Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters

A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France—a novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano. "Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti. . . . Readers will savour this wistful narrative."—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single...

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature....

A classic novel from recent Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, now available to English-language readers in a superb new translation "Modiano at his best."—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (starred review) One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano’s writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this...

A Sensitive Person is a brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic’s greatest living author. Tab, an itinerant Czech actor, travels around Europe on the theatre circuit with his partner, Sońa, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides to return home to the...

Barefoot Doctor is a profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, crafted by one of the world’s great contemporary novelists. A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life.” — Publishers Weekly A barefoot doctor herself,...

A profound and genre-defying work of literature about love, death, and illness from one of Portugal’s most celebrated writers Incapacitated after the removal of a malignant tumour, the narrator, António, spends his days in a Lisbon hospital enduring the humiliations of severe illness. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he revisits fragments of his life and the people...

An incantatory poetic novel that interweaves the legends, tragedies, and histories of a village in Vietnam. "The book bursts with characters, poetry, philosophy, romance, violence, and struggle. . . . A dreamlike, original, strangely hopeful book."—Kirkus Reviews At the foot of Mun Mountain in central Vietnam, a self-appointed scribe collects the stories of his neighbours—tales of love, nature, and war—and...

Exiled Shadow is a virtuoso collage novel about narrative, identity, and exile, from international literary sensation Norman Manea. In this vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories, the protagonist, known only as the Nomadic Misanthrope, leaves communist Romania and is reunited with his friend Gunther, an unrepentant Marxist exiled in Berlin. Their meeting sparks a spirited dialogue that endures throughout...

The first full-length novel by Chinese author Can Xue to appear in English Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50...

A brilliant new translation of Ó Cadhain’s modern Irish literature masterpiece, meant to spark debate and comparison with Alan Titley's Dirty Dust, now with bonus materials on its history, reception, interpretations, adaptations, and more. "Gloriously attuned to the energy, copiousness, invective and ribaldry of the original Cre na Cille." — Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement "Corrosively satirical and darkly comic....

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature. I Live in the Slums by Can Xue observes no obvious conventions of plot or characterisation. That is the only rule it follows. Instead, it tends to limn a disordered and poetic state, given...

Patrick Modiano explores the boundaries of recollection in a "mesmerizing, enigmatic novel" (Publishers Weekly). "A mesmerizing, enigmatic novel... A story about growing old and the gaps and omissions that make up a life... Its dreamlike prose and a beguiling structural twist make it a worthy and satisfying addition to [Modiano’s] accomplished oeuvre." — Publishers Weekly "Nobel Prize winner Modiano’s title...

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 The most ambitious work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers "In this dreamlike novel . . . amid increasingly bizarre scenarios, appearances give way to hidden, otherworldly layers."New Yorker In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the...

One of Pierre Michon's most powerful works, this book imagines decisive moments in the lives of five artists of different times and places: Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya, Antoine Watteau, Claude Lorrain, and Lorentino, a little-remembered disciple of Piero della Francesca. Michon focuses on particular moments when artist and model collide, whether that model is a person or a landscape,...

From beloved Japanese author Shūsaku Endō, a newly discovered novella and five short stories of love, grief, and maternal longing. Shūsaku Endō, widely considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, is known for his historical novels, which masterfully probe the encounters between the cultures and religions of East and West from a Japanese Catholic perspective. A salient...

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano. "Polizzotti's crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked."—Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences, Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and...

A haunting novella that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano revisits the places and events in his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences: the season in his childhood during which he shared a home with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist...

The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations Patrick Modiano’s first novel since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy...

Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano’s spellbinding tale of adolescent schoolmates and the vicissitudes of fate. As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the...

From beloved storyteller and Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, a masterly and gripping crime novel set in picturesque Nice on the French Riviera Stolen jewels, black markets, hired guns, crossed lovers, unregistered addresses, people gone missing, shadowy figures disappearing in crowds, newspaper stories uncomfortably close and getting closer... this ominous novel is Patrick Modiano’s most noirish work to date. Set...

“Elegant. Unpretentious. Approachable. . . . He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post “Modiano is a pure original.”—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian “A fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.”—The Economist “These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel...

The complete short stories of acclaimed Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri, translated into English and collected in one volume for the first time. Mohamed Choukri’s vivid stories invite the reader to wander the streets of Tangier, the ancient coastal crossroads between Europe and Africa, and to meet its denizens at markets, beaches, cafés, and brothels. Choukri’s Tangier is a place where...

The Body of the Soul is a new collection of stories by the acclaimed Ludmila Ulitskaya, masterfully translated into English. While we can feel, know, and study the body, the soul refuses definition. Where does it begin and end? What does the soul have to do with love? Does it exist at all, and if so, does it outlast the...

Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory. Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi Street...

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek—a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria. "The surface of [Jelinek's] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek's novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and...

The original English-language translation of Ó Cadhain’s raucous masterpiece Cré na Cille, which Colm Tóibín has called the “greatest novel to be written in the Irish language”. "An audacious novel rendered entirely in dialogue . . . [with] hilarious quarrels and devastating put-downs that reflect O’Cadhain’s finely attuned ear for the nimble language of his people. He does not judge...

This spare, unforgettable novel is Pierre Michon's luminous exploration of the mysteries of desire. A young teacher takes his first job in a sleepy French town. Lost in a succession of rainy days and sleepless nights, he falls under the spell of a town resident, a woman of seductive beauty and singular charm. Yvonne. Yvonne. "Everything about her screamed desire...

A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighbouring city, Pasha,...

A collection of the finest stories from the Irish author of The Dirty Dust, published fifty years after his death These colourful tales from beloved Irish author Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–1970) whisk readers to the salty western shores of Ireland, where close-knit farming communities follow the rhythms of custom, family, and land, even as they dream together of a kinder...

Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water is a novel about the horrors of war and its aftermath from one of Europe’s most brilliant authors. Award-winning author António Lobo Antunes returns to the subject of the Portuguese colonial war in Angola with a vigorous account of atrocity and vengeance. Drawing on his own bitter experience as a soldier stationed for twenty-seven...

Michon’s exquisite short narratives transport us to the heart of the Middle Ages as witnesses to the double-edged power of belief. This welcome volume brings to English-language readers two beautifully crafted works by the internationally acclaimed French author Pierre Michon. Populated by distant and little-known figures—Irish and French monks, saints, and scientists in Winter Mythologies; Benedictine monks in the Vendée...

A selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English. "An unvarnished view of war and its repercussions: fear, dread, devastation, and exile."—Elisabeth Egan, New York Times Book Review Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most important poets of the Arabic-speaking world. This definitive collection, which draws from...

The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris's renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by Richard Sieburth. "Reading Frail Riffs, appearing in English nearly fifty years after its initial French publication, I realize how much our attraction to autobiography owes to Leiris...a quiet virtuoso of French prose." — Alice Kaplan, New York Review of Books...

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century. Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It...

From Ukraine’s leading writer-activist comes an intimate account of resistance and survival in the earliest months of the Russian-Ukrainian war When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Serhiy Zhadan took to social media to coordinate a network of resistance workers and send messages of courage to his fellow Ukrainians. What began as a local organising effort exploded onto the...

A shattering tale of oppression and resistance during Franco's dictatorship, by a beloved Spanish novelist. "Passion in ordinary lives, sobriety and melancholy are the flavours of Delibes's writing . . . with a profound empathy for nature and the poor. . . . The Holy Innocents is a ferocious story." — The Guardian Named One of the Best 100 Spanish-Language...

A controversial Swahili classic by one of Tanzania's most revered writers, banned on publication and finally translated into English. Teenage Rosa lives with her parents and four younger sisters in a village on Ukerewe Island in Lake Victoria, where she attends the local school and helps out on the family farm. Life would be relatively peaceful if it weren't for...

A timely and provocative essay about the parallel lives of Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt and their mission for a more humane society. “An intimate and timely meditation on dark times, Hermsen’s illuminating essay offers readers a way to think with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg about how to build a more humane world in common.”—Samantha Rose Hill, author of...

A multilayered exploration of poetry, authorship, and digital intelligence by "a writer of immense poetic power" (The Guardian) In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon-Perse finds himself in possession of one of the most promising inventions of the century: a computer. Enchanted by snippets of Persian poetry he learns from his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismoil, Jon-Perse builds...

The untold story of how the volcanic landscape surrounding Naples influenced a crucial moment in twentieth-century intellectual history. A New Yorker "Best Book of 2024" Selection "Well-written—and well-translated."—Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal In the 1920s, the Gulf of Naples was a magnet for European intellectuals in search of places as yet untouched by modernity. Among the revolutionaries, artists, and thinkers...

From a trailblazing poet, a trilingual narrative in verse that bears witness to a devastating crime and testifies to the power of collective defiance. In 2007, Mexican soldiers raped and left for dead a seventy-three-year-old Indigenous Nahua woman, Ernestina Ascencio Rosario, as she worked on her farm. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, including eyewitness accounts, the courts ruled that...

The last work by "one of the most singular voices of twentieth-century French philosophy" (Critical Inquiry) on the complexities of love in public and private life. Vladimir Jankélévitch stands alongside Emmanuel Levinas as one of the most admired French ethicists of the twentieth century, known for his work on everything from the possibility of forgiveness after the Holocaust to the...

An enthralling reflection on the ways that family history influences identity, from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candour, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves together a series of interlocking stories...

An exemplary collection of work from one of the world’s leading scholars of intellectual history “Földényi . . . stage[s] a broad metaphysical melodrama between opposites that he pursues throughout this fierce, provoking collection (expertly translated by Ottilie Mulzet). . . . He proves himself a brilliant interpreter of the dark underside of Enlightenment ambition.”—James Wood, New Yorker László Földényi’s...

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first time Éric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honour the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists. This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones,...

From an acclaimed Ukrainian author, snapshots of a city haunted by war The women, men, and children in Serhiy Zhadan's new collection of stories testify to the dignity of daily life in the war-battered Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Through a series of powerful vignettes, we witness the ordinary experiences of people in extraordinary times: weddings, love affairs, tense visits home...

The award-winning newest novel by Spain's premier writer—a metafictional meditation on the limits and possibilities of literature. The narrator of Montevideo is an itinerant writer and erstwhile drug pusher in the throes of a personal and literary transformation. Increasingly disillusioned with life in Paris and hoping for an artistic breakthrough, he ventures out in search of a "new style." His...

Late Fragments is the first English collection of the late poetry and prose fragments of literary icon Charles Baudelaire. “[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth’s learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[These] unfinished works written after 1861 . . . deliver what their...

The untold story of how the volcanic landscape surrounding Naples influenced a crucial moment in twentieth-century intellectual history A New Yorker "Best Book of 2024" Selection "Well-written—and well-translated."—Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal In the 1920s, the Gulf of Naples was a magnet for European intellectuals in search of places as yet untouched by modernity. Among the revolutionaries, artists, and thinkers...

The instant bestseller from Djamila Ribeiro that sparked a major Black feminist movement in Brazil. Part theory, part manifesto, part history... Where We Stand has the makings of a truly modern feminist classic. —Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024" In a society shaped by the legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and sexism, who has the right to a voice?...

A single-volume edition of Diary, Gombrowicz’s acclaimed masterpiece, now with previously unpublished pages restored. Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his Diary with one of literature’s most memorable openings: “MondayMe.TuesdayMe.WednesdayMe.ThursdayMe.” Gombrowicz’s Diary grew...

A celebration of the beguiling power of literature, from one of the world's greatest storytellers At the Pigeon Book Club, a circle of readers joins in exhilarating meetings to discuss literature. The only requirements for entry are an all-encompassing love of books and an intuition that to read is to love and to love is to read. Xiao Sang, a...

A searing testament to poetry’s power to define and defy injustice, from iconic writer-activist Serhiy Zhadan Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan has brought international attention to his country’s struggle through his unflinching poetry of witness. In this new selection of poems, forged entirely in wartime, Zhadan honours the memory of the lost...

A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout history Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis...

The extraordinary testimony of a daring Caribbean writer-activist, determined to expose injustice and defend the dignity of migrant workers. In the 1960s, hundreds of women travelled from French colonies in the West Indies to become domestic workers for white families in France. Recruited by the French government with the promise of economic opportunity, these women instead found themselves subjected to...

Kraus’s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time "[A] superb translation."—Bill Marx, Arts Fuse One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus’s play enacts...

The instant bestseller from Djamila Ribeiro that sparked a major Black feminist movement in Brazil Part theory, part manifesto, part history. . . . Where We Stand has the makings of a truly modern feminist classic. — Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024" In a society shaped by the legacies of enslavement, white supremacy, and sexism, who has the...

A moving collection of poems by internationally acclaimed Greek poet Kiki Dimoula, brilliantly translated into English Kiki Dimoula’s poetry—the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature—is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, conflating concrete and abstract, literal and metaphorical, physical and metaphysical. Exacting and...

A stunning collection that draws from four decades of verse by one of modern Greece’s most lauded poets. This is the first English-language collection of work by the renowned Greek poet Michális Ganás. Originally from a remote village on the northwest border of Greece, Ganás witnessed the Greek Civil War as a young child, and was taken into enforced exile...

An introduction to an original poetic voice from eastern Ukraine with deep roots in the unique cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation. “This collection of Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poems will likely cement his reputation as the unflinching witness to the turbulent social and political travails of his nation. With an acerbic tone that will seem familiar to admirers of Franz...

A masterful collection by a literary giant of the past century, rendered by one of our most esteemed Italian translators "A fine sampling of Pirandello’s world, convincingly translated by Jewiss, who negotiates the problems of bringing his vivid, colloquial prose and effortless storytelling into English with great skill.”—Tim Parks, New York Review of Books Regarded as one of Europe’s great...

Edith Grossman, celebrated for her brilliant translation of Don Quixote, offers a dazzling new version of another Cervantes classic. The twelve novellas gathered in Exemplary Novels reveal the extraordinary breadth of Cervantes’s imagination: his nearly limitless ability to create characters, invent plots, and entertain readers across continents and centuries. The assemblage of characters — eloquent witches, talking dogs, Gypsy orphans,...

Young Jawad, born to a traditional Shi’ite family of corpse washers and shrouders in Baghdad, decides to abandon the family tradition, choosing instead to become a sculptor—to celebrate life rather than tend to death. He enters Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, in defiance of his father’s wishes and determined to forge his own path. But the...

The most complete English-language collection of the prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz, with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny  “Borowski’s sharp-edged descriptions of life in Nazi concentration camps shatter the limits of even Kafka’s most surreal imaginings.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal  "The most important work of the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz.”—Timothy Snyder,...

The first major career-spanning collection of the poems of Adonis, widely acknowledged as the most important poet working in Arabic today. “Poetry for [Adonis] is not merely a genre or an art form but a way of thinking, something almost like mystical revelation.”—Charles McGrath, New York Times Born in Syria in 1930, Adonis is one of the most celebrated poets...

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek—a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria’s scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks...

A riveting English translation of the Irish classic tale of heartache, death, and loneliness by the beloved author of The Dirty Dust The final published work by the renowned Máirtín Ó Cadhain, this novella follows a widower as he attempts to plan his wife’s funeral arrangements without money, direction, or whiskey. Thrown into a desert of unknowing, he knows not...

A selection of the exquisite, passionate verse of the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, superbly translated into English. Finalist for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Finalist for the 2025 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry Winner of the 2024 Big Other Readers' Choice Award Shortlisted for the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize Longlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award for...