Two Basque Stories

by Bernardo Atxaga; translated from Basque by Nere Lete. This sixth volume of the CBS Literature series presents for the first time in English two of the author’s short stories previously published in Euskara, the Basque language, “Two Letters All at Once,” in which Old Martin, a Basque immigrant living in Boise, receives two letters from Europe in a period of ten days, and “When a Snake Stares at a Bird.” Bernardo Atxaga broke onto the international scene with the 1988 publication of Obabakoak in Euskara. The novel has been published in 26 languages, including an English edition (Vintage, 1994, Graywolf 2009), and earned the author Spain’s top narrative prize, the Premio Nacional de Narrativa, the Premio Milepages (the Paris Milepages Prize) (1991), the Premio Tres Coronas de los Pirineos Atlánticos (the Atlantic Pyrenees Three Crowns Prize) (1995), among others. That book was praised in The Observer of London as “a brilliant novel, full of life,” and by The New York Times Book Review