Welcome to Detour Books
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We offer world literature in English translation for children and adults. Many of the authors in our catalog are making their English language debut.
In January we remember an American who changed the way we think about race and character. Much has been written about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington. But there's little on his legendary speech and how he came to write it. As a new generation of activists demands an end to racism, A Place to Land reflects on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the movement that it galvanized.
Learn why Kids' Books are not just for kids. Read more here about how and why we are building our curated children's books collection.
New in Translation
Samanta Schweblin is a National Book Award Winner from Berlin via Buenos Aires originally.
Shahriar Mandanipour is from Iran now living in California.
Start the year with short stories that are quicker and more bitting than the last book you read.
Staff Pick
"This lavishly illustrated multilingual alphabet book isn't about inclusion, it is inclusion."
--The New York Times
About the Author:
Ellen Heck is a printmaker. For the past decade, through several print projects, she has explored questions about identity—its creation, variability, persistence and change. She studied philosophy at Brown University and art at SAIC. Inspired by reading Lithuanian alphabet books to her son, A Is for Bee is her debut picture book.
Uncommon Gifts
A Benefit Volume to Support Ukraine Relief - a trilingual edition.
Toward Hopeful Skies is a beautifully illustrated children’s book by Yuriy Budiak. First published in Ukrainian in the 1920s and shortly thereafter in free Yiddish translations. As a testament to the universal appeal of children's literature and the joyful contact of cultures that these translations represent. This re-issue is trilingual Ukrainian, Yiddish and English.
World Literature in English Translation
A New Photography Book
The Glass Plates of Lublin: Found Photographs of a Lost Jewish World
Excerpt from the introduction by Piotr Nazaruk, curator and editor:
In the winter of 2010 Krysztof Janus, an engineer and specialist in architectural history and monument conservation . . .came upon something astonishing. He and his renovation team found lying in a pile of trash, a box containing almost three thousand glass photographic plates.
~
From the dirty and sometimes broken tiles emerge the faces of Jews and Poles, children and the elderly, young couples flirting, workers, athletes, dignitaries in tails, and anonymous people who posed for a camera long ago, before the war, and never dreamed that their portraits would be of interest to anyone.
Yiddish Literature in Translation
Staff Pick:
Written in a conversational tone that sparks with the mind bending truth of the Holocaust, Eleanor Reissa’s memoir, The Letters Project: A Daughter's Journey offers a way into a history that is often left to scholars and survivors or "fighters" as Reissa describes them.
“'The Holocaust," Eleanor Reissa writes in this unforgettable and courageous book, 'is attached to me like my skin and I would be formless without it."
Join us for our interview with Eleanor Reissa celebrating the one year anniversary of the publication of her memoir.
