Synopsis
Enrique Vila-Matas, Olivia Sudjic, Jon Fosse, Inger Wold Lund, Vi Khi Nao, Patrícia Portela, Lucie Elven, Mara Coson, Christina Hesselholdt, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Naja Marie Aidt, Michael Salu, Joanna Walsh, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Anna Zett, Emilio Fraia, Frode Grytten, and Olga Ravn Translations by Margaret Jull Costa, Zoë Perry, Martin Aitken, Denise Newman, Paul Russell Garrett, Damion Searls, and Rahul Bery Eighteen international writers respond to the open-ended period of social distancing, closures, and illness caused by Covid-19. Compiled during the initial lockdown in Europe, this special collection is a meteoric publishing project with contributions from some of the most exciting and innovative authors working today. Meditating on notions of distance and closeness, sameness and alterity, extinguishing and kindling, Tools for Extinction considers how a common pause might give rise to new modes of domesticity and shift experiences of time. What gestures and actions are we willing to perform to make ourselves, and each other, feel at ease – or at work? What tools and objects are useful, or unprecedentedly useless, to us in the process? And as our species’ trademark proclivity for projecting ourselves into the future is disrupted, might we come to see the buildings, animals, plants, and foodstuffs around us in a new light? The anthology takes its name from Steven Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture compendium of product reviews, essays, and articles on the themes of self-sufficiency, ecology, and alternative education. By giving “access to tools”, a new social order and a more sustainable Earth was imagined. Compiled, edited and with a foreword by Denise Rose Hansen.
About the Authors
Emilio Fraia was born in São Paulo in 1982. Sevastopol, his third book, was one of the winners of the Biblioteca Nacional Prize and a finalist for the Oceanos Prize and Jabuti Prize. One of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Writers, Fraia has been awarded a Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship and is currently an editor at Companhia das Letras.
Olga Ravn (b. 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. Her novel The Employees, translated by Martin Aitken, was nominated and shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the International Booker Prize and the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. She has also edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books and was involved in the recent revival of Ditlevsen’s work in English.
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He was a finalist at the U.S. National Book Awards 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize 2019 for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.
Damion Searls is an award-winning translator. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, Gide, Christa Wolf, Patrick Modiano, and Nescio, as well as writing criticism and poetry, editing a one-volume abridgment of Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, and producing a lost work of Hermann Melville’s.
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