Books published by Open Letter

strange and twisted characters populate the pages of Why, Why, Why?, a delectable brew of dark humor and biting satire on human relationships. In these stories, the characters don t start falling until they know they re off the cliff. By then, rock bottom isn t a long way off. Another stunning entry from Catalan s greatest contemporary writer, Monzì s stories dust themselves off and speed on to their next catastrophe.

"e;A remarkably funny book written by a remarkable pair of collaborators."e;New York TimesOstap Bender, the "e;grand strategist,"e; is a con man on the make in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. He's obsessed with getting one last big scorea few hundred thousand will doand heading for Rio de Janeiro, where there are "e;a million and a half people, all of them wearing white pants, without exception."e;When Bender hears the story of Alexandr Koreiko, an "e;undercover millionaire"e;no Soviet citizen was allowed to openly hoard so much capitalthe chase is on. Koreiko has made his millions by taking advantage of the wide-spread corruption and utter chaos of the NEP, all while serving quietly as an accountant at a government office and living on 46 rubles a month. He's just waiting for the Soviet regime to collapse so he can make use of his stash, which he keeps hidden away in a suitcase.Ilya Ilf (18971937) and Evgeny Petrov (19031942) were the pseudonyms of Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny Petrovich Katayev, a pair of Soviet writers who met in Moscow in the 1920s while working on the staff of a newspaper that was distributed to railway workers. The foremost comic novelists of the early Soviet Union (invariably referred to as Ilf & Petrov), the pair collaborated together for a dozen years, writing two of the most revered and loved Russian novels, The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, as well as various humorous pieces for Pravda and other magazines. Their collaboration came to an end following the death of Ilya Ilf in 1937he had contracted tuberculosis while the pair was traveling the United States researching the book that eventually became Little Golden America.Konstantin Gurevich is a graduate of Moscow State University and the University of Texas at Austin. He translates with his wife, Helen Anderson. Both are librarians at the University of Rochester.Helen Anderson studied Russian language and literature at McGill University in Montréal. She translates with her husband, Konstantin Gurevich.

Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girla choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women.In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them.A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.

Eleven Sooty Dreams could also have been called Meeting at Bolcho Pride, or Fire Deep Down Below, or Station in the Heart of the Flames, or Granny Holgolde's Stories, or The Liars' Bridge, or Eve of Battle After the Defeat, or Never Without My Embers, or Good-Bye to Death, or Fire Stories, or Terminal Childhoods, or Granny Holgolde's Childish Sickness, or Even the Nursing Home Is in the Line of Fire.In Manuela Draeger's poetic 'post-exotic' novel, a group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year's Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. They remember Granny Holgolde's stories of the elephant Marta Ashkarot as she travels through the Bardo, to find her home and be reincarnated again and again. They remember the Soviet folk singer Lyudmila Zykina and her melancholic, simple songs of unspeakable beauty. They remember the half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death, and as the flames get higher they hope to become them.Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children's tales, that is far less visible in the other authors' works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.

A faux-historical romp about a real-life conquistador who founded New Catalonia in the wilds of Venezuela.

The previously untold story of the plot to kick Michel Foucault out of Poland in the 1950s.

"e;When you live in an adopted country, when you're an exile in your own body, names are simply lists that dull the reality of death."e;Cars on Fire, Monica Ramon Rios's electric, uncompromising English-language debut, unfolds through a series of female characters-the writer, the patient, the immigrant, the professor, the student-whose identities are messy and ever-shifting. A speechwriter is employed writing for would-be dictators, but plays in a rock band as a means of protest. A failed Marxist cuts off her own head as a final poetic act. With incredible formal range, from the linear to the more free-wheeling, the real to the fantastical to the dystopic, Rios offers striking, jarring glimpses into life as a woman and an immigrant. Set in New York City, New Jersey, and Chile's La Zona Central, the stories in Cars on Fire offer powerful remembrances to those lost to violence, and ultimately make the case for the power of art, love, and feminine desire to subvert the oppressive forces-xenophobia, neoliberalism, social hierarchies within the academic world-that shape life in Chile and the United States.

A clerk at the State Bank begins to notice that something strange is going on--bank employees are stuffing their pockets with money every day, only to have it taken every evening by the security guards who search the employees and confiscate the cash. But, there's a discrepancy between what is being confiscated and what is being returned to the bank, and our hero is beginning to fear that a secret circulation is developing, one that could undermine the whole economy. Meanwhile, the clerk and his family begin to keep guinea pigs, and at night, when everyone is asleep, our hero begins to conduct experiments with the pets, teaching them tricks, testing their intelligence and endurance, and using some rather questionable methods to encourage the animals to befriend him. Ludvi k Vaculi k's The Guinea Pigs is one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.

The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms. As she returns home to visit her mother who is dying of cancer, the narrator recounts a brief, intense love affair, as well as the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. The book's striking imagery and magnificent prose underpin its principal theme: the jarring contrast between the recollection of stability - your parents, your childhood home, your love - and the continual endings that we experience throughout our lives. A true-to-life, deeply poetic novel that works in the same vein as Anne Carson, One of Us Is Sleeping has won Klougart countless accolades and award nominations-including the Readers' Book Award-securing her place as a major new voice in world literature.

An instant classic of Russian literature, Maidenhair weaves together myriad plots, all revolving around innocence and violence and escape.

A novel decades ahead of its time, and the only work by Jorge Luis Borges's mentor available in English.