Archipelago Books is a not-for-profit press devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature. In our first fifteen years, we have brought out over 170 books from more than 35 languages. We strive to find visionary international writers whom American readers might not otherwise encounter. We hope our translations will increase cultural exchange between readers, writers, thinkers, and educators across borders.

Featured Titles:

Love
Hanne Ørstavik
Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken
$17.00
Paperback, ebook
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0914671947; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-95-4
Pub date: February 13, 2018
5.75 x 7″

Love can change everything. And it does in this edgy, elegiac, and beautifully written novel . . . What you think will happen doesn’t—and what does breaks your heart.” — Kerri Arsenault, Oprah.com

Love is the story of a single mother, Vibeke, and her son Jon, who have just moved to a remote small town in the north of Norway. It’s the day before Jon’s birthday, but with concerns of her own, Vibeke has forgotten this. With a man on her mind, she ventures to the local library while Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club. From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter’s night, their experiences nevertheless linked in seamless narrative. The reader is privy to each character’s intimate thoughts as suspense builds and tragedy looms. Translator Martin Aitken has done a beautiful job of capturing the raw power, rhythms, and electricity of Ørstavik’s prose.

Hanne Ørstavik published the novel Cut in 1994 and embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then, the author has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.

Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul, and his translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.

The Farm
by Héctor Abad
Translated from Spanish by Anne McLean
$20
Paperback, ebook
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-914671-92-3; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-93-0
Pub date: April 17, 2018
7.5 x 6″

“Abad’s arresting novel (after the memoir Oblivion) tells the story of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains outside Medellín that has weathered guerrilla and paramilitary violence but whose future is anything but secure…a brilliant lesson in Colombian history, as it fluctuates between past, ‘nonexistent future, which is over for us or ending,’ and ‘the present, the here and now, in these few moments of life left to us.'” — Publisher’s Weekly

Pilar, Eva, and Antonio Ángel are the last heirs of La Oculta, a farm hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The land has survived several generations. It is the landscape of their happiest memories but it is also where they have had to face the siege of violence and terror, restlessness and flight.

In The Farm, Héctor Abad illuminates the vicissitudes of a family and of a people, as well as of the voices of these three siblings, recounting their loves, fears, desires, and hopes, all against a dazzling backdrop. We enter their lives at the moment when they are about to lose the paradise on which they built their dreams and their reality.

Héctor Abad is one of Colombia’s leading writers. Born in 1958, he grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy and journalism. In 1987, his father was murdered by Colombian paramilitaries, an event he reflected on 20 years later in Oblivion: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), which earned widespread critical acclaim as well as the WOLA-Duke Book Award. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy before returning to his homeland in 1987. Abad writes a weekly column for Colombia’s national newspaper El Espectador. The Farm won the 2015 Cálamo Prize in Spain and was shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Prize.

Anne McLean has translated works by Javier Cercas, Evelio Rosero, Juan Gabriel Vázquez, Ignacio Martinez de Pisón, Carmen Martín Gaite, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Héctor Abad, as well as Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, Diary of Andrés Fava and From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar. She has twice won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Backlist:

The Expedition to the Baobab Tree
Wilma Stockenström
Translated from Afrikaans by J.M. Coetzee
$18
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 9781935744924; ebook ISBN 978-1-935744-93-1
Pub date: April 2014
7.5 x 6″

“I’d love to read the entire novel to you, passage after passage because it’s not only the story of a woman who struggles her way to freedom, but someone through whose eyes we see a world of existential beauty beyond the boundaries of dispiriting struggle. This slim book takes a place high in my own pantheon of beautiful novels come to us out of Africa.” — Alan Cheuse, NPR

In the Presence of Absence
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon
$16
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 9781935744016; ebook ISBN 978-1-935744-65-8
Pub date: November 2011
6.75 x 6.25″

“[A] unique achievement . . . It offers costly wisdoms from a life journey, rendered in the opaque lyricism of Darwish’s poetry . . . His is the voice of dispossessed Palestine but its longings, including sheer lust, are universal. This book overflows with resonant lines and questions . . . It is a book for life.”  — The Independent

Gate of the Sun
by Elias Khoury
Translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies
$26 (Paperback)
Paperback, Hardcover, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-61-9; Hardcover 0-9763950-2-9; ebook 978-0-9826246-8-5
Pub date: January 2006
8 x 6”

“There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies’ sparely poetic translation, Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.” — New York Times Book Review

Dance on the Volcano
Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Translated from French by Kaiama L. Glover
$18
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-57-2; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-58-9
Pub date: January 10, 2017
6 x 7.75”

“Vieux-Chauvet’s novel is that rare gem that takes an ambitious scope and successfully captures the social and political turmoil of a country at war…those interested in Haitian history, deep explorations of social injustice, and courageous, determined heroines will find much to enjoy in Vieux-Chauvet’s masterly tale.” — Publishers Weekly

In Praise of Defeat: Selected Poems
Abdellatif Laâbi
Translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
$20
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-59-6; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-60-2
Pub date: January 17, 2017
6 x 7”

“Laâbi has always been interested in inviting his readers to imagine what it would look like for a society to publicly honor, rather than privately imprison, the poets responsible for unmaking its own language.” — Max Nelson, The Paris Review

The Birds
Tarjei Vesaas
Translated from Norwegian by Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud
$18
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914-671-20-6; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-21-3
Pub date: May 3, 2016
5.5 x 6.5″

“Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, The Birds — it is absolutely wonderful, the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard

Wayward Heroes
Halldór Laxness
Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
$20
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-09-1; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-10-7
Pub date: November 1, 2016
6 x 7″

“Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas’ shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.” — The Guardian

Map Drawn by a Spy
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Translated from Spanish by Mark Fried
$18
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-79-4; ebook ISBN 978-0-914671-79-4
Pub date: August 29, 2017
6 x 7”

“Infante leaves out no detail; it is meticulous, and sad, like the account of a prisoner from a concentration camp. It does not shy away from domestic life and its worries, or romance and its intrigues, and is at every moment so laid bare as to cause itself – and the reader – to bleed…Cabrera Infante’s most heartrending book.” — Juan Cruz, El Pais

The Waitress Was New
Dominique Fabre
Translated from French by Jordan Stump
$16.99
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 9780977857692; ebook ISBN 9781935744108
Pub date:  February 2008
5.5 x 6.5”

“The strong, intimate voice of this gentle, canny narrator continues to stay with us long after we reach the end of The Waitress Was New—what an engrossing, captivating tale, in Jordan Stump’s sensitive translation.” —Lydia Davis

Nest in the Bones: Stories
Antonio Di Benedetto
Translated from Spanish by Martina Broner
$18
Paperback, ebook
ISBN: 978-0-914671-72-5; ebook 978-0-914671-73-2
Pub date: May 23, 2017
6 x 7.5″

“In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly…Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders.” — Harvard Review