Dom Quixote (Portugal) will publish 'The Destitutes of Lodz', by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Published this year in Sweden by Albert Bonniers, this novel was one of the hist of last Frankfurt Book Fair and it recently won the August Prize, awarded by the Swedish Booksellers Association. 

The jury's motivation was as follows:

"With this collective novel, Steve Sem-Sandberg attends to a specific chapter in the annals of World War II: the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz (west of Warsaw), its origin, organisation and heartbreaking conditions under Nazi supervision. It is a story that is told after all the tears have dried, depicted in an almost dry and unsentimental style, a balancing act between fact and fiction that with a basis in the (authentic) Ghetto Chronicles 1941-44, portrays a series of individual destinies with strong integrity, also when they waver or fail".

SalmaiaLit handles Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil) and Catalan Languages rights. We are happy that (with this last deal in Portugal) we have managed to get deals with good publishers in all these territories.

All other rights are handled from Sweden by Joakim Hansson at Nordin Agency. Up to now, the following publishers have already acquired rights:

Brazil (Companhia das Letras), Canada (Anansi), Catalonia (La Campana), Czech Republic (Paseka), Denmark (Gyldendal), Finland (Like) France (Robert Laffont), Germany (Klett-Cotta), Greece (Patakis), Israel (Kinneret), Italy (Marsilio Editore), The Netherlands (Ambo Anthos), Norway (Aschehoug), Poland (Wydawnictwo Literackie), Portugal (Dom Quixote), Russia (Corpus), Spain (Literatura Mondadori/ RHM Group), UK (Faber & Faber), USA (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux).

El filo de la hierba (The Edge of Grass), by Harkaitz Cano is already published in Greece

Konidaris Publications has already published the Greek edition of Harkaitz Cano's 'The Edge of Grass', a short Modernist fable set in New York with Adolf Hitler and Charles Chaplin as main characters.

Despite his youth, Harkaitz Cano (b. 1975) is consolidated as one of the best contemporary Basque writers. His mixture of modernism, poetical insight and an accurate narrative rhythm comes at equal parts from the classics of literature, the comics, the cinema and the music. His works, with echoes of Raymond Carver and Paul Auster, have received important awards such as the 2005 Critics Award (for his collection of short stories Neguzko zirkua –Winter Circus). His last published novel, El filo de la hierba (The Edge of Grass) has received the Euskadi Award for Literature.

The hypothesis of the Nazis invading the USA is nothing new in literature and it has fascinated authors such as Philip Roth in The Plot Against America or, even before him, Philip K. Dick in his masterpiece The Man in the High Castle. Harkaitz Cano departs from this premise to build a short and poignant allegoric story about freedom. 

The novel begins with Hitler on board of a German battleship en route to New York. Far away from dying in his bunker in 1945, the Führer has won World War II. After the conquest of Europe, his next objective is New York, and afterwards America. The British actor and filmmaker Charles Chaplin, tortured and as a prisoner of the Führer, is also a passenger of that ship. He is a victim of Hitler’s rage in revenge for his film The Great Dictator. 

Many years before, in 1886, a Frenchman called Olivier Legrand travelled as a stowaway in the same ship that transported the Statue of Liberty from France to New York. The statue, of 225 tons of weight, was made out of 300 pieces that were packed in more than 200 cases. The only piece that wasn’t packed in a case was the crown of the Statue, inside of which Olivier hid during the four weeks of the journey through the Atlantic ocean.

El filo de la hierba interlocks between the lives of Chaplin and Legrand until they both meet each other in a New York occupied by the Nazis (Chaplin had managed to escape but is severily ill) and the old Frenchman, who is now almost 90 years old, decides to hide Chaplin in his small appartment, where the actor will slowly recover. From this moment on, with Wagner’s music sounding all over the city and with Hitler trying to take control over Hollywood, the reader will be kept on tenterhooks until the end of the novel.

As the title suggests, this short novel is just like the flexible and soft grass. However, its edge is sharp as a knife.

The new novel by Laura Fernández to be published by Seix Barral

We are closing the year with good news for one of our represented authors: Laura Fernández. World Spanish rights of her new novel, provisionally entitled 'Wendolin Kramer', have been acquired by Seix Barral, the Spanish publishing house of authors such as Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, Isaac Rosa, Gioconda Belli, Eduardo Mendoza, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón or Antonio Muñoz Molina. 

The forthcoming publication of ‘Wendolin Kramer’ by Seix Barral confirms the twist to first division of literature of Laura Fernández, an original and witty author with an unusually funny voice who declares herself an admirer of other writers such as Brautigan, Fante or Vonnegut.

WENDOLIN KRAMER.
A Novel of Superheroes, Villains and Depressed Dogs
By Laura Fernández

Wendolin Kramer is not a nobody. She is Super Girl. Or that’s what she believes. She keeps a suit with a cap in her closet (a yellow cap, by the way) and waits for Kirk Cameron to reply to her lettlers. When she doesn’t know what to do, she plays to sell mail-order furniture to his dog Earl, who is depressed because he has lost ‘The Golden Bone’.

Earl is a peculiar pink rusty, and he is the Kramers’ main source of income. He wins all dog-beauty contests. All but the last one... Why? Don Garcia, a dog psychologist addicted to impossible love affairs, believes it is Oliver’s fault. Oliver is the cat that, apparently, Earl is dating.

Wendolin is almost 30 and keeps believing she is Super Girl. She lives at her parents home, in a putird narrow street in the centre of a filthy but exciting Barcelona. She has set an office in her bedroom and looks forward to her first real case.

And the real case finally arrives: a weird man called Strawberry Milkshake asks her to find out what Francis Domino, a private investigator who was a gigolo and afterwards a writer of romance novels, will be doing next saturday night. Without realising Wendolin embarks herself in an adventure that will change her life forever and will unveil the most hidden secrets about Vendolin Woolfin, a cult and bestseller author...

*

Laura Fernández (Terrassa, Barcelona, 1981) is a journalist of the Spanish newspaper ‘El Mundo’. She also contributes with articles and interviews to different magazines such as Mondo Sonoro, Qué Leer, Go-Mag or Kaos Magazine. Up to date she had published two novels: ‘Dos y dos son cinco’ (Ediciones Barataria, 2006) and ‘Bienvenidos a Welcome’ (Elipsis Ediciones 2008). She also published a short story in the anthology ‘La lista negra: Los nuevos culpables de policial español’ (Salto de Página, 2009), an anthology devoted to new Spanish crime writers. In January 2010 the prestigious literary magazine Quimera will publish a short story by her.

Quotes from the Spanish media about Bienvenidos a Welcome, by Laura Fernández:

* En registro de farsa panorámica desmadrada, construye con humor el doble novelesco de una más bien histérica ciudad de nuestro tiempo sometida a las peores pesadillas mediáticas.

Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, ‘Culturas/La Vanguardia’

* Admiradora de John Fante, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Chandler o Stephen King, Fernández ha conseguido destilar lo mejor de todos estos autores en una farsa por la que se pasean actores, detectives, monstruos, actrices, políticos, incluso un ‘guest star’ de la talla de Dios.

Carlos Sala, ‘La Razón’

* Fernández debuta con una hilarante y satírica novela // La observación de la realidad a través del tamiz de la hipérbole delirante es su método. Y con el aliciente de un humor absurdo al estilo de Richard Brautigan o Kurt Vonnegut, el resultado no tiene desperdicio.

Matías Néspolo, El Mundo

* Es un mundo de cultura pop, de cómics y series de televisión, de plástico y vinilo, de celofán y cromos. Y la gracias es convertir todo ello en el mejor elemento para deconstruir y criticar una época, ésta que vivimos, en la que llegar a fin de mes es un milagro.

Víctor Fernández, La Razón

* En ese loco mundo nada es lo que parece a primera vista. Más de sesenta esperpénticos personajes pueblan un universo fantástico y sorprendente que, en realidad, no es más que la exageración de situacionesa las que asistimos cada día, ya sea presencialmente o a través de los medios de comunicación.

Diario de Terrassa

* Toda una travesura galáctica que se lee como una peli de aventuras de los 80. // Fresca, trepidante y tan pulp como satírica, Bienvenidos a Welcome es una estupenda anomalía dentro del soso panorama literario español.

Leticia Blanco, Go-Mag

* Novela negra y paródica, de ritmo enloquecido y gesto entrañable. // Una abigarrada obra coral de múltiples y polimórficas influencias, desde la novela pulp de detectives hasta la novela pulp de ciencia ficción, pasando por las melancolías y los sueños truncados de los grandes héroes de John Fante. 

Milo J. Krmpotic, Qué Leer