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Kirkus's Best Fiction of 2012 List Featuring TWO Open Letter Titles

Now that Cyber Monday is underway, it’s about time for the “Best of Everything!!!” lists to start coming out. (Or, as documented at Largehearted Boy, continue coming out.) Personally, I fricking love these sorts of lists, to find books/albums that I need to check out, and to serve as fodder for my anger . . ...

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. ...

A Thousand Peaceful Cities [Why This Book Should Win the BTBA]

Similar to years past, we’re going to be featuring each of the 25 titles on the BTBA Fiction Longlist over the next month plus, but in contrast to previous editions, this year we’re going to try an experiment and frame all write-ups as “why this book should win.” Some of these entries will be absurd, some more ...

A Tipsy Post about Drunken Literature [Pilch's "A Thousand Peaceful Cities"]

This was written late last night and set aside for, um, proofing. For the sake of accuracy, one should never drink while proofreading. But in the case of Jerzy Pilch, it just feels right . . . After all, The Mighty Angel is—despite all of the narrator’s attempts to artfully beautify this away with words and ...

Summer 2010 Open Letter Catalog

Only seems appropriate that just before Christmas we should announce our summer list of titles . . . You can click here to download a pdf version of the new catalog (which contains excerpts from all the books), or, for those of you who are anti-pdf, the list below has the basic information for the next five Open Letter ...