Welcoming new books & supporting a new decade!

A note from the publisher

Dear friends,

I write on a lovely spring afternoon to invite you to consider supporting Restless Books and help us meet our $10,000 fundraising goal by Friday, June 9. This is our tenth year of publishing literature, which invites the kind of contemplation that can only be found by first looking outward, into the world, with all its beauty and complications—books that share the inner lives of people we’ve never met, places we’ve never been, perhaps even truths we don’t yet know or can’t yet understand.

This May, we were privileged to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month alongside some truly wonderful books that make Restless who we are. And now, as Pride Month begins, we recognize groundbreaking works that have helped shape queer literature into the force that it is. As we celebrate these books and many others, we also recommit to upholding the human right to read. Simply put, there is no democracy without dissenting opinion, and there is no worthy dissenting opinion without a calibrated understanding of what it means to be human. That is what Restless Books seeks to explore through literature: what makes us different and what unites us. If ever there was a time to believe that literature has the power to bring people together, it’s now. Your support is crucial. It allows us to continue doing what we’re doing, hopefully for another decade.

Here’s a quick look at what we’ve been up to recently.

Just two months ago, we published The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language, an anthology that chronicles how the English language has transformed over the last 450 years by featuring poets, translators, lexicographers, politicians, actors, comedians, activists, and many more. We also released a beautiful compact book by Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer that features, in bilingual (English-Yiddish) format, his extraordinary story Simple Gimpl, with glorious illustrations by Liana Fink. And we have De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century by Max Czollek, translated from the German by Jon Cho-Polizzi, an insightful meditation that asks a difficult question: should minorities still dream of integrating into mainstream culture? Do the benefits outweigh the limitations? 

This fall, our books continue to take on a variety of subjects that merit contemplation: The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo, translated from the Portuguese by Sophie Lewis, a fresh and otherworldly novel that takes on femicide and deforestation in the Amazon; an award-winning Finnish novel Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila, translated by Lola Rogers, a humorous, post-apocalyptic, ecological adventure you won’t want to put down; An Unruled Body by Albanian poet and translator Ani Gjika, a memoir of immigration and female sexuality that redefines the tradition of immigrant writing; and not least, just in time for Halloween, a new take on Dracula, with illustrations by Kaitlin Chan and introductions by Alexander Chee and Silvia Moreno-Garcia that ask us to reimagine the monster through our modern lens, for good or ill. 

We’re also bringing young readers two works of fiction: The House of the Lost on the Cape by renowned Japanese children’s author Sachiko Kashiwaba, translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa and illustrated by Yukiko Saito, which begins on the day the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan and tells a story about what it means to heal, and how recovery from loss is only really possible when we support each other. And not least, The Invisible Elephant, an imaginative picture book from Russia by Anna Anisimova, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and illustrated by Yulia Sidneva, that asks the reader to experience the world from a blind girl’s point of view. Both of these books engage children through story while also tackling very real subjects that touch our lives in myriad ways.

Recently, our books have been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, PEN Translation Prize, the Chautauqua Prize, and a few others we aren’t allowed to announce yet. We’ve welcomed tremendous new staff and new members to our board, and have opened a new office in Amherst, Massachusetts—so stay tuned! To learn more about what we’ve been up to at the end of our first decade and all that we’re planning for the beginning of another, check out our fall catalog.

Please join Restless in celebrating our tenth anniversary by supporting us. Since we began our campaign, we have received $7,250 in donations. Can we make it $10,000 before the deadline of Friday, June 9? This is the right time to show your support. English-language readers need our kinds of books. And our books need you.

A thousand gracias,

Ilan Stavans

Publisher

Restless Books 

Announcing the publication of Simple Gimpl: the Definitive Bilingual Edition!

From bestselling, controversial Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize–winner Isaac Bashevis Singer comes a little gem of a book about a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker who is the butt of every joke—until one day the devil shows up and invites him to take revenge. 

Singer’s folktale-like story, “Gimpl Tam,” was first published in an obscure Yiddish-language journal on March 30, 1945—about a month before the Nazi surrender. Nine years later, Saul Bellow translated the story into English, introducing Singer to an audience of American Jewish readers. Gimpl’s predicament has since come to be seen as a symbol of the diaspora. What role should a minority people play in the face of aggression?

Today, “Gimpl Tam” is one of the most influential and beloved stories in the canon of twentieth-century literature, taught in high schools and colleges, endlessly discussed, and even analyzed from a Talmudic perspective. But Bellow’s translation, which was done without Singer’s involvement, has been accused of christening the language to make it palatable for a mass readership. 

In 1991, before his death at the age of 88, Singer (whose relationship with Bellow was complicated, to say the least) sat down to write his own translation. The definitive bilingual edition of Simple Gimpl brings the Yiddish original alongside both Singer’s and Bellow’s renditions, beautiful drawings by award-winning New Yorker illustrator Liana Finck, and an essay by scholar David Stromberg, who completed and edited Singer’s translation. The volume introduces new readers to Singer’s talents as a storyteller, inspires conversation about the role of translation, especially of endangered languages like Yiddish, and confirms the value of individual integrity and the steadfastness of individuals and minority communities under duress.

Simple Gimpl is published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Restless Books with the generous support of David Bruce Smith and the Grateful American Foundation, Dean and Annette Cycon, and Terry Philip Segal in honor of Joseph Lieberman.    

Join us in celebrating Simple Gimpl with these in-person events! 

• Brooklyn
  On March 23rd at 7:00 p.m. EST, Brooklyn Jews and Community Bookstore present A Night with David Stromberg and Val Vinokur at Congregation Beth Elohim.
  

• Boston
  On March 27th from 7:00–8:00 p.m. EST, Harvard Bookstore presents David Stromberg and Jamaica Kincaid in conversation about the art of translation, Singer’s legacy, and much more.

Events for "The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language" with Ilan Stavans

In 2023, Restless Books celebrates its 10th anniversary with the publication of The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language, a riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English that features a tremendous array of letters, poems, memoirs, jeremiads, stories, songs, documents, and more from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodríguez and Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich.

The volume’s pursuit is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans, an internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, The People’s Tongue is organized chronologically and offers an array of foundational texts that trace the development of American identity and vernacular.

We hope to see you at one of our in-person events to celebrate this incredible book! You can find registration info below as it becomes available.

2023 eventS

Feb 21, Feb 28, Mar 7: New York’s 92nd St. Y Hosts Ilan Stavans for Three Sessions (virtual)

Mar 1, 7:00 PM: Ilan Stavans at the Newport Public Library, VT (virtual) 

Mar 29: Ilan Stavans in Conversation with John McWhorter at New York’s Tenement Museum (hybrid)

Apr 4: Restless Books 10th Anniversary Celebration at the Brooklyn Public Library, NY (in-person)

Apr 11: Ilan Stavans at the New York Public Library, NY (virtual)

Apr 19: “The Sounds of English” with PEN America at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (in-person)

May 21: American Writers Museum hosts Ilan Stavans with Carolyn Curiel and music by Paquito D’Rivera & Fareed Haque, Chicago (in-person)

June 8: Ilan Stavans in Conversation with John McWhorter at Planet Word Museum, Washington, D.C. (in-person)

Jun 17–Jul 1: “Great Books: Language and Democracy” at Amherst College, MA (in-person)

ABOUT THE EDITOR

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© Kevin Gutting

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and a passionate lover of dictionaries, with a collection of over three hundred now housed in his personal collection at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published an assortment of books about language, including Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language (2003), Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (2005), Resurrecting Hebrew (2008), and How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (2020). He serves as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary and lives in Amherst, Mass.

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