{"title":"ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"eastbound","title":"Eastbound","description":"** SELECTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS 1 OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR **\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e** INCLUDED ON THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 **\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At The New York Times Book Review, I think it's fair to say we were dazzled by the way the author creates . . . a miniature masterpiece of narrative tension and compression” – Emily Eakin, \"The Book Review\" podcast\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRacing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975589191837,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781953861504.jpg?v=1746650999"},{"product_id":"a-practical-guide-to-levitation-stories","title":"A Practical Guide to Levitation","description":"A luminous collection of dryly humorous stories that revel in the surreal and fantastic, from the pen of José Eduardo Agualusa, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerfect for readers of Haruki Murakami, Julio Cortázar, and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVividly translated into English for the first time by long-time Agualusa collaborator Daniel Hahn, the jewel-like tales gathered in this collection are an exuberant celebration of story-telling in all its various forms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the sands of Itamaracá, an old fisherman dreams of fish: shad in the morning, when the water’s smooth and silvery, the Atlantic tarpon after it rains, and a jack when the sea goes blue. Elsewhere, Borges sulks away in a plantation of neverending banana tree, and the president of the United States wakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith “the lyrical experimentalism and unabashed weirdness of the surrealist” (The Arts Desk), Agualusaoffers a sly wink to the fictional quality inherent in all narratives, whether they’re fishermen’s tales, national histories, or the stories we tell ourselves.","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45975632871581,"sku":null,"price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/9781953861627.jpg?v=1746650995"},{"product_id":"a-question-of-belonging-cronicas","title":"A Question of Belonging","description":"\"An exemplary compendium of brief glimpses into the quotidian concerns of everyday South Americans . . . [that] exudes the author’s characteristically bright insight and sense of attentive amusement.\" – Kirkus Reviews, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e25 Crónicas – uniquely Latin American short stories – from a master of the form, a star heralded alongside Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez for blending insight, honesty, and humor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUhart reinvigorates our desire to connect with other people, to love the world, to laugh in the face of bad intentions, and to look again, more closely: from lapwings, road-side pedicures, and the overheard conversations of nurses and their patients, to Goethe and the work of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It was a year of great discovery for me, learning about these people and their homes,” Hebe Uhart writes in the opening story of A Question of Belonging, a collection of texts that traverse Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Spain, and beyond. Discoveries sprout and flower throughout Uhart’s oeuvre, but nowhere more so than in her crónicas, Uhart’s preferred method of storytelling by the end of her life. For Uhart, the crónica meant going outside, meeting others. It also allowed the mingling of precise, factual reportage and the slanted, symbolic narrative power of literature.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere, Uhart opens the door on all kinds of people. We meet an eccentric priest who conducts experiments down by the riverside hoping to land on a cure for cancer; a queenly (read: beautiful and relentlessly indolent) teenage girl; a cacique of the Pueblo Nación Charrúa clan, who tells her of indigenous customs and histories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe writes with characteristic slyness. 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Adopted by the Francoeurs, Hugues remains an outsider in his semi-family. At the same time, Habéké is adopted by a Canadian family and brought to Quebec after his own family dies of famine in Ethiopia. On the margins of their small town, the boys become sworn brothers, searching for their roots, desperate to return to exile, to a paradise called Ityopia.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eNarrated by the bold and imaginative voice of Hugues, Sylvain Trudel’s prize-winning debut novel is at times serious and at times fantastical. In their child’s world, where Hugues and Habéké haven’t yet learned the prejudices of adults, they embark on adventures, digging holes to China and building fantastical contraptions to take them to far off places, like their hero, explorer Roald Amundsen.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"PRH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46663837057181,"sku":null,"price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/8783\/5037\/files\/harmattan.jpg?v=1746650987"},{"product_id":"mafalda","title":"Mafalda","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eIntroducing the South American comic sensation starring a hilarious 6-year-old whose spunky self-confidence will inspire budding activists and curious middle grade readers along with adult fans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMafalda may be small—but her hopes for the world are as big as her heart!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSix-year-old Mafalda loves democracy and hates soup. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat democratic sector do cats fall into?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e she asks, then unfurls a toilet paper red carpet and gives her very own presidential address. Mafalda’s precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her. Dissident and rebellious, she refuses to abandon the world to her parents’ generation, who seem so lost. Alongside the irascible Mafalda, readers will meet her eclectic group of playmates: dreamy Felipe and gossipy Susanita, young-capitalist Manolito and rebellious Miguelito. Quino’s bright irony and intelligence bring the streets and neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to life.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eYou can clearly see Mafalda is small, but her hopes for the world and her heart are huge and as sincere as can be. Generations of readers have discovered themselves in Mafalda, and learned to question, rebel, and hope. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSince Quino first drew her in the early 1960s, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eMafalda\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e has captured public imagination in Latin America and beyond. 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He’s strolling down the glinting avenues of Lima, branches crowning overhead, when he hears someone snickering from the shadows. He wanders away in concentric circles, as if along a spider web, and wakes in a sweaty torment. Nakamatsu sleepwalks his way toward sublime disintegration.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eKatzuo is at sea after being forced out of his job as a literature professor without warning. He retreats into flânerie, musing with imaginary interlocuters, roaming the streets, and reciting the poems of Martín Adán. Slowly, to the “steady beat of his reptilian feet,” Nakamatsu begins to arrange his muted ceremony of farewell. He conjures his smiling wife Keiko and wonders how he lost his Japanese community with her death. With a certain electric lunacy, he spruces himself up with a pinstripe tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and wooden cane, taking on the costume of a man he knew as a child, hoping to grasp that man’s tenacious Japanese identity.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLike a logic puzzle, \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eEnlightenment\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003ecalibrates Augusto Higa Oshiro’s own entangled identity. 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From this singular event arises a cascade of memories, regrets, and longings: the buried sensations of a whole lifetime, condensed and released. We hear of life during occupation, the scarcities of a childhood lived under the sign of war—and fragments of a home’s sounds and scents (the private speech of mothers and fathers, the treasures of coffee, raisins, almonds, and plums). There are loves unrequited and fulfilled, landscapes of winter and spring, old jobs and old friends, all flowing together.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWiesław Myśliwski’s latest novel is a personal epic written on the smallest scale. Its narrator, a medieval historian in his latter years, lives surrounded by images of the past. From within this wandering mind, Myśliwski has composed his own ode to lost time, a nonlinear, chameleonic meditation on a half-century of Polish life as it does not appear in the historical record. 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