VIRTUAL - Translator Triptych with Katie Whittemore
August is Women in Translation Month! And to honor the occasion, Brazos Bookstore joins Third Place Books (Seattle), the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith (Boston), and Community Bookstore (Brooklyn) to welcome translator Katie Whittemore for a special occasion: the premier of Open Letter's Translator Triptych series. Every year, a translator will curate and translate three works by authors of the same country. This year's Triptych features three books by Spanish authors: Wolfskin by Lara Moreno, Mothers Don't by Katixa Agirre, and Bad Handwriting by Sara Mesa.
To help us launch this special occasion, authors Mark Haber and Lynn Steger Strong will join Whittemore in conversation. Learn more about Open Letter's Translator Triptych series.
This event will take place on Zoom. Register here.
Katie Whittemore translates from the Spanish. Full-length translations include works by Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aroa Moreno Durán, Lara Moreno, Nuria Labari, and Katixa Agirre. Forthcoming translations include novels by Mesa, Serena, Jon Bilbao, Juan Gómez Bárcena, Almudena Sánchez, Aliocha Coll, and Pilar Adón. She received an NEA Translation Fellowship in 2022 to translate Moreno's In Case We Lose Power.
Mark Haber is the author of the 2008 story collection Deathbed Conversions and the novel Reinhardt’s Garden, longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, was published in 2022. He is the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. His nonfiction has appeared in the Rumpus, Music & Literature, and LitHub. His fiction has appeared in Southwest Review and Air/Light.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida.
Sof a is thirty-five and her husband has left her. Her father died the year before, and her mother is living in the Canary Islands with a new partner. Sof a flees the city with her young son, seeking refuge in her father's house on the southern coast of Spain, where she spent summers as a girl. Her younger sister, with whom she has a close but uneasy relationship, joins her. Living together again, the sisters face their present as well as their childhood and tangled past.
Wolfskin is an intimate meditation on ambivalence and motherhood, eroticism and disappointment, family violence and failure, and ultimately, the possibility--or impossibility--of living with those you love.
A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realizes that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime.
Mothers don't write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children? How could she kill them? Is motherhood a prison? Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don't plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.
From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.
The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface--subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented--or not--by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes--both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.
Events at Brazos Bookstore: A few things to remember
IN PERSON EVENTS
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Books to be signed must be purchased directly from us
VIRTUAL EVENTS
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Please visit the individual event page to find out more about the platform and register
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Not all books will be signed. Please see the event page to find out if purchasers will receive signed book plates with the book
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Personalized books are unavailable unless otherwise stated on the event page
Brazos Book Clubs
SEPTEMBER PICK
Meeting on Thursday, September 28 at 6:30pm *note this is a new date!*
This meeting will be hosted in person by Susan
OCTOBER MEETING
Meeting on Tuesday, October 24 at 6:30pm CT. Click here to register.
We will be joined by author Sara Gran
OCTOBER PICK
Meeting on Thursday, October 17 at 6:30pm
This meeting will be hosted in person by Keerthi
