It’s a book that����praised, stating “the novel’s dream logic is as intoxicating as the secluded setting. Readers will eagerly turn the pages of this beguiling literary thriller.” And none other than Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu claimed��Of Beasts and Fowls��is “the most haunting [novel] I have read in years.”

To celebrate this release (the first of two Adón books we’re doing), we’re offering a for the rest of the month. (No checkout code required, U.S. purchases only.)

And to entice you further into this witchy, captivating novel, below you’ll find an excerpt from when Coro arrives at Bethany and has her first interaction with it’s inhabitants.

Also: Sign up for the for more insights into how this book came to be, how it’s being reviewed, and other news from Open Letter. (And an easily accessible way to listen to this conversation with Pilar.)

She’d put a cotton jacket on over her T-shirt, foregoing the summer raincoat she kept in the backseat. If she had to sleep in the car, she would use it as a blanket.

Once she had a handle on the scene—the black fence and the vegetation that grew up around it, the stone walls bordering the lane—she zipped up her jacket and switched on the overhead light. From her purse, she took out a handkerchief embroidered with the letter C and her sketchbook. Maybe there was a security camera on the fence, pointing down at her. Her fixed image at the center of a monitor. Wide-eyed. She was going to write that she needed help on a piece of paper and put it on the windshield, in case somebody, somewhere, could read it. And she was going to draw using the dashboard for support. It was the only thing that would calm her right then, while she got used to the idea that this thing was happening to her. She had actually gotten lost. Her fingers were cold, but she opened the sketchbook and leaned on the dashboard. That’s when she saw that someone was approaching the gate with a flashlight.

“What are you doing here?” The stranger addressed her with the formal you.

She found it odd that a stranger would ask her the exactly same thing she’d been asking herself.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

She rolled down the window.

“I’m lost,” she said.

“What are you looking for? Are you looking for something?”

“I’m running out of gas. I need to know if there’s a gas station somewhere nearby.”

“Are you wanting a house? What do you want? To rent or buy?”

She heard.

“I’m lost. Can you help me?”

“People love coming around here. They’re attracted to the scenery.”

Coro put the handkerchief in her purse and got out of the car.

The woman was opening the gate.

“I just need to turn around and get back to the main highway, but I can’t move with all those planks on the ground. And I’m not sure if I have enough gas. Do you know if nearby . . .”

“It’s not easy to get here. Where do you live?”

The woman drew closer and pointed the flashlight right at her face. She shut her eyes.

“Don’t do that. Please.”

“You’re not from around here.”

She wasn’t going to repeat that she was lost.

“There’s nothing for sale in the area. It’s even worse the closer you get to the mountain. You have to turn around, go back to the flatlands. There are more houses there. More properties.”

“You’re mistaken. I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

Coro looked inside the car, still illuminated by the overhead light. Her purse. Her things.

“I’m running out of gas.”

“You’ve said that already.”

For a second, she thought the best thing would be to be clutching the steering wheel again. To put a piece of gum or candy in her mouth. Her breath probably stank.

“Do you have a car? Maybe we could take some gas from your tank and put it in mine. I’ve seen it done, you suck it through a tube.”

The woman shined the flashlight in her face again.

“What’s your name? What’s your surname? I’m not bringing a stranger to my house.”

“I just need a little gas.”

“Have you come alone?”

The woman inspected the inside of the car, the backseat, and asked again what her name was and if she had come there alone.

“I better go. I’ll try to turn around.”

“I think it’s reasonable to want to know the name of the person who has just plunked herself down on my doorstep at this time of night.”

“It wasn’t intentional. I’m telling you.”

She got into the car. The flashlight was right back in her eyes again.

“Come on. Come with me. We’re going to try this tube thing. We have two cars down below.”

The woman said to follow her.

“I don’t want to bother anyone.”

The woman would go on foot and Coro would follow, behind the wheel. That’s what she proposed.

“It’s downhill. It’s fine.”

“Listen . . . Why don’t you bring your car up here?”

“I’m telling you, it’s downhill.”

“And if we don’t know how to transfer the fuel between tanks? Then I won’t be able to get back up.”

“You want gas, don’t you?”

She thought for a second.

�Ԩ���.”

“Well, come on.”

She started the car.

Very slowly, she began to follow the woman, staring at the bright spot of the flashlight leading the way, pointed at the ground. Down a dirt lane toward a house that emerged on the left after several minutes, and which appeared covered in the leaves or branches of several trees. Facing a potholed slope and enveloped in a darkness she wouldn’t know how to get out of.

The woman motioned for her to go even slower.

“Are you hungry?” she asked, coming over to the window.

“I just need a little gas. You wouldn’t have a can, would you?”

“You’re going to have to get out of there.”

At that point in the night, she was exhausted. She only just realized she had been breathing through her mouth for some time.

Waving her arms, the woman indicated where she should park, under a tree, where there were two other cars. Coro sighed and tried to calm herself. That woman was going to lend her a hand. She really was going to help her.

“Do you like the house? They say it was built by a single man.”

Just then, the lights came on in the first-floor windows and someone turned on a fluorescent outdoor bulb that completely illuminated the front of the house with an extraordinary white light.

“Some think all the lights should be left on, to discourage burglars. But I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s better if they don’t know we’re here.”

Coro couldn’t see her face because the woman had positioned herself against the light. She could see, however, that another woman was coming out of the house, headed in their direction, carrying something. Five or six dogs also appeared, circling Coro and sniffing her.

“You’re not afraid of dogs, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

The vagueness of the sky against the excessive light from the fluorescent bulb acted almost like a cupola. The place looked like a stage surrounded by trees.

“I’ve just taken it off the fire. Be careful.” The second woman handed Coro a mug, and she accepted it. It was scalding. It scorched her fingers. Her first impulse was to drop it. But she contained herself.

“C������ڳܱ�.”

“Shit!” she exclaimed.

The woman who gave her the mug made no expression whatsoever.

“Watch that mouth,” said the other.

“It’s boiling.”

She looked around for somewhere to set it down. In the company of those two women who watched her.

In an exercise of maximum self-control, after what seemed like hours, she set the mug on the hood of her car, spilling some of the liquid.

“Bring it here. I’ll hold it for you.”

“It’s boiling.”

“I warned you.”

“Nobody could drink that.”

“I warned you. We’ll wait until it cools.”

A nozzle hung from the side of the house, lit by the fluorescent bulb, fastened to the wall by a pipe and dripping a few centimeters from the bottom of a stone basin.

“Can I get some water?” she asked.

“It doesn’t work. Just drips.”

Coro brought her hands to mouth with the sensation that they were on fire. She went to the faucet and tried to turn it, but it was stuck.

“It doesn’t turn on or off. We told you.”

She brought her hands to her mouth again. They would be covered in blisters. She let the drops from the faucet wet her skin. She had hurt herself in the attempt to turn the lever and now her fingers shook.

A hoe and a rake were propped against the wall, beside the basin. And a wheelbarrow. The two women approached in silence, and when she turned around, she found them right behind her, fully illuminated by the fluorescent bulb. One had incredibly light brown eyes, almost golden, and the pair looked older now than she’d first imagined. They were slim and limber. They wore their hair pulled back and the same clothes, with identical boots. The same fabric for a pair of dresses equally threadbare and equally wrinkled. The woman who’d come from inside had put on a shawl.

Over their heads an immense tree grew. Carob, they told her.

“Can we try for the gas?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t you prefer to come inside? Sit down and have a drink?”

“You’re not going to help me?”

“We are helping you.”

Coro looked at the dogs still circling her. Coming and going. Peeing on the flowerpots. At the base of the tree hugging the trunk, ringing it, a row of bowls, cups, and tin cans were tied together with string and containing water and scraps.

“For the cats.”

“They get on well with the dogs.”

Coro couldn’t care less whether or not they got on. Whether they ripped each other apart or ate each other up. Whether they tore out their eyes or chewed off hunks of flesh.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of us, are you? You’re the one who turned up at our gate.”

“You made me drive down here.”

“If you’re looking for property, it’s better to see it during the day. The land. The lake.”

“I told you, I’m lost.”

“Right, but no one gets lost around here.”

“Do you think the broth will have cooled by now?” the first woman asked the second.

“Not broth, milk.”

“Do you like milk? Everyone likes milk, don’t they?”

“What’s your name?”

She answered and the women laughed.

“Coro? What kind of name is that? Where are you from?”

They told her the name didn’t exist and she thought that she should get back in the car. She always had that option. That blessed option. Only then would she be calmer. Getting into the car and locking the doors. Staying inside.

“You don’t want to come in?”

The two women watched her.

“You’re obviously tired.”

“Here. Drink.”

They handed her the mug again. Firmly. Coro brought it indecisively to her lips, but she drank. All of it. Asking herself how she could be there. How had she been able to leave her phone at home. What was happening to her.

It was still hot.

“Better? You feel better, don’t you?”

Did she feel better?

“Come on, relax a bit.”

“Do you want to come in?”

��by Pilar Adón & Katie Whittemore is available from (30% off before 12/1/24), , and better bookstores everywhere!

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, his��Grand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—h������asits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.��An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,��Melvill��contains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature’s most ambitious writers.

If you enjoy what you read below, you can from now until midnight PT on October 31st. (U.S. residents only, discount applied automatically at checkout.)

*

Now he knows he’s surrounded by everyone and everything, but he feels more alone than ever. Here, the perfect solitude of one outside but with no way out. Freezing but soon to burn, the fire of a fever already rising inside him. Speaking in smoldering, scorching tongues: sparking words that flame and name, far away and foreign to any warmth of home, to that home he’s dying—and where he’ll die—to return to.

Ready to be one more among so many memories. Wanting to be remembered like this. Epic in defeat. Broken but stronger than ever because there’s nothing left to break inside of him. Nothing to hide, all’s been revealed. All of him to everyone. Exposed to all and after all.

His name pronounced (mispronounced, emphasis on the ultimate syllable, foreignizing, Frenchifying it, making it more removed and, perhaps in that way, worthier of greater rejection) with a combination of shame and condemnation.

His name before a jury that would never dare find for him and, prejudging, would reach a unanimous verdict: “Young Wastrel of a Patrician Family,” and that’s the way—all-caps when written and��italics when spoken—people write about him in letters and speak about him at balls and banquets and masses.

Thus, his sentence to be served posthaste with no possibility of appeal or pardon. But here he is, still begging for someone to at least testify on his behalf and to write his story and to put him into words and, in a way, if not justify him then at least give him a modicum of redemption, a modicum of significance and purpose and reason to exist.

To be written.[1]

To be a being written (him being someone who more than once wished and dreamed he could write it all down and is already ready to transfer the acquittal of such a sentence) on empty and frozen pages like the waters he’s walking across now, barely keeping warm with the breathless breathing of dead supplications and unheard prayers. Messianic and miraculous, yes; but not like the Omnipotent and triumphant Creator on high but like a deity plummeting from higher still, in free fall, prisoner and fallen in his disgrace. His once divine voice no longer commanding, deafening, proof of love and respect but, trembling and weak, dwindling until it becomes a silent and flashing sacrifice he makes to himself. And, meanwhile, as he prepares his own execution ceremony, asking himself, without an answer, why (wasn’t this a distinctive trait of mortals? that almost last and willful gift of your whole life summarized in seconds and in reverse so you could understand it better or not bother? wasn’t that the explanation of the mystery of why so many people died with a Momma, Mommy, Ma on their lips?) all the people and things of this world that he loves or that don’t love him, the whole history of his story, now seemed to converge in this white darkness. Darkness he advances through, previously opaque and obscure and so late, suddenly without time and as if untethered from time, forever and ever, implacable and clean and transparent.

*

Record and file it, even if you prefer not to:

It’s the night of Saturday, December 10th, 1831, and Allan Melvill walks across the frozen waters of the Hudson River.

*

And, oh, when you walk on ice, on water in suspended animation, moods shift and thoughts are thought differently, Allan Melvill thinks. He thinks about how thoughts are thought with the most burning coolness. He thinks about how you think of anything other than that which, once deemed unthinkable, is, as such, impossible not to think about: about how that ice could break and about how, then, sinking to never again rise back up to that surface of superficialities to be ignored or attended to, you would cease to think forever. He thinks about the cold that freezes into crystals that bind together and break apart to separate and rise into the sky to then fall on the living and the dead in always different shapes.[2] With that cold that forces you to close your eyes to discover that, like certain lizards, you can see through your eyelids: his now almost sliced off by the freezing blade of the wild wind that whips his hair into disarray.

The same thing would happen (Allan Melvill thinks now, like he’s never thought before, thinking about what would be thought about or about what one would never dare to think about again but that, in the act refusing, one thinks about, thinking about how he once thought, afloat in a damning floating city of the damned) when we find a way to remain aloft, airborne and truly and joyfully displaced. When man can fly aboard marvelous machines (not just aerostatic balloons) whose sound will be like that of thousands of men clearing their throats after the morning’s first pipe. And with and in those machines, battles will be waged among the stars, and they’ll even make it to that fleeting moon, which, at this very moment, the clouds cover and uncover only to cover it again, and hurl down almost merciful white flakes of snow on Allan Melvill, as if they were soldiers laying siege to that defeated and humiliated deserter of the crucifying crusade of his own life.

But we’ve got a long way to go before that. Now, beneath his feet, that ice is the only solid thing left to hold him up, while around him and above him everything is thin ice in suspense, and the important thing is not to fly but to keep from falling or sinking or drowning.

Thus, in the dark, Allan Melvill remembers first; but then it’s as if he were dreaming, as if he were dreaming himself, or seeing himself from above. And he’d read somewhere that people who lived and wandered through landscapes of endless ices often felt that someone, their doppelgänger, was walking beside them (like that vanquished and enslaved memento-mori walking beside a triumphant Caesar or other victorious generals) and whispering in their ear the more than fifty names snow can be given, but not the names for each and every one of the infinite and always-different flakes that make up that snow and that, first, give the shape of snow to whatever they happen to come to rest upon and, then, to all the shapes they take after giving shape to the snow.

Then, suddenly, to the surprise and wonder of Allan Melvill, his whole life (his life as a father) is lived and relived, it melts away only to resolidify, like an invention invented by the boy who, though he would never theretofore have imagined it, has turned out to be the most inventive and imaginative of his children.[3]

[1] But no, not yet. It will be years before that happens: the sad masquerade of my father (there’s no need for me to wait for the revelations of a future yet-to-be-revealed science that will be dedicated to the interpretation of dreams and daydreams) rewritten wearing different masks like that of a riverway conman or that of a delusional captain or that of an incestuous decadent or that of a by-product of the Revolution or that of a more confusing than confused pale-gray colored scrivener, among many others. And it will be even longer before I comment on it from here: from the marine and oceanic depths of these pages en route to the last and final shore. Me holding and losing my breath; because nothing is more exhausting than swimming upstream, taking in air, in pursuit of the always forgetful founts of memory.

[2] Imagine a book always at high sea. A book adrift and drifting in swirling digressions and dodging not icebergs of small tips and massive bottoms but compact glaciers that have as much to show as to hide. A book that is nothing but a perpetual draft, because every book is never-ending. A book that is the draft of a sketch; because the smallest constructions can be completed by their original architects; while the largest, the truest, always leave the conclusion on the tallest rooftops to fix and secure there the posterity of whoever reads them beyond the one who wrote it.

My case, without looking any further.

[3] His light casts my shadow. The one is the eclipse of the other. I, at his feet, will tell what he, lying there, tells me. He is bound and I’m bound to him; and I trust that all the information that I’ll offer has, moreover, some literary and dramatic value, beyond the tragedy and sorrow of the events that keep that man prostrate here. Thus, I shall send my indefinable imagination (truly the most exact of sciences) off to hunt and track and catch the facts. And then, flay and eviscerate them, as once upon a time I did whales. To those whales that, as the years pass, seem to me more and more the product of youth’s liquid dream. Always taking care to keep their stomach gasses from bursting and covering me with guts and blood and excrement. And to keep from spilling that illuminating sperm of the truth that, once processed, will be irreconcilable as something that happened but, at the same time, will be read (will be read by the light of candles and oil derived from that same whale sperm) as something even truer than it ever was. Reality only becomes really real after crossing the stormy sea of art and arriving safe and sound to the other shore. Not while we live it or write it, but later, when we read it; and only then does everything become logical and inevitable and we ask ourselves how we failed to see it or see it coming.

Thus, everything that one invents ends up (or starts out) being true and, taking place, ends up having taken place to thereby begin to take place.

by Rodrigo Fresán & Will Vanderhyden is available in better bookstores everywhere on October 8, 2024, and available at 30% off (until 11/1/2024) on the .��

To mark the release of Dubravka Ugresic’s final book,����(translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać)—order it now from , or your local indie bookstore!—we thought we’d share an excerpt, which you’ll find below.

As a bit of context, this book is a conversation between Dubravka and Mermima Omeragić, although to be honest, it reads a bit more like a guided monologue. A lot of Dubravka’s typical themes are presented here—exile, writing in a “small language,” the evils of nationalism, the workings of the literary world—but this isn’t some sort of rehash or greatest hits. Knowing that this was likely going to be her final work, there’s a sense of Dubravka looking toward the future, which makes this book all the more compelling.

The bit below is from a section entitled, “The Melancholy of Vanishing,” and before we get to it, grant me one selfish aside. As you’ll see below, Dubravka alludes to an event at Powells bookstore (arranged by the amazing Jeremy Garber), and where Pilar Adón gave a reading last week. I mention that, because on several occasions, Dubravka told me she wanted me to meet her “Spanish publishers.” She never named them, and it took me far too long to realize that are Pilar and her husband Enrique! Literature is a small world.

Well, let’s get on with it:

Through many of your books runs the melancholy of vanishing. Is a happy literary outcome even possible?

I just read a report in the news about online auctions of the late Sylvia Plath’s belongings. At one auction (Your Own Sylvia) a deck of tarot cards that Ted Hughes had given to Plath was sold for $200,000. The fifty-odd items sold at auction broughtPlath’s heir, Frieda Hughes, over $1,000,000. Among them was a particularly impressive rolling pin. Quite recently a Scottish miniskirt of Sylvia Plath’s was sold at auction. The description of the skirt was much semantically richer than the reviews of the poet’s poems had ever been: “The skirt represents Plath and her personality in every way—the conflict inside, her inner art monster, cloaked by the most precise, nearly persnickety, clothes. (. . .) Plath was miserable, but she created art, and the skirt is a representation of that struggle.” I read these and other news items as if they are symbolic eulogies. Who actually died here? Literature died. At a moment when those who are nameless, the amateurs, the influencers, male and female, the politicians and porn stars, the writers and artists, the media gurus all become stars, when the genres of tell-all books, autobiography, and media-profiling have overshadowed the literary work, when The Life and Work of X is reduced to The Life of X, when what the author, male or female, wrote becomes irrelevant as long as their “product,” their “work,” refreshes the world and makes a difference, this is the moment when the death throes begin for the traditional concept of literature. If literature is to survive it must move into a zone of invisibility and go underground.

This moment seems the most narcissistic in the history of civilization. Today writers are writing their own hagiographies, or kickstarting their career by writing their own hagiography. In so doing they radically change the very essence of literature, even while being unaware of this, and mostly they are unaware. Consequently, they spur readers to write their own. And their readers have no need to tear their hair out over this—there are professional companies where nameless professionals are ready to tackle the job for them. Therefore, things are far deeper and more complex than they might seem at first glance. I won’t be far off the mark, or so I hope, if I say that the key word in our contemporary vocabulary is—archive. More than a mere word, archive is diagnosis. Diagnosis is—to use an old term expunged from our current usage—weltschmertz, world pain, with unusual symptoms. We are all of us affected by a hysterical drive to leave traces of our personal existence on the planet Earth. This narcissistic hysteria is evaluated as a positive, as success, and, in the realm of literature, as artistic success. However, the Booker Prize has not appeased the anxiety of the successee, because in success the Booker has been far outstripped by the producer of little bottles filled with one’s individual farts. Everyone has the right to leave their trace. Everyone is able to leave their trace. Traces draw attention to the fact that we exist, that we will not be erased. Therefore all evaluation is pointless, because the producer of fart jars and the author of a novel that has been awarded the Booker Prize end up equally forgotten. They will be pushed aside by a flood of new creative people, influencers, visual artists, writers, actresses selling candles perfumed with the scent of their own vaginas. They are all seeking, in a frenzy, the best possible way to leave a trace of their existence. Whence this fear of erasure, the possible disappearance of civilization? As far as literature is concerned, this fear has found its home in the genre that will be their salvation. Hagiography. Thanks to the indestructible wedding of democracy and digitalization, people can depart this world as saints. So it is that literature itself, in its mainstream, is being whittled down to a single genre, the hagiography (autobiography, autofiction), and so it is that the author, fraught by fear of disappearance, nullity, the loss of the importance of their work, the reduction of their efforts to laboring on an assembly line, step back from their text and become their own text. Their name matters more than the title of their work. Here I recall the statement of a serial killer who snorted in frustration: “Hey, how many times do I have to kill before I make it to the front page?!” Yet, who can guarantee that our lives are authentic? Who can guarantee that the saints really were saints? There is a weird company in Japan. Ingenious documentary-filmmaker Werner Herzog made the film Family Romance about it in 2019. The company provides an array of services. The client can hire people who will attend the funeral of a deceased who had no family. People can be hired to act as marital partners for those who need this kind of support (pornography, prostitution, sex are strictly prohibited). Werner Herzog zeroes in on the case of a little girl who has no father. Her mother contacts the Family Romance company. The owner spends time with the little girl, ultimately the girl opens up to him, begins to think of him as her real father. Her mother asks their rental dad to move in with them. The business owner refuses because this is not part of the deal. The end of the movie discloses a sad truth, the business owner is not part of the life of his own family. If his own family needs a father, they can only hire one.

Literature is not a toy in the hands of male or female writing egos. Literature must not (nor can it!) be placed under the control of national literatures, various ministries of culture, academies, publishers and all those bureaucratic institutions that have latched onto literature with the excuse of giving it room to breathe, yet in fact seeing to its “esteemed” demise. Literature is communication between me and those of my readers who cannot be bought, no matter who and where they are. Recently a reader from somewhere in Chile messaged me to say he had COVID and was reading my novel, Fox. He is my authentic reader. How do I know? I simply do.

Literature is what happens between me and a reader I have never met somewhere in India who discovered something in my text that I wasn’t myself aware of. Literature is what happens between me and a reader who showed up at a sparsely attended reading in Portland, bringing copies of all of my books that have

appeared in English translations, and showed that he knew by heart the most minute details which I, myself, no longer remembered. We all of us depend on the “kindness of strangers” (Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers)��like tragic Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire. Literature is a non-utilitarian activity. But one real reader is enough to persuade me of the meaningfulness of my work. Mystical are the paths of literature.

And while we’re on the subject of literary anticipation, Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 and the unforgettable movie version, directed by François Truffaut, have been permanently etched in my memory. In the final scenes we discover the existence of a literary underground, hiding in a forest. Since possession of books is strictly banned in Bradbury’s dystopian world, the book-people have chosen to live in a parallel world. This sort of scenography does not invoke vanishing but the inkling of a new life, of revolution. The book-people are members of an underground intellectual resistance movement, where each of them commits an entire book to memory. The book-people are living libraries. The only library that exists. Who knows, perhaps a reader will appear who will choose one of my books, thereby postponing my inevitable demise. Perhaps near the end of their life, this imagined woman-book or man-book will exhale my book into the mouth of someone else, and this person will, having lived their life, pass it on to yet another. Do I believe that in the very rhythm of inhaling and exhaling lies the meaning of literature? Is any other meaning necessary? Inhalation and exhalation—life itself. With the first breath it begins, with the last it ends.

A Muzzle for Witches��is available from , , and better bookstores everywhere!

April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borge��’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

Translated by Jonathan Dunne.��

What you’ll find below is an excerpt from the very start of��Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin & Aneesa Abbas Higgins. You might remember Dusapin & Higgins as the winners of the 2021 National Book Award for Literature in Translation for��Winter in Sokcho, and as the stellar team behind the English-language follow-up, Pachinko Parlor.

Vladivostok Circus��is coming out from Daunt Books in the UK in February 2024 () and ours drops in May 2024 . . . which is quite some time from now! (Kind of.) Anyway, since it is #WITMonth, since this one of our lead titles, and since I’m feeling generous (?), you can . (Only available in the U.S.) That discount is only good until midnight Pacific Time, August 31st.��So, time is of the essence!

Here’s the jacket copy:

Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent . . . when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.��

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader into Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

Enjoy! And order now! As soon as the finished copies arrive—well in advance of the pub date—I’ll personally ship these out to everyone who preorders.

Vladivostok Circus

They don’t seem to be expecting me. The man in the ticket booth checks the list of names for the hundredth time. He’s just ushered out a group of women, all with the same muscular build, their hair scraped back. I can see the glass dome of the building on the other side of the barrier, the marbled stone of the walls beneath this season’s posters. I’m here for the costumes, I tell him again. In the end he turns away, stares at a television screen. He probably doesn’t understand English, I think to myself. I sit down on my suitcase, try calling Leon, the director, the one I’ve been corresponding with. My phone battery flashes low, only 3 per cent left. I hear myself laugh nervously as I look around for somewhere to charge it. I’m about to walk away when I hear someone calling out to me from inside the circus building. A man comes running towards me, steadying his glasses on his nose. Tall and lanky, not at all like the girls I saw a moment ago. I’d say he was in his thirties.

“Sorry,” he says in English. “I wasn’t expecting you until next week! I’m Leon.”

“Beginning of November. Isn’t that what we said?”

“You’re right, I’m all over the place.”

Elisa Shua Dusapin

He leads me round the outside of the building to a small courtyard, fenced on one side. Beyond the fence, the ocean, the shoreline visible through the gaps. Paper lanterns dangle from the branches of a tree. A beige-colored caravan looms large over the metal furniture set out beside it. Tables littered with plates, some doubling as ashtrays, others streaked with tomato sauce. Scrunched-up sportswear and lace-trimmed undergarments strewn on chairs.

I follow him inside the building, down a dark, curving hallway. He translates the signs pinned to the doors for me: offices, backstage access, arena floor. Bedrooms and dressing rooms upstairs. We come to a staircase. He excuses himself for a moment saying he needs to catch the circus director at dinner and runs up the stairs.

A cat gazes at me from the top of the staircase, its coat is white, almost pink. I stretch out my hand and the cat pads down the stairs towards me. The peculiar pinkish hue is its skin color. A cat with almost no fur. It rubs up against my legs. I pull myself upright, feeling vaguely repulsed.

Leon comes back, another man at his side, fiftyish, platinum-colored hair, firm handshake. He starts talking to me in Russian; Leon translates for me as he speaks. He’s sorry about the misunderstanding, I’m a bit early. A short laugh. He’s certainly not going to turn me away, I’ve come such a great distance. He’s honored to be hosting a talented young designer from the European fashion world. Vladivostok Circu��’s major autumn show is still running. It’ll be closing for the winter at the end of the week. Until then, I’m welcome to come to as many shows as I like. The only problem is accommodation: the rooms are all taken by the artists. I can move in after they’ve left.

I force a smile, say I’ll manage just fine. The director claps his hands, perfect! I mustn’t hesitate to ask him if there’s anything I need.

He disappears into his office before I have a chance to respond. I thank Leon for translating. He shrugs. He used to teach English, he’s Canadian. He’s happy to help me. I tell him what’s on my mind: I’ve only just finished college, my training’s been in theatre and film, I’ve never worked for a circus, he did know that, didn’t he? And I’m not sure I understand how this is all going to work if the artists are all leaving at the end of the season. Leon nods. Yes, it wasn’t really made clear. Usually, everyone leaves, the performers all go and work for Christmas circuses. But our group, the Russian bar trio, have arranged with the director to stay on here at the circus rent-free while they work on their new number. They’ll perform it at the Vladivostok spring show in exchange.

“Anton and Nino are big stars,” Leon explains. “It’s a good deal for the circus. Not sure if it’s so good for Anton and Nino, but that’s the way it is.”

I try and look convinced, sizing up the gulf that separates me from this world. All I know about the three I’m working with is that they’re famous for their Black Bird number, in which Igor, the flyer, performs five perilous triple jumps on the Russian bar. I’ve looked it up and gleaned some information about this piece of equipment: it’s a flexible bar, three meters in length with a diameter of twenty centimeters. The two bases carry the bar on their shoulders while the third member of the group executes moves on it, leaping high in the air and flying free, without a wire. It’s one of the most dangerous of all circus acts.

“Were you the one who created the number with Igor?” I ask.

“No, not me. I didn’t even know him before his accident.”

“Accident?”

“Didn’t you know? He hasn’t jumped for five years. They have a new flyer. Anna.”

He says she’s gone into town with Nino, but Anton’s here, in his room. He can introduce me if I like, or else tomorrow after the show. I tell him tomorrow will be fine.

“Yes, that’s probably best. Anton can get by in quite a few languages but he doesn’t speak much English.”

The show has finished for today. He has to tidy up. Would I like to come with him? I’m very tired, I say, I have to find a hotel, and what about my luggage? Oh, he’ll help me with all that, he says, with a sweeping gesture of the hand.

*

Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Backstage, a pungent animal smell hits me. Straw scattered on the ground. Streaks of dirt on the walls. Like a stable but with velvet lining—hoops instead of horses, waist-high wooden balls, metal poles, tangles of cables, drones in the shape of planes, straw hats hanging on hooks. Leon tugs a cord and the curtains part.

I walk out into the ring. Carpeting on the ground, rumpled here and there, talcum powder and splashes of water, traces of the show that finished earlier. The space seems smaller than I’d expected, less imposing than when seen from the outside. Four hundred seats at the most. Red risers, velvet-covered seating. A platform overhangs the public entrance, with six chairs, music stands, a drum set, and a double bass.

“Do you need a hand?” I ask, watching Leon climb up one of the towers located at intervals around the edge of the ring.

He doesn’t respond and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can’t see myself going up there to join him. He unhooks a trapeze, disturbing one of the spotlight projectors as he moves around. The spotlight begins to wobble, its beam falling on a torn curtain over a window. I can see a section of the sky through the tear in the fabric. It’s dark outside, and still only six o’clock. The sky is studded with stars.

Leon starts rolling up a carpet.

“Can I do anything to help?” I say again.

He shakes his head, straining from the effort. With the dirt floor freed from its covering, the odor intensifies, as if the smell emanated from here, from unseen animals trampled beneath our feet.

“It smells pretty strong.”

“It stinks, you mean!” Leon exclaims.

He says the circus doesn’t use animals now. He hasn’t seen any in the seven years he’s been working here. The smell hasn’t gone away though. No one seems to know why.

“It’s not so bad right now, but in the summer, with the heat, the lights, the people. It really stinks.”

He glances around the ring and adds in a hushed voice: “I don’t think any of this has ever been properly cleaned.”

He goes backstage again. The lights go down. I turn back to look at the ring again before joining him. A gleam of light from a lamppost filters in through a gap in the curtains, casting a yellow glow on the risers. It makes everything look much more old-fashioned, a scene from another century. The beam of light hits the double bass. Lying on its side, the bow across its hips, the bass looks as if it’s resting, weary of carving out its tune, waiting for tomorrow’s performance.

If you’re in the UK, preorder from ! If you’re in the States, for 40% off! (If you’re in Canada, email me at chad.post [at] rochester.edu and we can figure something out.)

Today’s #WITMonth post is an except from

Here’s the jacket copy:

Subtly in the vein of��Dogville��or Coetzee’s��Disgrace, and invoking the works of Agota Kristof,��Un Amor��probes ideas of language, alienation, and community through the eyes of a woman who, when brought into conflict, finds herself on the potential brink of deeper awareness of herself and her place in the world.

On the heels of a cryptic mistake, Nat arrives in La Escapa, an arid rural village in Spain’s interior. She settles into a small, shabby house with cheap rent to begin work on her first literary translation, with a skittish and ill-tempered dog—a gift from the boorish landlord—her only company.

Burdened with assumptions about country life, Nat will enter into relationships with the handful of local inhabitants—her negligent landlord, Píter the hippie, the dementia-afflicted Roberta, the young city family who comes on weekends, the unsociable man they call “The German”—from whom she appears to receive a customary welcome.

Mutual misunderstanding and a persistent sense of alienation, however, thrum below the surface. And when conflicts arise over repairs to the house, Nat receives an offer and makes a crucial decision.

In prose as taut and oppressive as the atmosphere in La Escapa,��Un Amor��extends Mesa’s exploration of language and power, confronting readers with the limits of their own morality as tensions mount and the community’s most unexpected impulses emerge.

This book—like so many of Mesa’s—is a slow burn, with tension increasing with every event, every turn of the page. The except below is from the first section of the book, setting the scene, introducing a few key characters, and creating the atmosphere of this part of rural Spain. Enjoy!

Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

She’d be hard pressed to come up with a convincing answer if asked to explain what she was doing there. That’s why she hedges when the time comes, babbling about a change of scenery.

“People must think you’re crazy, right?”

The cashier smacks gum as she piles Nat’s shopping on the counter. It’s the only store in a few-mile radius, an unmarked establishment where foodstuffs and hygiene products accumulate in a jumble. Shopping there is expensive and the pickings are slim, but Nat is reluctant to take the car to Petacas. She rummages in her wallet and counts out the bills she needs.

The girl from the shop is in a chatty mood. Brazen, she asks Nat all about her life, flustering her. The girl wishes she could do what Nat’s done, but the opposite, she says. Move to Cárdenas, where stuff actually happens.

“Living here sucks. There aren’t even any guys!”

She tells Nat that she used to go to high school in Petacas, but she dropped out. She doesn’t like studying, she’s crap at every subject. Now she helps out in the shop. Her mom gets chronic migraines, and her dad also does some farming, so she lends a hand at the store. But as soon as she turns eighteen, she’s out of there. She could be a cashier in Cárdenas, or a nanny. She’s good with kids. The few kids who ever make it to La Escapa, she smiles.

“This place sucks,” she repeats.

It’s the girl who tells Nat about the people living in the surrounding houses and farms. She tells her about the gypsy family squatting in a dilapidated farmhouse, right near the ramp for the highway. A bus picks up the kids every morning; they’re the only kids who live in La Escapa year-round. And there’s the old couple in the yellow house. The woman is some kind of witch, the girl claims. She can predict the future and read your mind.

“She’s a little crazy, so it’s creepy,” the girl laughs.

She tells Nat about the hippie in the wooden house, and the guy they call “The German” even though he isn’t from Germany, and Gordo’s bar—though to call the storehouse where they serve up bottles of beer a bar is, she admits, a bit of an exaggeration. There are other people who come and go according to the rhythms of the countryside, dayworkers hired for two-week stints or just the day, but also whole families who have inherited houses they can’t manage to sell and who live somewhere else half the year. But you never see women on their own. Not women Nat’s age, she specifies.

“Old ladies don’t count.”

During the first days, Nat gets confused and mixes up all that information, partly because she’d listened absently, partly because she’s in unfamiliar territory. La Escapa’s borders are blurry, and even though there is a relatively compact cluster of small houses—where hers is located—other buildings are scattered farther off, some inhabited and others not. From the outside, Nat can’t tell whether they’re homes or barns, if there are people inside or just livestock. She loses her bearings on the dirt roads and if it weren’t for the shop—which sometimes feels more familiar to her than the house she’s rented and slept in for a week—as a point of reference, she’d feel lost. The area isn’t even very pretty, although at sunset, when the edges soften and the light turns golden, she finds a kind of beauty she can cling to.

Nat takes her grocery bags and says goodbye to the girl. But before she exits the shop, she turns back and asks about the landlord. Does the girl know him? The girl purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. No, not really, she says. He’s lived in Petacas for a long time.

“But I do remember seeing him around here when I was little. He always had a pack of dogs and a really bad temper. Then he got married, or got together with someone, and left. I guess his wife didn’t want to live in La Escapa—can’t blame her. This place is worse for girls. Even though Petacas is nothing special—I wouldn’t want to live there either, no way.”

*

Sara Mesa

She tries to play with the dog, tossing him an old ball she found in the woodpile. But instead of catching it and bringing it back, the dog limps away. When she crouches down next to him, putting herself on his level so he won’t be afraid, he skulks off with his tail between his legs. The dog is a piece of work, she thinks, a real rotter. Sieso, they’d call him in the part of Spain she comes from. It seems a good a name as any—after all, she has to call him something. It certainly describes his surly nature. But Sieso is as inscrutable as he is unsociable. He hangs around, but it’s like he wasn’t there at all. Why should she have to settle for a dog like that? Even the little dog in the shop, an extremely anxious Chihuahua mix, is much nicer. All the dogs she meets on the roads—and there are tons of them—run over when she calls. A lot of them are looking to be fed, of course, but also to be pet; they are nosy and curious, wanting to know who this new girl in the neighborhood is. Sieso doesn’t even seem interested in eating. If she feeds him, great, and if not, that’s fine too. The landlord wasn’t kidding: the animal’s upkeep is cheap. Sometimes Nat is ashamed of the aversion she feels toward the animal. She asked for a dog and here he is. Now she cannot—must not—say—or even think—that she doesn’t want him.

One morning at the shop, she meets the hippie, as the girl called him. Now she languidly waits on them both, smoking a cigarette with no sense of urgency. The hippie is a little older than Nat, though he can’t be more than forty. Tall and strong, his skin is weathered by the sun, his hands broad and cracked, his eyes hard but placid. He wears his hair long in a terrible cut and his beard is on the reddish side. Why the girl calls him “hippie” is something Nat can only guess. Maybe it’s his long hair or because he is someone who, like Nat, comes from the city, a stranger, something incomprehensible for anyone who has lived in La Escapa since childhood and can only think of getting away. The truth is, the hippie has lived there a long time. He is, therefore, nothing novel, not like Nat. She observes him from the corner of her eye, his efficient movements, concise and confident. As she waits her turn, she pats the back of the dog he has brought with him. She’s a chocolate Labrador, old but undeniably elegant. The dog wags her tail and noses Nat’s crotch. The three of them laugh.

“What a good girl,” Nat says.

The hippie nods and holds out his hand. Then he changes his mind, withdraws it and moves in to kiss her. Just one kiss on the cheek, which causes Nat to remain with her face tilted, waiting for the second kiss that doesn’t come. He tells her his name: Píter. With an i, he specifies: P-í-t-e-r. At least that’s how he likes to spell it, except when he’s forced to write it officially. The less one writes one’s real name, the better, he jokes. It’s only good for signing checks at the bank, for those thieves.

“Natalia,” she introduces herself.

Then comes the obligatory question: what is she doing in La Escapa? He’s seen her out on the trails and also saw her tidying up the area around the house. Is she going to live there? Alone? Nat feels awkward. She would prefer that nobody watch her while she works, especially without her knowledge, which is inevitable because the boundaries of the property are marked only by fine wire mesh, denuded of vegetation. She tells him she’s only staying a couple of months.

“I’ve seen the dog, too. You got him here, right?”

“How do you know?”

Píter confesses that he knows the animal. One of the landlord’s many. That dog, in fact, is probably the worst of the lot. Her landlord will pick them up wherever, doesn’t train them, doesn’t vaccinate them, doesn’t care for them in the slightest. He uses, then abandons, them. Did she ask for the dog? She can be sure the landlord has given her the most useless one he had.

Nat considers this and the man suggests she give the dog back. There’s no reason to settle if he isn’t what she wanted. The landlord isn’t a good guy, he says, she’s better off keeping her distance. He doesn’t like to speak badly of anyone, he insists, but the landlord is another matter. Always thinking about how to scam people.

“I can get you a dog if you want.”

The conversation leaves Nat uneasy. Sitting on her doorstep with a lukewarm bottle of beer—the fridge, too, is on the fritz—she watches Sieso sleeping beside the fence, stretched out in the sunshine. The flies loiter on his slightly swollen belly, where the marks of old wounds are visible.

The thought of returning him is deeply unsettling.

*

Katie Whittemore

She is surprised by the activity in Petacas. It takes her a while to find parking; the layout of the roads is so chaotic and the signage so contradictory that once you enter the town, an unexpected detour can easily take you right out of it again. The houses are modest, their façades worse for the wear and mostly plain, but there are brick buildings, too, up to six stories tall, distributed arbitrarily here and there. The businesses are clustered around the main square; the town hall—an ostentatious building with large eaves and stained-glass windows—is surrounded by small bars and Chinese-owned bazaars. Nat buys a small fan at one of them. Then she wanders in search of a hardware store, reluctant to ask for directions. She is struck by the neglected appearance of the women, who have left the house with unkempt hair and slip-on sandals. Many of the men—even the old ones—are in sleeveless shirts. The few children she sees are unsupervised, licking popsicles, scampering, rolling on the ground. The people—men, women, kids—all of whom are loud and sloppy, look strangely alike. Inbreeding, Nat thinks. Her landlord is a perfect fit.

She worries about running into him, but it’s Píter, not the landlord, whom she meets in the hardware store. She is happy to see him: someone she knows, someone friendly, someone smiling at her at last, coming over, what are you doing here, he asks. Nat shows him the box with the fan and he scowls. Why didn’t she ask the landlord? It’s his responsibility to keep the property in habitable condition. Not air conditioning, obviously, but a fan at least.

“Or you could have asked me. That’s what neighbors are for.”

Nat looks for an excuse. She’s happy to buy one, she says. She’ll take it with her when she leaves La Escape. Píter looks at her askance, pretending not to believe her.

“And what are you buying here? Tools to fix everything he left broken?”

Nat shakes her head.

“No. Stuff for the garden.”

“You’re planting a garden?”

“Well, just something basic . . . Peppers and eggplants, they’re easy, I guess. I want to try, at least.”

Píter takes her by the arm, steps closer.

“Don’t buy anything,” he whispers.

He tells her that he can lend her all the tools she needs. He says, too, that she might as well forget about a garden. Nothing’s grown on her land in years; the soil is totally depleted; it would take days and days of hard work to get it into shape. If she insists—Nat hangs on that word, insists—he could lend her a hand, but he absolutely advises against it. Although he speaks smoothly, Píter’s voice contains indisputable sureness, an expert’s confidence. Nat nods, waits for him to finish his shopping. Cables, adaptors, screws, a pair of pliers: all very professional, very specific, nothing at all like the indefiniteness in which she operates.

Outside, Píter walks beside her at an athletic pace, straight but flexible. His way of moving is so elegant, so different from the people around them, that Nat is proud to be walking next to him, the sort of pride associated with feeling legitimate. The spell breaks when he points to the windows at the town hall.

“Pretty, aren’t they? I made them.”

Nat thinks the windows clash terribly with the building’s exposed brick, but she is all praise: they suit it perfectly, she says. Píter looks at her appreciatively. Precisely, he says, that’s what he seeks, for his work to befit its context.

“Petacas isn’t the nicest place in the world, but—to the extent possible—one should strive to beautify one’s surroundings, don’t you think?”

“So, you’re a . . .” Nat doesn’t know what you call a person who makes stained-glass windows.

“A glazier? Yes. Well, more than a glazier. A glass and color artisan, you might say. Like, I don’t just cover windows.”

“Of course.” Nat smiles.

They have a beer in one of the bars on the square. The beer is ice-cold and goes down easy. Píter observes her closely—too closely, she thinks—but his eyes are sweet and that softens her discomfort. The conversation returns to the landlord—that cheeky bastard, he repeats—the tools and her barren plot. He insists on lending her what she needs. Just a matter of tidying the yard, clearing space for a table and some lawn chairs, then planting a few oleander and yucca, or some succulents suitable for the harsh climate. There’s a huge nursery near Petacas, very cheap. If she wants, one day they can go together. It seems her plans for a vegetable garden have been scrapped. She doesn’t mention them again.

Again Un Amor is available for preorder from better bookstores everywhere, our , , or

Today’s #WITMonth post is a preview for an Open Letter title coming out next summer, which isn’t even available for sale anywhere yet. It’s��

“Sis, I want to tell you about the river. Ģ����ý me in the river. It makes me shiver, tremble. It makes me laugh. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this alive . . .”

Rute is no stranger to displacement and loss. As a child she and her older sister, Dina, were subject to their mother’s romantic whims, moving from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend. Then, when the sisters were in their late twenties, Dina disappeared. In the decade that has since passed, Rute has become a husk of her former self, going through the motions in work, life, and love, composing daily letters to Dina in the hopes they’ll one day see each other again.��

When the sisters’ biological father, Jūle, dies, Rute unexpectedly inherits his country property. Curious about this man she’s never really known, she takes the opportunity to flee the city, the people, herself. But once in the countryside she meets Matilde, the young, single mother from next door who (along with her brother Kristof) was practically raised by Jūle. Rute learns about Jūle, a generous soul whose door and heart were always open to those less fortunate.��

Haunting, sparse, and echoing Scandinavian greats like Kjersti Skomsvold, Laura Vinogradova’s��River��is a tightly crafted work that defies resolutions and endings, instead hailing the importance and beauty of the personal journey to one’s internal truths and external freedoms.

��The book isn’t quite available for preorder yet, but stay tuned, and we’ll let you know when it is!

Before

Dina likes Rute’s place. There’s a warmth to it. The kind of warmth that is oblivious to the weather outside. As soon as she steps into her sister’s apartment, Dina takes off her boots and socks and stands for some time, barefoot, soaking up the warmth. Rute has heated floors; Rute has everything.

—What are you doing? Rute laughs.

—Have you been outside?

—No, I’ve been working. What is it?

—The wind, little sister, the wind.

—There’s wind in here, too, Rute laughs again and blows into Dina’s face.

Laura Vinogradova

Then they drink coffee. Rute orders a pizza. Dina’s eyes wander around the kitchen; they hungrily take in every beautiful detail, because Rute’s place is beautiful. Warm and beautiful. Sometimes Dina wants to call her out on it. Tell her she’s spoiled. Tell her Stefans has spoiled her. Because Dina can’t escape. She can’t escape the cold, the loneliness. And sometimes she feels like she can’t even try. Can’t be free, doesn’t deserve to be free. And then she gets angry at Rute. Because Rute shouldn’t be living in an apartment like this. Shouldn’t have heated floors or love, shouldn’t be stringing fairy lights from all the shelves.

Rute has a jar of kombucha fermenting on the windowsill. When Dina sees it, she chokes on her coffee and laughs while wheezing.

—What’s that? she points to the jar.

—Kombucha, Rute says.

—Why is there lace over the top of it? Dina laughs again.

Rute pouts and says nothing.

—It reminds me of something. Dina grows thoughtful and stops laughing.

—Kombucha? Rute’s voice drips with sarcasm.

But Dina shakes her head. The pizza is delivered. The sisters eat, their fingers greasy, and forget about the kombucha.

—Walk me out? Dina asks, but Rute shakes her head.

—I want to get a bit more translating done.

They hug each other tightly; Rute blows Dina a kiss, and the door closes behind her.

After that, everything happens too fast to make sense of it. Too fast to scream, too forceful to fight back. Dina gets off the No. 6 tram at the Mārkalne stop and heads for home. The street she’s walking down is quiet and empty, with a few cold cars and a red minivan parked along the side of the street. It’s a snowless, windy January, and Dina retreats deeper into her scarf. It happens in a second: three men jump out of the van, grab her, and pull a bag over her head. They lift her like a rag doll and toss her into the back of the van. No screams. No movement. Dina freezes and gives in having, at some point in her life, stopped fighting back.

She lies silent in the back of the van and tries to think. Is she hurt? Will she survive this? Will it happen quickly? But she can’t think clearly. Her goddamn mind is trapped in this bag. Everything is trapped, even her fear. She doesn’t feel afraid. What she feels are her pants, wet, cold, plastered to her skin. She’s pissed herself. They seem to have left Riga because the van is driving straight, smooth, and fast. Dina is curled up into a ball, lying in her own urine, with a bag over her head. Suddenly, she realizes what Rute’s kombucha reminded her of.

*

At the time, Dina would have been around ten years old. One day their mother, without a word, had taken her and Rute to live with Aigars. No, we’re not going back home, their mother had told the girls, and they never brought it up again. Their mother loved Aigars just as much as she’d loved Vladimir before him, and Igor before him, and Jānis somewhere in between. Aigars wasn’t bad, he left the girls alone. He never spoke to them, and the girls quickly learned to remain silent. If they talked or laughed, it meant a black eye for their mother. Their mother loved Aigars even with her black eye, so the girls weren’t worried.

Kaija Straumanis

The sisters didn’t have their own room at first, instead sharing one with their mother and Aigars. They were set up on the floor behind the wardrobe, with a quilt to sleep on and a small night light. But it was still dark. Each night, Dina had to listen to their mother’s panting and snoring, and Aigar��’s moaning. Dina and Rute wet their “bed” on the very first night. Dina had been embarrassed to tell their mother, but she worked up the courage and finally did. The girls were given a clean sheet, but the same thing happened the next night and the night after that. Dina woke up on a quilt that was wet and a sheet with a large yellow stain on it. She pulled on her jeans and went to school, but she could feel that damp cold on her legs the entire day. She didn’t say anything to their mother again—they didn’t have that many clean sheets, and their mother was busy. Aigars wanted to spend every second with her. He didn’t like it when she wanted to play with Dina and Rute.

The girls spent several months sleeping behind the wardrobe. They wet the bed every night. Sometimes they couldn’t tell if it had been only Dina, or only Rute, or both of them. They’d study the stains on the sheets, trying to make sense of it, but what did it matter? Either way, the bed was wet. Either way, it stank. Either way, they had to sleep there again. Every morning Dina would pull back the sheet and hope it would be the last time, that everything would dry out and she wouldn’t wet the bed anymore. But she did. And so did Rute.

Then they got their own room, and in the process of moving them their mother saw their sleeping space for the first time. She saw the piss-stained sheets. The cotton quilt they used as a mattress had started to mold. Their mother said nothing; neither did the girls. Urine isn’t something you talk about.

Having their own room was better. They had their own beds and were given special mattress covers to go under the sheets. Dina’s bed stayed dry the first few days, and she was happy because she thought she’d conquered bed-wetting. There was one morning when Rute’s bed was wet, but she was still little. She couldn’t hold it in.

One night, Dina woke up needing to pee. But the toilet was outside, and to get to it, she’d have to go by Aigar��’s room. What if she woke him and he got angry? What if he took it out on their mother? Because he did that when he got angry. The times he got angry like that it seemed that their mother didn’t love him after all, but that wasn’t true. She did love him. She’d cry, rub ointment on her bruises, and go on loving him.

Dina got an idea. On the table was a jar of water used for rinsing paint brushes. She’d pee in there. She squatted, positioned the jar under herself, and tried to aim in the dark. She filled it completely, a bit of warm urine dripping onto her hands. But Dina was pleased with her solution. Her bed would stay dry, and she wouldn’t reek at school. She found a few more jars in the courtyard and secretly stashed them in their room. She filled those, too. When she ran out of jars, she peed into a vase that was in the girls’ room because Aigars didn’t like vases. And when she ran out of vases, she peed in the bowl that sat under the flowerpot.

On rare occasions she would take the jars out to empty them. Very rarely. And so, the urine-filled jars would turn dark, cloudy. They looked like jars of kombucha. Now she remembers.

*

The van stops. Dina is dragged outside and through the bag she can feel the damp sea air. She recognizes it because Vladimir, whom her mother had loved, had lived by the sea. The sea air makes up a bit of her childhood air. We all start at childhood. She takes a deep breath of the damp air and savors it. And there’s a sharp pain on the back of her head. Then darkness.

River by Laura Vinogradova, translated from the Latvian by Kaija Straumanis, will be available from Open Letter Books in the summer of 2024.

Today’s #WITMonth post is an excerpt from��

is available from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.

Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their right arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may say so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind, conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

conversation is a specialty that is eminently French.

*

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in our little town in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end of the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

*

Conversation is going downhill.

*

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count on them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cintegabelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civic. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful for seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.

Lydie Salvayre

In the interest of clarity, my lecture will scrupulously observe each step of the following outline, which I ask you to please keep in mind.

Part One: The advantages of conversation, already noted, and upon which we will elaborate with a most mathematical rigor.

Part Two: Those conditions favorable to the flowering of conversation, which are ten in number:

—the presence of at least two persons;

—the comfort of the derrière;

—the ability to keep silent;

—c�dzܰ��ٱ����;

—c���������ٲ�;

—j�dz��ܱ��������ٲ�;

—the principle of equality;

—a sense of proportion;

—an insouciant disregard for time;

��������dz�.

Part Three: Five examples of conversation selected from among the most common categories:

—amorous conversation;

—literary conversation;

—political conversation;

—patriotic conversation;

—conversation with the dead.

The whole thing enlivened by a number of axioms with which I am not at all displeased. I’m rather fond of axions.

*

So, Part One: The advantages of conversation.

The first of the advantages of conversation, as I was saying, and not the least of them, is that conversation always finds remarkable favor with women. Every last one of them goes into raptures before a clever conversationalist, be he cross-eyed, pot-bellied, warty, a journalist, or deformed. Take me: noticeably ill-favored, with big ears, and a cowlick I spend hours plastering down, I was an immediate hit with Lucienne (a woman impervious to poetry and little given to linguistic acrobatics) the second I began to babble. And I must confess that my verbal vivacity and florid declarations (I commanded, at the time, a whole battery of tricks, classified by genre) did more to lift up her redoubtable skirt than any fumbling gesture I’d never have dared make anyway. I wasn’t that stupid. And kew for a fact that

*

women’s genitals communicate with their ears.

*

If, gentlemen—for it is to you, men of Cintegabelle, that I speak—if nevertheless you prove unable to resist the summons of the flesh, if you are seized with the desire to place your hand on the knee of an altogether too concupiscible woman, I urge you most emphatically: under no circumstances interrupt your harangue. Without ceasing to chatter, keep gaining ground. Advance stealthily and with ingratiating ploys. Like the sinuous serpent of desire. Pursue your reputation garlanded with pretty turns of phrase. In perfect synchrony, lay compliments at her feet and hands on her modesty. From poems to promises, from promises to prattle, you will proceed without mishap to the inevitable place. Once there, stop talking! Pounce!

The second advantage of conversation concerns in particular those scheming, bloodthirsty youths who crave a brilliant career in the Arts and Letters. You will find such young men everywhere, and our town is no exception.

That’s right, my little wolf cubs in the first row, I’ll have you know that you will achieve more through a funny remark, a turn of phrase, or a flash of wit than through your girlfriend’s sex appeal, a complete familiarity with the twelve volumes of Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria, and even the outstanding dishonesty that in France ranks demonstrably among the most important factors of success.

You see, I have a friend (who shall remain nameless), a regional writer, an expert on the arts and crafts of Languedoc, who, whenever he goes out in society, flounders, stammers, stares like an idiot at his perfectly ordinary shoes, and can only bleat “Ah” and “Oh” and “Uh” and sometimes “Hee-hee.” Now, although each of these onomatopoeias contains a world of perplexity and terrifying apprehension, they do absolutely nothing to fuel the fires of literate conversation. As for the few times when this friend is invited to appear on a television program, it’s just pitiful to hear him sputter away! Result: he gets no name recognition, as the rabble say.

*

Lousy conversation is social suicide.

*

Through a quite common misunderstanding, his poor speaking skills make a poor impression on people, whose low opinion of him we find most unfair. But the world is made in such a way that

*

it is not enough to be talented,

one must also look the part.

*

This will be our inevitable axiom. The corollary to which is equally inevitable:

*

To appear to be what one is not is ridiculous,

like dressing up a monkey in a three-piece suit.

*

Linda Coverdale

Or wearing one myself. The results are guaranteed!! am grotesque. Lucienne always told me so. She preferred me in a track suit. To my great sorrow. So is better, it seems, to suit one’s style to oneself. And what’s more, one must know one’s own style. And oneself. And how to make them work together. All that isn’t easy. I feel I’m getting bogged down. Which happens whenever I try to think. I see no other way to land on my feet again (one couldn’t dream up a more appropriate expression), no other way than to quote Baltasar Gracián, a philosopher whom I’ve discovered since my Lulu left me (mourning has its good points, you must admit).

When the bottom has fallen out of everything, this thinker wrote, nothing can replace it. And although you can spruce up what the English refer to as the “packaging” (it’s me speaking now), try as you may to decorate the emptiness with ruffles, doll it up, swathe it in tissue paper, beribbon it with fancy words and frills, the emptiness stubbornly, imperturbably, remains. I will let you meditate a moment on what I’ve just said, before issuing the following warning.

Warning:

Whoever considers the subtle art of conversation simply a useful skill for social climbing is a fool and a cipher. For conversation presupposes, ladies and gentlemen (before swelling into chamber music, or jazz, or rock, depending), an incubation period when the riches of the mind ferment, I don’t like that image because it reminds me of cheese, whereas, we’ll get back to this, conversation is not a cheese, another French specialty along with champagne and the famous spirit of collaboration, and if we absolutely had to find a metaphor here, I’d propose that

*

conversation is a wine that improves with age.

*

Which means that in my eyes, it possesses every virtue.And not only does it not preclude either thought or culture. Which are not acquired in one day. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Lucienne, for example, barely attained their outer edges. And died as lightweight as the day she was born. I’m not speaking of her body, that poor shell, but of her soul, which had the thickness of a blotter. And not only, as I was saying, does conversation not preclude either thought or culture. It positively requires them. Sanctifies them. And celebrates them. Just listen to me, for instance.

The preceding assertion might seem like a perfidious attack against certain modern writers whose profundity of thought and cultural capital—I love that last expression, simply saying it makes me feel rich, but not for long—whose cultural and more particularly syntactic capital is limited to pocket change. But God forbid we should wish them harm! Every poor man is our friend!

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we will be posting excerpts, readings, summaries from the Translation Database, former Two Month Review seasons, and various special offers—so stay tuned!

Today’s excerpt is from����by Hwang Jungeun, translated by Janet Hong as part of her . ( All three titles for $30!!!)��

You might recognize Hwang Jungeun from her two Tilted Axis titles: (translated by Jung Yewon) and�� (translated by Emily Yae Won). (Also, Open Letter will be publishing Hwang’s ��in the near future.)

And here’s the current copy for��Year After Year:

Three women—the old mother and her two daughters—contemplate their family life and their bottled-up feelings through the novel’s placating yet oddly unnerving prose.��

Year After Year��is divided into four large chapters; the first unravels from the perspective of Sejin, younger daughter, the second from that of Youngjin, older daughter, the third from the mother’s, and the fourth, back to Sejin’s. Throughout the course of the novel, a number of themes are developed, including its discussion of interracial marriage, different forms of family, and sexual minorities. Circumstances and history forced the mother to the life of obedience, familial obligations and financial hardship forced Youngjin to give up her dream and support the family, and the reality of her culture forced Sejin to be in the closet. And all the while, these three women, while empathizing with each other, seem entrapped in the cycle of forcing each other to further succumb.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

Gravedig

After the Chuseok holiday, before the ground freezes.

So Yi Sunil had said numerous times, and now the time had come. It was the second week of November. At six o’clock in the morning, Han Sejin got in her car and sped along the mostly empty Olympic Highway and arrived at Sunil’s apartment. She pulled up to the shuttered garage and turned off the engine. Her seat chilled almost immediately. The day was bitter cold. It would get a little warmer when the sun rose fully, but they were heading toward the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), where the temperature, even at midday, was lower than during nights in the city. It was the same every year.

Sejin peered down at the cracked, uneven surface of the parking lot and retied her hair. She went up to the fourth floor. Sunil was waiting, everything already packed. Containers of mung bean pancakes, stuffed chili peppers, and stir-fried beef were stacked inside a paper shopping bag, along with some apples and pears, and a bottle of liquor. Next to the bag sat a smaller backpack. She’d said she wanted to use plates this time. Not Styrofoam or aluminum foil trays, but real plates, since this visit was to be their last. As soon as Sejin picked up the backpack, it sagged under the weight of the dishes, and there was a clatter.

They’re going to break. You don’t care?

Why would they break? They won’t, as long as you’re careful, Sunil said, adding, I’m bringing them back.

Sejin said no more and carried the bags down.

*

She loaded the bags in the trunk and spread out a blanket in the backseat. She started the car and turned on the heat. When Sunil finally appeared from the entrance of the mid-rise, Sejin was crouched in front of the car, examining the ground. Two rusted screws, dull and as fat as a thumb, protruded from the surface. They were all that remained of the parking barrier. Her brother-in-law had installed it to prevent people from parking illegally in their lot, but it must have been a hassle for him and the tenants to get in and out, because it was removed one day, leaving behind these two screws anchored deep into the ground. They weren’t too sharp, but sharp enough to puncture a tire if a car drove over them at a certain angle. On her last visit, Sejin had mentioned they could be dangerous, and Sunil had said she’d relay the message.

They’re still here, Sejin said, standing up.

Sunil frowned, shaking her head.

Did that mean she’d told her son-in-law, but he’d done nothing? Or that she hadn’t mentioned it yet, because she hadn’t found the right time to bring it up? Without asking any of these things, Sejin helped Sunil into the backseat, taking the duralumin cane from her and stowing it in the trunk. She then removed Sunil’s right shoe, helping her prop her leg onto the center console and covering her swollen knee with a blanket. Sunil was wearing a wool cap with a small brim, a pair of thick quilted trousers, a red-and-brown cardigan in a dizzying pattern, and a skinny knit scarf wrapped around her neck.

You won’t get cold dressed like that?

Sunil said she had on many layers underneath and patted her belly. She’d also packed hiking boots, which she’d found stored neatly in a box. They belonged to Sejin’s older sister, Yeongjin, who hadn’t touched them after using them once. Though they were a little big, as long as Sunil put on an extra pair of socks before setting out, they should fit just fine. At last, they left.

*

Hwang Jungeur

They headed northeast. If they traveled 100 kilometers an hour, they would arrive at their destination in two and a half hours. Grandfather’s grave was in Jigyeong-ri village, in the town of Galmal of Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province. Both women called him Grandfather, but he was actually Sunil’s grandfather, which made him Sejin’s great-grandfather. He was buried deep in the mountain where a frontline military unit was stationed. The graves of other Jigyeong-ri residents lay scattered over the mountain as well. They needed to pass through the military base in order to access the graves. And so, every year around Chuseok, villagers gathered in front of the base, carrying sickles and bundles of food. After leaving their IDs at the checkpoint, they hiked up the mountain to hold memorial ceremonies in honor of their ancestors, each family escorted by one or two armed soldiers. From the mid-eighties, Sunil visited her grandfather’s grave every year without fail, but once Sejin got her driver’s license and a car of her own, Sunil went with her daughter. When Chuseok drew near, Sunil would give an old neighbor from the village a call and ask when everyone was planning to head up the mountain. Then she’d call Sejin and update her on that year’s visit.

Hey, let’s have some gotgam.

Sunil pulled off the end and tore the dried persimmon in two. She held it out toward Sejin, who accepted it without taking her eyes off the road. The car continued to glide forward. The sun was rising, and to their right, the mountain fog was creeping down toward the rice paddies spread below. Sejin said they weren’t going to be late after all, since there was no traffic on the roads, but Sunil was worried the workers had headed up the mountain already, and said they should have set out earlier.

We need to make the last offering before they start digging.

Sunil was born in Galgol, north of Jigyeong-ri, but after she lost her parents, she went to live with her grandfather in Jigyeong-ri. Some of her relatives had disappeared without a trace in the border clashes that took place along the 38^th parallel during the Korean War, and her grandfather, her only remaining next of kin, took the five-year-old Sunil in, raising her and getting her to run errands for him. When she was fifteen, she was sent to live with a distant relative in Gimpo, and there she helped at a market until she married Han Jungeon, in a match arranged by one of the merchants. Sunil liked to tell Sejin how she’d never in her wildest dreams expected her grandfather to make the long, inconvenient journey to see her get married, but he’d come after all, dressed in his worn traditional coat. He’d sat in the wedding hall for a bit, eaten some noodles, and then left.

Grandfather passed away in Jigyeong-ri in 1978. At the crack of dawn, three or four men from the village had shouldered his coffin and buried him halfway up the mountain. Sejin had never met him, but she knew what he looked like. A framed photo of him hung on the wall of Sunil’s apartment, along with their family pictures. In the shot taken head-on, he had a scruffy beard and wore a fabric skullcap over coarse, white hair. Just from his face and expression alone, one could tell he was very short, and that his forehead, eyebrows, eyes, and nose were round, like Sunil’s. He seemed like someone Sejin had met many times, perhaps because she’d grown up staring at his picture her entire life. So she visited his grave every year, feeling as if she were looking in on him. But before this, Sunil had made the trip on her own, changing buses several times. Neither Jungeon nor her older daughter Yeongjin had any desire to accompany her, and Mansu, her only son and the youngest of her children, had been too young or hadn’t known the way to the gravesite to go with her.

Why go through all that trouble every year?

Janet Hong

Yeongjin and Jungeon couldn’t understand why Sunil went to such lengths to visit her grandfather’s grave. How could they possibly know about the dried-up burrows or the shrubs draped occasionally with snakes, and how, in just a year, the weeds would have grown as tall as a person that they’d have to hack them down with a sickle in order to pass through? Or about the moss and the trees twisted from lack of sunlight, the burial mound crushed and trampled by wild boars, the chestnut trees surrounding the grave, or the silence of pine trees? Sejin alone knew the reason why Sunil went up the mountain every year, cutting a path through the forest. It was her home. For her mom, that grave was her childhood home.

Grandfather, I’m a granny now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come next year.

For the past few years, this is what Sunil has been saying at the graveside, but this visit was truly her last. She was seventy-two years old and planned to have knee replacement surgeries in both knees next year. Once a child of the mountains, she’d been surefooted on steep terrain, harvesting fiddleheads and young shoots off angelica trees, but now she needed a cane even on flat land, and she walked slowly, grimacing from the pain. She’d held out for several years, saying each time it was her last, but she couldn’t manage the wild rugged terrain anymore and had finally accepted the truth earlier this year. After worrying about Grandfather’s resting place that would lie deserted deep in the mountains, she resolved to dig up his remains and get rid of the grave altogether. After all, no one would visit him once she was gone.

Year After Year is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

The large image associated with this post is copyrighted by .

And to kick things off (technically a day before the start of #WITMonth, but whatever, time is a construct), here is an excerpt from Mexican author Karla Marrufo’s Flame Trees in May,��translated from the Spanish by Allison A. deFreese. Here’s a description of the book:

“There are stories that cannot help but change us forever, and Mayo, with its showers of golden rain, its flame trees on fire, its dark sun and the drips and drops that form bubbles, is one of them.”—Nidia Cuan

In her most experimental work to date, Karla Marrufo Huchim explores universal themes with appreciable specificity: loneliness, family angst, memory loss—from a perspective belonging singularly to a native of the Yucatán Peninsula.��Mayo’s unnamed narrator is an older woman, isolated in her domestic life, who is both suffering from memory loss and intent on recounting the lives of three generations of her family. The Yucatán culture and community that Marrufo Huchim describes through her narrator’s fine but faltering mind will be foreign but not fetishized for American readers.

Flame Trees in May is available for purchase from better bookstores everywhere, , , or you get your books.��

And, as an editorial note, the layout of this novella is much closer to poetry than to prose. I’ve tried to represent it as best as possible in this post, but I highly recommend reading the physical book for a better sense of how this is supposed to appear on the page.

*

did you know there’s a word in portuguese that resembles your name?

i’ve forgotten it now, but it means mementos or memories, like remembering to send greetings to someone, to send a memo. i would remember it if only i could pet the cat, just like i would remember to take out the trash on friday and to close the refrigerator door

the door to my tears,

and all the windows before leaving the house.

so much silence here. have you noticed? that when you keep quiet, the house gets dirtier so much faster? you are such stubborn dust. you pass through doorways and come to settle in corners kept under lock and key. maybe that’s why lola can’t stand this place

the room still sweats with the warm hypocrisy from when it was a law office

and i’ll tell you why, if we keep going like this, soon we’ll be able to rent it out as a funeral parlor. that’s a profitable business. people will never stop dying

or keeping quiet

or thinking today must be friday.

Karla Marrufo

come here. touch the wall. it’s covered in dark bubbles. so humid! the wood is swelling. i am swelling, and sometimes i feel myself rolling, floating, rolling—like those days when we’d go to the park and roll down the hill until we were exhausted, until we would land at the base of the hill where the grass was peaceful and green. remember? we spent so many weekends at that park! we arrived with our childish excitement, believing everything was going to be fine; we ate sandwiches and sipped fruit juice while the clowns blew up dog-shaped balloons

the dogs walking by were shaped like balloons that would later pop—

once blown up to full size and left to bloat at the side of the road, the cars never stopping.

but in those days, bubbles were clear, and everything was fine. we should return to that city again sometime, leave this flat landscape for a while.

have you noticed how tiresias looks at me? i’ve often wondered what he’s thinking when his little green eyes grow big and stare into mine. it reminds me of that movie

what was it called?

the one where they ask whether, instead of us being the ones who make animals more human, it’s not the opposite way around, that the creatures in our lives turn us into animals. later lola brought up that song again, the one about the professor who teaches puppies how to write

he was an animal lover for sure; a regular zoophile, lola said

what a silly song! it makes me laugh,

though my excitement lasts an instant

as i think about those animals

those bubbles

and how they drift through life with their broken fragments of memory.

so little time has passed, really, and yet i’ve started mixing things up; things disappear from my mind. sometimes the past is a faded beach house, condemned each day to endure the relentless caress of sand and the sting of salt swept in by the wind. lola insists i take vitamins, fish oil, seaweed capsules. she says i should sleep more

have peaceful dreams, sleep without needles pounding in my temples

for eight, ten hours

a thousand hours

to sleep forever

but a wicked sun keeps visiting me in my dreams, drawing black holes before my eyes

it wakes me—agitated—every forty minutes.

i saw it on tv. the blonde girl with the small mouth was talking about it: about the very dark spot at the center of a solar flare. you have to see it

we should talk more. a little more. you know? it’s easier to remember ordinary things that happen to us when we talk about them. that’s why names are so important

a handful of letters from the alphabet, bound to the heart our whole lifes.

mamá panchita used to repeat this ad nauseam.

she said names are very dangerous; they chart the lines that lead to our destinies.

i remember the last time, so sad, though it barely lasted a few seconds. we had bound mamá panchita’s hands with a rope, secured them to the ceiling beams, so she would stop

she was only hurting herself;

scratching open her skin as a way to remember.

her hands restless as kites,

but without the colors

and i was deeply moved by her dark skin. seeing it touched me in a way that no one else’s skin had ever moved me before. it smelled ancient, the scent of many years. doubt had left a deep crease between her eyebrows. in a corner of the room, right in front of her, the small altar to our lady of charity was laughing along with five freshly cut sunflowers and the sparkle of a few fake coins. eyes half-closed, mamá panchita squinted suspiciously as she observed the saint; her pupils glowering with the hatred of a thousand questions answered only by whispers.

and just as i walked into the room, an unspeakable anger seized me

she was scratching open her skin

who knows what she was looking for below the surface

that’s why she had all those sores on her arms,

that long scar on her face

and her terrifying screams and outrage made me shake with anger and then grow quiet because, there at her side for the last time, i felt incapable of speaking to her

come now, mamá, everything’s going to be fine. when i look into your eyes, there you are—so very much yourself, mamá, always you, taking the little thread of your name, that’s about to break

nothing. silence. in that quiet corner of the room, i didn’t so much as dare to light the white candles around our lady of charity; we kept still, our mouths sealed

by our dark hands.

when it comes to giving me looks, even tiresias is more expressive than that. this must be why he scratches me with such determination. you see? it’s the same thing backwards. relentless caresses and reverberating silences—and this house didn’t even suffer the misfortune of having been built near the ocean. it has survived for years in mamá panchita’s absence

in the absence of your sisters, your father, you,

and me

only the bubbles and drops remain

drip, drop

of a rather thick liquid, as if flooded by disappointment, muddied by a sadness that makes everything slippery. no matter how hard i try, i can’t stop pacing between these same drops of music, these same notes, this same smell that comes, always, in may

it’s may again

that clings to the walls of memory, climbing the walls like a vine, working its way into the memories hidden in every corner, embroidered with the threads of mamá panchita’s name. she was fascinated by fancy paper napkins, by the little drawings on disposable cups, the tiny flowers on plastic cutlery—so many treasures. remember? she ate with her hands instead of touching the plastic forks, cleaned her mouth using her sleeves instead of napkins, discreetly wiped her fingertips on the edge of the tablecloth—all to preserve the beauty of disposable things.

you see, i’m still finding her trove of plastic and paper at the most unexpected moments, in the most unexpected places, and this creates a dilemma for me because i never know what to do with these disposable objects she left untouched only to be thrown out later, nobody giving them a second thought.

do you know how many things vanish without anyone so much as thinking of them? i try to do it, to think about every single thing, about every person who dies . . . but there are far too many and i am

it seems to me

much too small. maybe when you start thinking about things, the things themselves become sad too. like the melon this morning. lola brought it, and it was gigantic, a really big one, and i had to cut through the rind myself, then scoop out the seeds from each little square—the hulls of those seeds rough to the touch as I removed them; each unique and alive, and they covered my hands like homicidal blood. and there wasn’t even running water in the house

no drip, no drop

and that meant my hands were coated in the melon’s sweet round death, its juice running onto the floor until finally i cried—knife in hand—about all the times i hadn’t known how to relish the thought of death.

*

where are you going? did you know there’s a greek word . . . ?

but i took out the trash on friday and closed all the doors

all of them

though later i opened them again because i needed to let in the daylight and to breathe in the outside world. sometimes when the sun

a spot black as night

starts to scribble on the walls and furniture in my room, i force myself awake: but it’s no use. my eyes keep me anchored in sleep. my eyelids stay closed, inwardly, looking for a long time at a universe that lacks the contours drawn for us by daylight. that’s why i have to open the windows and doors, expand this space so the colors don’t stay hidden, so i, too, may draw myself for one more day. it’s strange: all of a sudden i start to imagine my own funeral, among dark bubbles, in this ridiculous heat. and i’m afraid,

of closed doors and windows

very afraid. i must be lost in the maze of cereal boxes and energy shakes. every morning the same routine, so easy to follow that in the end i get lost. it’s easy to get lost when you go about your day only pretending to be free

to have no blood at all.

and you know it. remember when we would get lost and promise each other we would never go home? never return again,

to the smoothies or fish oil or seaweed

even though the way home was a straight shot, no turns. we wanted to run away to the parks with their hills and lakes

do you remember?

Allison A. deFreese

to sail far away from home, balloons that rise until they touch the sky. we were happy runaways, glancing over our shoulders, feeling above it all and looking down on those small lives below . . . exactly the way life looked from the picture window at the italian restaurant. remember that place? its crystal-clear windows under the shade of a ceiba tree, where i waited for you, hidden inside, imagining the instant you would arrive? the ceilings in that space were as high as our sky. sometimes when you arrived, i would imagine you were someone else, a different fellow coming to see me. then we’d escape with our foolish fantasies that i cherish to this day

you are so silly, small woman!

you ramble on and on, you can’t hold your tongue; with a warm, sweet venom in your saliva

i am quite small for being such a silly woman

with the eagerness of a schoolgirl and a trembling desire to see you again, i loved waiting for you. and when you triumphantly entered the restaurant, you grinned, confirmed what you suspected, and then kept playing our game, hiding a rose behind your back

a forbidden caress

fixing your gaze on my body

later putting the flower in my hands without a word

what a lovely couple

yes, mamá, we make such a lovely couple, though tiresias may condemn us

with his intense green gaze and his claws on our skin.

yes, it sounds so pretty, but neither of us were destined to be martyrs, nor would our deaths be foreshadowed by ripping open our consciousness, little by little each day, in an italian restaurant

or by having someone read of a very long will and testament:

�� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��the one who dies first, dies best

we didn’t think about death back then, even though in those days we knew already that neither words nor names would ever be on our side. remember the letters we wrote each other, the tongue twisters, all the wordplay?

paradise bird white angel cloud heaven dream blood

and what does blood have in common with dreams?

they are connected in the same way that paradise is full of birds and angels: you must fly to reach paradise, just as there must be blood for a dream to end

and i laughed then, though i never understood a thing. because to me, you were as bright as the look of hope in a street dog’s eyes.

wait! you would have loved it in the city center yesterday, everyone was there. i walked and walked, past all the shops, among people and pigeons. it was fascinating. it was strange, getting lost in a crowd again. a thousand colors overlapping, dust in the air, the excitable sounds of people in a hurry, with their purchases and their sniveling kids holding melting ice creams, sad from the heat. and a man looked at me like no man has looked at me for many years.

i felt paralyzed and dry, a scarecrow of a woman. except that i can’t scare anything, not even pigeons. i couldn’t return his look, because i could tell he was someone who refused to be intimidated. i felt trapped like the queen in a game of chess, alone and vulnerable at the moment of defeat. i would like to learn to play chess

to find my way out of mazes

to fill myself with the power of knives

but no one will tell me how it’s done. i never learned to return a look. i know nothing about revenge. that must be why everything around me ends up dying or getting killed. you know, tiresias spent the night in the carport again. i’m afraid i will forget him, that he’ll forget about me. i am very afraid that one day we will both forget about each other—that i’ll drive out of the carport and he won’t move; and after that, he’ll never run away or come to me again; that later i’ll have to wipe up his blood and gently remove his little red collar from his neck, and place the drop that was his body

dark as a bubble

in a trash bag that i won’t forget to take out on friday. maybe after that, i’ll close the doors forever.

go on then. you can leave if you want. there’s nothing here anymore. that’s why we are so backward and rustic, so broken down—at a standstill. we lack the words to communicate, even those words that conspire against us, that aren’t on our side.

sometimes, i have the feeling a man is watching us, staring, lewd and hateful, and what no one realizes is that we are actually alone in this world, and no one can form the shapes of our eyes

of our skin, of our memories

as if not one beautiful thing remained, and only a little of the bad, the exact size and shape of our hearts

which become a little less small every day,

gets embedded in our hands and feet

did i tell you? tiresias killed a hummingbird

angel bird heaven paradise

and is tearing it apart now, licking it, dropping it at my feet as an offering of sacrifice. he’s a hunter because he can kill, because that swift flutter of wings makes no difference to him, nor does he care if a shooting pain stabs the heart as his little whiskered mouth shreds the warm body and throbbing heartbeat of a bird that was about to take flight. i also know how to heal wounds just like those, death wounds.

tiresias has killed another hummingbird. nothing ever changes! it’s like he fills his mouth with death so as not to hiss at our sins. we should play again

another paradise another crow another angel another cat another pair of wings

but without the terror of these days that now keep us apart. if we stay quiet, if we speak very quietly and tell each other new secrets, things could be like they were before. look closely . . . if you can just ignore my slurred speech and the way i drag my ��’s in every phrase—such an effort to form that sound— everything will be exactly the same as it has always been. you only need to make me repeat it over and over again

she sells seashells she sells seashells she sells seashells

and everything

everything

will be the same again.

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