A collection of nineteenth-century folklore-infused tales of Jewish life in Prague.
 
Trained in philosophy and medicine, the writer, translator, scholar, and political and cultural activist Siegfried Kapper (1821–1879) devoted significant effort to the advancement of Jewish culture in Bohemia, Jewish emancipation, and to the commitment of Jews to contemporary Czech society. The three stories in this collection, which first appeared in the press in the 1840s and were posthumously published as a collection at the end of the century, offer a Romantic and folkloric vision of Jewish culture in Prague.

The first story, “Genenda,” displays Kapper’s operatic eye for detail and drama with its account of a dutiful rabbi’s daughter being swept away by a dashing young man, a Christian nobleman disguised as a Jew. “The Curious Guest” is an intricate tale of a quest for wisdom and power. The final story, “Glowing Coals,” is a supernatural tale of romantic desire and revenge, displaying Kapper’s skill at deploying the tropes of folklore for dramatic literary effect. The collection not only provides a colorful snapshot of nineteenth-century Czech-Jewish culture but also resonates with universal human themes that transcend a single national experience.

They Die Strangers, a novella and thirteen short stories, is the first full-length work of the distinguished Yemeni writer Mohammad Abdul-Wali to appear in English. Abdul-Wali died tragically in an aviation accident, and his stories were collected after his death by the translators Abubaker Bagader and Deborah Akers.

Abdul-Wali was born in Ethiopia of Arab Yemeni parents. His stories, filled with nostalgia and the bitterness of exile, deal with the common experiences of Yemenis like himself who are caught between cultures by the displacements of civil war or labor migration. His characters include women left behind, children raised without fathers, and men returning home after years of absence. He explores the human condition through the eyes of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is particularly sympathetic to the plight of women.

Through this translation of As Três Marias the literary achievements of Rachel de Queiroz may at last be judged and appreciated by the English-reading public. Since none of her four novels has previously been translated into English, The Three Marias will be, for many non-Brazilians, an introduction to this nationally known South American author whose books have been widely praised for their artistic merits. Her literary works are colored by her projected personality, by an intense feeling for her own people, by an omnipresent social consciousness, and by personal experiences in the arid backlands of her native state of Ceará.

Basing this story on certain of her own recollections from the nineteen-twenties, Rachel de Queiroz tells of a girl growing up in the seaport town of Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. Fred P. Ellison, whose special field is Brazilian and Spanish-American literature, has captured in his translation the author's graceful style and simplicity of language, and has successfully retained the perspective of an idealistic and gradually maturing girl.

A vision of late-twentieth-century Prague from an acclaimed Czech novelist.
 
In late 1992, three years after the Velvet Revolution and as Czechoslovakia is about to dissolve into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, choreographer and dancer Leonora Marty, who fled the Communist state decades earlier, has returned to Prague. Having wrapped up her ballet of The Makropulos Affair, the famous dancer meets old classmates, wanders the city through crowds of tourists, and visits the most obscure and unvisited museums. When she is approached by Thomas Asperger, a descendant of ethnic Germans driven from Czechoslovakia after World War II, she must confront three relationships—her relationship with the city of her youth, her homeland’s relationship with its past, and her new romance with this German admirer.

Written in German and published in 1995, by an author whose life mirrored her protagonist’s, the novel provides a cultural tour of Prague. Employing a style as influenced by the operas of Leoš Janácek as the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Transfigured Night is a masterpiece of Czech literature, showing that the culture of this nation comes in a variety of tongues.
 
 

In these three deeply observed novellas, award-winning author David Nikki Crouse dramatizes the lives of women living in Interior Alaska. Each novella acts as an extended meditation on grief, loss, and the nature of imagination. Crouse’s usual storytelling gifts are on full display here, but the darkness found in past short story collections is balanced by images of stark beauty. In “Misfortune and Its Double,” a woman remembers—and manufactures—the story of an arduous cross-country drive that might not be entirely true. “A Rough Map of the Interior” follows a woman’s life from suicide attempt to hospitalization to a new kind of self-knowledge, and “Asmodeus Speaks” lingers on a Dungeon and Dragons roleplaying game in remote Fairbanks and its disruption when one of its players, a young Yupik man, goes missing.
 
While Crouse’s prize-winning collection of short fiction The Man Back There offered up insights into a kind of self-destructive masculinity, these novellas now sensitively and persuasively capture the inner landscapes of women struggling with grief and isolation. Trouble Will Save You is a unique and fully realized work from a keenly empathetic writer.
 
Praise for The Man Back There:
“In this virtuoso collection of stories, David Crouse guides us directly to where the shadow lies—the disorienting loss, the surprising heartache, the forgotten wound—those inevitable areas of the psyche we all share and through which only truth, illuminated with a such a light touch here, can deliver us; The Man Back There is the work of the real thing.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog
 
“I chose these stories because they made me feel. I felt the characters like I would feel a stranger in a room or on a bus with me, with an irrational sympathy more animal than moral in its nature.”
—Mary Gaitskill, 2007 Mary McCarthy Prize judge