A book, untitled

By Shushan Avagyan / Translated from Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz

Winner, 2023 English PEN Translates Award

What is history, undocumented? How do we archive censored lives? A poetic reflection on authorship and erasure, A Book, Untitled is an intimate and innovative approach to autofiction and the act of remembering.  

In her first novel, Armenian writer Shushan Avagyan tells the story of a fictional encounter between Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan, two early twentieth-century pioneers of feminist literature, whose legacies have been obscured in Armenian history. Their fictive meeting is interspersed with conversations between the author and her friend Lara, who are researching the work of Kurghinian and Yesayan. While sifting through censored documents, unpublished works and unfinished drafts, they linger in speculation and piece together lives that have been overshadowed by the Tsarist and Stalin regimes.

At once electric and ephemeral, A Book, Untitled is a story of re-cognition otherwise– posthumous, imagined and intricately powerful.

PRAISE

“Shushan Avagyan’s Girq-anvernagir is among the most interesting phenomena of the post-Soviet era.” — Taguhi Ghazaryan, literary critic

“Avagyan’s book is completely new writing within the Armenian world, as much in its form and mode as in its content.” — Marc Nichanian, author of Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century

“A Book, Untitled is an absorbing, moving literary experiment.” — Alistair Ian Blyth, translator of Varujan Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers

“The English-speaking world already owes Shushan Avagyan a tremendous debt for her essential translations of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Now she has composed a brilliant novel of her own. A Book, Untitled is a powerful pastiche of voices and eras, as well as a feminist reclamation of Armenian women writers lost to time. For all its shifting, its purposeful resistance, its sharpness and darkness, I found this book simply delightful.” — Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture

“At once lyrical and theoretical, personal and protest, Avagyan’s singular approach fabricates a polyvocal palimpsest tinged with exile and opacity, distortion and estrangement. Authorship, and the hegemony from which it hails, will never be the same.” — Alex Brostoff, co-translator of Ailton Krenak's Life Is Not Useful

contributors’ DETAILS

Shushan Avagyan is the author of the novels Girq-anvernagir (A Book, Untitled, 2006) and Zarubyani kanayq (2014). She has translated into English a volume of Shushanik Kurghinian’s poetry, and critical works by Boris Arvatov and Viktor Shklovsky. She currently lives in Yerevan and teaches at the American University of Armenia.

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a translator and literary theorist who writes on translation, gender and nationalism, and technologies of race in the geographies of Armenia, Turkey, and their diasporas. Having called these places, and likewise Italy and her native New York home, she is currently based in Istanbul as she completes her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. 

More information

• Publication date: 14 December 2023

• Format: B-format paperback (198 mm x 129 mm)

• Extent: 222pp

• Rights held: World English excl. N America (Awst)

• ISBNs: 978-1-911284-88-8 (paperback) / 978-1-911284-87-1 (ebook)