Francis Combes, COMMON CAUSE
‘Communism,’ wrote Brecht, ‘is the simple idea so hard to achieve.’ Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a ‘history of the defeated’, a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners, an epic poem, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination.

Francis Combes has published fifteen books of poetry and has translated Heine, Brecht, Joszef and Mayakovsky into French. He is a founder of the radical publishing cooperative, Le Temps des Cerises, and was for many years responsible for putting poems on the Paris Metro.

Paperback £12.95 ISBN 978-0-9560341-8-2

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András Mezei, CHRISTMAS IN AUSCHWITZ
Christmas in Auschwitz brings together, for the first time in English, András Mezei’s poems about the Hungarian Holocaust – in which half a million Hungarian Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents were transported to extermination camps and three-quarters of Hungary’s Jewish population perished.

A locksmith by trade, András Mezei (1930-2008) was one of the most prominent writers in post-War Hungary. A poet, novelist and essayist, he wrote the script of Lucky Daniel, one of the first Hungarian films to critically examine the events of 1956.

Paperback £7.95 ISBN 978-0-9560341-9-9

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Kristin Dimitrova, MY LIFE IN SQUARES
My Life in Squares is an introduction to the work of a major European poet and one of the most original writers to emerge in recent years from the ‘new Europe’. Kristin Dimitrova is a Balkan minimalist, a feminist-fabulist whose work combines the fantastic and the prosaic. She writes with a deceptively simple, playful, light-touch, teasing the reader with faux-folk-wisdom and unexpected, often bathetic endings.

Kristin Dimitrova teaches at the University of Sofia. A five-times winner of national poetry-of-the-year awards, her work has been published in 22 countries and translated into 19 languages. She has translated John Donne’s poetry into Bulgarian.

Paperback £7.95 ISBN 978-0-9560341-7-5

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For more information about Smokestack Books, see www.smokestack-books.co.uk. Smokestack Books is supported by the Arts Council, England.