The Mercantile Library

This summer New Directions published two translations of work by Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy: I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives. The former consists of short fiction, the latter of three biographical essays on Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. When you come into the Mercantile these days, you’ll see both prominently displayed–we recommend that you read them! They’re compact little texts, both admirably translated from the original Italian (I Am the Brother of XX by Gini Alhadeff; These Possible Lives by Minna Zallman Proctor), and almost certainly unlike anything you’ve read recently.

Here is the Keats chapter from These Possible Lives, published online at The New York Review of Books, which, when you are next at the Mercantile, we also recommend you spend some time reading:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/24/a-possible-keats/

You can find I am the Brother of XX in a clutch of newly-acquired works of fiction on our front table:

These Possible Lives is currently part of our “New Nonfiction” A-frame display, in good company next to Eliot Weinberger’s The Ghosts of Birds and Joan Didion’s South and West:

And if you’re interested in reading more by Fleur Jaeggy, here are links to two stories from I Am the Brother of XX:

http://www.theliteraryreview.org/fiction/the-heir/

https://harpers.org/archive/2017/06/an-encounter-in-the-bronx/

-Adam Kosan

Assistant Collector

Author admin

New to the Collection: Two Books by Fleur Jaeggy