Publishing events traditionally increase in the run-up to the Easter holidays, and we can’t wait to dive into the pages of new books, as well as gift them to our loved ones. So, from brand new Fernanda Melchorup to the new translation of the iconic Bloody Meridian of Cormac McCarthyand from the long-awaited Cloud Atlas of David Mitchellto a new collection of his short stories H.P. Lovecraftwe collect Holy Week must-reads.
Bloody Meridian “Or the evening blush in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Translation: Giorgos Kyriazis
Gutenberg Publications
Rightly considered one of the most important American novels of all time, it is now available again in Greek, years after its last release. In his great book Cormac McCarthy, a fourteen-year-old from Tennessee, referred to simply as the Kid, wanders the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-19th century. There he will meet with the infamous Glandon gang and will immediately witness incredible brutality, a condition that will lead him to an immersion in the extreme limits of human horror. A landmark book for world literature and one of the publishing events of 2024.
The Land of Snow by Yasunari Kawabata
Translation: Panagiotis Evaggelidis
Agra Publications
The Japanese Nobel Laureate (1968 Nobel Prize in Literature) Yasunari Kawabata is translated once more into Greek, with Snow Country to be offered as a delightful love story between a lazy urban intellectual of Tokyo and a geisha of the mountains of northwestern Japan. And it takes readers on an exemplary journey to a remote hot spring area of Niigata Province, where the story takes place.
This is not Miami by Fernanda Melchor
Translation: Angeliki Vasilakou
Doma Publications
He is one of the most interesting contemporary voices of Latin America and his success You deliver and her Season of Hurricanes which have been released in recent years by Roof confirm that it has a very small audience in our country as well. In the This is not Miamithe Fernanda Melchor tells stories of her hometown, Veracruz, in a book written while she was still a journalist. In its pages we read about the carnival queen who killed her children, about bourgeois and proletarians, about drug dealers, and about all those who live and grow up against the background of this difficult port. However, the main protagonist of the book remains the city itself, which is definitely not Miami, and which we are invited to discover.
The Last Dream by Pedro Almodóvar
Translation: Maria Paleologu
Dioptra Publications
Twelve unpublished stories from the personal archive of the virtuoso of 7her art, Pedro Almodóvar, written from the late 60s to the present day, are collected in a valuable volume for movie and book lovers. The Last Dream it looks like a “fragmented autobiography, incomplete and somewhat enigmatic”, as the Spanish director himself states, inviting us to immerse ourselves in a eulogy of the relationship between life and art, fiction and reality. Basic themes of his stories, desire, mortality, loneliness and the very process of creation.
Margins and dictation: For the enjoyment of reading and writing her Elena Ferrante
Translation: Maria Paleologu
Pataki Publications
The mysterious and much loved Elena Ferrante returns with a book of essays dedicated to her own “adventure of writing” but also that of writers who marked her throughout her life. The Margins and dictation: For the enjoyment of reading and writing consists of three “lectures” and an essay, where its author Tetralogy of Naples she returns to her early writing years, but also to her student notebooks, reflecting on the constant struggle that characterizes her to this day: her attempt to stay within the framework while something calls her to break it. She looks back at the same time to the thought and writings of important personalities, from Dante to Gertrude Stein.
We Say It in August by Gabriel García Márquez
Translation: Despina Drakaki
Psychogios Publications
“Sitting alone by the clear blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach is curious about the men in the hotel bar. She has two children from a happy marriage of twenty-seven years that she has no reason to want to escape from. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night finds a new lover. Amid stifling Caribbean nights, full of salsa and boleros, Ana travels every year deeper into the hinterland of her lust and her heart’s fears.” This is what the back cover of the novel by the Nobel laureate tells us Gabriel Garcia Marquez, released a decade after his death in Mexico City. A deep meditation on freedom, grief, personal transformation and the mysteries of love, from a much-loved author.
Cloud Atlas/Atlas Nefon of David Mitchell
Translation: Maria Xylouri
Metaichmio Publications
Twenty years after its first release in 2004, the iconic cult novel by David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas: Cloud Atlas, is released again in Greek, in a new translation Maria Xylouri for Metaichmium and with the epitome of the author himself, inviting the youngest readers to his imaginary world among many literary genres. Out of print for years and one of the most sought-after books on the second-hand market, the book is considered one of the modern classics of the 21st century.u century, presenting original fiction that explores fundamental questions of reality and identity, taking us from the Chatham Islands in 1850 California, to Belgium in 1931 and the West Coast of the 1970s.
The Rocks by Cara Hoffman
Translation: Panagiotis Kehagias
Editions Gutenberg
Athens, 1988: An English couple, the black poet and boxer Milo and the white alcoholic Jaspers, in order to secure free accommodation in a cheap hotel near the Larissa station and a little money for their drinks, bark with the aim of attracting tourists in the hotel. Their meeting then with the American Bridie will change the lives of all three forever. A very interesting book about the challenge of survival in a familiar place, by the American woman Cara Hoffman (founding member of the Anarchist Review of Books) and translated by the talented Panagiotis Kehagia.
Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Translation: Katerina Schina
Psychogios Publications
One morning in 1899, an Englishman, Martin Pearce, stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali’s sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rihanna, treats Pierce, a romance is born with consequences that will extend into the future when another illicit relationship flares up, with equally unpredictable and dramatic consequences. The Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (Nobel Prize 2021) is translated into Greek for the second time after Paradisein a book that reminds us through high drama of the individual, social and political legacy of colonialism.
Mice on the Walls of H.P. Lovecraft
Translation: Maria Exarchou
Acid Publications
After the death of his only son in World War I, the American Delapore will move to his ancestral home, Exham Abbey in England. There, he and his cats will often hear strange sounds of rats running behind the walls. Upon further investigation, Delapor will discover that his family has maintained an underground city for centuries, and then a landscape of unprecedented horror will open before his eyes, with unforeseen consequences for him and his companions. The 9o volume of publications Acid with the great work of the lord of terror, HP Lovecraftwith three chilling stories by the great creator: “The mice on the walls”, “Beyond the wall of sleep” and “In the crypt”.
Embarrassment of Richard Powers
Translation: Giorgos Kyriazis
Gutenberg Publications
After the death of his wife, astrobiologist Theodore Byrne devotes himself to his nine-year-old son Robin, who is on the autism spectrum and is influenced by his mother’s ecological concerns. Bern, in order to support his son then, resorts to new experimental methods leading the lives of both of them to extreme situations. THE Richard Powers writes a highly interesting novel, which mixes references to political events with elements of science fiction, giving readers deep emotion.
In Khaki of Philip Kerr
Translation: George Maragos
Cedar Publications
“Cuba 1954. ‘One does not work for one’s enemies unless one has little or no alternative,’ argues Bernie Gunter. It’s 1954 and Bernie is in Cuba. Wanting to avoid another one of the risky missions assigned to him by Meyer Lansky, he decides to leave the island on a boat with a woman in tow. But the US Navy, on a patrol, discovers his identity and Bernie ends up in a place he knows – a prison cell. After exhaustive interrogations, he is jailed in New York and then sent back to Berlin, again in a cell, with the offer: Work for French counterintelligence or we’ll hang you for murder.” The In Khaki of the great Philip Kerr is released in Greek, taking us to Cuba, a Russian prisoner of war camp, Paris and Berlin, on a journey from 1930 to 1950. An excellent thriller about the Second World War, from the master of the genre.
Life with Your Light by Abdellah Taïa
Translation: Dimitris Dimakopoulos
Polis Publications
The Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa tells the life of his mother in three episodes, from the distant 1954 to 1999, a woman who did everything to survive and earn a small place in the world of colonialism, war and injustice. On the pages of the book, emotions such as rage, the thirst for revenge and the emancipatory dream of the woman herself are mixed, which ultimately makes her unfair to her own children. Ahmed, one of her sons and gay, will never be able to collect the necessary understanding from her. But the last episode of the book will turn into a message of acceptance and perhaps posthumous forgiveness, of a subject who suffered injustice throughout his life.
