Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby (Preface by), Nathaniel Davis (Editor)

Overview

This anthology is the essential resource for readers, critics, and publishers interested in contemporary European literature. In this, the eighth installment of the series, the anthology continues its commitment to uncovering the best prose writing happening across the continent from Ireland to Eastern Europe. Also featuring an erudite prefatory essay written by Eileen Battersby of the Irish Times, Best European Fiction 2017 is another essential report on the state of global literature in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628971439
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	10/28/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Born in California, Eileen Battersby is a graduate of University College Dublin. An Irish Times staff arts journalist and literary reviewer, she has won the National Arts Journalist of the Year award four times and was National Critic of the Year in 2012. Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty was published in 2009. Ordinary Dogs – A Story of Two Lives was published by Faber in 2011. Teethmarks on My Tongue, her first novel, is published by Dalkey Archive.

Nathaniel Davis is a freelance editor living in Paris. He is also a translator and holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

For one book to range so widely in geographical terms is a praiseworthy achievement in itself; to do so and encompass so many delightfully singular, fascinatingly overlapping talents is an achievement of another order."

Wall Street Journal

Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).

Starred Review Booklist

For one book to range so widely in geographical terms is a praiseworthy achievement in itself; to do so and encompass so many delightfully singular, fascinatingly overlapping talents is an achievement of another order."

Wall Street Journal

Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).”

From the Publisher

Sept. 7, 2016
The across-the-pond rejoinder to Best American Short Stories delivers another fine collection of continental conjuring.To judge by this sparkling anthology, the eighth in the series, Europeans live in high places and are given to throwing themselves from them—or at least in front of buses. The protagonist of Danish writer Ida Jessen’s “Postcard to Annie,” for instance, lives in an attic room from which “she could see the red rooftops of Trøjborg, the woods, and the bay of Aarhus Bugt.” We should have a sense of foreboding: Scandinavian gloom and heights do not make a good combination, but the story resolves in vehicular mayhem instead, which just makes the protagonist hungry, if a touch world-weary. In Mikkel Bugge’s contribution from Norway, a “girl leaps from the fifth floor wearing an Alice in Wonderland costume,” while in Macedonian writer Sneana Mladenovska Angjelkov’s “Beba,” the jumper is less clearly defined: “Something fell from the building. I didn’t see exactly what it was.” What that “something” is lies at the heart of her pensive, economical tale. Other writers take those heights even higher: more than one turns to outer space, including Liechtenstein’s contribution to the proceedings, in which binational writer Jonathan Huston imagines a grumpy retired astronaut, very much in his dotage, recalling a lunar rock whose “color was alien, like a rainbow trapped in amber, graceful and fragile and bound to give the geologists on Earth wet dreams.” Wet dreams? Well, it being Europe and all, there’s some sex, mostly understated and angst-y—and on that aging continent there’s also a pronounced thematic preference for the experiences of the old, such as the narrator of Ticinese writer Giovanni Orelli’s “Death by Laughter,” who is “ninety nine point nine years old, a hundred let’s say,” with all the intimations of mortality attendant. Generalizations aside, the 29 stories here are excellent and frequently brilliant, with none of the workshopped feel of so many of their American counterparts. Of interest to literary readers of English on both sides of the water.

Kirkus Review