...think about feeling lucky, like in those opening lines of the Langston Hughes poem "Luck": "Sometimes a crumb falls/ From the tables of joy/ Sometimes a bone is flung." Epler is the president of ...New Directions and Chew is co-director of publicity; Weinberger--an essayist, editor, and translator, most notably of Octavio Paz--is the one who discovered the book, and Douglas, at the 2017 Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad in April 2017. (Peepal Tree is the major forum for Caribbean writers, with more than 300 books published since 1985, and where many of the writers Weinberger met at the festival have published, or hoped to be published.) He went to Douglas's reading and onstage interview, and was "simply knocked out" by this "panoramic novel that takes place on one corner of Kingston, Jamaica, full of characters, living and dead--from street vendors to historical figures like Marcus Garvey--presented in a multiplicity of voices, with a vibrancy of the English language that was new to me." The book is personal for Douglas, who came to the U.S. to study when she was 19, but came of age in Half Way Tree, which, she explains, is the crossroad in Kingston that separates uptown from downtown, with a clock in the tower that always tells the wrong time: "There's a square where Jamaicans come together, where politicians come to speak, and it's a meeting place of different people from different classes.
This fall, the Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan will have his North American debut with the publication of his novel, Beauty Is a Wound. The novel takes on dark episodes in Indonesia's ...history--including the anticommunist killings that took place there in the mid-1960s--while dealing playfully with the country's traditional folklore and myths.
From a family saga steeped in the culture of Barbados to a political drama set in Spain's Basque Country, this season's premier fiction debuts are as diverse in their settings as they are in their ...approaches to narrative form. Information about several debut books is presented.
The Parable Book,/ by Per Olov Enquist, translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner, MacLehose Press, RRPPounds 17.99/ In this autobiographical tale of longing and loss, an ageing author recalls his ...encounter, aged 15, with a 51-year-old woman from Stockholm visiting his remote northern village. Fish Have No Feet: A Family History,/ by Jon Kalman Stefansson, translated by Philip Roughton, MacLehose Press, RRPPounds 14.99/ In this powerful family saga spanning three generations, Ari, a divorced poet-turned-publisher, returns to...
