Books published by Small Stations Press

Xoana is the descendant of hard-working women, starting with Pepa the Mole, her great-great-great-grandmother, who went around with a peddler, Maricallo, who played the violin and sang coplas, romantic songs, at the fairs in Galicia. At one fair, in Monterroso, she was raped under cover of night. Pepa dreamed that in actual fact she had been made love to by Einhard, Charlemagne's page, and in the manner of an oyster she wrapped an affliction with the purest of material until it was transformed into a pearl. Xoana's great-great-grandmother was Rosa, who worked in the Big House as a maid, where she was made pregnant by the lord of the manor, Don Álvaro, and likewise became a single mother. Her great-grandmother was Carolina, happy as a tinkling bell and strong as boxwood. Carolina's husband died while digging a tunnel in Asturias, only two years after they had been married, so she ended up being a single mother as well. Her grandmother was Carme, who attended a convent school in Zaragoza, where there was a strict divide between paying and non-paying pupils. This irked Carme so much she stirred up trouble and got expelled, much to her uncle Xenxo's delight, who hadn't wanted her to go there in the first place. She later became a member of the union at the local factory, where she married the clerk, Pedro. She is the woman who was determined to change the world. Xoana's mother is the narrator of this novel. She is a violinist - like Pepa the Mole, who inherited Maricallo's violin. She is pregnant with Xoana and both anxious and eager to welcome her into the world. Marica Campo grew up in Lugo. She studied theology at Salamanca's Pontifical University and then became a teacher. She has written poetry, fiction, drama and children's literature. Memoir for Xoana is her first novel. Kathleen March is a renowned Galician specialist, Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, and the translator of important Galician authors into English, some of whom are published by Small Stations Press.

In these two poetry collections, Fossil Time (2018) and Book of Devorations (1996), the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés takes us into the nooks and crannies of time. She splices open time to reveal the innards. We are transported to another self that we didn't know existed. The poetry is so weighty that it becomes light, as if the space between the atoms had ballooned and risen upwards. Pilar Pallarés defines Galician poetry of the last thirty years. The Galician language has been a vehicle for poetry since the medieval troubadours and the lament of a woman on St Simon's Island waiting for the waves to arrive. Pilar embodies the voice of that woman, gives it a home, which is all we can do as the breath enters and leaves our lungs, hums, vibrates. Both these books received the Spanish Critics' Award for Galician poetry in the year that they were published; Fossil Time won the Spanish National Book Award for Poetry in 2019. Pilar Pallarés is considered a major poet in the Galician language. She has published five collections to date: In the Dusk (1980), Seventh Solitude (1984), Book of Devorations (1996), A Leopard Am I (2011, also available from Small Stations Press) and Fossil Time (2018). In 2019, the Galician-Language Writers Association made her a 'Writer in Her Land'. Carys Evans-Corrales has translated several major Galician authors into English. Her translations of prose by Xurxo Borrazás, Miguel-Anxo Murado and Anxos Sumai are published by Small Stations Press, as is her autobiography, Talking Girl.

An anthology of Cork-based Galician poet Martín Veiga's poetry from the last thirty years in a bilingual Galician-English edition, Alfaias na lama: Poesía selecta 1990-2020 / Jewels in the Mud: Selected Poems 1990-2020. The poems are selected and introduced by Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo; the parallel English translation is by Keith Payne.

Teo and Gordo have been friends since they were at school. Teo is sent by his father to study in the States but returns early because of a girl. Gordo decides what he needs is some action and they set out on a road trip in his boss's Dodge Charger. The question is how long can they keep going? And have they been entirely honest with each other?

Paulo's grandfather suffers from Alzheimer's. The one person he never forgets is his grandson, Paulo, even though he calls him Sinbad the Sailor and they have adventures together at sea (in the sitting room), fighting the filibusters. One Sunday, Paulo's grandfather goes missing, and Paulo will have to find out where he is.

The Luzada is a café in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia. The café has its share of cosmopolitan visitors and different languages who share the smoky atmosphere and the products of the coffee machine. Everyone's fears and aspirations seem to find a shelter in this place, albeit some are on the table, while others remain hidden.

The 'barefoot shadow' in this story is Elsa's great-aunt, Sagrario, who always goes about the house without shoes. A sense of guilt hangs around the figure of her great-aunt, which intrigues Elsa. When Sagrario dies and turns up in the coffin wearing a pair of pretty high heels, she is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Mara’s parents run the Sunset Hotel in Bico, a small town on the coast of Galicia. The Sunset Hotel is a family hotel, with old-world charm, the kind of place people come back to back year after year. Mara is almost eighteen and has taken the liberty of staying out all night and going to the disco with some friends. She has then hooked up with Tucho and brought him back to the hotel for a little intimacy, only her mother, who seems to have an inbuilt tracking device, finds out. The next day, Mara is unaware there has been an accident in front of the hotel, a hit-and-run. It just so happens that the victim of the accident is Tucho’s previous (or not so previous) girlfriend. Mara for her sins is forced to do a stint in reception, where she checks in a hesitant, but not unattractive young man, Antón, who is staying with his mother and her husband. Mara and Antón become friends and investigate together the past of Mara’s great-uncle, Paco, the previous owner of the hotel, who died some months earlier. It isn’t only Mara’s family that hides secrets, however, since Antón’s family appears to harbour some secrets of its own. The summer holidays, which had looked like being a succession of boring revision classes, turn out to be much more eventful and illuminating than anyone could have imagined. Iria Misa is the author of several young adult and children’s novels in Galician. She is the recipient of the Jules Verne Award for Young People’s Literature. She works as a secondary-school teacher.

A boat with the charred body of a man crucified on its mast turns up at the mouth of the river in Romero, a town on the frontier. The boat belongs to the owner of the printing-firm that publishes the local newspaper. He engages Marqués, who is from the east coast and claims that he can write, to head upriver to find out the causes of the boatman’s death. His only deckhand is a mestizo boy called Cordel who’s learned his trade from the previous boatman (‘What you steer isn’t the boat, it’s the river’). They soon reach the mission, which is staffed by a single friar, Father Bento (‘He seemed to chew his words like a cow chewing grass before releasing them in short bursts’). The friar asks if Marqués has come to judge, to govern or to execute. ‘To tell,’ is his answer, ‘I’m a writer.’ Marqués, however, soon falls into a fever and has to be cured by the healing-woman from the local Aventurei Indian tribe. He realises that entering the world of the river is like clambering up a liquid wall on which there are no ledges or crannies for hands and feet to cling to. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the journey is an end in itself and the reader doesn’t know what secrets the river will reveal. There is also the writer’s own personal journey in search of fulfilment through his art. Marqués and Cordel will be joined on board by Rufus the Strongman and Ela, circus workers, as they struggle to come to grips with the tangle, both real and imagined, of the jungle. Xelís de Toro is a Galician performance artist, musician and award-winning writer based in the south of England. He is the author of five works of adult fiction (Feral River being the most recent), several children’s books and a book of poetry that was published by Pighog Press in a bilingual Galician-English edition, The Book of Invisible Bridges. John Rutherford is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He founded and directed the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford, which is now named after him. He has translated Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta for Penguin Classics. His other translations include The Book of Invisible Bridges by Xelís de Toro and Halos by Xosé María Díaz Castro.

Nuria Uría lives in Madrid. She designs floral motifs for a ceramics factory in Lisbon. But one August she is driven to rent an apartment overlooking a beach in the Arousa estuary in west Galicia, the selfsame beach where she made love with a boy from school, Quin, twenty years earlier.

The Roman poet Ovid's famous book of poetry Metamorphoses contains a succession of women who are changed into something else after they have been raped. One of these is Medusa, the Gorgon, daughter of the sea deities (and also siblings) Phorcys and Ceto. She is reputed to have been a ravishingly beautiful maiden, with striking hair, who received the attention of many suitors. She was raped by the god of the sea, Neptune, in Minerva's temple. In anger at this desecration of her temple, Minerva turned Medusa's hair into serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that it would turn any who looked at it into stone. The Greek hero Perseus, son of Jupiter and the mortal Danaë, was sent by the king of Seriphos, Polydectes, who desired Perseus' mother and wished to get Perseus out of the way, to behead the Gorgon. For this purpose, he received help from the gods: a shield of polished bronze, winged sandals, an adamantine sword and Hades' helm of darkness (or invisibility cloak). According to the myth, he beheaded her in her sleep and used her head as a weapon before giving it to Minerva. But who is the real victim here? Medusa suffers for her beauty. She is raped by a god and punished by another. People then avoid looking her in the eye in case they are turned to stone. And how does the myth of Medusa relate to two students in Galicia in their final year at school, Sofía and Lupe, who after a fancy-dress dinner, in the early hours of the morning, are picked up by two men and sexually assaulted? What will the reaction of their classmates be? Will they be prepared to look them in the eye? And how will the girls themselves respond to this assault in a society that may prefer to sweep its acts of indecency under the carpet and turn a blind eye? Head of Medusa is a story of wrongdoing, friendship, renewal and moral courage.

Ramón Lamote, a living representation of the city he inhabits, aged sixty-one, gives private lessons in a local dialect, Terra Chá, and augments his income by taking on commissions to draw dreams. He is a keen observer of the life that goes on around him, unfailingly polite and ever willing to lend a helping hand. On a visit to a large important house in the city centre, he comes across a book that warns of the imminent arrival of a dragon-like creature called a Noticer, which awakens every 696 years, and he hurries to inform the Lord Mayor (though getting in to see him requires all his ingenuity). On another occasion, a fat woman is blocking the stairs, and Ramón Lamote is unable to find a way past her to make it to his lesson on time. He is invited to give a lecture on a kind of domestic animal and chooses the Endomodelph, an egg-laying mammal that sings and whistles through its behind. An enormous pipe appears one day in front of his house, which seems to serve no purpose until the local children come up with a use for it, which quickly catches on. After his lessons, the teacher and drawer of dreams likes to visit the local railway station and to play at guessing people's destinations. And in July he places an advertisement in the newspaper for the first ever Cloud Race, with marmolubles for prizes, an idea that draws the Lord Mayor's attention and soon has everybody talking about it. In The Things of Ramón Lamote, a modern classic of Galician literature and one of the first works in Galician to win the Spanish National Book Award, we are invited to witness the sublime and ordinary, the comic and absurd features of life in a provincial city.

Stones Of Ithaca is a book about God in language and the environment. It looks not only at a theology of language, but also at a theology of stones. What lies beneath the surface of language, beneath the surface of the world around us? The book contains 80 black-and-white photographs of stones collected on the beaches of the Greek island of Ithaca.

There are three main branches in Karen Harrison's poetry - mythological interpretation, journeying and intimate experiences. These sometimes intertwine, sometimes stay parallel. And the crown is full of movement with falling leaves at the edge of summer (her primordial sorrow) and elegant trembling of language. The movement is often a pulse. Some poems maintain their distance, others crush you with their closeness. But this is not a feminine poetry of attraction and sentiment, anticipating and inducing, it is a traveller's poetry in which the poet floats free with her images and readers solely dependent on the river's currents. A confirmation of Heraclitus' 'Everything is one.' Where rivers are trees from above. This is Karen Harrison's first poetry collection in English, originally published in 2011 and now reprinted in 2018. Her second poetry collection, Night-Singing Bird, is also available from Small Stations Press.

Xavier Queipo's novel Kite follows the life of Francis, a Galician-born emigrant in the United States, who lives in the city of San Rafael, north of San Francisco, and works as a freelance translator and editor. At a showing of Apocalypse Now in the cinema, he meets Rose, a liberal and career-minded Irishwoman, and they start a passionate relationship. But their carefree and hedonistic relationship is threatened when Francis, who has been asked by his publisher, Martin, to complete a translation into English of the Portuguese writer José Saramago's Essay on Blindness in record time, owing to the predictions that Saramago might win the Nobel Prize, is himself diagnosed with the onset of blindness. How will Rose react? How will Francis cope with this descent into darkness? And will he be able to finish his translation of Saramago's work in time? Kite takes us on a journey into the lives of emigrants in the United States whose traditional upbringing is often in conflict with the permissive, liberal society they inhabit. Then there is Andy, Francis's ex-lover and a loyal friend, for whom he still harbours intense feelings, and a return to the Galicia of his birth, an experience Francis hopes will be balsamic, but which may prove catastrophic. We are left with the image of a Chinese boy on the beach in San Rafael, trying to fly his kite, the symbol of something (or someone) at the mercy of the wind. The boy is grateful for the help Francis offers, but unsure whether to accept. There is the gesture; we are left with the time and space to interpret it.

Long Night of Stone is the most famous book of Galician poetry published during Franco's dictatorship. The poem with this title is the result of the author's imprisonment in Celanova Monastery during the Spanish Civil War; the book is read as a metaphor for the long years of dictatorship that ensued. Celso Emilio Ferreiro, a man of unwavering commitment, who stands with the downtrodden and oppressed and refuses to give up hope on the world, was himself born in Celanova, a town in the province of Ourense, in 1912 and died in Vigo in 1979. The message the book contains is surprisingly modern, inviting us as it does to investigate the truth of our own time and find our poetry. This English edition was first published in 2012 and is now reprinted.

Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981) is one of Galicia's best loved writers. Born in the cathedral city of Mondoñedo to the north of Lugo and a short flight of the imagination from the sea, he is best known for his collection of literary sketches Folks From Here and There and for his Arthurian novel Merlin and Company, published in Colin Smith's English translation in 1996. His portraits of local characters are done with great humor and tenderness and the reader is left wondering if these characters existed in real life or were imagined. Cunqueiro was an accomplished poet, journalist and dramatist, who published also in the Spanish language. This English edition was first published in 2011 and is now reprinted.

Lois Pereiro (1958-96) was born and spent his childhood in Monforte de Lemos, an important railway hub in the east of Galicia. At the age of 17, he went to Madrid to study sociology and modern languages (English, French, German), where he was involved in editing the magazine Loia (Skylark). It was here, in 1981, that he suffered from toxic oil syndrome, traced to adulterated rapeseed oil. This had a very debilitating effect on Pereiro, who later moved to Coruña (where he helped edit another magazine, La Naval) and travelled through central and western Europe. An addiction to heroin led to the author contracting AIDS, which was the cause of his untimely death, aged only 38. Pereiro published two poetry collections in his lifetime: Poems 1981/1991 and Last Poetry of Love and Illness 1992-1995. A posthumous collection of early poems, Poems for a Skylark, appeared one year after his death. All three books are included in this volume, first published in 2011 and now reprinted.

In 2003 the Galician writer Manuel Rivas, well known for his novels The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly, published in his native Galician language his collected poems, five books of poetry and a selection of recent poems, under the title Do descoñecido ao descoñecido (From Unknown to Unknown). This anthology in English, From Unknown to Unknown, gathers together eighty of those poems and is introduced by the Scottish writer John Burnside, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, who writes, 'Again and again, as we listen to the account Rivas gives of the world, we come across the beautiful surprise, the breathtaking renewal of some process or way of seeing we normally take for granted… It is an enormous privilege to have this selection of poems in this attentive and imaginative translation… Here is an essential poet whose work illuminates the world and the condition of those who live it.' This English edition was first published in 2009 and is now reprinted.