Fitzcarraldo Editions strana 2 z 5

In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his story is not actually over – rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated. Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness?

The ancient Greek word for tragedy (????????) is a compound of goat (??????) and song (???). In Phoebe Giannisi''s Goatsong, the seam that connects human and animal, myths and history, is the body.In Giannisi’s language, life obeys myth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn’t stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we’re told ‘the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.’ Adjacent to the mythical setting is the material, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle – chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered – begins after weaning, and is lain alongside how we think: ‘from the moment of separation / from the mother / they ruminate.’ In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still.From Homer to Donna Haraway, Derrida to state archives, klephtic ballads and rebetiko, to Parmenides and Giannisi’s dog, Ivan, the many human and animal voices of Goatsong form an incantatory lyricism and layered engagement unique in literature.

In A State of Siege, Janet Frame brings her signature playfulness to paint a thrilling psychological portrait. After the death of her invalid mother, Malfred Signal, a retired New Zealand art teacher, leaves her birthplace in the south for a beach cottage on a sub-tropical island in the north. Freed from endless lessons on still life and the dominating presence of her family, she hopes at last to be alone with nature and the ‘room two inches behind the eyes’. But the solitude she has sought mocks her with echoes of her past, when, one stormy night, an intruder pounds ceaselessly and inexplicably on her door. Propulsive yet poignant, A State of Siege is a mesmerizing exploration of the artistic process, of selfhood and loneliness, and of death and its counterpart: the need to survive, to live.

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjorgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange…

Once upon a time, there was a tower on a hill, beyond the dark trees, somewhere north. An octagonal tower on two levels: glass upstairs and stone below, beneath a steep slate roof – a folly, it was said. According to locals, a young woman named Annie who fell ill was confined to the tower by her father for three years and died there, alone. Fascinated by Annie’s story, Thea Lenarduzzi attempts to piece the past together in a formidable act of imagination, which, tugging at the strings of the how, why and who of stories, begins to unravel the very idea of storytelling itself. Veering between fiction, memoir, fairy tale and folklore, The Tower is an extraordinary book about power, abuse and why we don’t always tell the story we set out to tell.  

The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage – a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories, trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? In yet another tour de force of fiction, Claire-Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. ‘It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,’ writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. ‘It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.’ In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky’s memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev. Almost a hundred years later, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is reissued in a superb new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.

One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women’s conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie’s memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. In The Other Girl, brilliantly translated for the first time into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters.

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech – was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history but a cosmology. Another brilliant ‘constellation novel’ in the mode of her International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night is a brilliantly imaginative epic novel of a small place by Olga Tokarczuk, one of the most daring and ambitious novelists of our time.

Transcendence for Beginners examines life writing and philosophy across certain European and Indian traditions, exploring questions of childhood and mortality, art and religion, beauty and loss. Informed by her experience as a biographer of Soren Kierkegaard and George Eliot as well as her own life, Clare Carlisle asks what one human existence can reveal, and how writing can transmit its truth. Intellectually stimulating and deeply moving, Transcendence for Beginners enacts a philosophy of the heart, told by a generous and compelling guide. This bold, enlivening work asserts Carlisle's place as one of our most innovative thinkers.

The characters in False Warare ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy,False Waris an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation.

In The City and the World, Gregor Hens explores the city in the twenty-first century – a space we shape and are shaped by in turn – and our place within it. Travelling from Berlin to Las Vegas, Shenzhen to Santiago de Chile, he moves through these pulsing, ever-expanding cityscapes, reading, walking, swimming, riding the metro and catching the bus, bearing witness to the strange vitality of urban life. Everywhere, catalysts for new understandings emerge. Pushing his young daughter’s pram turns Berlin upside-down. Students’ exercises in getting lost and reorienting themselves throw into question notions of centre and periphery. Google Maps becomes an unexpected gallery, offering new ways of encountering art and architecture. Buildings hold their own histories and secrets, illuminated by chroniclers of Hens’s cities, from Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec to Rem Koolhaas and Valeria Luiselli. Even libraries become cities in their own right. Blending memoir, travelogue and philosophy with photography and literary insights, The City and the World is a witty, captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city.

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe. Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.

A deeply moving and revelatory reading experience, the essays collected in Portrait of an Island on Fire form a searing account of Mauritius at a crucial moment in its history. Unceasing in its critiques of racist, patriarchal abuses of power, in its unpicking of the ills at the core of contemporary Mauritian society and their roots, the collection is a milestone in thinking about the lasting social and political effects of colonialism and how they play out at the level of government policy, the handling of environmental issues, in schools, in hospitals, in families, in language. For all its well-placed anger, Ariel Saramandi’s sparklingly intelligent and intimate debut is full of love and momentum – a push for a better future for Mauritius and, by extension, for the world.

Lili is Crying, Hélene Bessette’s debut novel, explores the fraughtness and depth of the troubling relationship between Lili and her mother Charlotte. With a near-mythic quality, Bessette’s stripped-back prose evokes at once the pain of thwarted love – of desire run cold – and the promise of renewal. Lauded by critics on its initial publication in 1953 for its boundary-pushing style, unusual economy of expression, strange humour and sheer vivacity, Lili is Crying announces Bessette’s singular take on the ‘poetic novel’. This edition marks the very first translation of Bessette’s work into English, by Windham-Campbell Prize-winning author and translator Kate Briggs.

‘The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city – the whole world – with a person you may never have met.’ These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.