Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs - Softcover

Wolff, Lina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908276649 ISBN 13: 9781908276643

Publisher: And Other Stories, 2016

Synopsis

This brilliant translation by Frank Perry won the 2017 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the 2019 Bernard Shaw prize

At a run-down brothel in Caudal, Spain, the prostitutes are collecting stray dogs. Each is named after a famous male writer: Dante, Chaucer, Bret Easton Ellis. When a john is cruel, the dogs are fed rotten meat. To the east, in Barcelona, an unflappable teenage girl is endeavouring to trace the peculiarities of her life back to one woman: Alba Cambó, writer of violent short stories, who left Caudal as a girl and never went back.

Mordantly funny, dryly sensual, written with a staggering lightness of touch, the debut novel in English by Swedish sensation Lina Wolff is a black and Bolaño-esque take on the limitations of love in a dog-eat-dog world.

About this title

About the Author:

Lina Wolff is a former student of languages, literature, and commerce, who has lived and worked in Italy and Spain. During her years in Valencia and Madrid, she began to write her short story collection Many People Die Like You. Her novel, Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, was awarded the prestigious Vi magazine literature prize, given to writers to watch out for, and shortlisted for the 2013 Swedish Radio award for Best Novel of the Year. She now lives in southern Sweden.

Frank Perry has translated many of Sweden's leading contemporary writers, poets, and playwrights, including Stig Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Katarina Frostenson. His work has won the Swedish Academy prize for the introduction of Swedish culture abroad and the drama translation prize of the Writer's Guild of Sweden. Recent translations include Lasse Berg’s Dawn over the Kalahari and Hans Hayden’s seminal work in the philosophy of art history, Modernism as an Institution, which won the STINT prize of the National Bank of Sweden.

Review:

Wolff’s prose has a quality of otherness’ entirely in keeping with the surreal atmosphere of the novel. This strange, provocative debut sits well alongside the work of Roxane Gay, Katherine Angel, Maggie Nelson, Zoe Pilger and Miranda July . . . a cool, clever and fierce addition to the canon of modern feminist literature.”
Sarah Perry, The Guardian

[A] filmic offering . . . channelling the spirit of Pedro Almodóvar. A thoroughly invigorating novel.”
Lucy Scholes, The Independent

"Oddly compelling . . . a European postmodern novel steeped in alienation and ennui."
Library Journal

The author demonstrates a marvelous command of language and creates characters with real depth, lending the book a sensual vibe and an acerbic wit that force its emotional truths to rise above the grunge of its hard-boiled setting. A poetic, unsentimental drama that offers a meditation on love in all its disparate forms.”
Kirkus Reviews

Wolff has had enough of the big swinging dicks of masculine literature. [Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs is] clever and challenging and distinctive.”
Galen O'Hanlon, The Skinny

Wolff manoeuvres with great skill through her breathtaking multitude of worlds and an equally impressive cast of characters. Bret Easton Ellis . . . takes the reader on a roller-coaster from the tragic to the comical, with hints of the mysterious and magical scattered in between it is a testimonial of a dead person remarkably full of life.”
The Bookbag, 5 Stars, January Book of the Month

A book that you just want to give people and say: take a look at this, read it, experience it. I would have liked to devote the entire review to quoting sentences and paragraphs from the novel it is almost as if that were the only way of adequately conveying the gravity, depth and lightness of Lina Wolff's prose, her tender yet pitiless character descriptions, her distinctive but also natural way of piecing together the novel's disparate parts into a shimmering whole.”
Eva Johansson, Svenska Dagbladet

About this edition

• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1908276649
• ISBN 13: 9781908276643
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304