Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
New Directions | 2008
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A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases ("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger -- after all, the murderers are the very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.

Gate of the Sun - Elias Khoury

Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
Archipelago Books | 2006

Gate of the Sun is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. Through them, we enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many others— into stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love. Khalil, like Elias Khoury, is a truth collector, trying to make sense of the fragments of stories that have been told to him. Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people.

A Dream in Polar Fog - Yuri Rytkheu A Dream in Polar Fog is at once a cross-cultural journey, an ethnographic chronicle of the Chukchi people, and a politically and emotionally charged Arctic adventure story. It is the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who is left behind by his ship, stranded on the northeastern tip of Siberia. It is the story of one native Siberian community that adopts a wounded stranger and teaches him to live as a true human being. Over time, John comes to know his new companions as a real people who share the best and worst of human traits with his own kind. Tragedy strikes, and wounds are healed with compassion and honesty as tensions rise and fall. Rytkheu's empathy, humor, and provocative voice guide us across the magnificent landscape of the North and reveal all the complexity and beauty of a vanishing world.

Midnight's Gate - Bei Dao Bei Dao has gained international acclaim over the last decade for his haunting interior poetic landscapes; his poetry is translated and published in some twenty-five languages around the world. Now, in Midnight's Gate, Bei Dao redefines the essay form with the same elliptical precision of his poetry, but with an openness and humor that complements the complexity of his poems. The twenty essays of Midnight's Gate form a travelogue of a poet who has lived in seven countries since his exile from China in 1989. The work carries us from Palestine to Sacramento. At one point we are led into a basement in Paris for a production of Gorky's Lower Depths; the next moment we are in the mountains of China, where Bei Dao worked for eleven years as a concrete mixer and ironworker. The subjective experience deepens and multiplies in these essays, filled with the stories of ordinary Chinese immigrants, as well as those of literary, artistic, and political figures.