Archipelago imprint: 122 books

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), one of Germany’s most revered poets, is equally well-known for his idiosyncratic prose, the vibrant voice of which feels astonishingly modern in its familiar tone and thematic acrobatics. Travel Pictures comprises the accounts of four journeys taken at different times...

Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness, and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas . . . because many of them wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters. . . . Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate...

Found in an envelope in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's house after his death in 2005, Map Drawn by a Spy is the world-renowned writer's autobiographical account of the last four months he spent in his country. In 1965, following his mother's death, Infante returns to Cuba from Brussels, where he is employed...

Dreams and Stones is a small masterpiece, one of the most extraordinary works of literature to come out of Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism. In sculpted, poetic prose reminiscent of Bruno Schulz, it tells the story of the emergence of a great city. In Tulli’s hands myth, metaphor,...

The Exploded View, from the masterful South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, tells the story of four lives intertwined through the sprawling infrastructure on the margins of Johhanesburg: a stastician taking the national census, an engineer out on the town with city officials, an artist interested...

A brooding meditation on violence by a classic post-war Dutch writer who has drawn comparisons to Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. A mesmerizing, dark meditation on the legacy of war. An interloper and opportunist makes a grand house his own in the chaos of a war-torn countryside, only to find himself involved with occupying forces and enraged locals.

Karim Chammas returns to Lebanon, his family, and his past after ten years of establishing a new life in France. Back in Beirut, Karim reacquaints himself with his brother Nassim, now married to his former love Hind, and old friends from the leftist political circles within which he once roamed under...

A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten. The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence...

Surviving the childhood trauma of his parents’ untimely deaths in the early skirmishes of World War I, Mümtaz is raised and mentored in Istanbul by his cousin Ihsan and his cosmopolitan family of intellectuals. Having lived through the tumultuous cultural revolutions following the fall of the Ottoman...

The Bottom of the Jar is the journey of a boy finding his footing in the heart of Fez during the 1950s, as Morocco began freeing itself from the grip of the French colonial occupation. The narrator vividly recalls his first encounters with the ebullient city, family dramas, and the joys and turbulence...

Prefiguring the vital modernist voices of the Western literary canon, Akutagawa writes with a trenchant psychological precision that exposes the shifting traditions and ironies of early twentieth-century Japan and reveals his own strained connection to it. These stories are moving glimpses into a...

"If it be permitted to speak of ‘love at first sound,’ then that’s what I experienced in my first encounter with this poet of prose." So said Thomas Mann of the work of PeterAltenberg. A virtuoso Fin-de-Siècle Viennese innovator of what he called the "telegram style" of...

All One Horse is a marvel-filled journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. The electrifying colors and penetrating images of his paintings converse with his lyrical and satirical dream-fables. These visions and parables emerge from a mélange of cultures and traditions: African...

Addressed to a young writer, Intimate Stranger is an eclectic and generous work flowing with insight and wit. Breytenbach's candid and provocative reflections on reading and writing guide without guiding, open mental channels, surprise, and inspire. A stirring glimpse into the mind of an artist, Intimate...