Two Lines Press Fall 2021 Preview

Fall 2021, you’re looking good. You’ve hopefully heard by now about our beloved Wolfgang Hilbig, whose books we have been publishing in Isabel Fargo Cole’s translations since 2015. His latest, The Interim—a book that “gleams brilliantly with the incandescence of an all-consuming inferno,” in the words of Powell’s bookseller Jeremy Garber—will hit bookstores in November. In September, we’ll publish an explosive new translation from the great Jeffrey Zuckerman: Kaya Days by the Mauritian writer Carl de Souza, a book that Nobel Prize-winner J.M.G. Le Clézio has called “a searing, urgent, far-seeing dispatch.” October brings one of Portugal’s most esteemed twentieth-century esteemed writers to English for the first time, thanks to the one-and-only Margaret Jull Costa. Lastly, we’ll release the fourth book in our Calico Series. Cuíer: Queer Brazil collects four decades worth of queer writing—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—from Brazil: a tiny revolution of a book.

Scroll drown to learn more! If you are a bookseller, librarian, or writer, please free to send any questions you may have about these titles my way. I’m at cfelix[at]twolinespress.com. Thanks, as always, for reading.

A story of societal upheaval written by the flash-bang light of a fireworks show, Carl de Souza’s English-language debut, Kaya Days, is a brilliant journey to the end of night steeped in Mauritian history. Among burning cars and buildings, a young Hindu woman named Santee discovers herself—and a world of revolutionary violence and potential—on a remarkable search for her missing little brother.

“I read Kaya Days in a single setting—in between and on flights—and found it to be dreamlike and evocative, a dramatic, rich and potent contribution to the thankfully multiplying literature from and of our oceanic realms. It was such a delightful companion.” —Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of The Dragonfly Sea

Our most ambitious Calico yet collects writings—fiction, poetry, and nonfiction—from LGBTQ-identifying Brazilian authors from across the last four decades to reveal the radical and revelatory literary tradition built by writers such as our own João Gilberto Noll and Caio Fernando Abreu and sustained by contemporary writers like Angélica Freitas, Marcio Junqueira, Tatiana Nascimento, and many others. Cuíer features thirteen different writers, all of whose work is presented in Brazilian Portuguese and English translation (from fifteen translators), as well as eight full-color portraits from Brazilian photographer Igor Furtado.

“Cuier merges the universality of queer experiences with the specificity of the Brazilian culture, creating an inspiring collection of angles and stances, forms and attitudes, that carries through to the very last, moving piece.”
—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir

“Fabulously queer in both senses of the word: it’s unlike anything you’ve encountered before, yet ever familiar.”
—Rabih Alameddine, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope

A tale of patriarchy told through gritted teeth, Empty Wardrobes introduces English-language readers to an icon of Portuguese letters. Dora is a widow of ten years, left behind by her principled but impractical husband with a daughter and zero income. Just as Dora’s life seems to be back on track, a revelation about her marriage is revealed late one night by her mother-in-law. As a result, Dora’s life is emptied of meaning—and three generations of Portuguese women are left to make sense (if there’s any to be made) of the pieces.

“A remarkable, necessary novel about women disposed of by men, about isolation and suspension and damage, with an acute perceptiveness that will pierce your mind. Dora, Manuela, Ana, Júlia, Lisa. These women will remain long after the middling men who have abandoned them fade away, as will Empty Wardrobes, finally, thankfully, translated into English.” —Amina Cain, author of Indelicacy     

C. is an individual without a country, a successful writer stuck between two Germanys. Traveling to and fro by train and foot, from red-light district to bar to literary reading and back to the bar again, Hilbig’s depressed Everyman serves as a brilliantly bitter orator of all the excesses and fixations of the divided twentieth century: addiction, consumerism, God, pay-per-view pornography, statelessness, and the writer’s place in “a century of lies.” “Will we survive this century?… Yes, surely we will survive this one last century.”

“Bilious and bleakly funny…Hilbig is one of the essential voices of the Cold War, and deserves to be as well known in the Anglophone world as Thomas Bernhard or Günter Grass.” —Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill

“Hilbig’s antihero is all of us, a stranger adrift in the modern world. Wolfgang Hilbig was a visionary, each of his novels awash in prophecy.” —Mark Haber, author of Reinhardt’s Garden 

Click here to browse our Fall 2021 titles, and everything else we publish, too! If you’re a bookseller, librarian, or writer, feel free to reach out to Chad at cfelix[@]twolinespress.com with any requests or questions about these titles.