Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs

by Lina Wolff, Frank Perry (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781908276643
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	01/12/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

01/01/2016
This oddly compelling novel won its author some prizes in Sweden, where it was originally published. Set in Barcelona, it is narrated principally by a young woman named Araceli who lives in an apartment with her mother; both are intrigued by their downstairs neighbor, a writer named Alba Cambó. After weeks of snooping, they eventually get to know Alba and her servant, Blosom. Alba dates a succession of men who are, in Araceli's view, unappealing losers, but that's her opinion of most everyone. Araceli attends a translation school where she befriends a cynical woman named Muriel, who steers Araceli toward work as a call girl. VERDICT The characters in this dark, rambling novel are like people you meet at a bad cocktail party: you want to get away from them, but they buttonhole you with such a weirdly convoluted story that you have to see how it ends. A European postmodern novel steeped in alienation and ennui, its sprawling plot—which includes two of Alba's short stories—initially seems random, but the characters interconnect in surprising ways, with Alba as the crux.—Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Library Journal