This Book has been translated with the assistance of the Sharjah International Book Fair Translation Grant Fund
Sensitive, passionate, outflowing, this is how critics received the new collection of poems “Attempt to Climb the Shadow of the Rose” by (Sudanese poet) Yousuf Al-Habob, which have launched early 2016 at Cairo International Book Fair.
A young woman, a tour guide on a cruise ship, befriends an elderly couple after they announce politely that they would ‘prefer not to’ go on the luxury cruise their son has booked for them. They’d rather go to see a film. This old-fashioned modesty creates a turning point in the young woman’s life. The couple’s kindness, generosity and appreciation of simple pleasures help her cling on to her own humanity in the face of the demands of modern life.
Avec Permis C, prequel au roman Le Cul entre deux chaises (2014), Joseph Incardona revient à son personnage fétiche et alter ego, André Pastrella. Dans une alternance bien pesée d’humour et de noirceur, il y parle des bouleversements de l’enfance, de ce que chacun de nous rencontre pour la première fois. Roman initiatique, du souvenir, roman des tragédies et légendes de la vie immigrée, il est aussi une formidable mise en perspective fictionnelle des épreuves qui nous déterminent.
Au soir de sa vie, une auteure se relit. Ses livres sont des îlots dans sa mémoire et elle cherche à relier ces repères. Sa relecture est relecture de soi. Grave, mais régulièrement drôle aussi. De ce voyage dans le passé, elle choisit les heures claires, souvenirs inaltérables de lieux propices.Reconnaissances est une reconnaissance de dette. L’auteure reconnaît la difficulté à être soi, à être fille comme à être mère, la difficulté à conjuguer tout cela. Dette infinie envers le vivant, dette que l’écriture transforme ici en don.
Published by arrangement with Agence Litteraire Astier-Pecher
Pachinko is a game for both groups and individuals.” This quotation from Roland Barthes opens Elisa Shua Dusapin’s most recent novel, The Pachinko Marbles. A group game because the arcades where pachinko – a Japanese variation on pinball – is played are full of rows of adjacent slot machines and an individual game because, when you play, you are intensely alone. The Swiss-Korean author uses this metaphor to tell a story; a story that tackles the issues of identity and otherness, through the prism of language and culture.
In the mid-19th century, in a valley in the Ticino, a woman in her 70s, Anna Maria, is the butt of finger-pointing and name-calling: she’s the “vile woman”, the “black widow”. She is indeed a widow, unbending and focused only on her grandson, whom she shields from the hatred of the villagers. But her life is soon changed by the arrival in the village of don Tommaso Barbisio, a sophisticated but disgraced priest from Piedmont. The old lady is taken on as his housekeeper and she sees in this a glimmer of hope for a solution for her grandson, an escape from the burden of the sins of his forefathers. Don Tommaso’s curiosity is aroused by the way the widow is ostracised by the village and eventually gets her to tell him her story. It’s a tale of theft, smuggling and murder, which gradually lifts the veil on her past, a past that goes back several generations and implicates numerous families in the village. It brings to light the relentlessness of fate and the unremitting nature of ancestral hatred.If don Tommaso is a fictional character, Anna Maria really existed, along with her husband, whose crimes were the origin of a legend that has rung down across the generations. Widow with Child is a story that lies somewhere between historical narrative and romantic invention, told amid the buzz and chatter of several languages; on stage are two enigmatic but intensely human people, whose lives will be defined by the very fact of their meeting.
An out-of-season South Korean resort, a mysterious foreign visitor and a young woman whose dual nationality and anguished diffidence mark her out as an anomaly among her community are the main components of French-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin’s compact first novel. The book is set in Sokcho, a city so close to South Korea’s impenetrable northern counterpart that it is possible to take a day trip over the border.
