'The only end of writing,' Dr Johnson said, 'is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.' "Misprint" offers the reader countries and languages perceived through the eyes of youth and loss. Untimely deaths and memories of far-off lands abound, some dreamed, some lived. In this first collection, James Womack plays with ideas of tradition, lightly conjuring heavy themes, and makes a bow to pulp culture. He ferries us between Russia, Spain and North Korea and the differently 'real' virtual environments of film, dream, ghosts, the North Korean Press Agency. 'Eurydice', the concluding sequence, draws the different strands of the collection together. We end up dislocated: bewildered but rather happier about the future. As Mr Edwards said to the Great Cham: 'I, too, Sir, in my time have tried being a philosopher; but somehow cheerfulness kept creeping in.'

Complete and uncensored in English for the very first time, a fragmented, daringly irreverent depiction of decadence and decay in Franco's Spain written by the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The translator Anthony Kerrigan compared Camilo José Cela, the 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Curzio Malaparte—all “ferocious writers, truculent, badly spoken, even foulmouthed.” However provocative and disturbing, Cela’s novels are also flat-out dazzling, their sentences as rigorous as they are riotous, lodging like knives in the reader’s mind. Cela called himself a proponent of “uglyism,” of “nothingism.” But he has the knack, to quote another critic, Américo Castro, of deploying those “nothings and lacks” to construct beauty.

The Hive is set over the course of a few days in the Madrid of 1943, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most oppressive. The book includes more than three hundred characters whose comings and goings it tracks to hypnotic effect. Scabrous, scandalous, and profane, The Hive is a virtuosic group portrait of a wounded and sick society.

A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death. Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak - bluntly, humorously - always alert for the fantastic. This is the first translation of Vilas's two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.

Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies 'one of the strangest documents of the human mind', and W.H. Auden singled him out as a 'really remarkable poet'. Womack's versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Longlisted for the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize. On Trust: A Book of Lies, James Womack's second collection of poems, is organised around the notion of telling the truth. Working against ideas of poetry as a vehicle for displaying individual truths or unprocessed confessions, these poems play hilariously, earnestly, undecidedly, with such simple identifications as the `I' of a poem with the `I' of the poet, offering us monologues which seem to be sincere, unvarnished accounts of things that have `really' happened, but which twist and escape any absolute statements of identity. Serious questions of being and belonging, as well as frivolous themes such as the Marquis de Sade, Siberia, genitals, the Fates, and death, are picked up in play, prodded at, then put down in new and sparkling configurations.

Longlisted for the 2018 Read Russia Prize. 'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.'

On the arrival of a mysterious stranger laden with paintings, Leandro finds his quiet life disrupted instantly and mysteriously. He awakens locked in a windowless room in a topless tower, the subject of one of the stranger's eerie paintings. His childish voice draws the reader into a mythical world full of imaginary beings. Basking in her friendship with literary luminaries such as Italo Calvino and Borges, Argentine poet and author Silvina Ocampo is among the foremost figures in modern South American literature. Heavily influenced by nonsense literature such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and the surrealist movement in South America, The Topless Tower, features all the typical hallmarks of Ocampo's fantastical writing. With subtle inflections of language and tremendous displays of imagination running riot, Ocampo's writing is beautifully translated by James Womack.

If this book were about a football game, instead of an ordinary life well lived, we would read thirty chapters where your favorite team is two points behind in the fourth quarter with forty five seconds left on the play clock. James is the quarterback and executes a play that produces the winning score with honor and dignity every time. His life is a complex tapestry woven with threads of racism, poverty, alcoholism, bravery, illiteracy, tension, paternal rejection, sexual exploitation, patient endurance, domestic violence and a strong faith in God. The challenges he faces would have caused men of lesser faith to find solutions deeply rooted in violence, hate, alcohol and disregard for humanity and the sacredness of life. James has invited you into the thoughts, feelings, successes, and failures of his life in an intimate and honest presentation. You will be honored by his honesty, and humbled by his courage and determination. There are enough struggles in this personal history to deter the brave but not enough to stop the honored bravery of someone who knows God. "Black Dad-White Dad" choreographs the life of black kid growing up in Mississippi as he transitioned from sharecropper status to urban life, from illiteracy to education in the forties and fifties. James does what so many think we may want to do in our life. He not only asks the questions but searches for the answers. One might say he should be mad at the world, but he is not. He does not let his life experiences be an excuse or the answer but uses each challenge and blessing as a welcome mat to the next chapter of his life.