.twine.net/DavidHoustonHill

Profile on Soundbetter:
https://soundbetter.com/profiles/697347-david-houston-hill

This is one in a series of readings from The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje. Check out the whole series at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvwToi1IG7tIbyOABfbjnvA

Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this masterful, multi-award-winning book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself.

In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.

In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.

In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.


"Daanje works a deep literary vein that’s full of sly allusions . . . And there are sublime moments throughout, even when death comes into play . . . A challenging book that rewards its readers with great depth and beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A significant and moving literary achievement, an unforgettable story of a historical mystery. . . McKay renders Daanje's distinct, rhythmic prose and character tones adroitly, alongside the atmospheric dread and luminous beauty that epitomizes her writing." —Elizabeth DeNoma, Shelf Awareness

Translator bio
David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Born and educated in the United States, he has lived in and around The Hague since 1997.

Author bio
Anjet Daanje writes novels, short stories, and screenplays. Her breakthrough novel, The Remembered Soldier, won the Netherlands’ 2020 F. Bordewijk Prize and the Best Book of Groningen Prize. The Song of Stork and Dromedary won the 2023 Libris Literature Prize, the most prestigious award for Dutch literature, and the Boekenbon Prize, the Netherlands’ other major literary award — the first time that the Libris and Boekenbon prizes have been won by the same book. It has since been licensed in 13 languages and has sold over 100,000 copies in the Netherlands. Scribe has licensed North American rights in its edition to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Buy the book:
https://scribepublications.com.au/books/the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary
https://scribepublications.co.uk/books/the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374620615/thesongofstorkanddromedary/

This video is private.

Catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition COCKTAIL PROLONGÉ: F. C. GUNDLACH SPECIAL at Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Haus der Photographie from June 5, 2026 through September 22, 2026 as part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026.

F.C. Gundlach (1926–2021) was famed between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s as a fashion photographer for women's magazines in Germany such as 'Film und Frau' and 'Brigitte'. He photographed Sophia Loren, among other sitters, and his photographic style was influential in the area of fashion design and tailoring.

In addition to pursuing his successful career as a fashion photographer, Gundlach cultivated the extensive private collection that is currently on view at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. This collection afforded Gundlach a way to pursue his interests in humanity and express himself as a gay man beyond the idealised and perhaps even sanitised world of glamour: the outcome is a collection which necessitates a notice 'at the door' which says, 'Please note: This exhibition contains works that are not suitable for children and that some visitors may find disturbing'.

It includes photographs by Oliviero Toscani for the controversial Benetton campaigns of the 1990s: the bloodied khaki kit worn by a soldier killed in Bosnia, a just-born baby, and a dying AIDS campaigner. It also features images of the human body by Jimmy De Sana, whose photograph 'Panty Hose', 1978–1979, is shown on the catalogue's front cover, along with works by sixty-six more photographers, Herb Ritts, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus among them.

The exhibition's focus in on the portrayal of people and the human body in photography and on the route from an objective typological approach (as represented by August Sander, for example) towards the capturing of an individual presence. It also inspires wider thinking about the relationship between the photographer – or the message the photographer seeks to get across – and the sitter(s). For example, the contribution that features in this video, as I translated it at the time, originally touched on the title of Diane Arbus's 1960s series 'Freaks', which features identical twins and people of short stature, a title which of course would not have been accepted today. A portrait of Marilyn Monroe, taken at her last sitting for Vogue in 1962 and superimposed with a blood-red cross (by Bert Stern), hints at exploitation and objectification, and the portrait of Carmen-Zénobia Visconti, the model for Rodin's sculpture 'The Kiss', in old age also conveys its message on the presentation of women and the passing of time (Erwin Blumenfeld, 1937).

https://www.perlentaucher.de/fotolot/triennale-der-photographie-in-den-deichtorhallen.html?highlight=Cocktail+prolong%C3%A9#highlight

Peter Truschner, Fololot, on perlentaucher.de

Man Ray. Hans Bellmer. Erwin Blumenfeld. Irving Penn. Richard Avedon. Diane Arbus. Helmut Newton. Gundula Schulze Eldowy. Cindy Sherman. To name just a handful of the big names from photography history that are brought together here.

[The themes of Gundlach’s collection]: nakedness, erotica, sexuality. Now playful, now staged, now casual, now tender, now raw – virtually all conceivable facets along this theme are presented, except perhaps the explicitly activist gesture (female gaze, body positivity) that has dominated debates and exhibitions in this field for some time.

Sabine Schnakenberg’s courage […] in thrusting these works on an of-age public with no trigger warning and no critical historical revision is notable. I mean: this exhibition would have been impossible to hold in the Anglo-American sphere, or it would have led to a veritable shitstorm.

https://www.ndr.de/kultur/kunst/hamburg/queer-bunt-brutal-triennale-der-photographie-in-hamburg,triennale-100.html

Website of Norddeutscher Rundfunk

Deichtorhallen unpack Gundlach’s private collection
Hamburg-based fashion photographer and collector F. C. Gundlach (1926–2021) founded the Triennial in 1999. Under the title, ‘Cocktail Prolongé’, the Deichtorhallen are showing photos from Gundlach’s private collection, curated by Sabine Schnakenberg, the director of Gundlach’s collection there. ‘Gundlach spent every day of at least thirty-five years of his life throwing clothes over thin women and then photographing them,’ explains Schnakenberg. ‘This man collected photographs by famous photographers from the mid-1970s and I wondered: what does he prefer about physical stagings of other people?’

Brutal, candid and not for children

The answer to that, hung on the walls, is resounding: queer, colourful, sometimes brutal and extremely candid and physical. This exhibition is definitely not for children. But otherwise: You must go and view [all exhibitions in the Triennial] with an open mind! It’s worth it!

Alexandra Cox (MSc in Translation, 2001) has been living and freelancing in Germany since 2003 (French and German into English).

Nominated for the 2006 Prix de Découvreurs and 2005 Prix Helikon, Alparegho, Pareil-à-rien by Hélène Sanguinetti (Editions Comp’Act, 2005) is a seven-part, 93-page poem. Drawing on her native Provence’s troubadour tradition, the poet weaves a surprisingly contemporary tale about Alparegho, a mysterious creature with a flute, on a journey to find his identity. A cast of cats, snails and bears—as well as a central fable—pay homage to La Fontaine. The nimble layering creates what Jean-Marie Perret calls—after Bartok—an “imaginary folklore.”

To order: https://beautifuldayspress.bigcartel.com/product/alparegho-like-nothing-else-by-helene-sanguinetti-trans-ann-cefola-preorder

[Alparegho is] “more chanted than inspired”[ and its characters] “seem to emerge from some primordial tribe or the imagination of a little girl dreaming of an ogre at night.” -- Yves di Manno, Vient de paraître, September 2005

“[Alparegho’s] impulsive and astonishing writing … launches in bursts, through musical effect and shape of language, rockets of meaning,” -- Jean-Marie Perret, Blue de Paille, August 2005

“We have no desire to be anywhere else, if not in Hélène Sanguinetti’s elusive musical movements.” -- Gaspard Hons, Le Mensuel Littéraire et Poétique (Brussels), October 2005

About the translator:

Ann Cefola’s translations of Sanguinetti have appeared as Alparegho, Like-nothing-else (Beautiful Days Press, 2025), The Hero (Chax Press, 2018), and Hence, this cradle (Seismicity Editions, 2007). She is the recipient of an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, a Witter Bynner Translation Residency, and the Robert Penn Warren Award for Poetry selected by John Ashbery. Her most recent book, Séquence Long Island (L’Harmattan), co-authored with French poet Jean-Luc Pouliquen, recently made its debut in France, and Once, Poïena is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2027.

About the author:

A contemporary French poet who lives in Arles, Hélène Sanguinetti has also published Do not cross / ne pas franchir (Lurlure, 2026), Jadis, Poïena (Flammarion, 2025), Cargo Bleu Sur Fond Rouge (Lanskine, 2025), Et voici la chanson (Lurlure, 2021), reprinted from L'Amandier, 2012; Le Héros (Flammarion, 2008), Alparegho, Pareil-à-rien (Comp’Act, 2005 ; second edition L’Amandier, 2015), D'ici, de ce berceau (Flammarion, 2003), and De la main gauche, exploratrice (Flammarion, 1999).

Tania is a young Bengali living in Calcutta in the 1980s. Hated by her mother and shunned by her peers, she seeks solace within the pages of Russian books she reads in her mother tongue, Bengali. In a bookshop, she stumbles upon a Russian book published in the USSR in the 1920s by Raduga, a once-prestigious publishing house that was closed in 1930 on Lenin’s orders. Intrigued by the mysterious publisher behind the book, Tania perseveres through numerous frustrating detours until she finally tracks down Adel, the publisher's octogenarian daughter residing in a St. Petersburg nursing home, and corresponds with her. Through this connection, she ultimately uncovers the tumultuous destiny of Raduga’s founder, a Jewish journalist named Lev Moisevitch Kliatchko, who narrowly escaped execution under Stalin thanks to the intervention of Maxim Gorky and who died in 1933 from tuberculosis, shortly before the Moscow Trials.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.hoperoadpublishing.com/books/russian-testament

'Shumona Sinha’s singular voice takes us into the nauseating world of bureaucracy, without heroes or pure-hearted victims. She does not condemn anyone, or perhaps she condemns everyone. Welcome to the real world.’ – Grazia, for Down with the Poor! ‘Indian poet Shumona Sinha has transformed Baudelaire’s poetic provocation into a strange and blazing reflection on violence.’ – Marianne, for Down with the Poor! ‘A seasoned novelist, Shumona Sinha travels between past and present, public unrest and private histories.’ – L’ Express, for Calcutta

About the translator:

Subhashree Beeman is a US-based literary translator. Winner of the 2024 PEN/Heim Translation Grant for the translation of an excerpt from Le Testament Russe by Shumona Sinha and 2024 SALT/ALTA Emerging Literary Translation Mentorship for Saigon Puducherry by Nagarathinam Krishna, she is currently translating Bain de Lune by Yanick Lahens into Tamil. She was the 2026 Laureate of Villa Swagatam, a 2-month French literary translation residency granted by the French Institute of India to translate Maylis de Kerangal's novel into Tamil. Her works have been supported by French Institute of India, Bangalore Science Gallery, Words Without Borders, The White Review, USAWA literary magazine, Weavers Literary Review, oneating.in, Kalachuvadu Magazine, etc.

About the author:

Shumona Sinha is the author of novels and anthologies of French and Bengali poetry, including Assommons les pauvres, Prix Eugène Dabit du roman populiste, Prix Valéry-Larbaud, Internationaler Literaturpreis in Berlin, adapted into plays in Germany and Austria, and Calcutta, Prix du rayonnement de la langue française de l’Académie Française, Grand Prix du Roman de la SGDL. Shumona Sinha’s books have also been the subject of various academic studies in France, Germany, and the United States.

When Anne’s father dies, she is left grieving a contradiction. Jean-Pierre was a man of many faces: the self-taught philosopher born into poverty; the Buddhist who marked favourite haikus with maple leaves; the old romantic who ends every evening kissing a pixelated portrait of his late wife; and the violent bully, whose alcoholism marks his family’s life in terrible ways. Sorting through his belongings and making funeral preparations, Anne tries to come to terms with who and what she’s lost.

Told with a quick wit and deep tenderness, Before I Forget is a tragicomic portrait of loss and a novel for anyone who’s ever loved a so-called monster.

‘A perfect strike: funny, emotional, political, and unflinchingly accurate.’ – Virginie Despentes

'There is a gorgeous tumbling present in these pages, a kind of slipperiness that presents itself in all the same ways we experience grief: pain and pleasure, joy and desperation. Before I Forget is a lovely ode to memory and trauma, but it's also a reminder that we hold so much love inside us that we can't help but inevitably leak and spill. Admirably brilliant work.' – Kristen Arnett

'Before I Forget... beautifully describes the claustrophobia and messiness of the grieving process... It’s darkly witty, so moving and can’t fail to stay with you.'– Service95

'A modest, beautiful tribute to death... From a subject that could descend into miserabilism, Anne Pauly produces a beautiful novel with burlesque moments.’– Elisabeth Philippe, L'Obs

'Humour and pain are always intertwined in this book, often in the same sentence.' – Oonagh Devitt Tremblay, Fallow

Translator bio
Dina Leifer is a London-based translator and writer. She switched career from journalism to translation in 2015 after gaining an MA in Translating Popular Culture. Dina’s first picture book, And Eddie Had an Egg, was published by Green Bean Books in 2025 after she won the 2023 UK Jewish Children’s Book Award. She won Stevns Translation Prize in 2025, and Before I Forget is her first translation of adult fiction.

Author bio
Anne Pauly is a writer working and living in Paris. Her first book, Avant que j'oublie, was awarded the 2020 Prix du Livre Inter and Prix Robert Walser, and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina, Prix Wepler, and Prix Goncourt. Anne has since written short stories for several reviews, a televised series, and a play. She is currently finishing a second novel, while working on a play for the Théâtre du Nord along with seven other writers, including Virginie Despentes, Paul B. Preciado, and Julien Delmaire.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.peirenepress.com/shop/books/before-i-forget/

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Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.

As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.

This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'A magnificent book. A wonderful dialogue between a mother and a daughter... A story like this belongs to everyone. It's a gift: in these cases we say thank you, and we smile.' La Repubblica Concita de Gregorio

'A book about pain is successful when it is also a book full of happiness. And when you read the first page, you understand that Come d'aira is a book that radiates happiness.' Corriere della Sera Paolo di Stefano

Translator bio
Alex Valente (he/him) is a bisexual bilingual Britalian on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land. He can be found in tiny writing on the credits page of books, when publishers remember to name the translator.

Author bio
Ada d’Adamo was an essayist and poet from Italy. After giving birth to her disabled daughter Aria, d’Adamo became an advocate for people with disabilities and for interabled families. While working on a memoir for her daughter, she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She passed away on the 1st of April 2023. Three months later her memoir, Gravity, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award.

BUY THE BOOK: https://akoyapublishing.com/products/gravity

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Distant Signs: A Novel
by Anne Richter, translated by Douglas Irving, published in 2019 by Neem Tree Press.

Distant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall.

In 1960s East Germany, Margret, a professor’s daughter from the city, meets and marries Hans, from a small village in the Thuringian forest. The couple struggle to contend with their different backgrounds, and the emotional scars they bear from childhood in the aftermath of war. As East German history gradually unravels, with collision of the personal and political, acutely observed vignettes quietly reveal their two families’ hidden truths.

“I don't know that I've read a more moving piece of post-war German fiction - and this includes Günther Grass's best efforts.”

Misha, US Online Blog Tour Reviewer

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From the publisher (World Literature Today): “In this story of lengthy quarantine due to an unnamed virus, a woman sneaks into the mountain to collect ferns—many ferns. Simultaneously evoking life under past Chilean political oppression and living under recent worldwide quarantines due to Covid-19, this Cortazarian story marks the author’s English-language debut.”
Catalina Infante Beovic is a Chilean writer, publisher, journalist, and teacher. Follow Catalina on Instagram at @catalinainfantebeovic
Michelle Mirabella is a Spanish to English translator studying at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. Follow Michelle on Instagram at @mirabella_michelle and Twitter at @MirabellaM_

Find the story at:
English translation, published by World Literature Today in 2020: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/fiction/ferns-catalina-infante-beovic
Spanish, published by Neón Ediciones: https://www.librospatagonia.com/library/publication/helechos

Follow World Literature Today on Twitter at @worldlittoday.

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It’s 2007 and we are in Bilbao, worn out by the final blows of Basque terrorism. Gorane and Jokin are twenty-five year old twins and children of ETA militants. Raised without rules, they take opposing and complementary directions: compliant and passive to everything, Jokin, a heroin-addict drummer, seems to follow in his parents’ footsteps, while Gorane, ambiguous and introverted, pulls away seeking refuge in an abstract world. When Jokin runs away and their parents become involved in a tragic event, Gorane finds herself prey to strange hallucinations of her parents. Meanwhile in Paris, Jokin struggles with his attraction to the mysterious Germana, yet, despite the distance, the twins’ lives seem destined to never separate and it will be a French writer’s novel that reconnects them.

The Melee is a polyphonic work; a world that connects reality to our most recondite dreams, a world where the only driving force seems to be blind violence. Can freedom reveal itself to be an instrument of torture, and can empathy that resists absolutism prevail in the face of trauma? Valentina Maini responds in the pages of this provocative debut and its web of stories connecting drug dealers, smugglers, psychiatrists, writers, cleaners and fortune tellers - and she does it with the conviction of Roberto Bolaño and Mathias Énard: looking chaos directly in the eye.

THE MELEE BY VALENTINA MAINI (PUBLISHED IN ITALIAN BY BOLLATI BORINGHIERI, 2020)

FIRST PLACE IN THE L'INDISCRETO QUALITY RANKINGS

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SEVERINO CESARI DEBUT AWARD 2020

SHORTLISTED FOR THE FONDAZIONE MONDADORI DEBUT AWARD 2020

CHOSEN BY KOBO IN THEIR 50 BOOKS TO DEFY AND SURVIVE THE YEAR 2020

“What is great European literature today? The Melee by Valentina Maini has the range and complexity to fit the bill and the ambition to be part of it.”
VERONICA RAIMO (The Girl at the Door)

“There are writers who, more than make their debut, burst onto the scene. By writing novels that play havoc with all the rules. Valentina Maini is one of them.”
ANDREA BAJANI (If You Kept a Record of Sins; Every Promise)

“Redolent of Clarice Lispector and Roberto Bolano, a haunted, captivating, poetic novel that tells the story of two children of ETA and their quest for life and the future under the tight rein of a true artist and her unique, visionary freedom of language.”
MARTA BARONE (Città sommersa)

“In The Melee, Valentina Maini unfurls a notable variety of textual typologies – reports, statements, recordings, a novel within the novel – showing that it is still possible to tell stories in an impressive, original manner.”
WU MING 2 (Q; Manituana; 54)


Valentina Maini was born in Bologna in 1987. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature between Bologna and Paris and has published short stories in retabloid, TerraNullius, Atti Impuri, Horizonte, and other magazines. Some of her articles have appeared in Poetiche, La Deleuziana, and Classiques Garnier. With her collection of poetry, Casa Rotta (2016), she won the Anna Osti literary prize. She translates from French and from English into Italian.

Sean McDonagh is an emerging literary translator who translates from Italian. He is based in London where he works in publishing, and has been pursuing literary translation projects since participating in the Warwick Translates Summer School 2019. He has had a translation published on Asymptote, and as a poet has also had work published on Allegro, Rockland and Foxtrot Uniform. Sean has a BA in English, has lived and studied in Turin, and has completed an advanced course at the Italian Cultural Institute.

@seanpjamcdonagh (Twitter)
seanmcdonaghtranslator.com

For rights info, contact: Flavia Abbinante - flavia.abbinante@bollatiboringhieri.it
Rights Sold: Portuguese

The translator has obtained permission from the original rights holder to translate this sample and share a recording of it on Translators Aloud.
TO READ A LONGER EXTRACT, please visit: seanmcdonaghtranslator.com/projects-seeking-a-publisher

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