Here’s an example from the opening paragraph:

There are more than a million people living in the city of Prague whom I’d just as soon not name here. Our family is originally from the country. Our family, that means me, my wife, and two tolerable little boys.

(It’s that “tolerable” that’s so fantastic.)

As the story progresses and the reader gets more and more attuned to the quirks and clicks of the narrator’s voice, the funnier this gets. Even when our friendly narrator is doing very odd things to innocent guinea pigs . . .

Anyway, to share our love of this book with the rest of the world, we decided to give away 10 copies via So if you’re a member, be sure to click this handy little widget below to be entered into the drawing.

With a little luck, I’ll highlight each of these next week, with excerpts and the like, but for now, here’s a list of all five titles along with links to their Open Letter pages, where you can find cover images, jacket copy, links to excerpts, author bios, etc., etc.

• Quim Monzo’s translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush

Excellent collection of Monzo’s stories, and the second book of his that we’re publishing. Next up: 1000 Morons.

• Sergio Chejfec’s translated from the Spanish by Margaret Carson, with an introduction by Enrique Vila-Matas

This is the first of three Chejfec titles we’re publishing, the other two being The Dark and The Planets. First came across Chejfec in a post by Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading linking to a recommendation at Hermano Cerdo written by Enrique Vila-Matas about how totally awesome this book is. (Or some similar Spanish phrasing.) We then went on to buy the rights to all three books thanks to a brilliant excerpt that was in BOMB magazine.

• Ludvik Vaculik’s translated from the Czech by Kača Poláčková

This is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. And the second Open Letter book in which guinea pigs are subjected to uncool things. I get the strangest reaction from friends when I try and describe just how funny the narrator’s guinea pig “experiments” are. Like the one with the record player. Or the stove. Or the bathtub. . . . Um, yeah. But seriously, it’s hysterical—mainly because of the voice of the befuddled, clueless narrator. And we have some awesome promotions in mind for this . . . none of which involve the harming of physical, living guinea pigs. Promise.

• Can Xue’s translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant

This new collection by Can Xue (who has also been published by New Directions, Northwestern, Yale, and Conjunctions) is the first Chinese title to come out from Open Letter. She’s a very interesting, unique writer who reminds me a bit of Rikki Ducornet. The stories are a bit surreal, surprising, and, at time, disorienting in a very pleasurable way.

• Ingrid Winterbach’s translated by Dick and Ingrid Winterbach

We published Winterbach’s last fall to some good attention. She’s a stark, interesting South African writer, and in the end, I think Book of Happenstance is an even better book than Cronje . . .

More all next week . . .

Incredibly, he returned to Prague after the 1968 uprising was put down:

Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. “I organised a reading the week after we got back,” he says. “I invited about 45 guests, which I’d worked out was the most I could get into our living room. And I prepared meatballs, ‘Klima-balls’ as they came to be known. There was some wine, and somebody read something that was newly written. That was how it went on, every week. I remember Havel read two of his new plays; Kundera, who was still in Prague at that point, came and read some things.”

After about a year, Klima’s friend Ludvik Vaculik (the author of A Cup of Coffee with my Interrogator) brought along a man from Ostrava to one of the gatherings, a writer who had spent a year in prison. The man, who later committed suicide, had signed an agreement in prison to work with the secret police and he passed on the names of everyone who was there, and pictures were taken of people coming in and out. “So from that point,” Klima says, “we were known.”

Klima, Vaculik (we’re doing a reprint edition of his The Guinea Pigs next year), Havel, and Kundera all in one place, reading together. No doubt Skvorecky attended these readings too. That’s just too much.

Vaculik has also written a sort of memoir of that time, and of the years when they published each other’s work in samidzat editions, which is really fascinating. Just reading about all of these amazing writers working together in such close proximity is something.

Maybe we’ll publish that one too…