Max Lawton

Samples

(If you would like to formally consider any of these samples, please e-mail me at [email protected])

The Sorias

Remember Famagusta

A Rainband Passing Through

Song of Dark and Light

In Antonio Moresco’s newest novel, light has disappeared from the Earth, which is gradually sinking into endless darkness. Not just the Earth, however: the entire universe, as in an inconceivable reverse big bang, has been enveloped by an inexorable and very mysterious darkness. This is not the world running out of oil, nor the end of energy resources: simply, in an absolutely incomprehensible but unstoppable way, every light has gone out. Is the darkness just a shadow? And what is its nature? Will it be reversible or is normality lost forever? While the narrator asks himself these questions, everyday life, as in a paradoxical apocalypse without catastrophe, continues in darkness just as it did before: even the war in Ukraine comes to no end, with the massacres, mass graves, the child torture and rape; the alienating routine of workers also continues, of the bank employee overwhelmed by technical procedures or of the supermarket operator, who repeats the instructions in the delicatessen manual like a mantra; daily violence in the family continues, against women, against children, against the weak… As you read, you realize that, after all, the imaginary world of fiction is not so different from the real world. But what is the song that all of a sudden seems to pierce the darkness that has fallen on the world? And truly, as an imaginary Vladimir Putin barricaded in a steel capsule states, darkness is the natural outcome of human existence, “because we are all programmed like this, we humans on whom darkness has now fallen and who deserve nothing else that the darkness”? Reading this book is a radical experience, between the wildest invention and the crudest reality, between viscerality and metaphysical challenge, between provocation and the withering evocation of our dark present. Song of Dark and Light is the result of years of preparatory work and the author’s explosive encounter with scientists, mathematicians, musicians, directors, painters, linguists, advertisers, dancers, magicians, hypnotists, fashion experts, goldsmiths, supermarket employees, nurses, educators, bank assistants, employees of large distribution chains… Many figures who have recently been fixtures in the news and famous people into whom the author enters as if into avatars also take part: Putin, Pope Francis, Jeff Bezos, Jesus… The novel is an immersion in an exciting and burning narrative subject, an adventure of knowledge that carries within it the radicalness and truth of the fairy tale.

Nightingale Grove: Selected Extremities

Nightingale Grove offers the most complex and exhaustive vision of Vladimir Sorokin’s long-standing practice as a writer of short fiction. Whereas the two rather slim volumes of stories being put out by Dalkey Archive and NYRB will offer a limited window onto his method by way of the neatest and most accessible stories he’s written, Nightingale Grove dives to the strangest and most formally difficult places Sorokin has ever gone. In the context of the eight books being put out in my translations by Dalkey and NYRB between 2022 and 2027 (Telluria, Their Four Hearts, The Norm, Blue Lard, Roman, Marina’s Thirtieth Love, The Sugar Kremlin, Doctor Garin, Red Pyramid, and Dispatches from the District Committee), Nightingale Grove represents an opportunity to deepen the conversation about the complexities of Sorokin’s work. This book will include every story Sorokin has written that has not already been anthologized: more than 45 in total. The centerpiece of Nightingale Grove is almost certainly the stories from Feast, unhinged texts that he wrote alongside and in the wake of Blue Lard. However, the collection also includes Sorokin’s first four stories, which pre-date The Norm and are rarely anthologized. 

Sorokin himself recently said that this is his favorite of the three collections we’ve compiled. It will, alongside the rest of the Sorokin books being published in the next five years and beyond, inform the English-speaking public’s conception of Sorokin as the most significant Russian author of his generation. Indeed, this collection, perhaps more than any other book in the Anglophone “five-year plan” put together by Dalkey and NYRB, cements Sorokin as the most visionary Russian writer since Nabokov.

Homewards

In Homewards, Michael Lentz recalls the eerie years of the old Federal Republic. Between apple pie and anger, matchbox cars and metaphysics, a West German small-town childhood (Lentz’s own) plays out in his new auto-fictional novel. The protagonist’s father (whom readers of Schattenfroh already know well) is violent whenever he doesn’t just wordlessly cross paths with his son, but there’s plenty to eat and his mother keeps everything tidy, working to tamp down her own guilty conscience. The protagonist’s memories are occasionally interrupted by the voice of another child who only knows the old Federal Republic by way of hearsay and has no more use for all of this detritus abandoned by time.
Since Motherdying, his first collection of short prose, Michael Lentz has been writing emotionally compelling and formally dazzling auto-fiction that deals with origin and family, childhood, love and death. Homewards goes a step further: the son (Lentz) has now become a father himself. So, while his own childhood, now lost to him, buried by time’s forward progress, is still powerfully present to him, the text’s true present is inextricably linked to the voice of the next generation. Lentz is currently hard at work on the trilogy that Schattenfroh is the first part of––all three of its parts are to be enormous novels renowned for their difficulty, just as Schattenfroh is already making waves and drawing intrepid readers to its shores without yet having been published in any language other than German––but Homewards is a much shorter, more tender book, more humanistic and less metaphysical, that, while it does not dispense with the formal innovations that are such a crucial part of Lentz’s project, also tells a nostalgic story about that which is lost in time––of what is lost, but also of what might be gained. Indeed, the book poses an age-old question: how can one be a better father than one’s own? Homewards will be of particular interest to readers of Sebald and Knausgaard.

Kinyas and Kayra

Hakan Günday’s novel Kinyas and Kayra is often considered to be the foremost work of Turkish underground literature. It narrates the escapades of two friends, Kinyas and Kayra, who engage in drug dealing, murder, blackmail, and even choose their own names, all while succumbing to the strong urge of “hitting the road” awakened by modern life. Günday’s book delves into individuals with corrupted souls, divided within themselves, resisting in a shadowy existence. It prompts readers to confront their concealed selves beneath society’s idealized facade. The two friends, Kinyas and Kayra, represent distinct life philosophies. They defy conventional thinking, as Günday emphasizes. The story immerses you in a vibrant world of nightlife teeming with argot, vice, narcotics, and inner turmoil. The setting hints at a French-speaking African colony. It explores a range of issues, including sexuality, alcohol, substance use, and the existence of the supernatural. It serves as a stark reminder of humanity’s capacity for savagery.