Will Evans: Photo by Rasy Ran
Remember our story in February about Hollywood Heights neighbor Will Evans, who founded Deep Vellum Publishing, a nonprofit publishing house in Deep Ellum? In short, Evans is passionate about publishing books by foreign authors, which was the inspiration behind why he founded Deep Vellum in 2013.
If you liked that story, particularly Evans’ list of favorite foreign literature, then you might like to know that Deep Vellum Publishing just released a list of six books it plans to publish, starting this fall.
The first, to be released in September, is “Tram 83” by Fiston Mwanza Mujila from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was translated from French by Roland Glasser. “Tram 83” is about a modern African gold rush that’s “as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic,” Evans describes. It centers around two friends who gather “in the only nightclub in a war-torn city-state, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities.”
The second, to be released in October, is “Home” by Leila S. Chudori from Indonesia. It was translated from the Bahasa Indonesia by John H. McGlynn. Evans describes it as “an epic novel of family sagas, exile, and love at first sight, with Indonesia’s 20th century political turmoil in the background, featuring a spicy mixture of love and food and the ability to withstand and rise above political repression, set between Paris and Jakarta in the time between Suharto’s rise to power in 1965 and fall in 1998.”
The third, to be released in November, is “Target in the Night” by Ricardo Piglia from Argentina, translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman. It is “a passionate political and psychological thriller in which the madness of the detective, a retired police captain, is integral to his solving mysteries,” Evans says. “This intense and tragic family history, with echoes of King Lear, set in a small town in the Argentinean Pampas features the return of Emilio Renzi, one of the greatest characters in recent Argentinean literature.”
Then in January 2016, the fourth to be released is “The Pirate” by Jón Gnarr from Iceland, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith: “The second volume in Gnarr’s childhood trilogy of memoir-novels. Poor young Jón is bullied relentlessly until he discovers the Sex Pistols and Prince Kropotkin. Even though the narrative is full of humor, it is both sincere and heartbreaking as the author’s journey through the Icelandic educational system was painful and full of conflict — both mentally and physically.”
The fifth to be released in February is “Seeing Red” by Lina Meruane from Chile, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. It’s an autobiographical novel that “describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind,” Evans says. “It charts her journey through hospitals and increased dependency on those closest to her to cope. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, science, and human relationships.”
In March, the sixth book, “La Superba” by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer from Netherlands, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. Evans says “La Superba” is a “Rabelaisian stylistic tour-de-force set in Genoa, the labyrinthine port city (nicknamed “la Superba”) where the author has lived for the last six years. Migration, legal and illegal, is the central theme of this autobiographical novel about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side in a mysterious and exotic Old World city.”
