Wednesdays are wunderbar: A giveaway from Pushkin Press

My plans for #germanlitmonth are not at all fixed, changing from day to day, but I notice that there is some incredibly advanced planning going on in the blogosphere.  Well, here I am to mess those plans up a little ….. in the nicest possible way …. with giveaways from some generous publishers.

Pushkin Press is kicking off this year’s #germanlitmonth giveaway season, and I’m quite envious of the eventual recipients of this one. You see I’ve been looking at the Pushkin Press Autumn catalogue and there are no less than 5 German literature titles in it (and yes, I want to read them all).  However, I’ve told myself that I mustn’t start on them until I’ve read the 3 from the Spring catalogue in my TBR.   You, however, need show no such restraint because Pushkin Press has made 3 copies of Saša Stanišić’s Before The Feast available to #germanlitmonth participants.  The book will be published on 22nd October, so this is your chance to bag a hot off the press edition.

Cue blurb from the publisher’s website.

It’s the night before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman – he’s dead. And Mrs Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells – the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than smoking. Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast.

Stanišić’s debut novel, How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, won the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize, and the English translation by Anthea Bell took the Oxford-Weidenfeld translation prize.  This second novel won the Leipzig Book Prize in 2014, and has also been translated by Anthea Bell.

To enter the giveaway, which is open internationally, simply leave a comment with a German (-language) literature recommendation of your own.  Winners will be chosen randomly and notified on Sunday 11th October.

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