Our 2022 online Art Auction for Elsewhere Editions is now live on our website! Join us to bid on fantastic works of art by Bruno Miguel, Nkechi Ebubedike, Anna Bjerger and more!
Author: Jack Rockwell
Archipelago Books featured on Mookse and Gripes podcast!
Archipelago Books is enormously pleased to have been featured on The Mookse and The Gripes podcast! On each episode of the show, co-hosts Trevor Berrett and Paul Wilson have a pleasant conversation about books and reading. On this week’s episode, they talk about Archipelago Books, including some recent releases and old favorites.
Please visit The Mookse and The Gripes podcast here, and also check out The Mookse and The Gripes website, dedicated to reviews of literature and film. We are extremely grateful for their support of the press!
Tribute to Lee Fahnestock
Please join us in celebrating the life and achievements of Lee Fahnestock, who passed away earlier this year.
Lee Fahnestock‘s first published translation, The Making of the Pré by Francis Ponge, was published by Indiana University Press in 1979. Since then, Fahnestock wrote and collaborated on many critically acclaimed and widely-read translations, including an enormously successful re-translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and a multi-voliume collection of Jean-Paul Sartre’s letters, edited by Simone de Beauvoir. She served as the president of the American Literary Translators Assocation from 1991 to 1993, and was a longtime member of the PEN Translation Committee. Her translation of Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression was published by Archipelago Books in 2006. She is survived by three sons and three grandchildren.
Lee was a beloved member of the literary translation community, and a steadfast advocate for translators and literature in translation. She will be dearly missed.
Ambai wins Sahitya Akademi Award!
We are delighted to announce that Ambai has won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi award!
Established in 1954, the Sahitya Akademi award is an annual prize conferred by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters, for the year’s most outstanding original work published in any of more than 20 major languages recognized by the academy. Ambai has won this year’s prize for her story collection, Sivappu Kazhutthudan Oru Patchaiparavai. She is the fourth Tamil woman to receive this award.
C.S. Lakshmi, writing under the pseudonym of Ambai, is a feminist Tamil writer. She was born in 1944 in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her stories have been translated into five volumes entitled In a Forest, A Deer, Fish in a Dwindling Lake, A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, The Purple Sea, A Night with a Black Spider, and A Kitchen in the Corner of the House (Archipelago Books, 2019). Her writing touches on societal perceptions and the understanding of one’s self, family, sensitivity, and love and its restrictions. Other non-fiction works include The Face Behind the Mask: Women in Tamil Literature (Vikas, New Delhi, 1984), An Idiom of Silence: An Oral History And Pictorial Study of Art, and Consciousness and Women in a series entitled Seven Seas and Seven Mountains.
In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organization for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. She is currently a member of the University of Michigan’s Global Feminisms Project. She was awarded the Lifetime Literary Achievement Award of Tamil Literary Garden, University of Toronto, in 2008. She lives in Mumbai with her husband, foster daughter and two brothers.
Please join us in congratulating Ambai on adding the Sahitya Akademi award to her long list of literary achievements!
Consider picking up a copy of Ambai’s A Kitchen in the Corner of the House today!
José Eduardo Agualusa wins the 2021 Portuguese PEN Prize for The Living and the Rest
We are delighted to announce that José Eduardo Agualusa has won the 2021 Portuguese PEN Prize for his novel, Os Vivos e os Outros (The Living and the Rest)! Archipelago is slated to publish the English translation of The Living and the Rest in the coming years.
Agualusa is an Angolan journalist and author of Portuguese and Brazilian descent who writes primarily in his native Portuguese. His books have been translated into over 30 languages. Archipelago has had the privilege of publishing two of Agualusa’s books, A General Theory of Oblivion (2015) and The Society of Reluctant Dreamers (2020), both of which were masterfully translated into English by Daniel Hahn.
Agualusa’s 1997 novel, Creole was awarded the Portuguese Grand Prize for Literature, and he received the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Book of Chameleons in 2007. A General Theory of Oblivion was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and later won the 2017 Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, Agualusa received Angola’s most prestigious literary prize, the National Prize for Culture and Arts.
Malcolm Forbes calls A General Theory of Oblivion “a powerful examination of personal recollection and public upheaval, and a penetrating study of isolation and the cost of freedom.”
Of The Society of Reluctant Dreamers, Publishers Weekly writes, “False memories and clairvoyant dreams combine in Agualusa’s sweeping, intricately plotted tale of personal and political history in Angola . . . While the dense and tangled story, rife with diary entries, recounted personal histories, and thinly drawn tertiary characters, is almost too short for its own good, Agualusa manages to pull off a deeply satisfying ending . . . (a) populous, multilayered commentary on the fogs of love and war.”
Read more here.
Andrea Bajani and Nick Flynn at Prairie Lights
On Friday, April 16 at 8:00PM EST, Prairie Lights hosted a virtual conversation with Andrea Bajani and Nick Flynn. They discussed Bajani’s novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris. You can watch a recording of the event here!
Andrea Bajani is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. He lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.
Nick Flynn is a formidable contemporary American poet, playwright, and memoirist. His work is often praised for its swift, lyrical expression and fractured narrative structures. Flynn has been published in fifteen languages, and has won two PEN prizes for his memoir and poetry writing. He has also received fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation; The Fine Arts Works Center; and the Library of Congress, among others. He now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and his daughter, Maeve.
Andrea Bajani, Elizabeth Harris, and Stuart Dybek at Pilsen Community Books
On Thursday, April 8th at 7PM CST / 8 PM EST, Andrea Bajani, Elizabeth Harris, and Stuart Dybek celebrated If You Kept a Record of Sins, hosted by Pilsen Community Books!
A recording of the event is available here.
A sly, prismatic novel that Jhumpa Lahiri says “accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm,” Bajani’s If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated by Elizabeth Harris, records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she’s building in Romania.
Andrea Bajani is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. His works have been translated into many languages. He now lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.
Elizabeth Harris translates contemporary Italian fiction, including novels and story collections by Mario Rigoni Stern, Giulio Mozzi, Antonio Tabucchi, and Claudia Durastanti. For her translations of Antonio Tabucchi’s For Isabel: A Mandala and Tristano Dies: A Life, she has received the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, The Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award for Prose.
Stuart Dybek was born and raised in Pilsen and Little Village. Dybek is a writer of place and those neighborhoods are central to his fiction and poetry. He is the author of 6 books of fiction including Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed With Magellan, all set in Pilsen, as well as the poetry collections, Brass Knuckles and Streets in the Own Ink. His work has received many awards including a Macarthur “genius award.” He is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University.
Andrea Bajani and Jhumpa Lahiri at Point Reyes Books
On Tuesday, April 1 at 9:00PM EST, Andrea Bajani joined Jhumpa Lahiri to celebrate and discuss his novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, which was translated to English by Elizabeth Harris. Point Reyes Books hosted the conversation in a virtual stream on Crowdcast. Watch a recording of the event here!
Andrea Bajani is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. He lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole. Lahiri’s new novel, Whereabouts, will be published on April 27th.
A conversation between Andrea Bajani and Edmund White, hosted by 192 Books / PCG Studio
On March 30th at 6PM EST, 192 Books hosted an online conversation between Andrea Bajani and Edmund White about Bajani’s novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, published March 23rd. A recording of the event is available here!
Andrea Bajani is one of the most respected novelists of contemporary Italian literature. His novel, Ogni promess (Every Promise), won the prestigious Bagutta Prize. Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins) won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. His latest novel, Un bene al mondo, is currently being turned into a film. Bajani is also a journalist, and he published his first book of poetry, Promemoria, in 2017. He teaches at Rice University in the Department of Classical and European studies.
Edmund White is the author of many novels, including A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Farewell Symphony, and Our Young Man. His non-fiction includes City Boy, Inside a Pearl, and other memoirs; The Flâneur, about Paris; and literary biographies and essays. He was named the winner of the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and is the recipient of the honorary National Book Award for 2019. White lives in New York.
Pierre Joris, Geoffrey Brock, and Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody in conversation, moderated by Mary Ann Caws
On Tuesday, December 1st at 6:00pm EST, Pierre Joris, Geoffrey Brock, and Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody joined moderator Mary Ann Caws for a conversation hosted by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery. They discussed their recent translations of Paul Celan’s Memory Rose into Threshold Speech, Guiseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, and Paul Valéry’s The Idea of Perfection, respectively.
A recording of the event is available here.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text.
Pierre Joris has written, edited, and translated more than sixty books, including poetry, essays, and anthologies, including Fox-trails, -tails, & -trots (Poems & Proses); Paul Celan: Microliths They Are, Little Stones (Posthumous prose); Arabia (not so) Deserta and, with Adonis, Conversations in the Pyrenees. Joris is the editor and translator of Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan. In 2005 he received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation of Celan’s Lichtzwang/Lightduress.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. Brock has edited three anthologies on Italian poetry and translated the work of Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, Umberto Eco, and others. Brock’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2007 , and his books, Weighing Light (2005) and Voices Bright Flags: Poems (2014) have received the New Criterion Poetry Prize and Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, respectively. His translations have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Florida Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Stanford University.
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody was born in Columbus, Ohio. He has translated the work of French and Belgian poets, including Benjamin Fondane, for which he was awarded the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He is the author of two volumes of poetry in French and one in English, and has worked as a typesetter, a programmer, and a private tutor.