Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers. Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual.

A captivating literary and historical record, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal offers a glimpse into life in collaborationist France during the Second World War, as seen through the eyes and thoughts of one of France's greatest and most independent writers. Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. A renowned writer and committed pacifist throughout the 1930s--a conviction that resulted in his imprisonment before and after the Occupation--Giono spent the war in the village of Contadour in Provence, where he wrote, corresponded with other writers, and cared for his consumptive daughter. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions. Giono recounts the details of his life with fierce independence of thought and novelistic attention to character and dialogue. Occupation Journal is a fascinating historical document as well as a unique window into one of French literature's most voracious and critical minds.

Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage. With Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Francis Ford Coppola’s short-lived City. Whether profiling Hollywood darlings, getting to the bottom of health crazes like yoga and acupuncture, remembering friends and lovers from her days hobnobbing with rock stars at the Troubadour and art stars at the Ferus Gallery, or writing about her beloved, misunderstood hometown, Los Angeles, Babitz approaches every assignment with an energy and verve that is all her own. I Used to Be Charming gathers nearly fifty pieces written between 1975 and 1997, including the full text of Babitz’s wry book-length investigation into the pioneering lifestyle brand Fiorucci. The title essay, published here for the first time, recounts the accident that came close to killing her in 1996; it reveals an uncharacteristically vulnerable yet never less than utterly charming Babitz.

A portrait of singer Jerry Lee Lewis details his early life, music, controversial marriage, problems and decline, endurance, and revival in popularity.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction "Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you."--Wall Street Journal "A tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bola o and Borges." --New York Times Book Review Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award * An Amazon Best Book of the Year * A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29, Nylon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Brit & Co., Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Read It Forward, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature--even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions--until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past. An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).

SPAIN, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo - a beautiful widow with a shadowy past - puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís' son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to winter with Lluís' brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on 'dead' fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini's decision will put her family's fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, old friend and traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the civil war, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction brings together twenty-eight of the most important Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century--several of which will be familiar to English-language readers, like Carlos Fuentes, Javier Marías, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and many who will be new revelations, such as Aurora Venturini, Sergio Pitol, and Elvio Gandolfo--and provides them with a chance to discuss their careers and explain the aesthetic influences behind the pieces they chose to include in this volume. Unlikeother anthologies, the stories and excerpts collected here were selected by the authors themselves and represent the "high point" of their writing career. Valerie Miles--translator, editor, and co-founder of Granta en español--not only curated perhaps the greatest cross-section of contemporary Spanish-language literature to be anthologized, but also brings to this collection original interviews with every author, along with biographic prefaces before each, in order to best introduce the reader to the author's entire oeuvre and his or her literary impact. Breathtaking in scope and historical detail, this anthology will no doubt become a fixture in personal literary collections, as well as a go-to resource for classrooms and libraries alike. Valerie Miles is a publisher, writer, translator, and the co-founder ofGranta en español. She is also the co-director ofThe New York Review of Books in its Spanish translation and, in 2013, was voted one of the "Most Influential Professionals in Publishing" by the Buenos Aires Book Fair. Contributors: Rafael Chirbes Edgardo Cozarinsky Jose de la Colina Cristina Fernandez Cubas Alfredo Bryce Echenique Jorge Edwards Abilio Estevez Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio Carlos Fuentes Elvio Gandolfo Juan Goytisolo Javier Marias Juan Marse Ana Maria Matute Eduardo Mendoza Jose Maria Merino Antonio Munoz Molina Horacio Castellanos Moya Ricardo Piglia Ramiro Pinilla Sergio Pitol Evelio Rosero Alberto Ruy Sanchez Esther Tusquets Hebe Uhart Mario Vargas Llosa Aurora Venturini Enrique Vila-Matas

John Taylor's brilliant new book examines the work of many of the major poets who have deeply marked modern and contemporary European literature. Venturing far and wide from the France in which he has lived since the late 1970s, the polyglot writer-critic not only delves into the more widely translated literatures of Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria, but also discovers impressive and overlooked work in Slovenia, Bosnia, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands in this book that ranges over nearly all of Europe, including Russia.While providing this stimulating and far-ranging critical panorama, Taylor brings to light key themes of European writing: the depth of everyday life, the quest of the thing-in-itself, metaphysical aspiration and anxiety, the dialectics of negativity and affirmation, subjectivity and self-effacement, and uprootedness as a category that is as ontological as it is geographical, historical, political, or cultural. The book pays careful attention to the intersection of writing and history (or politics), as several poets featured here have faced the Second World War, the Holocaust, Communism, the fall of Communism, or the war in the former Yugoslavia.Taylor gives the work of renowned, upcoming, and still little-known poets a thorough look, all the while scrutinizing recent translations of their verse. He highlights several poets who are also masters of the prose poem. He includes a few novelists who have fashioned a particularly original kind of poetic prose, that stylistic category that has proved so difficult for critics to define. Into the Heart of European Poetry should be of immediate interest to any reader curious about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas underlying major trends of contemporary European writing. In a day and age when much too little is translated and thus known about foreign literature, and when Europeans themselves are pondering the common denominators of their own culture, this book is a

Diaristic writing has often been relegated to the fringes of literary studies as a marginal cultural activity. This volume seeks to challenge that marginality by exploring some of the wide-ranging forms of literary practice encompassed by diaristic writing in Europe from the Renaissance to the present day. The volume deals with questions of the value and status of the diary, of the functioning of the diary in society and history, and of the reception and interpretation of the multifarious forms of first-person daily writing. The volume investigates diaries across national borders and linguistic boundaries, so as to make the hitherto marginal place of the private journal a site of fruitful interdisciplinary encounters. Australian, British, Catalonian, French, German and Italian critics examine diaries dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, within the context of the literature, history and literary history of Catalonia, England, France, Germany and Italy. A prime concern of the essays in this collection is to highlight the cultural, generic and historical diversity of the diary, while emphasising the points of convergence between different texts and differing critical approaches to the texts. The volume will be of interest to students and teachers of European and comparative literature.