The Hunger Angel: A Novel by Herta Müller

The Hunger Angel: A Novel
Herta Müller; Translated by Philip Boehm
Picador Paperback
Publication Date: April 30, 2013

For a review copy (US and Canada only), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR THE HUNGER ANGEL
“A wonderful, passionate, poetic work of literature…Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose.”—Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

“This is not just a good novel, it is a great one… Müller is through and through a stylist. Her novel is written in a taut idiomatic German, which breaks into paragraphs of wrenching, Rilkean lyricism…A masterpiece.”—Financial Times

“Written in terse, hypnotic prose…exquisite.”—New Yorker

“Wry and poetic, and Müller’s evocative language makes the abstract concrete as her narrator’s sanity is stretched…Boehm’s translation preserves the integrity of Müller’s gorgeous prose, and Leo’s despondent reveries are at once tragic and engrossing.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The stunning, exhilarating, heartbreaking culmination of Müller’s work as a novelist…A 300-page prose poem of resistance to totalitarian repression, the book is a haunting paean to the human angel–the inventive, imaginative, invincible force that transcends suffering and absement, that defies depersonalization and deprivation to survive, and even thrive.”
—The Wichita Eagle

“A work of rare force, a feat of sustained and overpowering poetry…Müller has the ability to distil concrete objects into language of the greatest intensity and to sear these objects on to the reader’s mind.”—Times Literary Supplement

ABOUT THE HUNGER ANGEL
The new novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author about a Romanian teenager’s detention in a Soviet gulag.

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, THE HUNGER ANGEL (Picador / On Sale: April 30, 2013 / ISBN: 9781250032089 / $16.00 / 304pgs.), Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers’ trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.

Müller has distilled Leo’s struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man’s soul.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HERTA MÜLLER is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceauşescu’s secret police.

MORE INFORMATION
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Herta Müller’s page at Picador

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder
Picador Original / $14.00 / 176 pages
On Sale: January 29, 2013 (February 2013)
Fiction / Short Stories / Horror

For review copies (US and Canada only), please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

PRAISE FOR REVENGE

“Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and REVENGE is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read.”  —Peter Straub

“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a secret garden of dark, glorious flowers: silky, heart-breakingly beautiful… and poison to their roots.”—Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns

“Ogawa crafts 11 interlocking short stories with eloquent prose that belies the nature of the tales she spins…. With dark calm and disquieting imagery, the author leads readers on a journey of the macabre in a progression of tales that resound long after the last page is turned…. Ogawa’s writing is simple and effective, and her technique for merging the tales demonstrates her mastery of the written word… The author paints each tale exquisitely.”—Kirkus

“Weaving together the morbid tales of 11 unnamed narrators, prolific Japanese author Ogawa (Hotel Iris), a Shirley Jackson Award winner, presents an intense rumination on the precariousness of interconnected lives.”—Publishers Weekly

“Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is a delicious mosaic that concerns much more than its titular subject, as the messy human emotional spectrum gets exposed in 11 compulsively readable tales that become increasingly multilayered and interlocked.”—Shelf Awareness

“If creepy were a place, Ms. Ogawa has come up with many ways to get there… Even while punctuated [by] macabre flourishes her book maintains its restraint, like a dark alley that’s too quiet, or an insane person acting too calm.”—Susannah Meadows, The New York Times

“From Japan comes Revenge, a spine tingling volume subtitled Eleven Dark Tales, from Yoko Ogawa … These are shiningly sinister stories that grab you by the vulnerable back of the neck and don’t let go.”—ELLE

“Woven through the 11 interconnected tales is a thread of the grotesque, the macabre, the mournful.… Ogawa’s language is both spare and searingly precise, crystallizing the details of everyday existence and capturing the unexpected shock of the bizarre…. Readers willing to explore the murkier edges of the human psyche will not be disappointed.” —Associated Press

“Every act of malice glows creepily against the plain background. It’s a book that ought to be distributed to every fiction-M.F.A. candidate who tends to overwrite: Ogawa is an expert in doing more with less.”—New York Magazine

“[Revenge] erupts into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave…. A haunting introduction to her work… the overall effect is [that of] David Lynch: the rot that lurks beneath the surface.”—The Economist

“Japan’s best teller of macabre tales… Ogawa is such a master that she pushes the boundaries and suspends the mystery… You never know ‘why,’ only that humans are slaves to time, and we keep on with our lives so that someday we might understand.”—The Daily Beast

“Magnificently macabre … Ogawa is the Japanese master of dread … These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Ogawa is more “Masque of the Red Death” than she is The Ring. She elevates herself above any limitations of the genre she’s working in.” —The New York Observer

“The deeper you go into this book, the more the oddness ramps up, and the more you start to notice unsettling connections… Powerful and strange. The tangle of sadism and lonely anguish will sneak up on you.”—Charlie Jane Anders, io9

“Interwoven stories from Ogawa involve murder, desire, jealousy, love, and torture, making for creepy but compelling experimental horror that stays with you long past the book’s last page.”—The Atlantic Wire

“Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. … an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached — and all the more unsettling for that.”—Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review

ABOUT REVENGE
Yoko Ogawa’s REVENGE: Eleven Dark Tales (Picador Original / February 2013 / ISBN: 978-0-3126-7446-5 / $14.00 / 176 pages), is a collection of macabre and fiendishly clever linked stories that flirt with the supernatural. Together they create a haunting tapestry of death—and the afterlife of the living.

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before the lover can follow through on her crime of passion, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman—a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. When the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.

The eleven eerie and absorbing stories in REVENGE draw together sinister forces and a cast of desperate characters that will leave you haunted after you close the covers.

YOKO OGAWA’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Harper’s Magazine. Since 1988, she has produced more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in several countries. In 2008 her novel The Diving Pool won the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. Her novel Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.

MORE INFORMATION
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Yoko Ogawa author photo for download (credit included in file name)
Stephen Snyder on Yoko Ogawa, Haruki Murakami, and the Business of International Literature at the Center for the Art of Translation

Emperor of Lies: A Novel by Steve Sem-Sandberg

Emperor of Lies
Steve Sem-Sandberg
Translated from the Swedish by
Sarah Death
On sale: July 3, 2012
Paperback
Fiction / Historical Fiction

PRAISE FOR EMPEROR OF LIES
“Fiction of true moral force, brilliantly sustained and achieved…I find it difficult to think of any book that has had such an immediate and powerful impact on me…Brave and brillant.”—Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies

“Was Rumkowski a sinner or a saint? Collaborator or a liberator? It is around this central question that The Emperor of Lies swirls, providing along the way. . . cinematic detail that invites immersion in the way few contemporary novels of serious ambition do.”—Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review

“A resolute masterpiece, The Emperor of Lies looks for truths in the great domain of dissolving syntax and shadows we call history….A great achievement.”—Sebastian Barry, Salon

ABOUT EMPEROR OF LIES
In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish businessman and orphanage director. From one of Scandinavia’s most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski’s monarchical rule over a quarter million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it —and himself — indespensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz Ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience and asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He divides his time between Vienna and Stockholm.

More Information
Emperor of Lies on the Picador website
Cover image for download
Author photo for download

For a review copy, please email gabrielle.gantz [at] picadorusa.com

Planning Ahead: Winter 2012

Here’s a list of books I’m working on for our Winter 2012 season. I have a limited number of galleys but feel free to request. As review copies become available each title will have its own page. Please follow Books on Tap on Facebook for updates. Please email me at Gabrielle.Gantz [at] us.penguingroup.com to be included on a book’s mailing list. More information about these titles will be posted as it becomes available.

January
Title: A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America 
Author: Tom Zoellner
Imprint: Viking (Hardcover)
On Sale: December 29, 2011
Category: Current Events / Politics
Penguin Group page
Author’s Website

Title: Island of Wings: A Novel
Author: Karin Altenberg
Imprint: Penguin (Paperback Original)
On Sale: December 27, 2011
Category: Fiction
Penguin Group page

February
Title: The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home
Author: Arlie Hochschild
Imprint: Penguin (Paperback Reissue with Updated Material)
On Sale: January 31, 2012
Category: Social Sciences / Women’s Studies
Penguin Group page 

Title: Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North
Author: Ibn Fadlan; Translated with Introduction by Paul Lunde & Caroline Stone
Imprint: Penguin Classics
On Sale: January 31, 2012
Category: Travel / History / Essays / Middle East
Penguin Group page

March
Title: Reading For My Life: Writings, 1958-2008
Author: John Leonard
Imprint: Viking (Hardcover)
On Sale: March 15, 2012
Category: Literary Criticism / Essays

Title: Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
Author: Ahmed Rashid
Imprint: Viking (Hardcover)
On Sale: March 15, 2012
Category: Foreign Relations / Current Affairs / Politics / Southeast Asia
Author’s Penguin Group page 

April
Title: The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc
Author: Nancy Goldstone
Imprint: Viking (Hardcover)
On Sale: March 29, 2012
Category: History / Biography
Author’s Website

Title: The Nobleman and Other Romance
Author: Isabelle de Charriere
Imprint: Penguin Classics (Paperback)
On Sale: March 27, 2012
Category: Classics / Short Stories

Year of the Hare

The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna with foreword by Pico Iyer
Penguin Paperback Original / On Sale: January 2011 

In his foreword to the internationally bestselling comic novel THE YEAR OF THE HARE (Penguin Paperback Original / On-Sale: January 2011 / ISBN: 9780143117926 / $14.00) by Finnish writer Arto Paasilinna, Pico Iyer asks, “Which of us has not had that wonderfully seditious idea: to play hooky for a while from life as we know it?,” an appropriate meditative beginning to the fairytale-like adventure that follows.

A contemporary classic of world literature, THE YEAR OF THE HARE was first published in Finland more than twenty-five years ago and has won three international prizes, twice been made into a feature film, and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. This is the first time it’s being published in North America, just in time to usher in 2011—the Year of the Hare in Chinese zodiac—and to inspire readers seeking a more meaningful life to take to heart this story of one man’s life-changing epiphany and to make their own vows of renewal in the new year.

Praise for THE YEAR OF THE HARE
“A spare narrative about a social misfit and a hare, halfway between fairy tale and fable, that builds with an unexpected cumulative impact. Perpetually unpredictable and constantly heartwarming, it’s a book to read slowly and savor.”
—Shelf Awareness

 “The Year of the Hare is only the most Finnish, and perhaps most antically Zen-ish, of a shelf-load of books that tell us to find and live by our own ideas of contentment.”
—The Wall Street Journal

 “Step out of the domestic gulag and into The Year of the Hare, a novel that depicts the confident freedom of the journeyman. I loved it.”
—Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

 “An exemplary comic novel, full of amiable if binding warnings about the septic follies of civilization—to be read with rising anxiety and delight.”
—Thomas McGuane

For More Information:
Press Release
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A Palace in the Old Village

A Palace in the Old Village by Tahar ben Jelloun
Penguin Paperback Original / On Sale: January 25, 2011

“Jelloun’s haunting novel reads like a timeless fable, while taking on the oh-so-timely challenges of the immigrant experience. Poignant meditation on the enduring lure of home and the cost of being left behind.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Subtle, well-paced . . . Ben Jelloun has created a fine character study and touching family drama well worth reading.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Lovers of literary fiction should take note of this affecting novel.”
—Booklist

“Beautifully and concisely written and well translated, this novel is a superb addition to the genre of ‘exile literature.’”
—Library Journal

“With this novel, Ben Jelloun, a native of Morocco, gives us an unvarnished look at a Muslim’s life in the West, and reminds us that literature can help us understand one another.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

A heartbreaking novel about parents and children, A PALACE IN THE OLD VILLAGE (Penguin Paperback Original / On-Sale: January 25, 2011 / ISBN: 9780143118473 / 192pgs. / $15.00) by Tahar Ben Jelloun captures the sometimes stark contrasts between old- and new-world values, and an immigrant’s abiding pursuit of home.

A PALACE IN THE OLD VILLAGE is a novel about returning to one’s place of origin with hopes of rekindling family relationships and a sense of self; it’s about an individual’s journey back to the important things in life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN was born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Répubblica, El País, and Panorama. His novels include The Sacred Night (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt), Corruption, The Last Friend, and Leaving Tangier. Ben Jelloun won the 1994 Prix Maghreb, and in 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:
LINDA COVERDALE (translator) has translated more than sixty books including Tahar Ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel This Blinding Absence of Light. A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she won the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

For More Information:
Press Release
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