Contra Mundum Press

03/25/2021

This morning, PEN.ORG announced that Pierre Joris will be receiving the 2021 PEN/RALPH MANHEIM AWARD FOR TRANSLATION.

The Manheim Award is bestowed to translators whose work has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of their work. This comes upon our release of Joris’s much-feted translation of Paul Celan’s Microliths They Are, Little Stones. Joris also translated and co-wrote (with Syrian poet Adonis) our publication Conversations in the Pyrenees. For other works penned by/with Joris, see our two volumes of/on/by American visionary poet Robert Kelly.

Lydia Davis will present Joris with the award on 8 April.

To register, visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2021-pen-america-literary-awards-ceremony-registration-145766093309

03/03/2021

To start off , check out this fantastic list of books compiled by CLMP, featuring two titles published by Contra Mundum Press: The Darkroom by Marguerite Duras and The Ladder of Oaths by Maura Del Serra.

To purchase or to get more information about The Darkroom visit:
https://www.contramundumpress.com/the-darkroom

To purchase or to get more information about The Ladder of Oaths visit:
https://www.contramundumpress.com/ladder-of-oaths

For Women’s History Month, observed annually during the month of March, we asked our members—independent presses, literary journals, and others—to share with us some of the books and magazines they recommend reading in celebration.   Nonfiction But Some of Us Are Brave Feminist Press | 1993 E...

02/28/2021

From David Auerbach’s recent review of Genese Grill’s translation of Robert Musil’s Theater Symptoms, in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“As with her previous translations of Musil’s writing (published in two volumes by Contra Mundum in 2015 and 2019), Grill brings great skill and finesse to Musil’s prose. She is possibly the most graceful English translator Musil has had, her lyrical efforts emphasizing how far from his rationalist caricature the author truly was.”

An immensely valuable collection of the great modernist’s plays and theater writings.

02/07/2021

Genese Grill reads from Robert Musil’s Thought Flights at Crow Bookshop in Burlington, VT.

From our website: Robert Musil’s Thought Flights vividly evokes the secrets, challenges, and mundanities of interwar life in cosmopolitan Vienna & Berlin. The texts presented here have been selected by translator Genese Grill from Musil’s Nachlass and collected for the first time under the title Thought Flights. They include material originally published in journals, newspapers, and magazines — but not included in Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author — as well as literary fragments & heretofore unpublished texts. Despite the temporal, geographical, and cultural distance between Musil’s world & ours, our own time & troubles are all too recognizable in Musil’s portrayals of the “age of money,” simulation, and standardization. Thought Flights is a lament of contemporary complacency, optimism, and homogenization as well as a celebration of living words and original thought by one of the great Modernists of the 20th century. As an astonishing master of metaphor & self-described “Monsieur le Vivisecteur,” Musil explores the psyches and lives of himself & his contemporaries with illuminating insight.

Grill’s new translation can be found on the Contra Mundum Press catalog: https://www.contramundumpress.com/thought-flights.

Genese Gorilekova

Genese Grill, translator, reads "Thought Flights", a collection of short prose from the late Robert Musil at the Crow Bookshop in Burlington. For more info visit: http://www.crowbooks.com

07/13/2018

“America is being led to her death by racist power junkies coasting on a stupid trip—the fatal fantasy that soldiers and police can destroy with clubs and guns an indestructible force: the hunger of the human soul for dignity, justice, and freedom.” — Iceberg Slim

07/10/2018

We just found the black Dionysos:

Released in 1970 on Mercury Records. Track Listing 1. Exuma, The Obeah Man (0:00) 2. Dambala (6:23) 3. Mama Loi, Papa Loi (12:04) 4. Junkanoo (16:40) 5. Sean...

07/10/2018

Michael Bishop on Mary Shaw's tr. of Claude Mouchard's ENTANGLED — PAPERS! — NOTES

Auteur de plusieurs recueils (Perdre, 1989; L’Air, 1997) et d’études critiques majeures (Les Équivoques de la modernité, 1991; Qui si je criais…? Œuvres-témoignages dans les tourmentes du XXe siècle, 2007), Claude Mouchard nous donne ici, réunissant enfin un ensemble de textes remontant...

06/02/2018

You will never sell more than five hundred copies, as your work demands mental attention. — Ezra Pound to Marianne Moore, 16 December 1918

04/26/2018

Book your tickets for the (14-21 May)! Discover the full line-up @ https://t.co/GOSmVfJvEA

From 14 to 21 May 2018, the Institut français will go Beyond Words with a festival bursting with bilingual live literature events, writers’ talks, musical performances, shared reading experiences, book launches, screenings of recent literary adaptations, staged readings... Beyond Words brings tog...

04/26/2018

The is delighted to welcome Pierre Senges for its 2nd edition of the ! More about the event here: https://t.co/8XVKBltS1O

From 14 to 21 May 2018, the Institut français will go Beyond Words with a festival bursting with bilingual live literature events, writers’ talks, musical performances, shared reading experiences, book launches, screenings of recent literary adaptations, staged readings... Beyond Words brings tog...