Five small presses are kicking off a shared, Zoom-centered, international book club today:
They are: Charco Press, Comma Press, Istros Books, Nordisk Books, and Peirene Press. All are publishers of fiction in translation, and, they write, “wanted to create an online space to read together and help us – and you – feel a little bit more connected.”
Each week, a different press will take over the group to lead a discussion of one of their books. There is one Arabic title on the initial list: Rana Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise, translated by Lissie Jaquette.
You can read (and listen to) more about that book here:
A Talk about Sudanese Short Stories and ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
Literary Playlist: Rania Mamoun’s ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
A Translated Excerpt from Rania Mamoun’s PEN-support-winning ‘Thirteen Months of Sunrise’
An Ever-so-short History of the ‘Complex, Capacious’ Sudanese Short Story
The meetings will be hosted by Peirene Press, held weekly via Zoom, every Thursday at 8pm GMT. To register your interest, you can subscribe to the book-club mailing list, where they promise to send you more information on which books will be featured, as well as the link to the Zoom meetings. They’ll also be using the hashtag #virtualbookclub.
Peirene will be leading the first meeting, today, on The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, tr. Jamie Bulloch.
The full list:
Week 1: The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, tr. Jamie Bulloch (German), published by Peirene Press
Week 2: Where The Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko, tr. Polly Barton (Japanese), published by Tilted Axis Press
Week 3: Fate by Jorge Consiglio, tr. Carolina Orloff & Fionn Petch (Spanish – Argentina), published by Charco Press
Week 4: Restless by Kenneth Moe, tr. Alison McCullough (Norwegian), published by Nordisk Books
Week 5: Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, tr. Elisabeth Jacquette (Arabic – Sudan), published by Comma Press
Week 6: Singer in the Night by Olja Savičević, tr. Celia Hawkesworth (Croatian), published by Istros Books
