Landscape with Dog - Softcover

Ersi Sotiropoulos

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566567734 ISBN 13: 9781566567732

Publisher: Clockroot Books, 2009

Synopsis

"Let's just say that Giacometti was setting out to draw a face. If he started with the chin, he would worry that he might never reach the nose. The longer he sketched the face, the harder he tried to offer a faithful representation of it, the more it resembled a skull. The only thing left was the gaze. So what he ended up drawing was a skull with a gaze.

Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is made up of countless such moments: transformations of the everyday, encounters between the known and the unknowable. Contemporary Athens wavers before us; the outlines of a sketch darken and blur; the face of a friend is at once beloved and strange. In Ersi Sotiropoulos's prose, the slightest event, the slightest change in the quality of the light, can alter everything. Karen Emmerich brings perfectly into English the precise, vibrant movement of Sotiropoulos's language, the mastery that has made her one of Greece's most acclaimed writers. These stories will be praised for their flashes of beauty and their crackles of dark humor, but what makes them so memorable is something else, impossible to pin down, something like the gaze of the skull. At once familiar and troubling, compelling and unapproachable, Sotiropoulos's stories give us a new way of seeing.

About this title

About the Author

Acclaimed Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos is the author of ten works of fiction and a book of poetry. Her novel Zigzag through the Bitter Orange Trees was the first novel ever to win both the Greek national prize for literature and Greece's preeminent book critics' award. Sotiropoulos's originality and elegant natural style have won her audiences in many languages; she has been a fellow at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, at Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany, at Princeton University, as well as at numerous other programs around the world. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in English in the Harvard Review, Circumference, SmokeLong Quarterly, Words Without Borders, Metamorphoses, Absinthe, and Two Lines.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her translations include I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou (chosen for the top 25 translated books of 2008), Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris (nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Prize in Poetry and praised by Harold Bloom as revealing "not only the disturbing intensity of the original but also a remarkable diction and poetic pacing of her own"), and The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis by Vassilis Vassilikos, which the New York Times called a "superb" translation of "a deft and witty reflection on writing as well as a moving portrait of the artist in as political exile." She is the recipient of translation grants and awards from the NEA, PEN, and the Modern Greek Studies Association.

Review

"Greek author Sotiropoulos (Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees) depicts the hollow, deceptive civility hidden within intimate relationships in this capably translated story collection featuring lovers, married couples, brothers and parents. In 'An Almost Guinea Fowl,' a husband and wife pull away from the brink of marital collapse after a dinner party game of Truth or Dare. A young man drifts toward waste and inertia over an adolescent romance gone sour in 'Kissing the Air.' 'Aren't You Going to Walk the Dog?' features a mother and her teenaged daughter facing off in a rancorous, controlling game of chicken. Other stories showcase the author's dark, effective devices, such as throwing together antipathetic characters in unfamiliar locales: in 'The Pinball King,' two sparring brothers and an Italian tourist couple wind up lost on the way to Delphi, eventually taking refuge with a goat-herding couple. Each story demonstrates compelling depth and breadth, and involves heavy emotional stakes; perhaps the most nerve-wracking are the author-fan confrontation in 'So You Like Literature' and the estranged father-daughter relationship in 'Rain at the Construction Site.'" --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Ersi Sotiropoulos's fiction owes a significant debt to her early work as a poet. Her stories in Landscape with Dog are pure electric, with the passion, energized wit and inevitability of the lyric poem. The surfaces are well-constructed, the characters often quirky and troubling and, like lines from a favorite poem, stay with the reader year after year." --Paul Vangelisti

"Ersi Sotiropoulos's short stories are jaggedly sharp and unsettlingly beautiful--and they are like none other being written today in any language. You have to go back to Cesare Pavese to find short fiction from Europe this vivid, lived-in, urgent and artful; Sotiropoulos writes as if her life depended on it. Landscape with Dog and Other Stories is a marvel." --Benjamin Anastas

"I loved these stories. They are vintage Sotiropoulos: electric, vivid, sensual, surprising." --Lynn Freed

About this edition

• Publisher: Clockroot Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1566567734
• ISBN 13: 9781566567732
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168