coming September 2008
All One Horse is a moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables. These visions and parables emerge from a mélange of cultures and traditions: African and Eastern thought, the spirit world, and the spheres of visual art, philosophy, history, and politics. Breytenbach’s watercolors communicate in hieroglyphs, where private conversation embraces myth and dream. The reflections and images—clear and complex at once—are cries for human dignity and justice. They reveal the profoundly personal struggle of a uncontainable creative force to find expression in a beyond the obstacles of censorship and imprisonment. With octopus-like grace, Breytenbach pulls together worlds in All One Horse and watches them dance and struggle together; echoes of Afrikaans haunt his English, the fantastic melds into the quotidian, love glimmers beneath rage, the immediate rises to the universal.
It is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say.
"—Nadine Gordimer
Heine possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection… And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language.
"—Friedrich Nietzsche
The pacing and perspective of Bosman’s tales...are unlike anything else in English...The closest comparison may be Robert Frost poems or Bob Dylan songs.
"—Publishers WeeklyHe knows what to tell us and when, and most importantly he knows what not to tell us…A subtle and simple treatment of deep reflections…A classic set of stories, deserving of world attention to match the attention it already receives in Bosman’s home country.
"—David Lahti
An astonishingly rich, mythic new direction in modern French narrative.
"—Guy DavenportOne of the best-kept secrets in of modern French prose.
"—Publishers Weekly
The Great Weaver from Kashmir
Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas' shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.
"—The Guardian
A Mind at Peace
The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul.
"—Orhan PamukEvery page is full of sharp insights into human nature, delivered with a linguistic confidence that cracks like a whip and warms one from the inside with a glow of recognition—the recognition that no matter how far away we think we might be from one another in time and space, we are all distilled from the very same mixture of passion and compassion, intelligence and foolishness.
"—Ugur Akinci
Tranquility
Reading like the bastard child of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelenik, Tranquility is political and personal suffering distilled perfectly and transformed into dark, viscid beauty. It is among the most haunted, most honest, and most human novels I have ever read.
"—Brian Evenson
The novel, filled with gossi and family intrigue as scandalous as any contemporary soap opera, reads deliciously like a Dostoevsky novel or Les liaisons dangereuses meets Korea's traditional middle class.
"—KoreAm
Georg Letham: