Books published by Small Stations Press

Sam is a drug addict with a sense of humour. One particular escapade lands him in hospital, where he makes friends with the old man in the adjoining bed and becomes progressively enamoured of the nurse Miss Cowbutt's unsung qualities. In an attempt to wean him off his drug habit, his elder brother, Nico, takes him to the village, Aita, where their grandmother lives, a world far removed from the distractions of modern life, in which even the silence seems animate. He meets up with Gaby the single mother and Dombodán the collector of discarded items. He also becomes acquainted with a slippery customer named 'Sir' who takes refuge in the radio set in the attic. A host of colourful characters - from Tip and Top to the 'relentless lady' - populate this tale, which pits a victim of zero expectations against the haunting traditions of the village.

This revolutionary book sets out to persuade the reader that the English language is not the result of years of haphazard evolution, a chaotic atom-like conglomeration of words, but a carefully planned whole in which each word has its place and is connected by a consistent set of rules. It is not by chance that 'earth' is 'heart' or 'soil' is 'soul', for instance, or that 'salt' makes us 'last' ('You are the salt of the earth') but 'last' is in fact 'lst'. This book journeys from the Book of Genesis and Creation to Revelation and the Last Judgement through the English language, suggesting that language has something to tell us about the environment and that he who would be true to himself is inexorably pushed out on to the margins. First published in 2007, it is now reprinted. A later book, The Life of a Translator (2013), also looks at English word connections and discusses coincidence in translation.

A young woman, who has left Galicia to go and study marine biology in Mexico (Baja California), is recalled to Galicia when it is found out that her mother is very sick. Her aunt would like her to sign some papers agreeing to take over the family business and renouncing her Mexican studies and emotional ties that she has forged in her new life. However, returning to Galicia and renewing her family ties is not exactly what the woman wants. Her mother has shut herself in her room for the last year, and relations between them have always been strained. She received more affection from a nanny, Felisa, and better advice from her uncle, Cándido. There is also an older brother, Ramón, a larger-than-life figure who has left an indelible mark in the lives of those around him, and an absent father. Will the woman's visit to see her sick mother turn out to be permanent, and will it soothe any of the festering wounds in her psyche, wounds that she has buried beneath her marine studies and a relationship with her one-time tutor? That's How Whales Are Born is a return to our origins, a search into the usefulness of stirring up past memories and seeking reconciliation. Anxos Sumai is one of Galicia's best contemporary novelists. Her first novels, Guardian Angels and Melody of Used Days, derived from her online diaries. She has also had great success as a radio journalist. But her reputation as a novelist was enhanced by her later novels, That's How Whales Are Born (Repsol Short Fiction Prize) and Harvest Moon (Spanish Critics' Prize). In 2007, the year That's How Whales Are Born was first published in the Galician language, Anxos Sumai was voted author of the year by the Galician Publishers' Association.

Clara Soutelo is a sixteen-year-old girl who spends her summers in the town of Vilarelle in Galicia. She descends from a well-to-do family that was on the winning side in Spain's Civil War and that occupies the manor house in Vilarelle. All the local families look up to them, and Clara has taken this attitude for granted. That is until the summer of 1995, when a skeleton is discovered in the manor house during restoration work. It has been walled up for many years, perhaps since the time of the Civil War, and the skull has a bullet hole. Clara also discovers a ring bearing the initial "R". What is the identity of the victim, and who wielded the murder weapon? The search for the discovery of the truth will lead Clara into her family's inglorious past through the witness of the town's inhabitants, and will also sow the seeds of romance between her and a young mechanic by the name of Miguel, descendant of the bookbinder Ishmael, with whom she shares the secret pleasure of reading. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Heart of Jupiter" by Ledicia Costas, "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros, "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey.

'Poetry is the taste of thinking in the mouth,' writes translator Erín Moure in introducing New Leaves. In the face of so much migration and precarity, poet Rosalía de Castro sets herself to thinking and recognizes repetition as key to humanity; she views the social as intimate; she creates poems in dialogue so that subjectivity reverberates; she examines the notion of home and articulates the effects of migration on women, the widows. 'Thinking,' continues Moure, 'fills the absence when love and hope are missing.' New Leaves confronts the conundrum of human existence and the injustices suffered by those left behind in the fight (flight) for (economic) survival. As such, Rosalía de Castro is our contemporary in our own times of migration. New Leaves was her second and last major work of poetry in the Galician language, after Galician Songs, and is here presented in award-winning poet Erín Moure's memorable translation.

There are three main threads in Karen Harrison's poetry, which intertwine: nature, God and her personal life. But they are not simply ontological, they belong to each other, they widen each other, they talk amongst themselves. In Harrison's nature, there is room for many birds, but the most important are those that sing at night (hence the title of the book), just as God made darkness His home. Her God is a long pilgrimage starting with an entire belonging, but also allowing for a critical mind: she will protest in front of the United Nations about Him, who permitted such diversity in faith, but accepts only true believers. In her intimate moments, she suffered a terrible illness, but this is not a reason for closing herself off; for Harrison, it is a source of communication. The soul of this poet is open towards the other. It is a poetry - and a life - of relation. In this way, she confirms that most Christian postulate: that there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends. We hold in our hands a book of aesthetic poetry, a silent book that sounds more like messages than conversation. This is autobiographical poetry, but it has deeper roots in the Spirit, which Church Fathers describe as a fish swimming in the open sea, in God. "Like a fish in an aquarium, I am a thing of the Spirit," writes Harrison.

'Possibly the most impressive novel ever written in the Galician language'. With these words, the eminent critic Basilio Losada describes Suso de Toro's novel Tick-Tock in a letter to the author. Suso de Toro is alternative in everything he does, he rearranges the boundaries, surprises the reader, does the unexpected, persons, tenses change, and what could be construed as an atheistic, chaotic novel acquires hints of religiosity. Nano, the narrator, is a man of uncertain age who has never made it in the world, but who likes to hold forth all the same, to fill notebooks with his thoughts on fishing in the Gran Sol, on controlling his libido, on inventing machines that serve no purpose. The novel centres on his experiences, and on the lives of those around him: his mother, his father and half-brother, the people who occupy the building where his mother cleans. Tick-Tock, a sequel to Polaroid, received the Spanish Critics' Prize for its unconventionality and narrative expertise, and is the author's most popular work.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," writes H. P. Lovecraft at the start of his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". In real life, the author Agustín Fernández Paz, Galicia's answer to H. P. Lovecraft, is reading the newspaper and comes across a classified ad for a haunted house. He imagines what would happen if someone answered that ad. Then what would happen if they went to see the house and liked it. Then what would happen if they had enough money and decided to buy it. And finally what would happen if they went to live there and discovered that the house was really haunted. This is the plot of "Winter Letters", one of the best-selling Galician novels of all time. The house will bring to mind, for older readers, the Bates' home in Alfred Hitchcock's film "Psycho". Inside the house is a book of prints that may remind younger readers of Tom Riddle's diary in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". However this may be, the reader is sure to be drawn in by the force and power of the narrative, which is as smooth and sinuous as the sirens' song heard by Ulysses from the sanctuary of the mast of his ship. Agustín Fernández Paz is the author of another novel in English, "Black Air", about a psychiatrist's race against time to save his patient from a malignant presence, the Great Beast. He was awarded the Spanish National Prize for Literature in 2008 and is Spain's nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" and "Dragal II: The Dragon's Metamorphosis" by Elena Gallego Abad, "Dove and Cut Throat" by Fina Casalderrey, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "I Love You Leo A. Destination Somewhere" by Rosa Aneiros.

From the author of "Low Voices" and "The Carpenter's Pencil", the book of short stories that set him on his way and revolutionized Galician literature when it came out at the end of the 1980s. For the first time, Galician prose dealt with the Galician landscape in a modern context, uniting tradition and modernity, placing the poetry of landscape alongside the irony of modern society. In "One Million Cows", a collection of eighteen short stories by Manuel Rivas, the first he published, a boy tries to find out if his cousin is really a battery-operated robot, a sailor who has been shipwrecked at sea turns up dead in a local bar, the inhabitants of a village transport a young suicide so that he can be buried in an adjoining parish, a Galician who has recently returned from England dreams of building a golf course on the mud-flats of his childhood, and a prospective councillor is put off by the fish scales on a fishwife's hands. Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most international author, and once again the reader will be able to enjoy his striking metaphors, his commitment to what he writes, and his lingering eye for detail. Other titles in the series Small Stations Fiction include: "Polaroid" by Suso de Toro, "Soundcheck: Tales from the Balkan Conflict" by Miguel-Anxo Murado and "Vicious" by Xurxo Borrazás.

André Santomé Lobeira is a teenager whose parents divorced when he was five. He puts on a front at school to defend himself against the bullies Raúl Pernas and Héctor Solla, who do everything they can to make his life miserable. He starts deliberately getting low marks in the hope they will ignore him. This encourages his grandfather to intervene, and André goes to live with his grandparents, who run a restaurant, The Birdhouse, in the garden of which his grandfather has an orphanage for birds. André finds a baby cut-throat finch, a finch with a red line across its neck, and keeps it as a pet. He is torn between two girls - Halima, a Moroccan girl in his class whose mother died as they were crossing into Spain, who helps him stand up to the bullies; and Dove, a girl he meets on the Internet, who helps him with his homework and when his grandfather falls ill. Dove arranges for them to meet in person, but André is afraid this will ruin their friendship and feels a strange sense of betrayal to the other girl in his life, Halima. He almost wishes Dove had never arranged their meeting... Fina Casalderrey is one of Galicia's foremost writers of young adult fiction, with over forty works to her name. She is the recipient of the Spanish National Prize for Literature and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Other titles in the series Galician Wave include: "Black Air" by Agustín Fernández Paz, "The Painter with the Hat of Mallows" by Marcos Calveiro and "Dragal I: The Dragon's Inheritance" by Elena Gallego Abad.

In this extraordinary account, Carys Evans-Corrales takes the reader on a cultural rollercoaster ride. As a child growing up in the Singapore, Malaysia and Jamaica of the 1950s and 1960s, the author came into contact with a host of languages and cultural influences, ranging from the Hainanese she spoke as a toddler to the Welsh counting song and English nursery rhymes she was taught by her mother to the Mandarin songs of Chinese children. In Kuala Lumpur, she came into contact with Malay, whose idioms delighted her, and in Kingston, Jamaica, with Jamaican patois, where she was shocked by the racially charged atmosphere. In Jamaica, she was introduced to Spanish, which conditioned her next move - to study Linguistics at York University in the UK, specializing in Spanish. This, in turn, led to a year abroad in Seville, where the author played the role of Andalusian novia, and, after completing her undergraduate degree, to a year of research in Salamanca. During this year, she was offered a job at the university in Santiago de Compostela, where she went in 1974, just as the Franco years were coming to an end and Galicia was recovering its language and identity. But it was in a move to America, in 1985, that the author finally acquired her own identity and laid the ghosts of her past to rest. The account of these years is littered with anecdotes about local people, school friends, linguistic conundrums and political backdrops, and offers a sweeping view of the second half of the twentieth century lived out on three continents. Carys Evans-Corrales is Professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. She has a PhD in Spanish Literature from Rutgers. She has translated work by numerous authors from Spanish and Galician into English, including Loreina Santos Silva's memoir This Eye that Looks at Me, verse plays by Pilar Enciso, Lauro Olmo and Alfonso Sastre, and the collection A Leopard Am I by the Galician poet Pilar Pallarés, also published by Small Stations Press.

How are English words connected? Is there a consistent set of rules by which words in the English language are connected not according to their etymology, their evolution over time, but according to their letters? These letters may be rearranged, read back to front, altered according to the laws of phonetics, their position in the alphabet, their physical appearance, their numerical value. So while the reverse of "live" is "evil", we can count down from I to O and find "love" instead (as "sin" gives "son"). The "ego", by taking a step back in the alphabet, can be turned into "God". Using the laws of phonetics, we can realize that the true purpose of the "self" is to "serve". In "The Life of a Translator", Jonathan Dunne offers a clear, direct introduction to the ways in which English words can be connected according to their DNA, arguing that words have something to tell us about human life, but their meaning is hidden and must be deciphered ("God" is "code"). In this sense, language is similar to the environment. We think we see what is around us, but we are spiritually blind even after we have opened our eyes, and it is this spiritual blindness causing a crisis in the world because of how we treat our world, the environment, each other and, ultimately, ourselves.