Father's on the Phone with the Flies

Herta Müller

Translated by Thomas Cooper

 

5.5 x 7.75 inches, 172pp, 81 colour plates May 2018

ISBN : 9780857424723

Rs  599.00 (HB)
$24.50 (HB)
£18.99 (HB)

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To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize–winner Herta Müller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage. Father’s on the Phone with the Flies presents 73 of Müller’s collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-colour reproductions of the originals. Müller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity and startling, surreal metaphors—the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in colour, font and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Müller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience.

 

Sure to thrill any fan of contemporary literature, Father’s on the Phone with the Flies is an unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel.

Novelist, poet and essayist Herta Muller was born in a German-speaking community in western Romania in 1952. She published her first collection of short stories in 1982. In 1987, she left Romania for West Berlin, where she continued to write and publish. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

 

Thomas Cooper has translated works of poetry and prose by many contemporary Hungarian authors, including Imre Kertész, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Péter Esterházy. He teaches course on literature and translation theory at the Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, Hungary.

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