Read your way around the world
Book
from Italy
Distant Fathers
This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre’s native Latvia during the 1920s and ’30s and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father—a Jew who...
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from Syria
Roundabout of Death
Set in Aleppo in 2012, when everyday life was metronomically punctuated by bombing, Roundabout of Death offers powerful witness to the violence that obliterated the ancient city’s rich layers of history, its neighborhoods and medieval and Ottoman landmarks. The novel is told from the perspective...
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from Israel
The Drive
This searing novel tells the journey of a young Israeli soldier at the breaking point, unable to continue carrying out his military service, yet terrified of the consequences of leaving the army. As the soldier and his father embark on a lengthy drive to meet...
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from Israel
And the Bride Closed the Door
A young bride shuts herself up in a bedroom on her wedding day, refusing to get married. In this moving and humorous look at contemporary Israel and the chaotic ups and downs of love everywhere, her family gathers outside the locked door, not knowing what to do. The...
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from France
Exposed
A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait. Possibly in the nude. Such...
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from The Netherlands
Sleepless Night
The grande dame of Dutch literature recounts a story of romance and death punctuated by a midnight baking ritual.
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from Russia
The Goose Fritz
This revelatory novel shows why Karl Ove Knausgaard has likened its celebrated Russian author to an “indomitable … animal that won’t let go of something when it gets its teeth into it.” The book tells the story of a young Russian named Kirill, the sole...
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from Switzerland
Allmen and the Pink Diamond
An unimaginably valuable pink diamond has gone missing and a mysterious Russian residing in Switzerland is suspected of having made off with the treasured jewel. But the investigative duo of Johann Friedrich von Allmen and his Guatemalan butler Carlos are on the case. Their search...
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from Austria, Germany, Switzerland
A Very German Christmas
The fifth volume in our popular Very Christmas series, this collection brings together traditional and contemporary holiday stories from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. You’ll find classic works by the Brothers Grimm, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Joseph...
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from Greece
What’s Left of the Night
A spellbinding novel based on the visit to Paris of C.P. Cavafy, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, filled with lyrical observations and infused with erotic desire.
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from France
The Eye
It’s a rare and secret profession, comprising a few dozen people around the world equipped with a mysterious mixture of knowledge and innate sensibility. Summoned to Swiss bank vaults, Fifth Avenue apartments, and Tokyo storerooms, they are entrusted by collectors, dealers, and museums to decide...
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from Switzerland
Allmen and the Dragonflies
A thrilling art heist escapade that evokes a world of European high culture and luxury, while plumbing the vicissitudes of less exalted human foibles and obsessions.
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from Italy
Neapolitan Chronicles
A masterful and gripping classic of European literature that inspired Elena Ferrante's depiction of Naples in her bestselling novels.
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from Italy
The Animal Gazer
The hypnotic tale of a masterful sculptor increasingly obsessed with animals as he and Europe teeter on the brink of the World War One.
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from France
The Madeleine Project
A young woman moves into a Paris apartment and discovers a storage room filled with the belongings of the previous owner, a certain Madeleine who died in her late nineties, and whose treasured possessions nobody seems to want. In an audacious act of journalism driven...
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from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden
A Very Scandinavian Christmas
Our fourth book in the very popular Very Christmas series, this collection brings together the best Scandinavian holiday stories including classics by Hans Christian Andersen of Denmark; Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf, August Strindberg and Hjalmar Söderberg of Sweden; as well as the acclaimed contemporary Norwegian...
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from Lebanon
Moving the Palace
At the dawn of the 20th century, a young Lebanese explorer leaves the Levant for the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot...
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from Russia
The Year of the Comet
From the critically acclaimed author of Oblivion (a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2016) comes The Year of the Comet, a story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. An idyllic childhood takes...
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from France
The Madonna of Notre Dame
This police novel illuminates the shadowy corners of Notre Dame Cathedral, shedding light on good and evil with wry humor.
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from Italy
If Venice Dies
What is Venice worth? To whom does this urban treasure belong? This eloquent book by internationally renowned art historian Salvatore Settis urgently poses these questions, igniting a new debate about the Queen of the Adriatic and cultural patrimony at large. Venetians are increasingly abandoning their hometown—there’s...
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from Denmark
The Last Supper
Alarmed by scant attention paid to the hardships endured by the 7.5 million Christians in the Middle East, journalist Klaus Wivel traveled to Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Palestinian territories on a quest to learn more about their fate. He found an oppressed minority, constantly...
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from Germany
Animal Internet
A bestial Brave New World is on the horizon: Some 50,000 creatures around the globe—including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will not only aid in conservation...
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from Switzerland
The Last Weynfeldt
Adrian Weynfeldt is an art expert in an international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he’s given up on love until one night—entirely out of character for him—Weynfeldt...
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from Russia
Oblivion
In one of the first 21st century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom...
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from Italy
A Very Italian Christmas
The third in the very popular Very Christmas series, this volume brings together the best Italian Christmas stories of all time in an elegant and vibrant collection featuring classic tales and contemporary works. With writing that dates from the Renaissance to the present day, from...
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from England
On the Run with Mary
Shining moments of tender beauty punctuate this story of a youth on the run after escaping from an elite English boarding school. At London’s Euston Station, the narrator meets a talking dachshund named Mary and together they’re off on escapades through posh Mayfair streets and...
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from France
The 6:41 to Paris
Cecile, a stylish 47-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But...
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from Poland
Killing Auntie
A young university student named Jurek, with no particular ambitions or talents, finds himself with nothing to do. After his doting aunt asks the young man to perform a small chore, he decides to kill her for no good reason other than, perhaps, boredom. Killing...
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from Israel
Alexandrian Summer
Alexandrian Summer is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which...
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from France
Guys Like Me
An ode to Paris as rarely seen – a minutely-observed tale about searching for love and a new lease on life.
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from Russia
A Very Russian Christmas
Crimson ribbons and troubled souls, landowners yearning for love, burning cheeks, salmon, and caviar. This is Russian Christmas celebrated in supreme pleasure and pain by the greatest of writers. Running the gamut from sweet and reverent to twisted and uproarious, and with many of the...
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from France
A Very French Christmas
A continuation of the very popular Very Christmas Series, this collection brings together the best French Christmas stories of all time in an elegant and vibrant volume featuring classics by Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet, plus stories by the esteemed twentieth century author Irène Némirovsky...
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from Poland
All Backs Were Turned
All Backs Were Turned, set in Israel, is a story of sexual passion, violence, and betrayal, in classic hardboiled prose. A noir novel with bite.
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from Austria/Germany
Who is Martha?
A rollicking tale about facing death with verve and style, richly told with great feeling and historical depth....
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from Austria/Japan
I Called Him Necktie
This is the Japanese "Catcher in the Rye" for the twenty-first century....
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from Moldova
The Good Life Elsewhere
This is the hilarious, tragic and grotesque tale of Larga, a small village in Moldova, and everything its residents do to escape it. Every Largavite has his/her own pitiful story, and all of them dream of going to prosperous Italy as a solution to their...
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from Italy
Cocaine
Elegant, witty and wicked, Pitigrilli’s classic novel was first published in Italian in 1921 and charts the comedy and tragedy of a young man’s downfall and the lure of a bygone era.
Book
from Argentina
The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra
At the age of nine, Juan Salvatierra became mute following a horse riding accident. At twenty, he began secretly painting a series of long rolls of canvas in which he minutely detailed six decades of life in his village on Argentina’s river frontier with Uruguay....
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from Austria
Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment
In 1776 Fanny von Arnstein, the daughter of the Jewish master of the royal mint in Berlin, came to Vienna as an 18-year-old bride, bringing with her the intellectual sharpness and vitality of her birthplace. In her youth, she was influenced by the philosopher Moses...
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from Poland
Killing the Second Dog
Robert and Jacob are two tough, desperate men, exiled from their native Poland and adrift in the hot, nasty underworld of Tel Aviv. They are planning to run a scam on an American widow visiting the country with her young son. What follows is a...
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from Israel
Some Day
On the shores of Israel’s Lake Kinneret lies the city of Tiberias, caught between reality and fantasy, where we find budding sexuality and a longing for great love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion that lead to the housing project where seven-year-old...
News
Translator Ann Goldstein introduces Distant Fathers
Join translator Ann Goldstein and Italian novelist Marta Barone for an online discussion of Distant Fathers by Marina Jarre on Tuesday, June 22, 6 p.m. EDT, sponsored by Rizzoli Bookstore. Click here for details.
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Sergei Lebedev discusses his new novel UNTRACEABLE.
Watch a video of celebrated author Sergei Lebedev in a discussion of his timely novel UNTRACEABLE with leading Russian spycraft expert Amy Knight and translator Antonina W. Bouis, sponsored by 192 Books in NYC. Online at bit.ly/sergei-lebedev
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The New York Times profiles UNTRACEABLE author Sergei Lebedev
The New York Times profiles novelist Sergei Lebedev in an article calling his new book UNTRACEABLE “a thriller dipped in poison” with a John le Carré-like “fascination with secret worlds and the nature of evil.”
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Villa of Delirium featured in The New York Times
Villa of Delirium is featured in a special report in The New York Times about the fanciful house on the French Riviera that inspired the novel by Adrien Goetz.
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Stay Open to the World Package
Stay open to the world: Read literature in translation with this fantastic discounted package of six books that will take you to Sudan, Lebanon, Russia, Argentina, Switzerland, Egypt and the Netherlands. An extraordinary literary journey for just $60, and we’ll provide free shipping (U.S. residents ONLY). This package comprises one copy each of Moving the Palace, Oblivion, […]
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European Travel Package
Enough quarantine, let’s go to Europe! These six books will take you to Paris, Zurich, Milan and Antwerp. An extraordinary literary journey that’s yours for only $60, with free shipping included (U.S. residents ONLY). This package comprises one copy each of The Madeleine Project, Allmen and the Dragonflies, Guys Like Me, The Animal Gazer, The 6:41 to […]
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The Drive – Video Discussion with Author Yair Assulin
Watch a video of Israeli author Yair Assulin, Booker Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen and novelist Ruby Namdar discussing THE DRIVE in a program held on April 19, 2020, co-sponsored by McNally Jackson Books in NYC and City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco. THE DRIVE by Yair Assulin is a powerfully subversive novel in a […]
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Catalogue 2019-20
Click here for New Vessel Press 2019-20 catalogue
News
Author of THE MADONNA OF NOTRE DAME on the Cathedral’s Future
Notre Dame’s Charred Glory and the Challenge of Globalized Modernity By Alexis Ragougneau Ten years ago, I worked in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in a job that consisted of ensuring the two groups that came to the massive church every day—the worshipers and the tourists in the tens of thousands—got along with […]
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Catalogue 2018-19
Click here to download the New Vessel Press 2018-19 Catalogue