What a joy to see Mafalda in the pages of the latest New Yorker! Daniel Alarcón beautifully traces Mafalda’s bighearted politics that speak directly to crises we face today.
“She was a little girl who read the newspaper and had opinions on current events. She cornered her parents with uncomfortable, often bewildering questions, and approached life with bemusement, pondering the mediocrity of the adults crafting the world she would inherit, people who, for the most part, disappointed her but whom she was still generous enough to love."
Order your very own Mafalda from our Elsewhere or Archipelago site ♥️
Coming this September.
Jérôme Lindon is a meditation on the friendship and working relationship between Jean Echenoz and his editor, the publisher of Les Editions de Minuit, Jerome Lindon. Lindon published the work of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Robbe-Grillet, among so many other giants. This voice-driven ramble recounts in candid glimpses Echenoz’s encounters with his publisher over a period of twenty years. Echenoz’s spare, lyrical, and playful descriptions of early-morning phone calls and exchanges over lunch illuminate Lindon’s impulsiveness and impatience, his matter-of-fact generosity, and the humanity beneath his gruff exterior. Echenoz lets us in on how his own literary path was shaped by Jerome Lindon’s belief in him and explores the deep bonds between a writer and his publisher. A tender tribute.
If you’re a reviewer, we’ve got galleys to share 💙
Cover drawing by @cameronsaltsman
Available today is our latest novel from Colombian master Héctor Abad, whose prose Dwight Garner has described as “elastic and alive.” In Anne McLean’s immersive translation, we meet the unconventional, art-obsessed Córdoba, a priest “as devoted to film and music as he is to God” in Krista Cerezo’s @wwborders review.
Out now: Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis, translated from the Italian by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart. A graceful (and bilingual!) collection that feels particularly lucent, insistent, searching and direct.
Last Stops of the Night Journey by Milo De Angelis is a profound and haunting exploration of memory, mortality, and the human condition. Drawing from his decades of teaching in a high-security prison and his encounters with figures and shadows of the past, De Angelis crafts a forensic accounting, where love, loss, exile, and redemption intertwine. — Peter Gizzi @p.g.gizzi
Read excerpts in The Brooklyn Rail’s April issue and in Bomb’s Spring 2026 issue.
@brooklynrail@bombmag
Three Archipelago excerpts in the latest @brooklynrail . Thank you @willchance for the beautiful editor’s notes.
On The Monroe Girls: “As in the work of Bacon, Volodine’s fundamental materials seem to carry some kind of psychic weight. Can one describe hell in a non-pejorative sense, as a blurring between the living and the dead? If so, this seems to be the territory Volodine is mapping, which I recommend following closely.”
On The Serpent of Stars: “The Serpent of Stars will surprisingly remind one most of a horror-free Blood Meridian, where shepherds are mystical heroes and approached with an apprentice’s trepidation and deference. This is a work of great power and joy.”
Minna Zallman Proctor’s impeccable translation of Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues has been awarded the PEN Translation Prize!
From the judges’ citation: “Minna Zallman Proctor’s vigorous retranslation . . . stands out from a superb shortlist as a brilliant meditation on, as well as in, translation. Pavese’s moving book neither retells Greek myths nor simply gives a new spin on the old stories: it draws on those myths, as though drawing water from an inexhaustible well.”
Our congratulations to Minna 💛
Three new reprints on our desk today.
Jean Giono’s The Serpent of the Stars, translated by Jody Gladding
“I read The Serpent of the Stars in one gulp sitting in the car in the bookstore parking lot, my baby asleep, my blood on fire . . . It has become a talisman for me. Everything is connected and yet unknowable.” —from Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones
Julio Cortázar’s Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, translated by Anne McLean
“Not to read Cortázar is a serious invisible disease, which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder . . . and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair.” —Pablo Neruda
Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s A Useless Man, translated by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely
“Reading these stories feels like finding secret doors inside of poems. Little moments open out into corridors of narrative, leading to effects and endings that are consistently both gentle and cutting, simultaneously honest and surprising.” —Rivka Galchen
Each available (at last) for purchase on our site 🌹
I was utterly spellbound by Birgitta Trotzig’s novel Queen, recently published by @archipelagobooks (US) and @faberbooks (UK). Every paragraph was a poem, impossible without the extraordinary skill and intuition of translator @saskia.vogel
lots of love to @kismet_mag for making space for the strange, the mystical, the divine!
link in bio or go visit Kismet 🪨
The first in a series of seven, Xiong Liang’s Lost in Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, introduces us to a daring young girl named Little Yu. When Little Yu happens upon an enchanted forest on her last day in the countryside, it’s the towering trees and mystical lichen that beckon her inside. 🍃
“She enters the wilderness with curiosity, not fear, and soon befriends the unique forest dwellers guarding their home. Embarking on a fantastical journey that recalls elements of Lewis Carroll and Hayao Miyazaki, Little Yu must rely on instinct—and help from her mystical new friends—to overcome obstacles and return home.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
Out from Archipelago’s children’s book imprint @elsewhere.editions this spring!
