Europa Editions

We’re giving away three of our limited edition World Noir tote...

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:59:27 -0400

We’re giving away three of our limited edition World Noir tote bags FREE! All you have to do is send in a copy of your receipt from any retailer (store or online) showing you’ve pre-ordered any of our World Noir Launch titles! Send your receipt to info@europaeditions.com and we’ll randomly choose three winners. You have until 5pm Friday, May 3rd so get out there and pre-order now!

Titles That Qualify for Giveaway

Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz
Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo
Chourmo by Jean-Claude Izzo
Solea by Jean-Claude Izzo
Blood Curse by Maurizio de Giovanni
At The End of a Dull Day by Massimo Carlotto
Garlic, Mint & Sweet Basil by Jean-Claude Izzo

EARTHLY POWERS was recently named a “book of a lifetime” by the...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:39:15 -0400

EARTHLY POWERS was recently named a “book of a lifetime” by the leading UK newspaper, The Independent. The novel’s power is illustrated by the writer’s tale of a love story that started with the exchange of this book.

“About 15 years ago I gave a copy of this novel to a friend who was setting off on holiday, with an inscription saying that it was my favorite novel. A few days later, the phone rang. It was her, breathless with excitement. She’d just finished the book. We gabbled away, agreeing about all the ways in which we loved the book. A decade and a half later, both of us remember this call with strange clarity. She’s now my wife.”

Engaging readers from all walks of life, Burgess’ novel makes us confront our beliefs on love, friendship, and the adventure of life. The Europa edition of EARTHLY POWERS is available at all leading bookstores.

Read the full articleHERE!

Europa World Noir: Death's Dark Abyss - Chapter 1: Silvano

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:13:53 -0400

Europa World Noir: Death's Dark Abyss - Chapter 1: Silvano:

europaworldnoir:

Silvano

A quick glance at the mailbox before heading home—my routine on week days. Mine was the first in a bank of six gold-colored aluminum boxes, each with a glass slot and a name computer-printed by the condo’s managing agent. Right away I saw the lone envelope was a letter. Nobody…

Europa World Noir: Europa World Noir Lets You Read Free!

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:26:20 -0400

Europa World Noir: Europa World Noir Lets You Read Free!:

europaworldnoir:

Over the next few months, Europa Editions will be giving you a preview of one of the best noir writers in the world, Massimo Carlotto. Starting today, you can read Carlotto’s Death’s Dark Abyss absolutely free right here!

Death’s Dark Abyss tells the story of two men and the savage crime…

TIME FOR A GIVEAWAY! Since it’s been, what, a week since...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:43:40 -0400

TIME FOR A GIVEAWAY! Since it’s been, what, a week since our last giveaway?…

E-mail your answer to the following trivia question, along with your mailing address, to info@europaeditions.com. In our oh-so-technologically-advanced way, we’ll put all correct submissions into a hat and draw our winners!

FILL-IN-THE-BLANK: The Ides of March is notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar in the year ______.

Winners receive Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s THE IDES OF MARCH, a political thriller set during the tempestuous final days of Julius Caesar’s Imperial Rome.

This contest runs March 15, 2013 only.

“Appel deserves credit for retaining de Giovanni’s...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:29:53 -0400

“Appel deserves credit for retaining de Giovanni’s distinct brand of noir in her translation, which will appeal to Agatha Christie and Manuel Vazquez Montalban fans.”

—Publishers Weekly

Kate Southwood’s debut novel, Falling to Earth, is part of...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:27:08 -0400

Kate Southwood’s debut novel, Falling to Earth, is part of the Spring 2013 class of B&N’s Discover program, in such company as Ayana Mathis’ Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Oprah Book Club) and the much-anticipated memoir from restauranteur Eddie Huang, Fresh Off the Boat.

Great news, Europa Editions is coming to town!Our Editor in...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:38:33 -0500

Great news, Europa Editions is coming to town!

Our Editor in Chief, Michael Reynolds, will be
visiting bookstores in North Carolina and Florida next month for a series of public events.

Some interesting topics are up for discussion! Hear the backstory of Europa’s catalog, the history of Europa Editions, and get a preview of upcoming highlights.

Check out the dates and locations below. Hope to see you there!

Tuesday, March 26 at 7:30 pm
Quail Ridge Books (Raleigh, NC)

Wednesday, March 27 at 6:00 pm
McIntyre’s Book (Fearington Village, NC)

Thursday, March 28 at 7:00 pm
Malaprops Bookstore Café (Asheville, NC )

Monday, April 1 at 7:00 pm
Bookstore 1 (Sarasota, FL )

Tuesday, April 2 at 7:00 pm
Inkwood Books (Tampa, FL)

Thursday, April 4 at 8:00 pm
Books & Books (Coral Gables, FL)

Friday, April 5 at 7:00 pm
Betsy Hotel (Miami , FL)
(sponsored by Books & Books)

Saturday, April 6 at 2p.m.
Book Club Mixer
Books & Books (Coral Gables, FL)

“Following a recent Automobiles article about a vintage Alfa Romeo that I brought back from...

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:31:54 -0500

“Following a recent Automobiles article about a vintage Alfa Romeo that I brought back from Italy, I got a fair bit of e-mail from readers. The most intriguing letter, though, was from a reader who asked if I had come across the novel Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles, by Fabio Bartolomei. I hadn’t, but did a little research…”

New York Times blogger Nick Czap on the Alfa Romeo’s great literary introduction: Wheels: The Nuts & Bolts of Whatever Moves You

Elena Ferrante’s MY BRILLIANT FRIEND and Carole...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:01:04 -0500

Elena Ferrante’s MY BRILLIANT FRIEND and Carole Martinez’s THE THREADS OF THE HEART are now available at Target stores!

Go check them out and get yourself a copy! The cover images are quite eye-catching, they’ll be a nice addition to your bookshelf.

"No moral thing to do. But something had to be done"

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:59:00 -0500

“No moral thing to do. But something had to be done”

- From Gene Kerrigan’s award-winning crime novel, The Rage, in stores today.

OUT LOUD: ANONYMOUS AND PAINFULLY HONEST Elena Ferrante writes...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:26:06 -0500

OUT LOUD: ANONYMOUS AND PAINFULLY HONEST

Elena Ferrante writes under a pseudonym—almost nothing is known about her true identity. Here Sasha Weiss talks with The New Yorker’s James Wood and Ann Goldstein, Ferrante’s English translator, about her intensely personal, often brutally honest writing.

From Shelf Awareness:

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:19:06 -0500

“Carole Martinez’s Threads of the Heart, a bestseller in Europe, tells Frasquita’s story from the eyes of a daughter attempting to lay her mother’s memory to rest. Martinez gives readers a whimsical, heartbreaking story of love and spells and beauty in which magic and reality are woven so tightly together that the two become inextricable. The result is a novel at once mythical in its scope and haunting in its realism, sure to be remembered long past the turn of the last page.”

The Guardian’s “10 Best First Lines in...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:06:00 -0500

The Guardian’s “10 Best First Lines in Fiction” lists Anthony Burgess’ EARTHLY POWERS as number 6th on the list! Check out his & other great first lines from fiction:

The 10 best first lines in fiction

Our guide to the greatest opening lines of novels in the English language, from Jane Austen to James Joyce

1. James Joyce

Ulysses (1922)

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

2. Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice (1813)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The one everyone knows (and quotes). Parodied, spoofed, and misremembered, Austen’s celebrated zinger remains the archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale. Only Dickens comes close, with the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light etc…”

3. Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre (1847)

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The polar opposite to Austen and Dickens, this line plunges the reader into the narrative, but in a low-key tone of disappointed expectations that captures Jane Eyre’s dismal circumstances. Brontë nails Jane’s hopeless prospects in 10 words. At the same time, the reader can hardly resist turning the first page. There’s also the intriguing contrast in tone with her sister Emily, who opens Wuthering Heights with: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.”

4. Mark Twain

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” The influence of this opening reverberates throughout the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like… and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

5. PG Wodehouse

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” A classic English comic opening, perfectly constructed to deliver the joke in the final phrase, this virtuoso line also illustrates its author’s uncanny ear for the music of English. Contrast the haunting brevity of Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, partly situated in the south of France, and also published in the 1930s: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

6. Anthony Burgess

Earthly Powers (1980)

“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham). It is matched by Rose Macaulay’s famous opening to The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

7. Dodie Smith

I Capture the Castle (1948)

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic, which tells us almost all we need to know about the narrator Cassandra Mortmain. Quirky and high-spirited, Dodie Smith’s novel is really an exercise in nostalgia. Smith (subsequently famous for The Hundred and One Dalmatians) was living in 1940s California, and wrote this story, in a sustained fever of nostalgia, to remind her of home. Perhaps only an English writer could extract so much resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.”

8. Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar (1963)

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Postwar American first lines don’t come much more angsty or zeitgeisty than this. Compare Saul Bellow’s Herzog: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” First published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, this first novel seems to parallel Sylvia Plath’s own descent into suicide. In fact, The Bell Jar was published only a month after its author’s tragic death in the bleak winter of 1963.

9. Donna Tartt

The Secret History (1992)

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” In this spooky opening, Tartt plunges the reader into the middle of a crime whose consequences will reverberate throughout the ensuing pages. Like all the best beginnings, the sentence also tells us something about the narrator, Richard Papen. He’s the outsider in a group of worldly students at Hampden College in rural Vermont. He was expecting a break from his bland suburban Californian life, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s got himself into.

10. Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (1883)

“Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17— and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Among the most brilliant and enthralling opening lines in the English language.

"Wonderful! MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is like water; it has a lovely fresh easiness about it…I couldn’t..."

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:19:00 -0500

“Wonderful! MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is like water; it has a lovely fresh easiness about it…I couldn’t stop reading it.”

- The New Yorker’s James Wood on Elena Ferrante’s new novel, from the podcast Out Loud: Anonymous and Painfully Honest

Photo

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:15:34 -0500

A remarkable New Yorker review by James Wood of Elena...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:35:57 -0500

A remarkable New Yorker review by James Wood of Elena Ferrante’s work, including her recent release MY BRILLIANT FRIEND.

“Ferrante’s own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing.”

“[My Brilliant Friend is] large, captivating, amiably peopled…a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/01/21/130121crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all

"To say that the author uses language expertly would be an understatement. In an inspired translation..."

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:40:40 -0500

“To say that the author uses language expertly would be an understatement. In an inspired translation by Michael Reynolds, the novel blends English, Italian and Chinese to impart something that exists beyond words with a surreal, symbolic language all its own.”

- Intense Sensations on Viola di Grado’s 70% Acrylic 30% Wool

"A few days ago – it was barely eight o’clock in the morning – sitting in the metro, rubbing my eyes..."

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:57:08 -0500

“A few days ago – it was barely eight o’clock in the morning – sitting in the metro, rubbing my eyes and fighting sleep because I’d woken up so early, I saw an Italian girl devouring a pizza as big as an umbrella.”

- Opening line from Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

David L. Ulin of The Los Angeles Times shares his picks for...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:11:52 -0500

David L. Ulin of The Los Angeles Times shares his picks for “Books 2012” and Erickson’s THESE DREAMS OF YOU is featured!

“What made 2012 a compelling year in reading? For me, it was the return of the novel of ideas.The best titles of the y

ear marked a return to writing that takes the measure of the moment, with standout writers like Steve Erickson, Hari Kunzru and Zadie Smith.” -David L. Ulin

See Erickson’s & other impeccable novels from 2012 here:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-best-books-2012-20121216,0,2730438.story