December Newsletter
What a year it's been for the press! With events on both coasts and recognition and reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and more, we published six new books from five countries—all written and translated by women:
Mariana Dimópulos’s razor-sharp, fragmented love story, All My Goodbyes, tr. Alice Whitmore (Argentina)
Jennifer Makumbi’s stories of exile and belonging, Let’s Tell This Story Properly (Uganda)
Gabriela Ybarra’s Booker-nominated account of her grandfather’s kidnapping, The Dinner Guest, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Spain)
Wioletta Greg’s follow-up to her Booker-nominated debut, Accommodations, tr. Jennifer Croft (Poland)
Maria Tumarkin’s look at the past and the stories we tell about it, Axiomatic (Australia)
Suneeta Peres da Costa’s family saga of Goan migrants in Angola, Saudade (Australia)
Help Us Make 2020 Our Best Year Yet
2020 will be a big year for Transit Books: we're growing our publishing program, introducing new voices from Algeria, Argentina, Norway, the Netherlands, and more, with some exciting announcements to come (stay tuned!).
As a nonprofit publishing house, we rely on our community of readers and supporters to keep the wind in our sails. Here are some ways you can help great literature from around the world find new readers in the new year:
Subscribe (or give a gift subscription) to the Transit Book Club
Make a tax-deductible donation
Order one of our recent releases from our website or your local bookstore
Axiomatic a New Yorker Best Book of 2019
The New Yorker announced its 10 Best Books of the Year, and we were thrilled to find Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic among them. Katy Waldman writes:
The book is comprised of restless, gorgeous essays, each of which uses an aphorism—“time heals all wounds,” “you can’t enter the same river twice"—to reflect on Tumarkin’s preoccupations: trauma, the ongoingness of the past, and the unworkability of language. Tumarkin takes up subjects like youth suicide and the plight of homeless people in North Melbourne, but her approach is never maudlin. The book exudes pity, as it’s classically defined— “a sorrowing compassion.”
You can read an excerpt from Axiomatic at The Paris Review and a new interview with Tumarkin on humor, the language of trauma, and the ethics of narrative nonfiction at the Jewish Book Council.
Join the Transit Book Club in 2020!
Treat yourself (or a friend!) to a subscription: you'll receive first editions of five books for $60 or ten books for $100—weeks before they're available in stores. That's up to 40% off the cover price.
New subscribers will receive Include Me Out by María Sonia Cristoff, author of False Calm, translated by Katherine Silver, in January, followed by new books by Jon Fosse, Dola de Jong, Ryad Girod, and Esther Kinsky.
Read an excerpt from Include Me Out at Latin American Literature Today.News, Reviews, and More
1. The A.V. Club named Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin a Best Book of 2019. 2. For Words Without Borders, writer and translator Jennifer Croft recommends Mariana Dimópulos's All My Goodbyes (tr. Alice Whitmore) for fans of Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. 3. Suneeta Peres da Costa's Saudade has been selected for The Morning News's 2020 Tournament of Books. 4. Lit Hub calls Andrés Barba's Such Small Hands (tr. Lisa Dillman) one of the best translated books of the decade. 5. The Center for the Art of Translation asked booksellers for their favorite translated books of the decade. Wioletta Greg's Swallowing Mercury (tr. Eliza Marciniak) and Esther Kinsky's River (tr. Iain Galbraith) both made the cut.