A Thousand Peaceful Victories

On Sunday, the Northern California Book Awards took place, and David Frick won for his translation from the Polish of Jerzy Pilch’s A Thousand Peaceful Cities. In honor of this accomplishment, we’re going to spend the day here at Open Letter with “a billion barrels of beer.” No, but seriously, we will.

If you want more info on A Thousand Peaceful Cities, you can read this tipsy post, or click here for the jacket copy, an excerpt, etc.

And for the next week (through 4/19), anyone who signs up for a new subscription will receive a free copy of this book.

For the handful of you who didn’t immediately click over to the Open Letter ordering page, you might be interested in knowing that in Poetry Translation category, John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis won for their translation from the Greek of Maribor by Demosthenes Agrafiotis.

Here’s a link to the official page at Post-Apollo Press, and below is a brief description that I swiped from “SPD”: (where you can order the book):

Demosthenes Agrafiotis’s Maribor is a book of thoughts, impressions, expressions and reflections from his travels to Hesperia (Western Europe) in the period 1980-90. The book is concerned with the constantly elusive identity of Europe as a geographic place, as a cultural gamble, as a historical problem, as a horizon for the future of humankind. “Maribor gives us both artifact—of the ephemera of communication, institutions, power—as well as blueprint for imagining an ‘alphabet of the future.’ A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall“—Eleni Stecopoulos.