SMALL STATIONS PRESS Publications
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Below is a list of our titles in English and Bulgarian, with the most recent titles first:
BOOKS IN ENGLISH
GALICIAN SONGS by
Rosalía de Castro
Series: Galician Classics
Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885) is considered the founder of modern Galician literature. She wrote three major books of poetry: two in Galician, Galician Songs and New Leaves, and one in Spanish, On the Banks of the Sar. Nourished by the popular songs the author heard around her, Galician Songs was first published in 1863 and dedicated on 17 May, the date that a hundred years later, in 1963, would become and has remained Galician Literature Day, when the work of a particular Galician author is celebrated. Galician Songs marks the first full publication of any of Rosalía de Castro’s books of poetry in English and is accompanied by a translator’s introduction that argues for the importance and contemporaneity of the author’s work and poetics, not just in Galician, but in English.
LONG NIGHT OF STONE by Celso
Emilio Ferreiro
Series: Galician Classics
Long Night of Stone is the most famous book of Galician poetry published during Franco's dictatorship. The poem with this title is the result of the author's imprisonment in Celanova Monastery during the Spanish Civil War; the book is read as a metaphor for the long years of dictatorship that ensued. Celso Emilio Ferreiro, a man of unwavering commitment, who stands with the downtrodden and oppressed and refuses to give up hope on the world, was himself born in Celanova, a town in the province of Ourense, in 1912 and died in Vigo in 1979. The message the book contains is surprisingly modern, inviting us as it does to investigate the truth of our own time and find our poetry.
SEKONYER RIVER by Karen
Harrison
Series: Small Stations Poetry
There are three main branches in Karen Harrison's poetry – mythological interpretation, journeying and intimate experiences. These sometimes intertwine, sometimes stay parallel. And the crown is full of movement with falling leaves at the edge of summer (her primordial sorrow) and elegant trembling of language. The movement is often a pulse. Some poems maintain their distance, others crush you with their closeness. But this is not a feminine poetry of attraction and sentiment, anticipating and inducing, it is a traveller's poetry in which the poet floats free with her images and readers solely dependent on the river's currents. A confirmation of Heraclitus' "Everything is one". Where rivers are trees from above.
FOLKS FROM HERE AND THERE by
Álvaro Cunqueiro
Series: Galician Classics
A remarkable collection of literary sketches and perhaps this author's best known work together with Merlin and Company (which was published by Everyman in 1996). Here the author from Mondoñedo takes us on a whirlwind tour of the local characters he meets (invents?) and the fantastical adventures they relate. The second in our series of Galician Classics, this new translation by Kathleen March promises to reintroduce the reader to the joys of Cunqueiro's unexpected world.
COLLECTED POEMS by Lois
Pereiro
Series: Galician Classics
This volume brings together, for the first time in English translation, all three books of poetry by this author, two of them published in his lifetime (Poems 1981/1991 and Last Poetry of Love and Illness 1992-1995) and one posthumously (Poems for a Skylark). Like any true poet, Lois Pereiro lived on the edge, between cultures, spending time outside his native Galicia in Madrid, learning foreign languages, travelling as much as he could. He was also the victim of toxic oil syndrome at an early age, which was followed by a heroin addiction and the contraction of AIDS. He died at 38, having been forced to write "with delicacy in a Pandora's box of pain".
FROM UNKNOWN TO UNKNOWN
by Manuel Rivas
Series: Small Stations Poetry
An anthology of 80 poems in English translation. Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most international author, having published four novels and a collection of short stories in Jonathan's English translation. Three films have been made of his work: Butterfly's Tongue, All Is Silence and The Carpenter's Pencil (this last novel is published in Bulgarian by SMALL STATIONS PRESS). Rivas' poems are earthy, a cry for us to come to our senses, and laden with beautiful imagery.
THE DNA OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE by Jonathan
Dunne
Series: Small Stations Essay
This revolutionary book sets out to persuade the reader that the English language is not the result of years of haphazard evolution, a chaotic atom-like conglomeration of words, but a carefully planned whole in which each word has its place and is connected by a consistent set of rules. It is not a coincidence that earth is heart or soil is soul, for instance, or that salt makes us last ("You are the salt of the earth") but last is in fact lst. This book journeys from the Book of Genesis and Creation to Revelation and the Last Judgement through the English language, suggesting that language has something to tell us about the environment and that he who would be true to himself is inexorably pushed out on to the margins.
BOOKS IN BULGARIAN
WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH ME, LOVE? by
Manuel Rivas
Series: Contemporary Fiction
"What more does a man need than a horse, a revolver and a woman with a flower's name to feel like a king?" writes Rivas and in a single sentence he embraces all the book, galloping through a world of pain and love seen with a look as pure as a child's, as eccentric as a poet's. In this book of sixteen tales that constitute a whole are heart-breaking stories in which the feeling of things precedes the things themselves, the end is in need of interpretation, and every image is a human cell – incomparable and trembling with life. The delicate style, the way the stories grab the reader, the erudite respect towards the reader and the ability to charge things with love place the author and this book forever on the list of classic works not to be missed.
LAND ROVER by Suso de Toro
Series: Contemporary Fiction
Suso de Toro's books appear like screenplays or simple plays. You can count the main heroes on your fingers; dialogue governs the action, characters and environment. The feeling is one of careering along in a Land Rover. Considered by critics as the author of degraded urban surroundings, a pornographic viewpoint and the deconstruction of language, he rushes unexpectedly into a biblical (or Shakespearian) story of fratricide and incest born out of envy not towards the other, but towards a third side. A Bermuda triangle of parents and children, lovers and customers of the flesh, where the privacy of family is a bargain, and sin isn't just a parasite that feeds off a foreign body, but the air needed for surviving, or even burning.
THE HEART IS NOT A CREATOR by Yordan Eftimov
Series: Small Stations Poetry
In his most recent collection, Yordan Eftimov again provokes with the presence or absence of a lyrical hero. His poems are hot-honest and endowed with an ill-defined presence. Using the evolutionary development of the human being from an amoeba to a killer or the act of making love on top of a grave, regardless of the ugliness or beauty of the gesture, the main purpose being to arouse the senses, the author provides a true story which clouds thoughts in order to awaken the reader from his lethargy.
THE WOLF TOTEM. THE UNPOLITICAL by Plamen Antov
Series: Small Stations Poetry
Plamen Antov's poetry has always been rich in images, thought provocations and post-modern references. In this book, however, the author places a greater emphasis on immediate experiences of politics and nature, with an instability in the language like literature or a judge and medium between the higher and ordinary. The value of language depends on the author's position between these two poles. To serve mammon or God.
WALLS AND BRIDGES by Rada
Panchovska
Series: Small Stations Poetry
The material and spiritual dimensions combine in this unusual book of poems from the experienced Bulgarian poet and translator Rada Panchovska. She gives us her vision of city life, managing to note down details that are important but often pass unnoticed. She steps through the borders of the contemporary world and the natural world we all inhabit with an ecological footprint, displaying sensitivity and cautiousness.
THE HOUSE SNAKE by Arian Leka
Series: Contemporary Fiction
This novel is located somewhere between the genres of fantasy and political prose. The mysticism in the book is a metaphor for the breakdown of Albanian life, lost between generations and times. The past is full of guilt, the present is purgatory, and the future is an incarnation in a home for blind people. This is a desperate story about the post-totalitarian collapse of the soul, which wanders like an eel through a maze of underground rivers. To quote the newspaper Korrieri, "The prose doesn't just roll along the lines, it flies."
THE CARPENTER'S PENCIL by Manuel Rivas
Series: Contemporary Fiction
This is the only the second book written in the Galician language of northwest Spain to be translated into Bulgarian. Widely acclaimed and widely translated, The Carpenter's Pencil is a story of love set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. The author, Manuel Rivas, seeks to dispel the darkness of hate with the light of fantasy, humour and tenderness. Günter Grass claimed to have learnt more about the Spanish Civil War from reading this novel than from any history book.
LUCK by Raymond Carver
Series: Small Stations Poetry
An anthology of 60 poems in Bulgarian translation. The American writer Raymond Carver had a difficult life but managed to find peace in the end. These sixty poems chart his journey from drunken beginnings to the realisation that someone was waiting for him and happiness can be found in the simplest moments, for example watching the newspaper boy and his friend walk up the road in the early morning. The author comes out of himself to view himself from the outside and then to break in: "I bashed that beautiful window and stepped back in." This is a book that is never without humour and modesty, the lessons of years.
Read the introduction in English
TIME AND RELATION by Tsvetanka Elenkova
Series: Small Stations Essay
In this book of nine essays written in Bulgarian and accompanied by colour photographs, the poet and critic Tsvetanka Elenkova travels from her native Bulgaria to Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia and England. Along the way, she shares her impressions of Athens, Delphi and the Dodecanese, of Alanya, of Kas and Megisti, where Turkey and Greece come face to face, of Lake Ohrid, the deepest in the Balkans, and Struga in Macedonia, famous for its poetry evenings, of the Serbian monasteries of Frushka Gora and finally of England, where she visits London, Chichester, Oxford and Portsmouth. In this book, the author connects legend with what she sees, a Balkan thread that ends up unexpectedly in England.
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