ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS

Alice in Wonderland meets Spirited Away: Xiong Liang's propulsive, Chinese mythology-inspired adventure story for kids ages 9-12. Embark on a forbidden journey through Peach Blossom Paradise—a world of mushroom elves and dragon slayers, with brilliantly crafted ink wash illustrations by a renowned Chinese artist. City-girl Little Yu just spent a glorious summer in the countryside with her grandparents. On the last day of her vacation, wishing she could stay forever, Little Yu notices peach blossom petals marching along the surface of the river. They sink and bob to the surface again, a pink rivulet flowing into the distance. Little Yu follows the blossoms to an enormous, mossy stone tablet carved with the histories of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the words: “Prohibited to cross!” Laughing in the face of this restriction, she hikes up a leg, crosses the stone fence, and sinks her feet into the muck and lichen of an ancient forest. The moment Little Yu enters the forest, the world shifts. The peach blossom petals flow backwards, stop, and then begin to spin. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice going down the rabbit hole or Hayao Miyazaki’s Chihiro entering the spirit world, Little Yu enters a forbidden world and must learn to trust her instincts at every turn. She meets and befriends the realm’s earthly guardians – puckish spirits of mountains, clouds, water, and wind. The first in the seven-book series, Little Yu and the Treelings, Lost in Peach Blossom Paradise is a new fantasy classic. The celebrated artist and writer Xiong Liang masterfully blends ancient Chinese mythology, traditions, and tales, in a story that shares many features with the best graphic novels. Xiong Liang's ink-wash drawings are vivid and meticulous, filling the page with cave dwellings, intricate creature-made tools, towering cypress forests, and a large, graceful hound dog.

A psychedelic adventure story of friendship, peril, gender questions, and foraging in two floating villages, perfect for 5-8 year olds — the latest fantasy world from beloved writer and illustrator Claude Ponti. In two floating villages on the river Longo live a pair of boat-faring communities, sailing where their whim or the current takes them. The Oolongs are known for the delicious roots, fruits, and flowers they gather; the Kukichas pick healiherbs, and prepare powerful potions that help them feel their best. Both communities foster an atmosphere of openness and play in all aspects of life, including where gender is concerned. For Lu Cha (an Oolong boy) and Ali Roo (a Kukicha girl), it's only natural that gender can be chosen, tried out, and reconsidered as each child sees fit. All is well in this idyllic world until suddenly, from far beyond the shiverbanks and the boobam brambles, a mysterious beast comes to prowl. Claude Ponti develops parallel utopian worlds where two communities, governed by values of kindness, openness, inventiveness, and the pursuit of beauty, end up realizing they need each other. In Claude Ponti’s wonderfully detailed illustrations and sparkling wordplay, skillfully translated by Margot Kerlidou and Alyson Waters, young readers will find a faraway world of pleasure, fright, and friendship.

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.When Vitangelo Moscarda?s wife tells him his nose leans slightly to the right, his entire world swings off kilter. Loafing about, suddenly estranged from himself, he accosts friends, strangers, and passersby to look closely and confirm: Am I not the self I thought I was? Wandering from mirror to mirror, Moscarda embarks on a dizzying pursuit to see himself as others see him, to root out the stranger within. Searching endlessly for his true self, Moscarda ricochets through insecurity, reclusiveness, self-detachment, and doubt ? resolving, with icy recognition, that "people roll through their lives like stones, complacent, insensate, and closed," locked in an unknown face. Things quickly escalate from pensive reflection to dramatic confrontations as the protagonist disintegrates. With sharp dialogue and comic brilliance, Pirandello dissolves the fixity of perception, challenging us to question the solidity of our own identities and to consider the ways we are each held captive by the gazes of others.

A rich, polyphonic novel from one of the leading voices of contemporary Polish literature, encompassing a half-century of history and memory In a Polish village, a young man watches an old man trip and fall down a flight of stairs. From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war?and fragments of a home?s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.Wieslaw Mysliwski?s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Mysliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. Part autobiography, part dreambook, Needle?s Eye is both a writer?s farewell to the Poland of his youth and an extended address, like the final lecture prepared by its narrator, on the persistence and necessity of memory.

A shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality"Above all [Pavese''s novels] are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese''s novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." ? Italo Calvino Cesare Pavese''s The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese''s characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor''s radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

A spirited tale of a small, mythical being who wanders off with the wind ? inspired by ancient Chinese poetry and rendered in exquisite silk paintings.Inspired by a classical Chinese poem by Song Yu, Take a Walk With the Wind dives into the world of the treelings, tiny beings that live in China?s ancient mountain forests. If a primeval forest is left alone and not damaged or disturbed for at least several hundred years, it will spontaneously create one of these tiny, special beings. In this wondrous story of one such creature, Xiong brings a puff of wind to life, sending the treeling?s little tangerine cap dancing through the air. Together, the treeling and the wind venture into a dark cave and visit a quiet lake, but the wind makes mischief wherever they go. Xiong is an ink wash artist, writer, and pioneering Chinese illustrator. With soft brushwork on rustling silk paper, Xiong expresses the joys and surprises of new encounters. Those who love Studio Ghibli, Tolkien?s Hobbits, and mythical worlds that combine nature and fantasy, will discover a new, classic tale in Take a Walk With the Wind.

?The best book on Haiti in a very long time . . . powerful, spot on, likely the best written.? ?Dany Laferriere An astonishing novel of raw beauty about gang life, sex work, and social media in HaitiCécé La Flamme, as she?s known by her loyal Facebook friends, captures photographs of still bodies. Figures scorched and bruised, left to the rubble of the Cité of Divine Power. When she posts an image of a corpse, Cécé?s followers skyrocket. ?Nothing got more attention than a good corpse that was nice and warm or already rotting.? Just beside visions of rot and neglect, she posts pictures of her toes, gullies crisscrossing the cité, and her own lips painted blue. With every image, Cécé seeks control and wants to create a frank, intimate record of the terror in her cité. Cécé?s world begins and ends with the cité ? a slum peopled by gangs, yelping kids, grandmothers, junkies, and preachers. The very gate that encloses the cité was constructed by militant gang members. First boss Freddy, then Joël, then Jules Ce´sar rule the gang that holds the cité in a chokehold. Sharp, sincere, and desperate, Cécé cleaves life for herself out of social media, sex work, and attempts at friendship with other women. When an American journalist offers to buy the rights to Cécé?s photographs, she demands double the cash. When an abusive former client dies, she wears hot pink to his funeral. Emmelie Prophete?s novel is fierce, devastating, and suggestive ? a record of a woman clawing back control.

Introducing the South American comic sensation starring a hilarious 6-year-old whose spunky self-confidence will inspire budding activists and curious middle grade readers along with adult fans.Mafalda may be small?but her hopes for the world are as big as her heart!Six-year-old Mafalda loves democracy and hates soup. What democratic sector do cats fall into? she asks, then unfurls a toilet paper red carpet and gives her very own presidential address. Mafalda?s precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her. Dissident and rebellious, she refuses to abandon the world to her parents? generation, who seem so lost. Alongside the irascible Mafalda, readers will meet her eclectic group of playmates: dreamy Felipe and gossipy Susanita, young-capitalist Manolito and rebellious Miguelito. Quino?s bright irony and intelligence bring the streets and neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to life.You can clearly see Mafalda is small, but her hopes for the world and her heart are huge and as sincere as can be. Generations of readers have discovered themselves in Mafalda, and learned to question, rebel, and hope. Since Quino first drew her in the early 1960s, Mafalda has captured public imagination in Latin America and beyond. Her wit and empathy have made her an enduring favorite.

The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide. Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

A metaphysical detective story about love and existence from the Italian master, Antonio Tabucchi. When Tadeus sets out to find Isabel, his former love, he soon finds himself on a metaphysical journey across the world, one that calls into question the meaning of time and existence and the power of words. Isabel disappeared many years ago. Tadeus Slowacki, a Polish writer, her former friend and lover, has come back to Lisbon to learn of her whereabouts. Rumors abound: Isabel died in prison under Salazar's regime, or perhaps wasn't arrested at all. As Tadeus interviews one old acquaintance of hers after the next, a chameleon-like portrait of a young, ideological woman emerges, ultimately bringing Tadeus on a metaphysical journey across the continent. Constructed in the form of a mandala, For Isabel is the spiraling search for an enigma, an investigation into time and existence, the power of words, and the limits of the senses. In this posthumous work Tabucchi creates an ingenious narration, tracing circles around a lost woman and the ultimate inaccessible truth.