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Karen Duve

The year is 2031 and all the dire predictions of environmentalists are coming true: extreme weather bringing storms, floods and intense heat; and the genetically modified 'killer rape' is rampant everywhere. A rejuvenation pill has been developed but no one is going to enjoy eternal youth for long: the experts forecast that the world's ecosystems will collapse in five years' time.
Women have taken over power to try and save the world from the mess men have got it in. But there is opposition in the form of the MASCULO movement that is aiming to reassert male power by violent means if necessary. At the same time apocalyptic sects are proliferating.
Sebastian, the central figure in this novel, appears to be one of the good guys, a Greenpeace activist in his youth, he now has an important position in the Democracy Centre. But in his private life he is attempting to restore his male pride: for the last two years he has kept his wife locked up in the cellar. But his attempts to do away with her so he can live with his new love lead to disaster.
A hugely entertaining novel about feminism, masculinity and the battle between the sexes for domination which is full of grotesque humour and highly-charged eroticism.

Dedalus

Dedalus Europe 2018

The Prepper Room

Mike Mitchell

Vladimir Sharov

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play Christ. They are persecuted, arrested, displaced, and ultimately replaced by their own children. Yet the rehearsals continue... A stunning reflection on art, history, religion and national identity, Rehearsals is the seminal work in the unique oeuvre of Vladimir Sharov, Russian Booker Prize winner (2014) and author of Before & During (Read Russia award for best translation, 2015).
'The clarity and directness of Sharov's prose - wonderfully rendered by Oliver Ready - are disconcerting, almost hallucinatory. His writing is at times funny, at times so piercingly moving, so brimful of unassuaged sorrow, that it causes a double-take. How did I get here? is a question his reader will likely ask gain and again.'
Rachel Polonsky, New York Review of Books

The Rehearsals

Oliver Ready

Take Six is a celebration of six remarkable Portuguese women writers: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Agustina Bessa-Luís, Maria Judite de Carvalho, Hélia Correia, Teolinda Gersão and Lídia Jorge.
They are all past mistresses of the short story form, and their subject matter ranges from finding one's inner fox to a failed suicide attempt to a grandmother and grandson battling the wind on a beach. Stories and styles are all very different, but what the writers have in common is their ability to take everyday life and look at it afresh, so that even a trip on a ferry or an encounter with a stranger or a child's attempt to please her father become imbued with mystery and humour and sometimes tragedy. Relatively few women writers are translated into English, and this anthology is an attempt to rectify that imbalance and to introduce readers to some truly captivating tales from Portugal.

Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers

Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

This is the first English translation of The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui, a picaresque novel in which the hero, a magical little boy, goes in search not of his fortune but of knowledge, growing both wiser and possibly sadder in the process.
'In his dedication, Ferlosio describes this exquisite fantasy novel, first published in 1952 and now beautifully translated into English as a 'story full of true lies.' Much honored in his native Spain, Ferlosio is a fabulist comparable to Jorge Borges and Italo Calvino, as well as Joan Miro and Salvador Dali. Cervantes comes to mind. Ferlosio's prose is effortlessly evocative. A chair puts down roots and sprouts 'a few green branches and some cherries,' while a paint-absorbing tree becomes a 'marvelous botanical harlequin.' Later, Alfanhui sets off on a tour of Castile, meeting his aged grandmother 'who incubated chicks in her lap and had a vine trellis of muscatel grapes and who never died.' This is a haunting adult reverie on life and beauty and as such will appeal to discriminating readers.' Starred review in Publisher's Weekly

The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhui

Margaret Jull Costa

This anthology illustrates the evolution of Russian women's writing over the 20th century. It wasn't until the 1900s that women authors finally made a notable breakthrough on the Russian literary scene. Despite a brilliant start further development of women's writing in Russia was crudely interrupted by Soviet censorship and only resumed after the downfall of the USSR. Whereas critics unanimously recognise the greatness of such literary stars as Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, opinions differ about other writers such as Nadezhda Teffi and Lydia Ginzburg who reached wide readerships only in the 1990s, when most of the formerly banned books were published.
Mid-century, women were almost invisible in Russian literature, but world-famous authors like Ludmila Ulitskaya, Galina Scherbakova, and Svetlana Alexiyevich were still writing. Latterly women writers such as Olga Slavnikova, Irina Muravyova, and Margarita Khemlin increasingly dominated publishing programmes.
Contents
Introduction by Natasha Perova
1. Solovki and Kishmish by Nadezhda Teffi, translated by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler.
2. My Jobs by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Jamey Gambrell.
3. Autobiographical Sketches by Anna Akhmatova,translated by Andrew Bromfield.
4. Conscience Deluded by Lydia Ginzburg, translated by Boris Dralyuk.
5. Lady with the Dog by Galina Scherbakova, translated by Ilona Chavasse.
6. The Gift Not Made by Human Hand by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Arch Tait.
7. Landscape of Loneliness : Three Voices by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by, Joanne Turnbull.
8. The Stone Guest by Olga Slavnikova, translated by Marian Schwartz.
9. Philemon and Baucis by Irina Muravyova, tanslated by John Dewey.
10. Such a Girl by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Joanne Turnbull.
11. Jewish Woman Farewell by Margarita Khemlin, translated by Arch Tait.