“At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what’s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amarâq becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky—suddenly everything is sky.”

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amarâq Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages—through deep personal ties and chilling alienation—the topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amarâq?

Anatomy of a Night is broken up into one-hour sections, with each section broken down into smaller vignettes. It is in these snippets that we learn about the villagers and their relationships. We are thrown into this insular society without much of an introduction and only over the course of the novel do we see the relationships between people develop and dissolve, and see the emergence of Amarâq as the real binding element. All of these characters are inherently tied to the village in one way or another through generations or a personal calling. Because of the evolving web of stories across the whole of the novel, identifying a key example of this intricate technique is very difficult¹; however, one of the most interesting relationships is between Ole and Magnus, two adolescent boys who resolve to commit tandem suicide:

“They wrap the scarves around the bedposts, tie knots. They sit down on the carpet, close to the post, wrapping one end around each of their throats, and knotting them under their chins. They work synchronously, their movements are coordinated, practiced.”

And farther down the page:

“Magnus sits back down on the floor, scoots over to the bed, takes the scarf, wraps it around the end of the bedpost, and knots it under his chin; light from the street falls on the wall, on the pictures Magnus had cut out of magazines and schoolbooks. He considered them outrageously beautiful photos, until about a year ago, when he stopped collecting them because he could no longer remember why he had started. It’s always the same motif: a sandy beach, the ocean in the background so blue it appeared to merge with the sky, but there was no horizon—the horizon was missing in all of the pictures.”

Even during one of the most intimate moments one person can have with another, there still lingers a sense of loneliness and alienation. Though a little more than halfway through the novel, these passages are like a skeleton key, unlocking a well-guarded secret—or maybe they just deepen the mystery.

At times, especially at the very beginning, the prose is a little difficult to grasp hold of, but what really catches and draws you in is Bradley Schmidt’s masterful rendering of Anna Kim’s text. Schmidt’s deft touch allows the prose to sing with full force; a pleasure to read from the first word to the last. Anna Kim’s gorgeous ebook (YES! Ebooks can be gorgeous), published by the new Berlin based Frisch & Co., is a haunting, thoughtful, beautiful work that sticks with you long after it’s done.

¹ Here is a , illustrating this point.

Jen is a former �����Թ� student, and a translator from German. Her first book-length translation, (Open Letter Books), comes out next week.

Here’s the beginning of Jen’s review:

“At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what’s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amarâq becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky—suddenly everything is sky.”

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amarâq Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages—through deep personal ties and chilling alienation—the topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amarâq?

Head over here for the rest of the review.

This is a really cool idea, and I hope it not only gains a lot of traction and readers, but expands rapidly to include many more partnerships and titles.

Frisch & Co. Launches International E-Book Publisher, Partners with Germany’s Suhrkamp Verlag

BERLIN/NEW YORK, October 2012—Frisch & Co. today announced the launch of its e-book publishing program, which will publish contemporary foreign fiction in English-language translation for e-book reading devices. For its initial titles, Frisch & Co. is partnering with Berlin-based Suhrkamp Verlag—venerable publisher of Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and many other modern German-language luminaries. The companies will collaborate to select and publish two new titles from Suhrkamp’s list each year. Frisch & Co. is currently seeking partners in other countries.

Frisch & Co.’s first two titles are Anna Kim’s haunting and poetic novel The Anatomy of a Night and Uwe Tellkamp’s award-winning epic The Tower. Both titles will be released for the first time in English in late-Spring 2013 and will be available through online e-book retailers and on Frisch & Co.’s website.

“There are so many truly fascinating stories, and great writers, that English-only readers simply don’t have the opportunity to discover,” said E.J. Van Lanen, Publisher and former Editor and co-founder of Open Letter Books. “The goal of Frisch & Co’s publishing program is to share some of these stories, and we’re trying to reach readers where they increasingly are: on their tablets, phones, and e-book readers.”

The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 25% of American adults currently own a tablet device, and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) estimate U.S. trade publisher e-book revenues of $1.97 billion (or 16% of total trade dollars) for 2011, up from $838 million and 6.7% in 2010. Adult fiction currently comprises 31% of sales within the category. With its list of prominent and emerging international authors from prestigious international publishers, its single-minded focus on the e-book category, and competitive pricing, Frisch & Co. is well-positioned to benefit from these trends.

“I’m really thrilled about this project,” said Nora Mercurio, Rights Manager at Suhrkamp Verlag, “since in my eyes it represents the perfect merger of the important values Suhrkamp stands for—tradition, high literary quality, the preference of stable partnership over one-time licensing, and an open-mindedness about the future, in this case digitalization.”

In addition to publishing its books through major online retailers, Frisch & Co. will sell its e-books in DRM-free .epub format on its website.

About the books:

Translated into fifteen languages, Uwe Tellkamp’s bestselling The Tower won the 2008 Deutscher Buchpreis—awarded annually to the best German-language novel—the Deutscher Nationalpreis (2009), and the Literaturpreis der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (2009). The Tower paints an epic panorama of the waning days of the German Democratic Republic.

Suicide is spreading like an epidemic in Anna Kim’s third novel, The Anatomy of a Night, which follows the twists and turns of eleven people’s lives in a poor and largely isolated village in the eastern part of Greenland. Precisely observed and beautifully written, The Anatomy of a Night announces a major new voice in German literature.

For more information on Frisch & Co., visit , or contact E.J. Van Lanen (vanlanen [at] frischand.co).