"No retelling of Kassandra and the Wolf can explain its charm, or its riddles. ... [It] is one of those rare creations that come alive mysteriously, without any antecedents. The book is original, terrifying, complete. It invents its own history, eases in and out of nightmare as it mingles dream and fact. Kassandra and the Wolf is a short, muscular novel with an absolute sense of craft. ... The language throughout is merciless and crisp. ... [A] stunning achievement: a lovely, sinister book." --Jerome Charyn, New York Times
Margarita Karapanou's Kassandra and the Wolf was first published in 1974, and went on to become a contemporary classic in Greece, receive international acclaim, and establish its 28-year-old author as an intensely original new talent, who garnered comparisons to Proust and Schulz.
Six-year-old Kassandra is given a doll: "I put her to sleep in her box, but first I cut off her legs and arms so she'd fit," she tells us, "Later, I cut her head off too, so she wouldn't be so heavy. Now I love her very much." Kassandra is an unforgettable narrator, a perfect, brutal guide to childhood as we've never seen it--a journey that passes through the looking glass but finds the darkest corners of the real world.
This edition brings Kassandra and the Wolf back into print at last--a tour de force and, as Karapanou liked to call it, a scary monster of a book.

Kassandra and the Wolf

Literature & Fiction

Margarita Karapanou

Contemporary

Clockroot Books

The story is simple: a love affair ends badly. A woman and a man marry, then cruelty, infidelity, and divorce. But this novel tells their story twice, from opposing perspectives. Our sympathies are inverted; we don't know whom to trust; the distinction between truth and deception blurs, and then seems simply to dissolve. The novel shifts deftly between endless oppositions: lover and beloved, angel and demon, master and slave, reader and writer. But inevitably both stories must arrive at the point of rien ne va plus: the moment in roulette when all bets are off and you either win or lose--the moment when the game becomes fate.
 Margarita Karapanou's third novel is an extraordinary experience in fiction: devastating and brave and true.

Rien ne va Plus

"Let's just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.
Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos's prose, the slightest event, the slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything. Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant movement of Sotiropoulos's language, the mastery that has made her one of Greece's most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos's stories give us a new way of seeing.

Landscape with Dog

Ersi Sotiropoulos

Amal: the practical sister who digs up the "diamond key" that unlocks the mystery of Pakicetus, a whale-dog creature who once swam the ancient seas that are now Pakistan. Mehwish: the blind younger sister, who moves with the sun and music inside her and thinks in "cup lits not fully legal." Zahoor: their heretical grandfather, a scientist who loves variation and "vim zee" and his two granddaughters most of all. Noman: the young man who steps into a lecture hall, decides "their triangle needs a fourth point," and changes all their lives.These are the four shifting chambers who make the heart of The Geometry of God, the new novel from lauded Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan. Through these vivid, contradictory, and original characters, Khan celebrates the complexities of familial and erotic love, the tug of curiosity and duty, the intersections of faith and longing. Her exuberant language draws from Urdu and Punjabi and invents one of its own for Mehwish, whose fractured English divides and slows and reveals. 
The Geometry of God is a novel one can read greedily, following these characters as their lives unfold against the backdrop of General Zia's Pakistan, where religious fundamentalism gains ground and the mujaheddin is funded by gem sales and the Americans. Or one can savor, as the sisters show us: digging as Amal does toward the novel's deepest questions about love and knowledge and faith, moving as Mehwish does to the rhythms of an abundant and original language.

Geometry of God

Khan, Uzma Aslam

"Epstein has a singular voice. The Moment that he decided to write prose was a blessed moment for the Hebrew literature of our times." -Gilad Saari Levy
 "Their love story ended many years ago. He still writes her name as a solution to crossword puzzle clues of suitable length." 
 Alex Epstein's miniature stories are indeed love stories, puzzles, stray clues to puzzles he never finishes, the beginnings or ends of philosophical treatises, parables, jokes, modernized legends, or perhaps a vivid handful of images thrown together, then allowed to disperse. This is a form of which he has been hailed as a master, a form as singular and intricate as a collection of fingerprints. His stories are populated by angels, chess players, mythical figures, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, lovers young and old, writers of disappearing languages; they are set in airports, trains, the sites of legends, hotels, bookstores in countries that no longer exist, dreams. In each of them, Epstein draws precisely the smallest possible world, and revels in the great possibilities of a single sentence. In each of them, we are invited to celebrate everything that can happen before "the tip of the pencil breaks against the bright paper."

Blue Has No South

Alex Epstein

Literary

"The most talked-about writer on the West Bank." --Ahdaf Soueif, author of In the Eye of the Sun Touch centers on a girl, the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family. In the singular world of this novella, this young woman's everyday experiences--watching a funeral procession, fighting with her siblings, learning to read, perhaps falling in love--resonate until they have become as weighty as any national tragedy. The smallest sensations compel, the events of history only lurk at the edges--the question of Palestine, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila. In a language that feels at once natural and alienated, Shibli breaks with the traditions of modern Arabic fiction, creating a work that has been and will continue to be hailed across literatures. Here every ordinary word, ordinary action is a small stone dropped into water: of inevitable consequence. We find ourselves mesmerized one quiet ripple at a time.

Touch

Adania Shibli

The first English translation of a major Argentine literary figure
 With an uncommon blend of elation and discretion, The Life and Memoirs of Doctor Pi takes readers on a journey of mysterious encounters, unspoken agreements, ofﬁcial-esque errands, and romantic escapades. Doctor Pi is an unflappable, perfectly human superhero-charismatic, artful, and with an understated swagger, master of his familiar yet impossible world. With its uncanny trust in language's capacity to capture that world in all its strangeness, The Life and Memoirs of Doctor Pi is delightful, mischievous, captivating in its suggestions of deeper literary and cultural intrigues. In the life of Doctor Pi, the familiar is rendered strange, but recognizable; the anticipated act is always fulﬁlled, but never as expected; and though consequences do ensue, they are never foreseeable, nor repeatable, and usually not very reasonable, either. To read Doctor Pi is to set forth on an expedition like no other--impossible to turn back from, impossible not to lose oneself in.

Life and Memoirs of Doctor Pi and Other Stories

Edgar Bayley

United States

Winner of the Prix de meilleur livre ÃƒÂ©tranger/Prize for the best foreign novel, Franc "Margarita Karapanou leads us into the labyrinth where God lives. One must read her as one reads Rimbaud or Blake... Karapanou's insistence on tearing off our everyday clothes and ridiculous masks makes her, indeed, a truly remarkable writer." --Jerome Charyn, Le Monde 
At the opening of Margarita Karapanou's stunning second novel, in disgust at mankind God vomits a new Messiah onto the earth. Or rather, onto a Greek island. Populated by villagers, ex-pats, artists, writers, this island is a Tower of Babel, a place where languages and individuals have been assembled, as though in wait for something as horrific and comic as this second coming. The Sleepwalker moves deftly and dizzyingly between genres-satire, murder mystery, magical realism, its own brand of Theater of the Absurd-following Manolis, the new Messiah, as he moves through this place like a sleepwalker, unaware to the very end of his divine nature. Manolis, in his guise as policeman, leaves nothing unchanged by his passing, as the island shifts from a conventional locale for upper-class tourists and drifters to a place where the surreal comes to life and the sun refuses to set. In The Sleepwalker Karapanou has created an unforgettable depiction of a dissolute world, desperately comic and full of compassion, a world in which nightmare and miracle both uneasily reside.

The Sleepwalker

Humor & Satire

A new collection from an acknowledged master of flash-fiction The stories in Lunar Savings Time slip through time and between dreams and waking, between native tongue and elusive translation, long-dead writers and just-opened books. Alex Epstein has created a masterwork in the finest strokes-stories in which humor, stubborn memory, and strange beauty meet and part ways in less than a page. Through these pages journey a woman who travels back in time to visit a psychoanalyst; Kafka, had he lived and emigrated to Israel after the Holocaust; the wandering Cain; the siege of Leningrad; Zen masters, beggars, writers, ghosts. In Epstein's lyrical philosophy, every imaginative proposition must answer to the burden of history--or perhaps, for every moon, there's rain; for every love story, the fact of time. "He can be placed next to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kafka, Borges," Haaretz has said of Epstein; Lunar Savings Time is his most radical collection yet, a wondrous achievement.

Lunar Savings Time

Epstein, Alex

A superbly crafted novel from award-winning Indian novelist Sunetra Gupta After years of absence, American travel writer Max Gate returns to Bengal, to the beach home of his longtime friend, the businessman Byron Mallick. The occasion is a funeral: for Damini, fervent investigative journalist and founder of a women's shelter, with whom Max once collaborated, until ultimately she scorned the book he wrote on their work together. It is irrefutable that Byron Mallick donated not milk, but milk adulterated with chalk, to the women and children at Damini's shelter-but did he also, to save his reputation, have her killed? The weight of this question burdens each character in this intricate, superbly crafted novel-Max; his former brother-in-law Piers O'Reilly, convinced of Byron's guilt; and Damini's cousin and Byron's former ward Ela, whose affair with Max has haunted both their lives, ending his marriage and setting him unaccountably adrift. Sunetra Gupta's consummate prose recreates the ache and complication of memory, as Max considers the tantalizing ambiguities of each of their pasts, the exquisite layers of emotion and action out of which, perhaps, the truth about Byron may be revealed.

So Good in Black

GUPTA, SUNETRA

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