Sounds kind of sexy, doesn’t it?

This series—which is an ebook only series—was put together with the intent to do something a little more to connect foreign publishers with translators, particularly those just starting out, and to give an extra boost to the number of books being brought into publication. It was also put together as a platform to give students working with the press a chance to get more hands-on in the production side of things: to work with translators and authors, use software to put the ebooks together themselves, gather the necessary catalog information . . . And, of course, it creates a little loophole for that wee, pesky issue of how many books we’re able to publish a year.

As is the case with many other small, non-profit presses, Open Letter Books has limited resources, capping the number of titles they can published (in a fiscally responsible manner) in a given year. For us, we’re limited to 10 new books a year. Because of these limits, we and many other presses are making tough decisions on an almost daily basis, of which books to pass on, which books to mull over, and which books, ultimately, to publish. However, with ebooks removing many of the constraints tied to print-publishing, we can increase the number of books we are able to introduce to the world of literature in translation.

But this series has a greater purpose in mind than just saving a few pennies in production costs. The beauty of ebooks is that once the book has been translated, edited, and proofed, it’s good to go on sale almost immediately, and to the delight of readers everywhere. Another benefit is that, within the After Dark series model, the foreign publishers, agents, and authors, even, are able to use this fully-treated translation to shop the book around to other publishers. Once a print publisher is found for the respective book, its time as an After Dark ebook comes to a close—but its life as a print book has found its beginning.

To kick off our After Dark series (which has been in a slow, soft-open for the last year now, and two of the three inaugural titles have been available for purchase for a bit already), we have three brilliant titles from three �����Թ� MA in Literary Translation Studies graduates. These titles were not only the three respective translators’ thesis projects, but also three books that we absolutely wanted to have in this series, for all their quirks, humor, thought-invoking and paranoia-inducing qualities. These are books you will want to read and reread, and books that, we hope, will continue to change and challenge the way each reader digests and understands literature.

Inaugural Titles – Open Letter After Dark

Medical Autobiography by Damián Tabarovsky, translated from the Spanish by Emily Davis.

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All of these books will be priced at $4.99—so affordable!—and available through all ebook platforms. All three are absolutely worthy of having the Open Letter colophon on their spine (or screen), so if you’re a fan of what we do, you should definitely check these out.

And be on the look out for a couple more Isaac Rosa titles in the near future. One of Spain’s hottest young authors, his works are meandering, high-minded, and, at times, really unnerving. (The robbery scene in Land of Fear still sticks with me, years after first reading it. What would you do if someone was in your room while you pretended to sleep?)

We’ll put up individual posts about each of these titles over the next few weeks, but for now, we wanted to at least introduce everyone to the core concept.

Flawed, yet engaging—at least in the opinion of the author himself—The Bad Memory takes place in 1977 and tells the story of Julian Santos: a man hired by a mysterious widow to ghostwrite her war criminal husband’s autobiography. Santos’s search into his subject’s past leads him to discover the secret town Alcahaz, which has been erased from all official records, and causes him to relive his experiences as a child during the Spanish Civil War.

What distinguishes Another Damn Novel from its predecessor, and makes the book a fun read, is that in this re-release, each chapter closes with an anonymous reader’s disparaging but humorous criticism of Rosa’s writing style and techniques that can be extended and seen as a critique of mainstream, realistic writing as a whole.

No character, word, or quote is safe from Rosa’s scathing self-criticism. This anonymous reader rips apart every aspect of the novel, wittily revealing interesting insights into the writing process and shortcomings of conventional novels. He jokes about the Moleskine journals that “writers” can’t live without, the author’s inability to create believable female characters, and the author’s habit of constructing whole chapters around bizarre words chosen at random from an encyclopedia.

For example, here’s what the anonymous reader has to say following a chapter in which the protagonist—through luck and a series of coincidences—discovers the town he’s been searching for:

Fate, the easy way out for bad writers. Chance, the unforeseen, a turn of luck, deus ex machina that in this case is aided by infallible intuition, by a hunch that helps the journey move along. Fate fatefully reveals the fateful existence of Alcahaz through a photo that fatefully falls from a book chosen by fate (well, actually, a photo prettily “born from the womb of the book”). And if fate isn’t enough, the protagonist’s resolute intuition enters the game, the hunch that there is something curious about this place, accented by the widow’s revelation that her husband’s voice “lightly trembled” upon speaking the name, and that “he became furious, he told me to shut up, he lost his temper.” Hmm, how curious, the protagonist will think, we imagine him raising an eyebrow and stroking his beard. What infuriated him and made him tremble upon speaking the name? Hmm, hmm, there could be something here, we shall see, we shall see. [Translation mine.]

Although Rosa jokes in the introduction that the impertinent critic is trying to “sabotage” his work, the re-writing of The Bad Memory becomes the central aspect of the novel. But it would be too simplistic to portray this as just a clever exercise in metafiction. Instead Rosa’s desire to rewrite his first novel reflects the novel’s plot (Santos’ ghostwriting of the war criminal’s autobiography) and explores Spain’s desire to rewrite its own violent past.

By drawing so much attention to his “bad writing,” Rosa runs a risk of alienating his audience. Who really wants to read 200 pagse of a crappy novel just to enjoy some snarky comments? But by linking up to the Spanish tradition of Civil War novels with a narrative that’s actually compelling, the still up-and-coming Rosa mostly avoids this problem, creating a book that—as a meditation on the nature of authorship, as a story about the Civil War—can be enjoyed on several levels.

Another Damn Novel about the Spanish Civil War!
By Isaac Rosa
Untranslated
Seix Barral
432 pp., 20,50 euros