Searching for Nausicaa
by Alexis Levitin
This book deals primarily with the difficulties that men (and even extraterrestrials) encounter wrestling with possibility (or impossibility) in the nebulous realm of love. Although the hapless anti-heroes of these tales often sabotage the very thing they seek by rejecting "mere" reality, in one tale the protagonist goes much further, refusing even the love of Jesus Christ, the saintly Dorothy Day, and his own beloved dead mother. However, for those seeking a glimmer of light, an antidote to the prevailing ironic gloom, the final tale, "A Touch of Grace," presents a brief, awkward glimpse of true love, beyond all hope, in the unlikely coupling of sexagenarians. This collection has something for both sodden realists and hopeless romantics.
Alexis Levitin has published fifty-two books of translations, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation awards, has held Fulbright positions in Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador, and has been a translation resident at Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice) and the Rockefeller Foundation Center at Bellagio, Italy. During the fear-tinged isolation of the pandemic, he began writing his own stories. So far, nearly seventy of them have appeared in magazines in the USA, England, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Italy, and Turkey. A collection of chess memories and inventions, The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, was published in 2023 by Russell Enterprises.
