Remembering William Faulkner on his birthday 🎂 📷 Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1962 "The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure & prevail." - from his Nobel Prize speech, 1950

"It has come too late." Jean Rhys on her rediscovery and subsequent literary acclaim after decades of obscurity. #booksky

🌓 HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones publishes today 🌓 A ‘constellation novel’, HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT is a brilliantly imaginative story of a small place by one of the most ambitious novelists of our time. 🌓 fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/house-...

Fragment from the incomplete epigraph to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, in a superb translation by Julie Rose

Some new acquisitions: A not-so-new Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, tr. Julie Rose #booksky

'If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.' From the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

'A light pleasant void was in Gregor's heart, life was good and free from care. The red-tailed dawn was pecking up the starry grain from the dove-coloured floor of heaven.' From Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Stephen Garry

'We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two—in case one misfired.' Irreconcileable horror in the untold stories of the women who fought in WWII, from Nobel laureate (and huge personal favourite) Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Book cover designs by Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell (c.1930) #WomensArt

A very beautiful cover of Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Leonard Schapiro; and the epigraph from which the novel takes its title

'His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles [...]' Two on a Tower - Thomas Hardy

'[...] and I thought to myself that nothing can make a face more impenetrable than a mask of kindliness.' From André Gide's doomed romance Isabelle, tr. Dorothy Bussy

'Chekhov said that you should write everything - except denunciations.' The Noise of Time - Julian Barnes

Recent-ish acquisitions: Serious Concerns - Wendy Cope Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov, tr. Paul Schmidt The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank, tr. Susan Massotty The Disinherited - Benito Pérez Galdós, tr. Lester Clark #booksky

Our short story prize is open for submissions again! Please share this widely - and please send us your stories: www.galleybeggar.co.uk/prize Closing date 8 November!

There's very little invention in my books. What came first was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down.

The cruel vacillation of a lover, taken from the opening stanza of Thomas Hardy's I Say I'll Seek Her

'But the desert is as unmarked as the hands of a cadaver, all lines of destiny wiped clean.' Really enjoying the intelligence, the unbounded creativity, and some of the simply wild paragraphs of Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra, in a masterly translation by Margaret Sayers Peden

'[...] its expression of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost [...]' From Jack Kerouac's poignant later novel Big Sur, a far cry from the boundlessness, the delirious energy of On the Road, one decade before

'Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.' O Pioneers - Willa Cather, via @hesperus.press

'Knowing its unadornment held as freight The sweetest image outside Paradise.' The ending of Her Definition, a love poem of Thomas Hardy

'[...] and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth.' From Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford

'Can you tell me, kind master, why it is that even in the presence of great happiness a man cannot forget his grief?' The Night Before Easter - Anton Chekhov, tr. unknown

'Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of Plaszów paperwork, Oskar's dozen pages of names were the only pages with a connection to the future.' From Schindler's Ark, the basis for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, by Thomas Keneally

‘Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ From 'Lady Lazarus', which appears in Sylvia Plath's Ariel.

Purchases from a Brighton & Hove trip: Selected Stories - Anton Chekhov, tr. (tragically) unknown Heart Lamp - Banu Mushtaq, tr. Deepa Bhasthi (via @andotherstories.bsky.social and bought from the amazing @citybookshove.bsky.social) The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford #booksky

Fancy 50% off all our published books? Because we're a "real" company, urgh, we've got to do some market research. So here's the deal, fill in our survey and in return we'll give you a 50% off code. It should take like five minutes. Deal? us6.list-manage.com/survey?u=12c...

'That's how it is: you're exhausted now, not just physically; your mind, which is also a little bit your heart, has sustained damage as well. Or your heart, which is also a little bit your mind [...]' From Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler, tr. Katy Derbyshire, out via @semiotexte.bsky.social

'In my case all painting - and the older I get, the more it becomes so - is an accident. I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it.' Francis Bacon

“The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame.

From a free community library in a tiny English hamlet: A Choice of Shelley's Verse, selected by Stephen Spencer Cranford - Elizebeth Gaskell Dubliners - James Joyce #booksky

An amazing quote on Milton and Paradise Lost from William Blake, excerpted from Orlando Reade's What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

Recent acquisitions: The Golden Bowl - Henry James And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov (tr. Stephen Garry) The Safekeep - Yael van der Wouden #booksky

'There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing[...]' On regret, from Dickens' Oliver Twist

''In the middle of the night you wake up. You start to cry. What's happening to me? Oh, my life, oh, my youth....' From Jean Rhys' last novel until Wide Sargasso Sea over twenty-five years later, the tragic, wine-soaked, Good Morning, Midnight

☀️ SUMMER SALE ☀️ We’re running a summer sale on our website until 10.00 a.m. BST on 23 June, with a 30 per cent discount across everything on our website using the code ‘SUMMER30’ at checkout. Shop now: fitzcarraldoeditions.com/shop/

'At this blessed point in his life, still in childhood, Alfred possesses both types of love, sacred and profane. He will grieve for such plenitude for ever after.' From Anita Brookner's Friends and Family, a meticulous depiction of a family unravelling and the strictures of expectation

'It [the internet] will be part of your presence all the time.' On the end of the internet, from Jeanette Winterson's insightful, philosophical, and often downright funny 12 Bytes: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Way We Live and Love

'[...] and the coachmen had to carry several of the guests in their arms as if they were parcels from some shopping expedition.' From Nikolay Gogol's lively and absurd short story The Carriage, tr. Ronald Wilks

'—Nautical night to be outside my girl. Considered you'd caught death.—' From @rgransden.bsky.social's apocalyptic odyssey, Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, out now in various editions (including this incredibly smart hardback) from Tangerine Press

Today’s reprints:

'Money counts for something only when feeling is dead.' From Honoré de Balzac's Old Goriot, tr. M. A. Crawford

'Are we so made that we have take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?' From Virginia Woolf's fantastical, joyous letter of love, Orlando

An etching by Clarke Hutton from a 1970 Folio Society edition of Pushkin's eminently readable The Queen of Spades/The Captain's Daughter

'[...] Christopher Burnet was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into a solitary confinement cell in a prison outside Paris. There he spent 526 days in complete isolation.' From the powerful blurb of Solitary Confinement, out now from @bhousepress.bsky.social

'But I don't want to forget,' Tony cried out in desperation. 'Forgetting - is that any consolation?' From Thomas Mann's epic tale of the decline of a family's decline, Buddenbrooks tr. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter

Release day for the Tangerine Press edition of the novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group! Three editions: special price on handbound/signed/art copies ends tomorrow, May 30th. Follow the path: www.thetangerinepress.com/FICTION/RG-F...

'[...] don't talk about Bolshevism or medicine at the table. And, God forbid - never read Soviet newspapers before dinner.' From Mikhail Bulgakov's daring satire of Bolshevism, A Dog's Heart, proscribed by the Soviet authorities in 1925, only published in his country in 1987. tr. Andrew Bromfield

For £1 in a charity book box, a beautiful copy of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye

'I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.' Evelyn Waugh on his work.