Restless Books

The forces of science, human error, and power run amok all collide in a wildly inventive, funny, and razor-sharp political satire about Putin’s Russia, from one of the country’s most fearless journalists.

When a scientist experimenting on humans in a sanatorium near Moscow gives a growth serum to a dwarf oil mogul, the newly heightened businessman runs off with the experimenter’s wife, and a series of mysterious deaths and crimes commences. Fantastical and wonderfully strange, this political parable has an uncanny resonance with today’s Russia under Putin.

Oleg Kashin is a famous Russian journalist and activist who, in 2010, was beaten to within an inch of his life by unknown assailants, in an attack most likely politically motivated by his reporting. The events of Fardwor, Russia! (the title is taken from a flag with a slogan—“Forward, Russia!”—gone wrong) could seem grotesque, if they did not so eerily echo the absurd state of affairs in modern Russia. Under Putin’s regime, authors dare to criticize the state of affairs and affairs of the state only through veiled satire—and even then, as Kashin’s experience shows, the threat of repercussions is real.

A witty, playful, brave, and incisive work that blends science fiction with political satire, Fardwor, Russia! is a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Russia—or the hilarious and frightening follies of power.

“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima.” —Valerie Miles, The New York Times Book Review

Holed away in a cabin in the Pyrenees, the world-famous and enigmatic mathematician Alexander Grothendieck is working furiously on a final project. But what exactly is this monumental, mysterious undertaking? Why did this man, one of the greatest geniuses of the century, a politically militant man himself, suddenly decide to abandon politics and society altogether? As the reader pursues the answer to these questions, two layered narratives emerge. One is a series of unforgettable characters that have transfixed the mathematician’s imagination: Chana Abramov, a woman obsessed with painting the same Mexican volcano a thousand times, Vladimir Vostokov, an anarchist in battle with technological modernity, and Maximiliano Cienfuegos, a simple man who will nonetheless become the symbol for the Colonel’s as well as Europe’s restless political conscience. The other is the protagonist’s life story: a picaresque journey that traverses the 20th century: from the Russia of the October Revolution to the Mexico of the anarchic 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, all the way back to France and from there to the Caribbean islands. Out of this Borgesian web emerges a tragicomic allegory for the political arch of the past century, one that began addicted to political action and ended up hooked on big data.

Loosely based on the fascinating life story of the eccentric mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Colonel Lágrimas is a world-spanning tour de force of history, politics, literature, mathematics, and philosophy that wears its learning lightly, forming an appealingly human story of the forces that have created the modern world.

The Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time presents a must-have collection by the great Russian author who captured humanity in all its complexity, and reintroduces Chekhov as a funny, playful, deeply human, and thoroughly modern writer.

The great 19th-century Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov wrote nearly one thousand stories, a body of work that is unmatched in its alchemy of sensitivity, wisdom, precision, verve, soulfulness, and economy. Chekhov’s sensibility was radically human and thoroughly modern: write not how you think things should be, but rather as they are. Universally recognized as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, he revolutionized the form and had a profound influence on his successors from Flannery O’Connor to Alice Munro.

As the celebrated Russian-immigrant author Boris Fishman writes in his bold, incisive, and delightfully counterintuitive introduction to this Restless Classics collection, Chekhov is funny, optimistic, ceaselessly curious, and undogmatic—a significant break from the bleak and morally rigid tradition of his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Unlike those peers born to privilege, Chekhov was raised in the peasantry and worked as a doctor. In his writing, he portrays the complexity of human beings as changeable and contingent, neither saints nor sinners—an approach intimately linked with his work as a clinician and humanitarian.

Chekhov’s humanity, just as much as his mastery of the writing craft, is potent medicine in times that seem so divided by ideology and antipathy for groups seen as “other.” The first new selection of his work in over a decade, the Restless Classics edition of Chekhov: Stories for Our Time pairs beloved favorites with lesser known gems, all stunningly illustrated by Matt McCann: a perfect introduction for novices and a must-have for Chekhov devotees.

Newly introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans, this 400th Anniversary edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha—called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel—inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is beautifully designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and a video teaching series and live online book club discussions led by passionate experts.

Described as “the novel that invented modernity,” Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote of La Mancha has become since its publication in Spain in two parts—the first in 1605, the second in 1615—a machine of meaning, endlessly adapted into ballet, theater, dance, film, music, and television, not to mention a veritable tourist industry.
Lionel Trilling argued that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” Mark Twain was a passionate fan. Flaubert modeled Madame Bovary after it. Dostoyevsky reimagined its protagonist in The Idiot. And Borges, in his story about Pierre Menard, looked at it as the gravitational center of Hispanic civilization. Milan Kundera fittingly summarized this unstoppable devotion when he said that “Cervantes teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.”
Of course, Don Quixote has its detractors, too. Nabokov, for instance, maintained it was one of the cruelest narratives ever. Still, after 400 years, the book remains with us, winding improbably through history like the famous errant knight and his companion, Sancho Panza.
The commemorative Restless Classics edition, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of its full release, features John Ormsby’s canonical English translation, illustrations by award-winning Mexican artist Eko, and an insightful, thought-provoking introduction by Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost public intellectuals today. Don Quixote, Stavans writes, is “not only a novel but a manual of life. You’ll find in it anything you need, from lessons on how to speak and eat and love to an exhortation of a disciplined, focused life, an argument against censorship, and a call to make lasting friends, which, in Cervantes’s words, is ‘what makes bearable our long journey from birth to death’.”
The volume includes access to an interactive series of video lectures by Stavans, available online at restlessbooks.com/quixote. The videos serve as map to this restless classic, which speaks more eloquently than ever to our perennial desire to sacrifice for a dream in order to see its true worth.

In this deadly-funny debut novel by renowned Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, five macho friends in Rio’s Copacabana reflect on their hedonistic glory days—now supplanted by the indignities of aging—in what turn out to be their final moments.

With uncanny insight into the less virtuous corners of the male psyche, Fernanda Torres brings us five friends who once milked the high life of Rio’s Bossa Nova age and are now left with memories—parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the grim realities of getting old. Álvaro lives alone and bemoans the evils of his ex-wife. Sílvio can’t give up the excesses of sex and drugs. Ribeiro is a vain, Viagra-abusing beach bum. Neto is the square, a faithful husband until the end. Ciro is the Don Juan envied by all—but the first to die. Cutting in on these swan songs are the testimonies of those the men seduced, cheated, loved, and abandoned: their wives and children. Edgy, funny, and wise, The End is a candid tropical tragicomedy and an epitaph for a lost generation of machos.

The final literary testament of “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World” (New York Times), Between Life and Death is a startlingly brave, funny, poetic, and moving autobiographical novel about the four months Yoram Kaniuk spent in a coma near the end of his life.

In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Told in an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such tenacity.

Shifting between memory and illusion, imagination and testimony, Kaniuk inquires into the place of death in society, the lust for life, and the force of human relationships. He also writes movingly about the Holocaust survivors of his childhood neighborhood, and the battles of the 1948 War of Independence, in which he fought. Full of renewed vitality at the age of seventy-four, Kaniuk announced his rebirth in Between Life and Death, and left us a treasure of world literature that is sure to become a classic.

“Captivity is a complex and fast-paced tale of Jewish life in the early first century, a sort of sword-and-sandals saga as reimagined by Henry Roth. The narrative follows Uri from Rome to Jerusalem and back, from prospectless dreamer to political operative to pogrom survivor—who along the way also happens to dine with Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate and get thrown into a cell with a certain Galilean rabble-rouser. Hungarian György Spiró’s deft combination of philosophical inquiry and page-turning brio should overcome that oft-mentioned American timidity toward books in translation.” —The Wall Street Journal, Best Books of 2015

A literary sensation, György Spiró’s Captivity is both a highly sophisticated historical novel and a gripping page-turner. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., between the year of Christ’s death and the outbreak of the Jewish War, Captivity recounts the adventures of the feeble-bodied, bookish Uri, a young Roman Jew.

Frustrated with his hapless son, Uri’s father sends the young man to the Holy Land to regain the family’s prestige. In Jerusalem, Uri is imprisoned by Herod and meets two thieves and (perhaps) Jesus before their crucifixion. Later, in cosmopolitan Alexandria, he undergoes a scholarly and sexual awakening—but must also escape a pogrom. Returning to Rome at last, he finds an entirely unexpected inheritance.

Equal parts Homeric epic, brilliantly researched Jewish history, and picaresque adventure, Captivity is a dramatic tale of family, fate, and fortitude. In its weak-yet-valiant hero, fans will be reminded of Robert Graves’ classics of Ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

"A mix of such otherworldly scenarios, pop culture references and linguistic inventiveness comes remarkably together for a brazen social and political commentary on modern Mexican reality." —NPR Books

The English-language debut of “one of the most original and entertaining voices in contemporary Mexican literature” (Revista Gatopardo): a collection of surreal, ironic, and madcap stories about the comedy and brutality of life in Mexico.

The provocateur and cult sensation Carlos Velázquez has earned comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, and has been called “a grand storyteller” (Diario Jornada) and “an icon” (Frente). In these seven surreal and unsettling tales, he portrays the comedy and brutality of a region that has captivated the North American imagination.

Akin to Márquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Velázquez’s PopSTock! is a fictional territory in a familiar but strange northern Mexico. Throughout the stories is woven the Cowboy Bible—a mystical and protean object that first appears as the talisman of a Santería-practicing luchador, DJ, and art critic, then later morphs into an unbeatable marathon drinker, a scion of a fried-chicken vendor dynasty who becomes a Communist guerilla freedom fighter, and the leather for a pair of boots so coveted that it leads a man to grant the devil a night with his wife. With such otherworldly scenarios, pop-culture panache, and Velázquez’s linguistic inventiveness, The Cowboy Bible is a brazen commentary on modern Mexican reality.

Winner of the prestigious Prix Femina, The Boy is an expansive and entrancing historical novel that follows a nearly feral child from the French countryside as he joins society and plunges into the torrid events of the first half of the 20th century.

The boy does not speak. The boy has no name. The boy, raised half-wild in the forests of southern France, sets out alone into the wilderness and the greater world beyond. Without experience of another person aside from his mother, the boy must learn what it is to be human, to exist among people, and to live beyond simple survival.

As this wild and naive child attempts to join civilization, he encounters earthquakes and car crashes, ogres and artists, and, eventually, all-encompassing love and an inescapable war. His adventures take him around the world and through history on a mesmerizing journey, rich with unforgettable characters. A hamlet of farmers fears he’s a werewolf, but eventually raise him as one of their own. A circus performer who toured the world as a sideshow introduces the boy to showmanship and sanitation. And a chance encounter with an older woman exposes him to music and the sensuous pleasures of life. The boy becomes a guide whose innocence exposes society’s wonder, brutality, absurdity, and magic.

Beginning in 1908 and spanning three decades, The Boy is as an emotionally and historically rich exploration of family, passion, and war from one of France’s most acclaimed and bestselling authors.

Restless Classics presents a trenchant new edition of Machiavelli’s most powerful works of political philosophy, including The Prince and selections from Discourses on Livy, introduced by New Yorker writer and biographer of Che Guevara Jon Lee Anderson.

Few authors achieve such notoriety that their name becomes an adjective. A "Machiavellian” politician is not simply one who is conniving; the term also refers to a tyrant who is enamored with all the power he (it is usually a “he”) can attain. With so many Machiavellian politicians on the world stage today—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Mohammed bin Salman, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, et alia—Machiavelli's masterpieces The Prince and Discourses on Livy are at once timely and eternal.

Widely held as a foundational work of modern political philosophy, The Prince can be read as a practical guide for ruling or a satirical guide on how not to rule. Machiavelli prefaces the book with a letter addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the infamous ruler of Florence, both admonishing and praising him for his governance. The sister volume, Discourses on Livy, offers an analysis of ancient Roman history that supports Machiavelli’s claims by lauding the merits of a republic.

As Jon Lee Anderson explores in his incisive introduction, Machiavelli’s hard-line outlook on power, politics, war, governance, and ethics has frightening parallels to the current trend toward authoritarianism in our global politics. Machiavelli: On Politics and Power is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the psychology and methods of power-hungry leaders, past and present.

“This dark, sprawling novel is the English language debut of Emiliano Monge, a Mexican writer who is often compared to the US literary superstar Cormac McCarthy. Written in a tone that evokes McCarthy’s unrelenting classic Blood Meridian, the novel tells the story of Germán Alcántara Carnero, a dangerous campesino fighting to survive in rural 20th century Mexico, and also a metaphor for the spiraling violence of contemporary Mexican society.” —Culture Trip

Set on a desolate, unnamed mesa, Emiliano Monge’s The Arid Sky distills the essence of a Latin America ruthlessly hollowed out by uncontainable violence. This is an unsparing yet magnificent land, whose only constants are loneliness, hatred, loyalty, and the struggle to return some small measure of meaning to life.

Thundering and inventive, The Arid Sky narrates the signature moments in the life of Germán Alcantara Carnero: a man who is both exaltedly, viscerally real and is an ageless, nameless being capable of embodying entire eras, cultures, and conflicts. Monge’s roadmap—an escape across borders, the disappearance of a young girl, the confrontation between a father and his son, the birth of a sick child, and murder—takes readers on a journey to the core of humankind that posits a challenge of the kind only great literature can pose.

From the award-winning Serbian author David Albahari comes a devastating and Kafkaesque war fable about an army unit sent to guard a military checkpoint with no idea where they are or who the enemy might be.

Atop a hill, deep in the forest, an army unit is assigned to a checkpoint. The commander doesn’t know where they are, what border they’re protecting, or why. Their map is useless and the radio crackles with a language no one can recognize. A soldier is found dead in a latrine and the unit vows vengeance—but the enemy is unknown. Refugees arrive seeking safe passage to the other side of the checkpoint, however the biggest threat might be the soldiers themselves. As the commander struggles to maintain order and keep his soldiers alive, he isn’t sure whether he’s fighting a war or caught in a bizarre military experiment.

Equal parts Waiting for Godot and Catch-22, Checkpoint is a haunting and hysterical confrontation with the absurdity of war.

“In essays that bespeak a thoroughly cosmopolitan sensibility, Githa Hariharan not only takes us on illuminating tours through cities rich in history, but gives a voice to urban people from all over the world—Kashmir, Palestine, Delhi—trying to live with basic human dignity under circumstances of dire repression or crushing poverty.” —JM Coetzee

What does a medieval city in South India have in common with Washington, D.C.? How do people in Kashmir envision the freedom they long for? To whom does Delhi, city of grand monuments and hidden slums, actually belong? And what makes a city, or any place, home? In ten intricately wrought essays, renowned author Githa Hariharan takes readers on an eye-opening journey across time and place, exploring the history, landscape, and people that have shaped the world’s most fascinating and fraught cities.

Inspired by Italo Calvino’s playful and powerful writing about journeys and cities, Harihan combines memory, cultural criticism, and history to sculpt fascinating, layered stories about the places around the world—from Delhi, Mumbai, and Kashmir to Palestine, Algeria, and eleventh-century Córdoba, from Tokyo to New York and Washington. In narrating the lives of these places’ vanquished and marginalized, she plumbs the depths of colonization and nation-building, poverty and war, the struggle for human rights, and the day-to-day business of survival. Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York presents a new kind of travel writing that is intellectually adventurous but never detached, couched in personal experience but deeply engaged in the world, inviting the reader to make surprising connections with her own sense of home.

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.

The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

Sixty years in the making and the capstone of a monumental literary career, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life is the final volume of the autobiographical trilogy from the author who is considered Borges’ heir and the vanguard of the Post-Boom generation of Latin American literature.

How could we define a perfect day? Maybe it would be better to say: how could I narrate a perfect day?

Is that why I write a diary? To capture—or reread—one of those days of unexpected happiness?

The final installment of Ricardo Piglia’s lifelong compilation of journals completes the seemingly impossible project of documenting the entire life of a writer. A Day in the Life picks up the thread of Piglia’s life in the 1980s until his death from ALS in 2017. Emilio Renzi, Piglia’s literary alter ego, navigates the tumultuous ups and downs of a post-Peronist Argentina filled with political unrest, economic instability, and a burgeoning literary scene ready to make its mark on the rest of the world and escape the shadows of legendary authors Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt.

Renzi’s peripatetic, drinking, philandering ways don’t abate as he grows older, and we’re exposed to the intrinsic insecurities that continually plague him even as fate tips in his favor and he goes on to win international literary prizes and becomes professor emeritus of Princeton University. His literary success is marred only by the disappointments and tragedies of his personal life as he deals with the death of friends and family, failed relationships, and the constant pecuniary struggles of a writer trying to live solely on his ability to produce art. The final sections of this ambitious project intimately trace the deterioration of Piglia’s body after his diagnosis: My right hand is heavy and uncooperative but I can still write. When I can no longer. . . . The crowning achievement of a prolific, internationally acclaimed author, this third volume cements Ricardo Piglia’s position as one of the most influential Latin American authors of the last century.

Praise for The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: A Day in the Life

“[A] posthumous autobiographical masterpiece. . . . [P]rofoundly moving. A meditation on both the accumulation and ephemerality of time, Piglia’s final work is a brilliant addition to world literature.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Filled with literary aperçus and fragments of history: an elegant, affecting close to a masterwork.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Much of the fascinating material is to be found in his brief appreciations and observations, such as notes on authors and his reading, but the life-story—of someone who has dedicated himself entirely to literature—also comes across, and it is thoroughly engaging, over all three volumes of this larger work…. A fine conclusion to this diary-trilogy, and a fascinating companion piece to this author and his work.”
—M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

Praise for The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

“Splendidly crafted and interspliced with essays and stories, this beguiling work is to a diary as Piglia is to ‘Emilio Renzi’: a lifelong alter ego, a highly self-conscious shadow volume that brings to bear all of Piglia’s prowess as it illuminates his process of critical reading and the inevitable tensions between art and life. Amid meeting redheads at bars, he dissects styles and structures with a surgeon’s precision, turning his gaze on a range of writers, from Plato to Dashiell Hammett, returning time and again to Pavese, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Arlt and Borges. Chock-full of lists of books and films he consumed in those voracious early years of call girls, carbon paper, amphetamines and Heidegger, this is an embarrassment of riches — by turns an inspiring master class in narrative analysis, an accounting of the pesos left in his pockets and a novel of Piglia’s grandfather (named Emilio, natch) with his archive of World War I materials pilfered from Italian corpses. . . . No previous familiarity with Piglia’s work is needed to appreciate these bibliophilic diaries, adroitly repurposed through a dexterous game of representation and masks that speaks volumes of the role of the artist in society, the artist in his time, the artist in his tradition.”
—Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

“For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia’s final project, a fictional journal in three volumes, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi—Renzi being Piglia’s fictional alter ego. And now here at last is the first volume in English, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll. It’s something to be celebrated . . . [It] offer[s] one form of resistance to encroaching fascism: style.”
—Adam Thirlwell, BookForum, The Best Books of 2017

“[A] masterpiece. . . . everything written by Ricardo Piglia, which we read as intellectual fabrications and narrated theories, was partially or entirely lived by Emilio Renzi. The visible, cerebral chronicles hid a secret history that was flesh and bones.”
—Jorge Carrión, The New York Times

“A valediction from the noted Argentine writer, known for bringing the conventions of hard-boiled U.S. crime drama into Latin American literature . . . Fans of Cortázar, Donoso, and Gabriel García Márquez will find these to be eminently worthy last words from Piglia."
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“When young Ricardo Piglia wrote the first pages of his diaries, which he would work on until the last years of his life, did he have any inkling that they would become a lesson in literary genius and the culmination of one of the greatest works of Argentine literature?”
—Samanta Schweblin, author of Fever Dream

“Ricardo Piglia, who passed away earlier this year at age seventy-five, is celebrated as one of the giants of Argentine literature, a rightful heir to legends like Borges, Cortázar, Juan Jose Saer, and Roberto Arlt. The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is his life's work . . . An American equivalent might be if Philip Roth now began publishing a massive, multi-volume autobiography in the guise of Nathan Zuckerman . . . It is truly a great work . . . This is a fantastic, very rewarding read—it seems that Piglia has found a form that can admit everything he has to say about his life, and it is a true pleasure to take it in.”
—Veronica Esposito, BOMB Magazine

“In 1957, Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia started to write what would become 327 notebooks filled with the thoughts of his alter ego, Emilio Renzi. Piglia’s final literary act before his death in January 2017 was to organize and publish these works as Renzi’s diaries. Formative Years, the first of three volumes, covers the years 1957 to 1967, detailing Renzi’s development into a central figure of Argentine literary culture. In epigrammatic diary entries filled with memorable observations, Piglia details Renzi’s political education, relationships, views on Argentinian politics, and experiences during this remarkably productive era of Latin American fiction. As a fictionalized autobiography, it is, like the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard, of My Struggle fame, part confession and part performance. Renzi meets and corresponds with literary luminaries like Borges, Cortázar, and Márquez, and offers insightful readings of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, and Joyce. Ilan Stavans (Quixote: The Novel and the World, 2015) provides a wonderfully informative introduction. Fans of W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño will find the first installment in Piglia’s trilogy to be a fascinating portrait of a writer’s life.”
—Alexander Moran, Booklist

"Here through the Boom and Bolaño breech storms Ricardo Piglia, not just a great Latin American writer but a great writer of the American continent. Composed across his entire career, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is Piglia's secret story of his shadow self—a book of disquiet and love and literary obsession that blurs the distinctness of each and the other."
—Hal Hlavinka, Community Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

“In this fictionalized autobiography, Piglia’s ability to succinctly criticize and contextualize major writers from Kafka to Flannery O’Connor is astounding, and the scattering of those insights throughout this diary are a joy to read. This book is essential reading for writers.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The Diaries of Emilio Renzi is a rare glimpse into the heart of twentieth-century Latin American literature, with the inimitable Ricardo Piglia as tour guide. More than just a traditional diary, Renzi is an illuminating voyage into the hearts of books and writers and history. An inspiring work and an important achievement.”
—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

“The great Argentine writer. . . . In a career that spanned four decades, during which he became one of Latin America’s most distinctive literary voices.”
—Alejandro Chacoff, The New Yorker

“The Diaries of Emilio Renzi continue to be a fascinating literary-autobiographical experiment . . . and, especially, a wonderful immersion in literature itself. Of particular interest in showing the transition of Latin American (and specifically Argentine) literature—no longer: ‘out of sync, behind, out of place’—Piglia's range extends far beyond that too. Yes, most of this is presumably mainly of interest to the similarly literature-obsessed—but Piglia makes it hard to imagine who wouldn't be.”
— M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.

The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

“A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present” (The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster is a harrowing parable of a young historian who becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2020 SELECTION

Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives.

The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill.

With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

“Deeply psychological and mysterious, the book will stimulate the imagination of the reader's mind to the extreme.” —Marina Abramovic

“In his latest novel, Jodorowsky builds on his multi-decade long assault of the public imagination…. a fantastical and genre-defying parable of love and friendship…. At its core, Albina and the Dog-Men is a love story about two people committed to one another's survival and to discovering their potential. And, as with life, it is sometimes only through the weathering of a storm that our true capacities are made clear.” —NPR Books

When two women—an amnesiac goddess and her protector, a leather-tough woman called Crabby—arrive in a Chilean desert town, Albina’s otherworldly allure and unfettered sensuality turn men into wild beasts. Chased by a clubfooted corrupt cop, evil corporate overlords, giant-hare-riding narcos, and Himalayan cultists, Albina and Crabby must find a magical cactus that will cure Albina and the men’s monstrous affliction before the town consumes itself in an orgy of lust and violence.

Albina and the Dog-Men is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s darkly funny, shocking, and surreal hybrid of mystical folktale, road novel, horror story, and social parable, ultimately uniting in a universal story of love against the odds and what makes us human.

Finalist for the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award

With the wicked humor and imagination that made readers fall in love with his novel I Am God, Giacomo Sartori brings us a madcap story of family dysfunction, (dis)ability, intelligent robots, bees, and a family of misfit savants living outside the bounds.

In the singular world of the young, deaf narrator of Bug, there are just a handful of people who try to understand him when he gets into trouble at school. His father, a data analyst for Nutella whose real job is to pinpoint terrorists, is clueless about humans in real life. His brilliant brother, called IQ in public and Robin Hood in the hackersphere, has his back but is ever busier training his robot. His grandfather, a retired anarchist-guerilla-turned-nematologist, chides him for misbehaving when he takes him hunting for worms. Meanwhile, his Buddhist beekeeper mother, ordinarily his closest confidante, has been in a coma ever since a terrible car accident.

Just when the family’s survival in their converted chicken coop seems most precarious, someone—or something—new enters his life: Bug. This self-declared "fast friend" seems to know all about his family and has some creative, if not strictly legal, ideas about how to help....

Emilio Renzi, literary alter ego of legendary Argentine author Ricardo Piglia, returns in The Way Out, an academic thriller that relentlessly questions the lengths we go to hide our own truths and to uncover the secrets of others.

In the mid 1990s Emilio Renzi leaves behind his unstable life in Argentina to take a visiting position at a prestigious university in New Jersey. Settling in for a semester of academic quietude and wintry isolation, he is surprised to be swept up in a secret romance with his colleague, the brilliant and enigmatic Ida Brown. But their clandestine relationship comes to an abrupt end when Ida is discovered in her car, killed in what appears to be a tragic accident. Discontented with the police’s lackluster inquiries, and troubled by the inexplicable burn found on her hand, Renzi begins his own investigation.

Renzi's suspicions are piqued as details emerge about a bizarre string of attacks, apparently targeting scientists and researchers. But after a radical manifesto appears in the press threatening continued violence, the killer's identity is suddenly revealed. As he delves deeper into Ida Brown’s past, Renzi discovers a link between her and the terrorist that sets him on a path of no return: he must discover once and for all whether her death was part of a larger pattern and, if so, whether she was a victim or accomplice. Renzi’s quest for truth reveals not only the secrets of his former lover, but also reveals a darker side of humanity that will force him to confront the systems and culture that could produce such a misguided killer.

A bracing critique of American culture and an exploration of privacy and politics in an era of rapid technological advancement, Piglia’s signature blend of autobiography and fiction is in full effect in this intriguing twist on the detective novel.

From beloved Cuban science fiction author Yoss comes a bitingly funny space-opera homage to Raymond Chandler, about a positronic robot detective on the hunt for some extra-dangerous extraterrestrial criminals.

On the intergalactic trading station William S. Burroughs, profit is king and aliens are the kingmakers. Earthlings have bowed to their superior power and weaponry, though the aliens—praying-mantis-like Grodos with pheromonal speech and gargantuan Collosaurs with a limited sense of humor—kindly allow them to do business through properly controlled channels.

That’s where our hero comes in, name of Raymond. As part of the android police force, this positronic robot detective navigates both worlds, human and alien, keeping order and evaporating wrongdoers. But nothing in his centuries of experience prepares him for Makrow 34, a fugitive Cetian perp with psi powers. Meaning he can alter the shape of the Gaussian bell curve of statistical probability—making it rain indoors, say, or causing a would-be captor to shoot himself in the face. Raymond will need all his training—and all his careful study of Chandler’s hardbitten cops—to outmaneuver his quarry.

As he did in his brilliantly funny and sharp science-fiction satires A Planet for Rent, Super Extra Grande, and Condomnauts, Yoss makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar in Red Dust, giving us an unforgettable half-human hero and a richly imagined universe where the bad guys are above the laws of physics.

An inspired and urgent prose retelling of the Maya myth of creation by acclaimed Latin American author and scholar Ilan Stavans, gorgeously illustrated by Salvadoran folk artist Gabriela Larios and introduced by renowned author, diplomat, and environmental activist Homero Aridjis.

The archetypal creation story of Latin America, the Popol Vuh began as a Maya oral tradition millennia ago. In the mid-sixteenth century, as indigenous cultures across the continent were being threatened with destruction by European conquest and Christianity, it was written down in verse by members of the K’iche’ nobility in what is today Guatemala. In 1701, that text was translated into Spanish by a Dominican friar and ethnographer before vanishing mysteriously.

Cosmic in scope and yet intimately human, the Popol Vuh offers invaluable insight into the Maya way of life before being decimated by colonization—their code of ethics, their views on death and the afterlife, and their devotion to passion, courage, and the natural world. It tells the story of how the world was created in a series of rehearsals that included wooden dummies, demi-gods, and eventually humans. It describes the underworld, Xibalba—a place as harrowing as Dante’s hell—and relates the legend of the ultimate king, who, in the face of tragedy, became a spirit that accompanies his people in their struggle for survival.

Popol Vuh: A Retelling is a one-of-a-kind prose rendition of this sacred text that is as seminal as the Bible and the Qur'an, the Ramayana and the Odyssey. Award-winning scholar of Latin American literature Ilan Stavans brings a fresh creative energy to the Popol Vuh, giving a new generation of readers the opportunity to connect with this timeless story and with the plight of the indigenous people of the Americas.

“A brilliant short novel that serves as a brave, sharp-toothed brief against letting the past devour the present” (The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice), Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster is a harrowing parable of a young historian who becomes consumed by the memory of the Holocaust.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2020 SELECTION

Written as a report to the chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, our unnamed narrator recounts his own undoing. Hired as a promising young historian, he soon becomes a leading expert on Nazi methods of extermination at concentration camps in Poland during World War II and guides tours through the sites for students and visiting dignitaries. He hungrily devours every detail of life and death in the camps and takes pride in being able to recreate for his audience the excruciating last moments of the victims’ lives.

The job becomes a mission, and then an obsession. Spending so much time immersed in death, his connections with the living begin to deteriorate. He resents the students lost in their iPhones, singing sentimental songs, not expressing sufficient outrage at the genocide committed by the Nazis. In fact, he even begins to detect, in the students as well as himself, a hint of admiration for the murderers—their efficiency, audacity, and determination. Force is the only way to resist force, he comes to think, and one must be prepared to kill.

With the perspicuity of Kafka’s The Trial and the obsessions of Delillo’s White Noise, The Memory Monster confronts difficult questions that are all too relevant to Israel and the world today: How do we process human brutality? What makes us choose sides in conflict? And how do we honor the memory of horror without becoming consumed by it?

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent, prize-winning debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.

As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Banaras on the banks of the Ganges, Pramesh Prasad administers to dying Hindu pilgrims who hope to be released from earthly reincarnation. He lives and works contentedly with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant Mohan, and the constant flow of families with their dying kin. But one day the past arrives in the form of a body pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh.

Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens between the cousins that he has willed himself to forget. Yet for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption.

Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead.

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2020

From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction.

Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak.

With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision.

While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.

Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction of 2020

From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction.

Women play all the time with the great power that’s been conferred upon us: it’s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you’re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you’re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.

Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru’s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak.

With a scientist’s curiosity and a libertine’s unbridled imagination, Wiener hungrily devours every scrap of information and misinformation she encounters during the nine months of her pregnancy. She ponders how pleasure and pain always have something to do with things entering or exiting your body. She laments that manuals for pregnant women don’t prepare you for ambushes of lust or that morning sickness is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at once. And she tries to navigate the infinity of choices and contradictory demands a pregnant woman confronts, each one amplified to a life-and-death decision.

While pregnant women are still placed on pedestals, or used as political battlegrounds, or made into passive objects of study, Gabriela Wiener defies definition. With unguarded humor and breathtaking directness, Nine Moons questions the dogmas, upends the stereotypes, and embraces all the terror, beauty, and paradoxes of the propagation of the species.

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent, prize-winning debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.

As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Banaras on the banks of the Ganges, Pramesh Prasad administers to dying Hindu pilgrims who hope to be released from earthly reincarnation. He lives and works contentedly with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant Mohan, and the constant flow of families with their dying kin. But one day the past arrives in the form of a body pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh.

Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens between the cousins that he has willed himself to forget. Yet for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption.

Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead.

The first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English, Naivo’s magisterial Beyond the Rice Fields delves into the upheavals of the nation’s past as it confronted Christianity and modernity, through the twin narratives of a slave and his master’s daughter.

Fara and her father’s slave, Tsito, have been close since her father bought the boy after his forest village was destroyed. Now in Sahasoa, amongst the cattle and rice fields, everything is new for Tsito, and Fara at last has a companion. But as Tsito looks forward to the bright promise of freedom and Fara, backward to a dark, long-denied family history, a rift opens between them just as British Christian missionaries and French industrialists arrive and violence erupts across the country. Love and innocence fall away, and Tsito and Fara’s world becomes enveloped by tyranny, superstition, and fear.

With captivating lyricism, propulsive urgency, and two unforgettable characters at the story’s core, Naivo unflinchingly delves into the brutal history of nineteenth-century Madagascar. Beyond the Rice Fields is a tour de force that has much to teach us about human bondage and the stories we tell to face—and hide from—ourselves, each other, our pasts, and our destinies.