Damion Searls

A slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual. André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive...

Acclaimed translator Damion Searls's exuberant debut novella navigates the bittersweet tug-of-war between nostalgia and living life meaningfully in a world buzzing with information overload. Analog Days is a snapshot of a circle of friends living through the sorrows and joys of a particular inflection point in history. Amid the ever-present news cycles, watching the world shift around them, they fall...

A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners "Searls's philosophy is ultimately one of freedom—to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says."—Max Norman, New Yorker Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award‑winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of...

For nearly a century, eager writers and young poets, as well as those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars have long assumed that the letters from the young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, these letters...