The books featured below represent a sample of our vast range—visit the store to see our entire inventory, and if you’d like more information on the titles we carry, check out our Staff Picks!
December 2022
Kleinzeit
Fiction by Russell Hoban
Paperback; $20.69
When Kleinzeit, a copywriter whose name means either ‘hero’ or ‘smalltime,’ depending on who you ask, picks up a sheet of yellow paper in the London Underground, he doesn’t suspect that it will cause him to be fired from his job and admitted to hospital with geometrical pain in his hypotenuse. In Hospital Ward A4, Kleinzeit discovers he is not alone: his fellow patients also suffer from nonsensical but possibly deadly ailments which all have something strange in common. A hilarious, surreal, and completely unpredictable novel about one man’s search for reality, Kleinzeit (1974) is one of Russell Hoban’s best-loved works.
The Shrieking Skull and Other Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories
Fiction by James Skipp Borlase
Paperback; $20.69
Thirteen rare tales by the most prolific Victorian Christmas ghost story author, collected and republished for the first time! Move over, Charles Dickens! The author of A Christmas Carol may be the most famous Victorian author of Christmas ghost stories, but the king of the genre was James Skipp Borlase (1839-1909), who published dozens of them in obscure British and Australian periodicals during a nearly fifty-year span. Now for the first time, thirteen of Borlase’s best tales have been unearthed from newspaper archives and compiled in a single volume.
Swedish Cults
Fiction by Anders Fager, translated by Henning Koch and Ian Lemke
Paperback; $20.69
A modern classic of Scandinavian horror that has been called ‘Swedish Lovecraft on acid,’ available in English at last! Forget everything you think you know about Sweden. Anders Fager’s stories reveal his native land as a place where dark and unimaginable things happen. Readers raved about Fager’s entry in the multi-award-nominated The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now Valancourt is pleased to present the first-ever English translation of the author’s first collection, already an underground phenomenon in Sweden, France, and Italy, and a cornerstone of modern Scandinavian horror.
The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition
Fiction by Clarice Lispector, translated by B. Moser
Hardcover; $17.95
The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction, taking us close to the true mystery of life.
Life Sciences
Fiction by Joy Sorman
Paperback; $18
Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each generation is marked by a uniquely obscure ailment. Embarking on a dizzying cycle of doctors, specialists, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure. A provocative and empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its limitations, to provide all the answers.
Fowlers End
Fiction by Gerald Kersh
Paperback; $22.99
In the poorest, most benighted corner of London is Fowlers End, one of the most godforsaken spots on the face of the earth. It is here that young Daniel Laverock, starving and nearly penniless at the height of the Great Depression, takes the only job he can find: manager of the Pantheon Theater. First published in 1957, Fowlers End is thought by many to be the masterpiece of Kersh (1911-1968). A comic romp with echoes of Dickens and Rabelais, Kersh’s novel remains one of the funniest English novels of the 20th century and one of the best works of fiction ever written about London.
The Birdcatcher
Fiction by Gayl Jones
Hardcover; $24.95
Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel that was a 2022 National Book Award finalist. Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island. A study in Black women’s creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature.
On Browsing
Nonfiction by Jason Guriel
Paperback; $13.95
A defense of the dying art of losing an afternoon—and gaining new appreciation—amidst the bins and shelves of bricks-and-mortar shops. Written during the pandemic, when the world was marooned at home and consigned to scrolling screens, these essays chronicle what we’ve lost through online shopping, streaming, and the relentless digitization of culture. The latest in the Field Notes series, On Browsing is an elegy for physical media, a polemic in defense of perusing the world in person, and a love letter to the dying practice of scanning bookshelves, combing CD bins, and losing yourself in the stacks.
The Coming of Joachim Stiller
Fiction by Hubert Lampo, translated by Paul Vincent
Paperback
Freek Groenevelt is a mild-mannered journalist who values his peace and quiet above all else. But his orderly life is suddenly upended by the intrusion of a mysterious figure calling himself Joachim Stiller, who seems in insidious ways to be controlling Freek’s life and destiny. One of the great classics of 20th-century Flemish literature and a founding text of Flemish magical realism, Lampo’s internationally acclaimed The Coming of Joachim Stiller (1960) has been published in fifteen languages and is now available at last in an outstanding new English version by award-winning translator Paul Vincent.
Offended Sensibilities
Fiction by Alisa Ganieva, translated by C. Apollonio
Paperback; $16.95
Offended Sensibilities chronicles a series of sudden deaths that occur among officials of a provincial Russian town. The events follow a blasphemy law banning forms of expression that offend the sensibilities of religious believers—a law passed after Pussy Riot’s infamous 2013 church-side protest. In Offended Sensibilities, Ganieva seeks to address nationalism, Orthodox religiosity, sexuality, and corruption. Suffused with a light touch, this timely, entertaining and thought-provoking novel can be read as an allegory for the current political, social, and cultural climate in Russia today.
Time Stitches
Poetry by Eleni Kefala, translated by P. Constantine
Paperback; $15.95
These experimental linked poems move across time, linking a young Cypriot to ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants through striking polyphony. In this award-winning bilingual collection, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early 20th-century Cyprus, 16th-century Scotland, and more. As the poem-threads draw together, it is as if the protagonist, in his travels through the twentieth century, encounters Odysseus, Cervantes, Columbus, Rembrandt, and others, all moving in multidimensional synchronicity.
The Impersonal Adventure
Fiction by Marcel Béalu, translated by G. MacLennan
Paperback; $14.95
A disorienting, de Chirico-esque detective tale of curio shops and eerie antiquities, penned in France’s postwar trauma. A traveling businessman decides to tarry in an unnamed city. As he wanders through the streets of unvisited storefronts, he encounters a strange constellation of characters, and they in turn lead the narrator into labyrinths of crowded curio shops. Béalu’s novella peels away an oneiric banality to reveal doubled lives and secret stories. The Impersonal Adventure utilizes a dreamlike logic to translate postwar trauma and urban devastation.
The Disaster Tourist
Fiction by Yun Ko-Eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler
Paperback; $16.95
Jungle is a cutting-edge travel agency specializing in tourism to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. And until she found herself at the mercy of a predatory colleague, Yona was one of their top representatives. Now on the verge of losing her job, she’s given a proposition: take a paid “vacation” to the desert island of Mui and pose as a tourist to assess the company’s least profitable holiday. An eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility, The Disaster Tourist engages with the global dialogue around climate activism, dark tourism, and the #MeToo movement.
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Nonfiction by Nick Estes
Hardcover; $26.95
In 2016, a small protest at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.
How to Be a Revolutionary
Fiction by C.A. Davids
Paperback; $19.95
Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises. Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising, How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It’s also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.
November 2022
Mothers Don’t
Fiction by Katixa Agirre, translated by K. Whittemore
Paperback; $15.95
A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realizes that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don’t plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law.
Rapture
Fiction by Iliazd, translated by Thomas Kitson
Paperback; $14.95
The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. With a deceptively light hand, Iliazd entertains questions that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf once faced. Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was nearly lost to Western audiences. This translation rescues Laurence’s surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he tries to outrun fate.
A Man’s Place
Fiction by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie
Paperback; $13.95
Annie Ernaux’s father died two months after she passed her examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux’s father had grown into a hard, practical man. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux’s cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer, while her father matures into old age. A Man’s Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman’s Story.
Man or Mango?: A Lament
Fiction by Lucy Ellmann
Paperback; $16.95
Man or Mango? is a formally madcap novel about men (and women), mangos (and bees), and modern love from the Booker-shortlisted author of Ducks, Newburyport. Reclusive Eloïse lives with her cats in an English country cottage, privately building a case against men, women, the Queen, and toilet-roll-holder manufacturers. George is an American poet, recently arrived in the UK and struggling to finish an epic poem on ice hockey. Lost and lonely, he and Eloïse really should be together, yet it seems they may never meet up. Man or Mango? is a funny and furious reflection on life and love in a belligerent world.
Panics
Fiction by Barbara Molinard, translated by Emma Ramadan
Paperback; $15.95
A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921-1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only published one book in her lifetime: Panics, a haunting short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience. These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. Panics recovers the work of a tormented writer whose insights into violence, mental illness, and bodily autonomy are simultaneously absurdist and razor-sharp.
Getting Lost
Memoir by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer
Paperback; $18.95
Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel Simple Passion was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.
October 2022
American Midnight: Tales of the Dark
Edited by Laird Hunt
Paperback; $18
American Midnight is a chilling collection of classic weird and supernatural tales from the dark heart of American literature. A masquerade ball cut short by a mysterious plague; a strange nocturnal ritual in the woods; a black bobcat howling in the night: these ten tales are some of the most strange and unsettling in all of American literature. From Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Zora Neale Hurston, the authors of these classics of supernatural suspense have inspired generations of writers to explore the dark heart of the land of the free.
Circa
Fiction by Devi S. Laskar
Hardcover; $27.99
Circa is a stunning novel that follows a young Indian American woman who, in the wake of tragedy, must navigate her family’s expectations as she grapples with a complicated love and loss. On the cusp of her eighteenth birthday, Heera and her best friends, siblings Marie and Marco, tease the fun out of life in Raleigh, North Carolina. But no matter how much Heera defies her strict upbringing, she’s always avoided any real danger—until one devastating night changes everything. Circa is at once an irresistible love story and a portrait of a young woman torn between between obligation and freedom.
A Different Darkness and Other Abominations
Fiction by Luigi Musolino
Paperback; $22.99
The highly original and truly terrifying folk horror of Italy’s Luigi Musolino was introduced to an international audience in the acclaimed The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, and now at last an entire volume of the author’s best work—eight stories and three novellas—is available in English for the first time. Musolino’s tales, set among the plains and mountains of his native Piedmont, are uniquely Italian, but the darkness he probes is universal. As Brian Evenson writes in the introduction, “Musolino has a strong and original voice and uses it to get to some uniquely dark places.”
The Famous Magician
Fiction by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
Hardcover; $17.95
A certain writer (past sixty, enjoying ‘a certain renown’) strolls through the old book market in a Buenos Aires park. He is suffering from writer’s block—and that proves to be the least of our hero’s problems. In the market, he fails to avoid the insufferable Ovando—a complete loser but a man supremely full of himself. Only César Aira could have cooked up this witch’s potion (and only he would plop in phantom Mont Blanc pens as well as fearsome crocodiles from the banks of the Nile)—a brew bubbling over with the question: where does literature end and magic begin?
The Wild Hunt
Fiction by Emma Seckel
Paperback; $16.95
The islanders have only three rules: don’t stick your nose where it’s not wanted, don’t mention the war, and never let your guard down during October. Leigh Welles has not set foot on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from life on the Scottish mainland by her father’s unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past and start fresh… but this October is anything but normal. Rich with historical detail, a skillful speculative edge, and a deep imagination, Seckel’s propulsive and transporting debut unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption.
The Pachinko Parlor
Fiction by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
Paperback; $16.95
It is summer in Tokyo. The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan they opened a pachinko parlor. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlor builds. The Pachinko Parlor is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness.
Rainbow Rainbow: Stories
Fiction by Lydia Conklin
Hardcover; $26
This fearless collection of stories celebrates the humor, darkness, and depth of emotion of the queer and trans experience that’s not typically represented: uncertain identities, queer conception, and queer joy. A nonbinary writer on the eve of top surgery enters into a risky affair. A lesbian couple enlists a close friend as a sperm donor, plying him with a potent rainbow-colored cocktail. A lonely office worker chaperones their nephew to a trans YouTube convention. Capturing both the dark and lovable sides of the human experience, Rainbow Rainbow establishes Conklin as a fearless new voice for their generation.
The Inugami Curse
Fiction by Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Y. Yamakazi
Paperback; $14.95
A fiendish classic murder mystery, from one of Japan’s greatest crime writers, featuring the country’s best-loved detective. In 1940s Japan, the wealthy head of the Inugami clan dies, and his family eagerly await the reading of the will. But no sooner are its strange details revealed than a series of bizarre murders begins. Detective Kindaichi must unravel the clan’s terrible secrets of forbidden liaisons, monstrous cruelty, and hidden identities to find the murderer, and lift the curse. The Inugami Curse is a fiendish, intricately plotted classic mystery from a giant of Japanese crime writing.
Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Poetry by N. Wijnberg, translated by David Colmer
Paperback; $18
The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He draws on everything from economics to parables to world history, and is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation. This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master.
Cry Perfume
Poetry by Sadie Dupuis
Paperback; $16
The title of Cry Perfume is an imperative to bottle sorrow in a beautiful vessel and shed the chemicals that cloud your sight. Written over a four-year period on tour and after losing loved ones to overdose, Dupuis funneled complicated grief into harm reduction advocacy. The slick performativity of pop, punk humor, electronic glitch and sampling, and the surprising leaps of improvisation influence these poems, but beyond music, these poems are informed by Dupuis’s larger concerns about justice and organizing.
The Gamekeeper
Fiction by Barry Hines
Paperback; $17.95
George Purse is an ex-steelworker employed as a gamekeeper on a ducal country estate. He must ensure that the Duke and his guests have good hunts when the shooting season comes round; he must ensure that the poachers who sneak onto the land in search of food do not. Season by season, George makes his rounds. He is not a romantic hero. He is a laborer, who knows the natural world well and sees it without sentimentality. Rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece of nature writing as well as a radical statement on work and class, The Gamekeeper stands as a haunting classic of twentieth-century fiction.
Grotesque Weather and Good People
Poetry by Solah Lim, translated by Oh Eunkyung and Olan Munson
Paperback; $16
A debut English translation of contemporary poetry by an award-winning South Korean poet and novelist. By turns humorous and dark, these poems explore the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of everyday life in urban Seoul. Many of these poems incorporate elements of drama and fiction, collapsing the boundaries between the imaginary and the real as they explore the writer’s relationship with multitudinous versions of her many selves.
September 2022
The Link: A Victorian Mystery
Fiction by Robin Maugham
Paperback; $21.95
Twelve years ago, James Steede set off to sea in search of adventure. When his ship was reported wrecked, James was presumed dead and the family fortune passed to his younger brother. But now, more than a decade later, a man shows up claiming to be the long-missing James…. One of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed English writers of his time, Maugham (1916-1981) was also one of the first mainstream writers to make a career of writing openly gay-themed books. In The Link (1969), Maugham draws upon the real-life Tichborne Case, which gripped Victorian England in the 1860s and ’70s.
Names and Rivers
Poetry by Shuri Kido, translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander
Paperback; $17
Shuri Kido, known as the “far north poet,” is one of the most influential contemporary poets in Japan. Names and Rivers brings the poems of Shuri Kido to readers in North America for the first time, thanks to this bilingual Japanese-English edition featuring star translator team Tomoyuki Endo and Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. Drawing influence from Japanese culture and geography, Buddhist teachings, and modernist poets, Kido presents a mesmerizing view of the world and our human position in it.
Late Summer Ode
Poetry by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Paperback; $17
In Late Summer Ode, first-generation Ukrainian American poet Olena Kalytiak Davis writes from a heightened state of ambivalence, perched between past and present tensions. With Chekovian humor and metered pathos, from a garden in Anchorage not pining for Brooklyn, these poems “self -protest, -process, -recede.” Davis is a conductor of sound and meaning, precise to the syllable: a commanding talent in contemporary poetry.
Bad Handwriting
Fiction by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore
Paperback; $15.95
From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four comes a collection of captivating stories. The stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock; adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; lives that hide crimes—both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing.
Crocodile Tears
Fiction by Mercedes Rosende, translated by Tim Gutteridge
Paperback; $14.95
The story starts in a Montevideo prison wherecDiego waits for his lawyer. Diego, betrayed by his partner in crime, was arrested for kidnapping a businessman. But charges will not be pressed—the businessman has described Diego as duped by his partner, certainly no master criminal, so he will be let out. But Diego’s slick lawyer has other plans for him, a favor that must be returned for his surprising freedom. This mad and hilarious caper has a powerful message: never, ever underestimate women.
A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts: Selected Poems
Poetry by Wang Yin, translated by A. Lingenfelter
Paperback; $16
A new, bilingual collection of poetry by a pioneering Chinese writer and photographer in a landmark English translation. Readers can follow the full arc of his career, from the early, surrealist work of the 1980s, when he made his debut as a post-Misty poet, through the turn toward the rawer, more immediate poetry of the nineties, and on to the existential and ineffable weavings of his more recent work. Wang’s sensibility is both cosmopolitan and lyrical, and his poetry has a subtlety and beauty that contrasts with the often physically painful imagery with which he depicts psychological reality.
Salka Valka
Fiction by Halldor Laxness, translated by P. Roughton
Paperback; $23
A feminist coming of age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town, Salka Valka is a novel of epic proportions, living and breathing with its expansive cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos.
The Care of Strangers
Fiction by Ellen Michaelson
Paperback; $16.99
Winner of the Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize, The Care of Strangers is the story of one woman’s discovery that sometimes interactions with strangers are the best way to find yourself. Working as an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, Sima is often reminded by her superiors that she’s the least important person there. However, everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency.
Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021
Nonfiction by Gary Indiana
Paperback; $23.95
The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature. Whether he’s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder or the installations of Barbara Kruger, Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it’s also political, plus it’s a riot of fun on the page.
The Rupture Tense
Poetry by Jenny Xie
Paperback; $17
This is the astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” (The New Yorker). Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
Nonfiction by Jenn Shapland
Paperback; $16.95
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love. In illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
Fiction by Noor Naga
Paperback; $16
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, this is a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire. A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland. In our globalized world, what are the new faces of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?
Bloom & Other Poems
Poetry by Chuan XI, translated by Lucas Klein
Paperback; $22.95
Bloom and change your way of living, Xi Chuan exhorts us. In his wildly roving new collection, Xi Chuan delves into the incongruities of daily existence, its contradictions and echoes of ancient history. Brimming with lyrical beauty and philosophical intensity, the collection ends with a transcript of a conversation between Xi Chuan and the journalist Xu Zhiyuan that earned seventy million views when broadcast online. Award-winning translator Lucas Klein demonstrates in this remarkable bilingual edition that Xi Chuan is one of the most electrifying international poets writing today.
Water Over Stones
Fiction by Bernardo Atxaga; translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Thomas Bunstead
Paperback; $18
Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle’s bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He’s been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. In Water over Stones, Atxaga finds new richness and depth in familiar subjects, weaving in themes of friendship, nature, and death.
Animal Joy
Nonfiction by Nuar Alsadir
Paperback; $17
Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied. Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school to Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
Leonard and Hungry Paul
Fiction by Rónán Hession
Paperback; $17.99
In this charming and truly unique debut, popular Irish musician Rónán Hession tells the story of two kind, gentle friends trying to figure out how to engage with life without becoming overwhelmed by it. It is a celebration of the quietly profound people who often get overlooked or undervalued in our noisy, competitive world. And as they struggle to persevere, the book asks a surprisingly enthralling question: Is it really them against the world, or are they on to something?
August 2022
The Absolute
Fiction by Daniel Guebel, translated by J. Sequeira
Paperback; $19.95
Called a “masterpiece” and the author a “genius,” this English-language debut of one of Argentina’s best writers is the story of a family of artists, scientists, and politicians who are responsible for the great cultural advancements of modernity, yet remain mysteriously unknown. This monumental novel tells the story of the Deliuskin family’s secret interventions in music, mysticism and revolutionary thought over the course of three centuries. Poised on the edge of something between reality and its negation, The Absolute is an undeniable masterpiece even as it questions if the novel is a failed project.
The Bloodless Boy
Fiction by Robert J. Lloyd
Paperback; $17.99
Part Wolf Hall, part The Name of the Rose, this is a riveting new literary thriller set in Restoration London, with a cast of real historic figures, set against the actual historic events and intrigues of the returned king and his court. The Bloodless Boy is an absorbing literary thriller that introduces two new indelible heroes to historical crime fiction. It is also a powerfully atmospheric recreation of the darkest corners of Restoration London, where the Court and the underworld seem to merge, even as the light of scientific inquiry is starting to emerge…
Telluria
Fiction by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by M. Lawton
Paperback; $18.95
Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor of the Middle Ages. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death. The fifty chapters of Telluria map out an immense tapestry of the world, carnivalesque and cruel, and Max Lawton has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.
Peep
Poetry by Danielle Blau
Paperback; $17
This Hecht Prize winning debut collection invites you into a world so strange it is utterly familiar, a world from our ancient past that could also be the future—or a twisted version of the present. It is a mirror world where the husk of our culture shows starkly, and yet it is lit by joy, in the words, the verses themselves. Peep is uncanny, primal, magical, capturing hopelessness, gridlock, our impact on the environment and those around us, questioning progress and the language we use to speak to each other, each little peep a little life desperate to not pass unnoticed.
The Parting Present / Lo Que Se Irá
Poetry by Manuel Iris
Paperback; $19
“Manuel Iris reclaims the poetic space as a radical exploration and celebration of paternal love and tenderness. If language is a vector of truth and transformation, if ‘the poem opens its wound’ to the spaces in which we examine ourselves and love begets love, the poems in this bilingual collection offer the magnitude and direction to do exactly what poetry aims to do: say in words what can never be expressed in words. Iris’ poems reveal the silences of our most vulnerable selves, and ‘the silence/ toward which we migrate,/ from which we came.'” —Tara Skurtu
Kraken Calling
Fiction by Aric McBay
Paperback; $22.95
In this sweeping near future dystopian fantasy, political activist and anarchist author McBay toggles between the years 2028 and 2051 to give us the experience, with breathtaking realism, of what might happen in the span of just one generation to a society that is already on the brink of collapse. In 2028, environmental activists hesitate to take the fight to the extreme of violent revolution. Twenty years later, with the natural environment now seriously degraded, the revolution is brought to the activists, rather than the other way around…
The Drunken Boat
Poetry by Arthur Rimbaud; translated by M. Polizzotti
Paperback; $18
Poet, prodigy, punk: the short, rebellious career of Rimbaud is one of the legends of modern literature. By the time he was twenty, Rimbaud had written a series of poems that are not only masterpieces in themselves but that forever transformed the idea of what poetry is. Without him, surrealism is inconceivable, and his influence is palpable in artists as diverse as Henry Miller, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. In this essential volume, renowned translator Mark Polizzotti offers inspired new versions of Rimbaud’s major poems and letters, including the entirety of his lacerating confession “A Season in Hell.”
The Road to Unfreedom
Nonfiction by Timothy Snyder
Paperback; $18
With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy seemed final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar in Europe and the United States. In this unsparing work of contemporary history, based on vast research as well as personal reporting, Snyder goes beyond the headlines to expose the true nature of the threat to democracy and law.
The Flanders Road
Fiction by Claude Simon, translated by R. Howard
Paperback; $16.95
On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper. This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel, The Flanders Road.
After
Poetry by Vivek Narayanan
Paperback; $25
After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana, one of Asia’s foundational epic poems and a story cycle of incalculable historical importance. But After does not just come after the Ramayana. On each successive page, Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic. In a work that warrants comparison with Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time.
July 2022
His Master’s Voice
Fiction by Stanisław Lem; translated by M. Kandel
Paperback; $17.95
From the author of Solaris comes a classic sci-fi tale about scientists who must decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space. Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.
Too Many Times: How to End Gun Violence in a Divided America
Paperback; $16.99
Gun violence in America is a problem with many faces, but seemingly no solution. From mass shootings to deadly domestic abuse to police officers opening fire, it permeates American life. And yet it feels impossible to address. That’s why it’s time to look at the issue differently. In this revelatory collection, top journalists, organizations, and anti-gun-violence advocacy groups address gun violence in America from three angles: how gun violence affects us today; how we have gotten to this juncture legally and socially; and finally, what we can do to reduce and end gun violence in America.
Twilight of Democracy
Nonfiction by Anne Applebaum
Paperback; $16
From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Nonfiction by Timothy Snyder
Paperback; $9.99
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance.
Open Pit
Poetry/Literary Nonfiction by Jose Antonio Villarán
Paperback; $25
Open Pit explores the role of extraction under the current capitalist accumulation model, through the specific story of the town of Morococha, located in the Peruvian Andes, and the ways in which extraction permeates most aspects of human activity. The book connects the world of mining and extraction to everyday life, personal histories of growing up in Lima, Perú, and living in California.
Gash Atlas
Poetry by Jessica Lawson
Paperback; $18.95
An award-winning poetry collection selected by Erica Hunt, Gash Atlas is a nightmarish cartography of life in and beyond the Trump era. Through poetic and visual “maps,” this collection surveys the cultural present while folding back nested histories of personal and cultural violence this moment contains. Combining the visceral images of Sarah Kane and the formal play of Douglas Kearney, Lawson’s debut collection pushes the boundaries of poetry and politics in a voice that is raw, urgent, and poignantly human. Gash Atlas stares hard into the heart of atrocity, and refuses to shy away.
Surviving Autocracy
Nonfiction by Masha Gessen
Paperback; $17
This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery.
The Bitter Seasons’ Whip
Poetry by Lee Yuk Sa
Paperback; $20
Born Lee Wonrok, Lee Yuk Sa (1904-1944) took his pen name from his prison cell number “264.” A first-generation modern Korean poet, his poems illustrate the resilience of the human spirit in the face of oppression. A member of the resistance movement known as the Korean Liberation Army, Lee Yuk Sa is also one of the most revered poets of the Japanese colonial period. Throughout the pages of The Bitter Seasons’ Whip, a bilingual collection of his complete works, Sekyo Haines’ exquisite English translations bring to us the late poet’s inner voice as he lived during one of the most fraught periods in Korean history.
Thunderbird Inn
Poetry by Collin Callahan
Paperback; $18
“These are dark, end-times poems that Bashō could have written. There’s a run-down small-town America here that Callahan looks at more carefully than most, uncovering the beauties and horrors of roadside motels, the ubiquity of ceiling fans, and a nacho machine that ‘vomits gold.’ But there is a curious love about all of this, and friends who move alongside you when you pass through this book. And there is a magic to the close observation that redeems what is often squalid, like a contemporary American Georg Trakl, with just as many drugs.”—Matthew Rohrer
Curb
Nonfiction by Divya Victor
Paperback; $17.95
CURB maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across the U.S. Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. CURB refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith.
Sens-Plastique
By Malcolm de Chazal, translated by Irving Weiss
Paperback; $24.95
After seeing an azalea looking at him in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens (and realizing that he himself was becoming a flower), de Chazal began composing what would eventually become his masterpiece, Sens-Plastique. Containing over two thousand aphorisms and allegories, the book was immediately hailed as a work of genius by such poets as André Breton and Francis Ponge. Embraced by the surrealists as one of their own, Chazal chose to avoid all literary factions and lived a solitary life as a bachelor mystic on the island nation of Mauritius, where he wrote books and painted for the rest of his life.
Brown Neon
Essays by Raquel Gutiérrez
Paperback; $16.95
Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding haunting the multi-generational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.
The Years
Memoir by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer
Paperback; $19.95
The Years is a personal narrative from Annie Ernaux of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. The Years is both an intimate memoir “written” by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story.
June 2022
The Last Days of Immanuel Kant
Fiction by Thomas De Quincey
Paperback; $9
Billed as an original piece when it appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1827, The Last Days of Immanuel Kant is largely De Quincey’s translation and embellishment of the account of the theologian Ehregott Andreas Wasianski, the amanuensis, friend, and caretaker of Kant during his last years. The version of the text published here closely follows the version published in De Quincey’s Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, Volume II (1853), while in several passages it follows the revised version printed in Miscellanies: Chiefly Narrative (1854) by James Hogg.
It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny)
Fiction by Kurt Luchs
Paperback; $19.95
This collection of stories pursues its comedic quarry with the ruthlessness of a cat trying to get out of a cardboard box. Luchs, who has written for august literary organs such as The Onion, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, is an inspired comic writer in the tradition of P.J. Wodehouse and S.J. Perelman. The hilarity he generates is not an end in itself; the convulsing diaphragms of his laughing readers are in his hands a remotely operated musical instrument bridging the woodwind and percussion sections.
The Mad Fiddler
Poetry by Fernando Pessoa
Paperback; $14
Written between 1910 and 1917, The Mad Fiddler is one of the most storied works attributed not to a heteronym (or pseudonym or orthonym), but to Pessoa himself. Included in all major editions of his English-language poetry, The Mad Fiddler has seldom seen publication in the Anglo-American sphere, in part due to the difficulty of an agreement about a “definitive” edition—Pessoa never published Fiddler in his lifetime, and so while typeset versions exist in the archive, there are notes and edits from different periods. Our version is based on the collection published as part of Poesia Inglesa.
The Longcut
Fiction by Emily Hall
Paperback; $15.95
The narrator of The Longcut is an artist who doesn’t know what her art is. Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job; insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment); encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.
Smoking the Bible
Poetry by Chris Abani
Paperback; $17
These poems reveal the personal story of two brothers—one elegizing the other—and the larger story of a man in exile. What we experience in this emotionally generous collection is a deep spiritual reckoning that draws on ancient African traditions of belief, and an intellectual vivacity drawing on various wisdom literatures. Abani illustrates the connective geography between regret and release, as poems move through landscapes of Nigeria, the Midwestern United States, adulthood, and childhood. There is no artifice here, no affectation; these poems are a study in the very grace of image.
Monkey Business
Fiction by Carleton Eastlake
Paperback; $18.95
A fast-moving Hollywood satirical adventure and deeply revelatory love story with a comprehensive look at the reality of producing a TV series. When William Fox, a TV writer on location in Florida, is dragged by his show’s toxic producers to a “gentleman’s club” that’s just appeared outside town, he meets Nicole, a mysterious dancer who claims to be an anthropologist searching for signs of rational life on Earth. Will falls in love—but can he discover Nicole’s true identity, learn the lessons she’s trying to teach, and earn her love before he loses her forever?
Boat
Poetry by Lisa Robertson
Paperback; $17.95
In 2004, boldly original poet Lisa Robertson published a chapbook, Rousseau’s Boat, poems culled from years of notebooks that are, nevertheless, by no means autobiographical. In 2010, she expanded the work into a full-length book, R’s Boat. During the pandemic, she was drawn back into decades of journals to shape Boat. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson’s ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.
Palace of Flies
Fiction by Walter Kappacher, translated by G. Bauer
Paperback; $16.95
This absorbing novel portrays a famed author in a moment of crisis: an aging Hugo von Hofmannsthal returns to a summer resort outside of Salzburg that he visited as a child. But in the spa town where he once thrilled to the joys of youth, he now feels unproductive and uninspired, plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues. Palace of Flies conjures up an individual state of disruption at a time of fundamental societal transformation that speaks eloquently to our own age.
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss
Fiction by Mark Haber
Paperback; $16.95
Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Hugo Beckenbauer and his masterpiece, ‘Saint Sebastian’s Abyss,’ the work that established both men as art critics and also destroyed their relationship. A darkly comic meditation on art, obsession, and the enigmatic power of friendship, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss stalks the museum halls of Europe, feverishly seeking salvation, annihilation, and the meaning of belief.
Entering Fire
Fiction by Rikki Ducornet
Paperback; $16.95
This brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of Lamprias de Bergerac, a gentle mystic who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, and his son Septimus, who seethes with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in pursuit of racial purity. Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.
A Fierce Green Place
Poetry by Pamela Mordecai
Paperback; $22.95
A Fierce Green Place: New and Selected Poems brings together, across the span of thirty-plus years, the innovative work of the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Pamela Mordecai. From her acclaimed first collection Journey Poem, to the moving elegy for her murdered brother in The True Blue of Islands, this collection—Mordecai’s first book published in the US—highlights the astounding range and depths of a poet whose poetry has been described by Kamau Brathwaite as “brilliant” and by Kwame Dawes as “deeply felt and immaculately crafted.”
Plans for Sentences
Poetry by Renee Gladman
Paperback; $30
A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, this book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry.
Diaries of a Terrorist
Poetry by Christopher Soto
Paperback; $17
This debut poetry collection demands the abolition of policing and human caging. In Diaries of a Terrorist, Soto uses the “we” pronoun to emphasize that police violence happens not only to individuals, but to whole communities. His poetics open the imagination towards possibilities of existence beyond the status quo. Diaries of a Terrorist is groundbreaking in its ability to speak—from a local to a global scale—about one of the most important issues of our time.
May 2022
The Flowers of Evil
Poetry by Charles Baudelaire, trans. by A. Poochigian
Hardcover; $27.95
First published in 1857, Les Fleurs du mal was an instant sensation, earning Baudelaire plaudits and, simultaneously, disrepute. Only a year after Flaubert had endured his own public trial for indecency, a French court declared Les Fleurs an offense against public morals and six poems within it were suppressed (a ruling that would not be reversed until 1949, nearly a century after Baudelaire’s death). Subsequent editions expanded on the original, including new poems that have since been recognized as Baudelaire’s masterpieces, producing a body of work that stands as the most influential book of poetry from the nineteenth century.
The Hurting Kind
Poetry by Ada Limón
Hardcover; $22
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ada Limón. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child. Along the way, there are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.
It Must Be a Misunderstanding
Poetry by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander
Paperback; $16.95
It Must Be a Misunderstanding is the acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho’s most personal and emotive collection to date, dedicated to her mother who died of complications from Alzheimer’s. Remarkably, Bracho, author and daughter, seems to disappear into her own empathic observations as her mother comes clear to us not as a tragic figure, but as a fiery and independent personality. The chemistry between them is vivid, poignant, and unforgettable.
Revenge of the Scapegoat
Fiction by Caren Beilin
Paperback; $16
One day Iris, an adjunct at an arts college, receives a terrible package: recently unearthed letters that her father wrote to her in her teens, in which he blames her for their family’s crises. Driven by the raw fact of receiving these devastating letters not once but twice in a lifetime, and in a panic of chronic pain, Iris escapes to the countryside—or some absurdist version of it. This is a beguiling novel of odd characters, surprising circumstances, and intuitive leaps, all brought together in profoundly serious ways.
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Introduction by Alex Andriesse
Paperback; $18.95
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays, a book that proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. In these often surprising, always well-wrought essays, we see Hardwick’s passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.
Dear Memory
Memoir by Victoria Chang
Hardcover; $25
The remembrances in this collection of letters are sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered. Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Chang grasps on to a sense of self.
Midlife
Nonfiction by Andrew Jamieson
Hardcover; $19.95
Only two species of mammal have a post-reproductive life that lasts longer than their reproductive life: killer whales, whose elders are able to sniff out food supplies over vast oceanic distances to keep their pods fed, and Homo sapiens. While the evolutionary purpose of the killer whale’s extensive life seems clear, what is the point of ours? In this highly readable new book, the psychotherapist Andrew Jamieson examines the Jungian concept of the midlife crisis to show how it is an essential rite of passage. Drawing on history, psychology, science, and literature, Jamieson shows just how ubiquitous, and crucial, the “midlife crisis” is.
New and Selected Stories
Fiction by Cristina Rivera Garza; translated by Sarah Booker with additional translations by others
Paperback; $16
New and Selected Stories brings together in English translation stories from across Rivera Garza’s career, drawing from three collections spanning over 30 years and including new writing not yet published in Spanish. It is a unique and remarkable body of work, and a window into the ever-evolving stylistic and thematic development of one of the boldest, most original and affecting writers in the world today.
Caroline’s Bikini
Fiction by Kirsty Gunn
Hardcover; $22.95
This is an intricate tale of a classic love affair, a swirling cocktail of infatuation and obsession. The moment that Emily’s friend Evan Gordonstone—a successful middle-aged financier—meets Caroline—a glamorous housewife and hostess—there is a PING! At least, that’s how Evan describes it to Emily when he persuades her to record his story: the story of falling into unrequited love. Written in a voice so playful, so charismatic, and so thoughtfully aware of the responsibilities of fiction it can only be by Kirsty Gunn, this is a swooning portrait of courtly love—in a modern world not celebrated for its restraint.
Poguemahone
Fiction by Patrick McCabe
Paperback; $21.95
Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their mother’s trials as a call girl. Young Una’s search for love in a haunted hippie squat. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool and her brother’s role in the tale grows ever stranger—and more sinister. A bleakly funny fugue, McCabe’s epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire.
My Jewel Box
Poetry by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Paperback; $20
Nominated for the 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize, My Jewel Box (Mit smykkeskrin) marks the final installment of Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s visionary trilogy, a “fairy tale of the universe” investigating grief, bodies, motherhood, and the physical and economic inequalities of modern planetary life. Rendered into diamond-sharp English by award-winning translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen, My Jewel Box mounts a cosmically human (and non-human) re-approach to a grief-stricken earth, a place of all times entangled.
The Year the City Emptied
Poetry by Daisy Fried
Paperback; $15.95
“There’s a lot of fake anger out there, masking dangerous fear. Daisy Fried gives us the real thing: anger born of despair, love, desire, injustice, and loss. She’s a grave robber, revivifying the corpse of Baudelaire to mess with him and help her to cope. His ghoulish presence accompanies her as she haunts Philadelphia, recording riots, suffering, stench. This book has killer atmosphere, fragrances fine and foul. But the calm center is Fried’s dying husband. Just try and read his last lucid words, swansong of a lost world, without choking up.” —Jennifer Moxley
Our Lady of Pain
Fiction by John Blackburn
Paperback; $15.99
A centuries-old Eastern European legend of a deadly curse. Three hardened criminals driven mad by terror. A washed-up actress hellbent on revenge. A sadistic doctor who takes pleasure in mutilating his patients. What is the connection between them? Reporter Harry Clay will risk his life and sanity to find out. Because he knows that when the curtain goes up on the opening night performance of the new play “Our Lady of Pain,” something horrific is going to happen…. The most unrelentingly dark of the many horror thrillers by the prolific Blackburn, Our Lady of Pain (1974) is also one of his very best.
For Fear of Little Men
Fiction by John Blackburn
Paperback; $16.99
“We daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men”— words from an old children’s song, but to the residents of one Welsh village it’s more than just a nursery rhyme. A legend has been handed down through the ages, telling of an ancient mountain people who were massacred by the villagers’ ancestors three thousand years ago. What does this folktale have to do with a man’s recurring nightmares, the murder of a High Court judge, an outbreak of food poisoning, and the death of a rock climber? Sir Marcus Levin is determined to find out…
When Darkness Loves Us
Fiction by Elizabeth Engstrom
Paperback; $16.99
Sally Ann and Martha. Two women, searching for love. Finding terror. During a terrifying storm, a gentle childhood is destroyed by a twisted man who promises love but delivers nightmare. In the lightless depths of an underground labyrinth, unseen creatures lie in wait for an innocent traveler, cold skeletal hands stretched out in welcome. This long-awaited reissue of Elizabeth Engstrom’s 1985 horror classic features a new introduction by Paperbacks from Hell author Grady Hendrix as well as the original foreword by SF legend Theodore Sturgeon and the original cover painting by Jill Bauman.
And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
Poetry by Lynn Xu
Paperback; $22
Part protest against reality, part metaphysical reckoning, part internationale for the world-historical surrealist insurgency, and part arte povera for the wretched of the earth, Lynn Xu’s book-length poem holds fast to our fragile utopias. Under the auspice of birth and the contingency of this beginning, time opens: Ecstatic, melancholy, and defiant, the voices of the poem flicker between life and death, gorgeous and gruesome, visionary and intimate.
Our Earliest Tattoos
Poetry by Peter Twal
Paperback; $16.95
Winner of the 2018 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, this playful, inventive, and wickedly sentimental debut collection takes a set of song lyrics (LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”) and treats them as an artifact of memory itself, blurring the line between self and other, between past and present.
Pleasure
Poetry by Angelo Nikolopoulos
Paperback; $16.95
A travelogue in verse, Pleasure takes place in Syros, the Greek island to which author Angelo Nikolopolous travels a few weeks after the discovery of his mother’s brain tumor. These elliptical explorations of solitude interweave images of seaside roaming, secluded town life, and ephemeral sexual encounters with the ubiquitous implication of death—the waning summer, the ill, perhaps dying, mother. Staring down true disconnection, Nikolopoulos writes about the thrill and sadness of turning your back against the world only to rediscover that which tethers all to human experience: the quotidian pleasures of having a body.
April 2022
Fledgling
Fiction by Octavia Butler
Hardcover; $27.95
Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: she is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted—and still wants—to destroy her, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of “otherness” and questions what it means to be truly human. This is a stunning new edition, with a new introduction by Nisi Shawl.
The Conversation of the Three Wayfarers
Fiction by Peter Weiss
Paperback; $12.95
The Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into one. Weiss’s strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-double backflip before neatly landing. This essential rediscovered work, from the masterful and acclaimed German modernist Peter Weiss, will be a delightful discovery for readers of Kafka and Musil.
The King’s Touch
Poetry by Tom Sleigh
Paperback; $16
Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.
Big Dark Hole: And Other Stories
Fiction by Jeffrey Ford
Paperback; $17
A stunning new collection from the award-winning author of A Natural History of Hell. A Jeffrey Ford story may start out in the innocuous and routine world of college teaching or evenings on a porch with your wife. But inevitably the weird comes crashing in. Maybe it’s an unexpected light in a dark and uninhabited house, maybe it’s a drainage tunnel that some poor kid is suddenly compelled to explore. Maybe there’s a monkey in the woods or an angel that you’ll need to fight if you want to gain tenure. Big Dark Hole is about those big, dark holes that we find ourselves in once in a while and maybe, too, the big dark holes that exist inside of us.
Imminence
Fiction by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore
Paperback; $15.95
A new mother holds her son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment. Set over the course of an evening, and a lifetime, Imminence shifts seamlessly between the present and the past. Little by little, her world begins to unravel. In a dreamlike space composed of overlapping vignettes, Irina retraces the mirrored paths of a life. Dimópulos’s mesmerizing novel reinforces her standing as one of the most inventive contemporary Latin American writers.
Squatter’s Gift
Poetry by Robert Rybicki, translated by Mark Tardi
Paperback; $13.95
Squatter’s Gift is a poetic travelogue through numerous languages and locales, both real and imaginary. Like Miron Białoszewski, Paul Celan, and Tristan Tzara before him, Rybicki excavates syllable and song, mind and muck, to invent a transnational poetry pointedly unapologetic and utterly unique. Karol Maliszewski observes that Rybicki has taken over from the Surrealists and the Dadaists: “The hero of these poems is language—escaping from a man and suddenly returning in flashes and dazzles.”
March 2022
Philomath
Poetry by Devon Walker-Figueroa
Paperback; $16
Selected as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of the places that haunt us. With Walker-Figueroa as our Virgil, we begin in the collection’s eponymous town of Philomath, Oregon. We drift through the general store, into the Nazarene Church. We move beyond the town into fields—and further still, along highways, into a cursed Californian town, a museum in Florence. An explorer at the edge of the sublime, Walker-Figueroa writes in quiet awe of nature and memory.
The Gleaner Song
Poetry by Song Lin, translated by Dong Li
Paperback; $15.95
Song Lin is one of China’s most innovative poets. When the Tiananmen protest exploded in Beijing in June 1989, Song led student demonstrations in Shanghai and was imprisoned for almost a year before leaving China soon afterwards. This selection of poems, made by the translator Dong Li and the poet himself, spans four decades of poetic exploration, with a focus on poems written during the poet’s long stay in France, Singapore, Argentina, and more recently, his return to China. From the experience of exile, his poetry continues to open and expand its horizons.
To Feed the Stone
Poetry by Bronka Nowicka, translated by K. Szuster
Paperback; $13.95
This book is a moving reminder of a child’s perspective; a child who is surrounded by unmagical things—things that are sad, serious, or just ordinary. It is that lens of a child that breathes magic into them. In her audacious debut, Nowicka offers writing that is both timeless and timely. Using the language of folk narrative, Nowicka’s prose poems take us through the disorienting world of a child––a world that excavates the border of appearances in a constant search for connection. The poet reconfigures the dynamics between people and objects, and the tenuous boundaries between death and life.
Scattered All Over the Earth
Fiction by Yoko Tawada, translated by M. Mitsutani
Paperback; $16.95
Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian). As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends…. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
Lucky Breaks
Fiction by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Paperback; $14.95
Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women. Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound Gogolian irony.
The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces
Memoir by Courtney Cook
Paperback; $18.95
“What does it feel like to fall in love too hard and too fast, to hate yourself in equal and opposite measure? To live in such fear of rejection that you drive friends away? Welcome to my world. I’m Courtney, and I have borderline personality disorder. In my illustrated memoir, I share what it’s been like to live and love with this disorder. This is a book about vulnerability, honesty, and how to speak openly—not only with doctors, co-patients, friends and family, but also with ourselves.”
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Fiction by Irene Solà, translated by M. F. Lethem
Paperback; $16
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, and in it Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe-deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children. Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal, historical, and even geological scale. Lyrical and mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders our tragedies and our triumphs.
A Sand Book
Poetry by Ariana Reines
Paperback; $17.95
Longlisted for the National Book Award, A Sand Book is a poetry collection in twelve parts, a travel guide that migrates from wildfires to hurricanes, tweety bird to the president, lust to aridity. It explores the negative space of what is happening to language and to consciousness in our strange times. From Hurricane Sandy to the murder of Sandra Bland, from the sand in the gizzards of birds to the desertified mountains of Haiti, A Sand Book is about the relationship between catastrophe and cultural transmission. In her long-awaited follow-up to Mercury, Reines has written her most ambitious work to date.
From Nowhere to Nowhere
Fiction by Bekim Sejranović, translated by Will Firth
Paperback; $1
8.95
From Nowhere to Nowhere is a subtle yet unforgettable meditation on the factors that shape identity. The novel’s unnamed narrator, raised by his grandparents and scattered to the wind from his hometown of Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, travels to Croatia and Norway, trying to reclaim a sense of self he isn’t sure he ever possessed in the first place. From his days playing soccer with friends on Unity Street outside his home to Muslim funerals, his job as an interpreter for Balkan refugees, and his fractious relationships with women, a nomadic aesthetic emerges brilliantly rendering what it means to live a life from which you have always been removed.
The Employees
Fiction by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
Hardcover; $19.95
Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmare. Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Ravn’s prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding.
War of the Beasts and the Animals
Poetry by Maria Stepanova; translated by S. Dugdale
Paperback; $17.95
Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative poets. War of the Beasts includes her recent long poems of conflict ‘Spolia’ and ‘War of the Beasts and Animals,’ written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a long poem ‘The Body Returns’, commissioned by Hay International Festival to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. This collection also includes two sequences from her 2015 collection. “Challenging, overpowering and disorientating. This relentless rush of a book gives the intriguing sense that the poetry itself is always one step ahead of the reader.” —Poetry News, Best Poetry Books of the Year 2021
Woman Running in the Mountains
Fiction by Yūko Tsushima, translated by G. Harcourt
Paperback; $17.95
Alone at dawn, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief affair with a married man, is a source of shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be a challenge that she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn. At first she seeks refuge in the company of other women, but as the baby grows, her life becomes less circumscribed as she explores Tokyo, then ventures toward a mountain that captures her desire for a wilder freedom.
Novel on Yellow Paper
Fiction by Stevie Smith
Paperback; $17.95
When Smith first tried to get her poems published in 1935, she was told by a publisher to “go away and write a novel.” Novel on Yellow Paper, the happy result of this advice, made its author an instant celebrity and was acclaimed as “a curious, amusing, provocative and very serious piece of work.” Pompey Casmilus, Smith’s loquacious alter ego, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing novel. “Dear Reader,” she addresses us politely in the whirlwind of her opinions on death, sex, love, anti-Semitism, art, Greek tragedy, friendship, marriage, Nazism, gossip, and the suburbs.
Wicked Enchantment
Poetry by Wanda Coleman
Hardcover; $25.95
“These poems are wildly fun and inventive … and frequently hilarious; they seem to cover every human experience and emotion…” —The New York Times
One of the most talked about literary collections of the year is this collection by a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity about her life on the margins. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of Coleman’s poems spanning four decades, edited and introduced by Terrance Hayes.
February 2022
Stories of A Life
Fiction by Nataliya Meshchaninova, translated by F. Bell
Paperback; $14.95
A Russian cult hit by rising filmmaker and author Meshchaninova, Stories of A Life is a fierce and tender memoir-novel of one young woman’s experiences growing up around, and despite, men in the post-Soviet malaise of the late ‘90s. Originally written as a series of viral Facebook posts, Meshchaninova’s serialized memoir-novel tackles gender politics and abuse with honest, cutting language. Starkly down-to-earth yet funny and informal, Stories of A Life demands that we bear witness to the bleakness of a young womanhood in post-Soviet Russia.
A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems
Poetry by Victor Serge, translated by James Brook
Paperback; $16.95
A Blaze in a Desert bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the “immense shipwreck” of Stalin’s ascendancy. Serge composed elegies for the fallen, as well as prospective elegies for the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century. Serge draws on the heritage of late- and post-Symbolist writers to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second World War.
The Breaks
Essay by Julietta Singh
Paperback; $16.95
A profound meditation on race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Singh writes toward a tender vision of the world, offering children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. With nuance and generosity, Singh reveals the connections among the crises humanity faces—climate catastrophe, extractive capitalism, and the violent legacies of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism—inviting us to move through the breaks toward a tenable future.
Phenotypes
Fiction by Paulo Scott, translated by Daniel Hahn
Paperback; $16.95
A smart and stylish account of the bigotry lurking in hearts and institutions alike. Federico and Lourenço are brothers. Their father is black, their mother white. Federico—distant, angry, analytical—has light skin, while Lourenço is dark-skinned, easy-going, and well-liked in the brothers’ hometown of Porto Alegre. Paulo Scott here probes the old wounds of race in Brazil, and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic, a story of crime and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas, Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.
The Therapist
Fiction by Nial Giacomelli
Paperback; $13.95
In this hauntingly surreal tale, a couple finds the distance between them mirrored in a strange epidemic sweeping the globe. Little by little, each victim becomes transparent, their heart beating behind a visible rib cage, an intricate network of nerves left hanging in mid-air. Finally, the victims disappear entirely, never to be seen again. “This is a story about grief and loss, but also about how the social fabric of our world shapes our most personal limits. The narrative drive is perfectly pitched, conveying an urgency that carries us irresistibly along.” —Dr. Meredith Miller
The Silentiary
Fiction by A. di Benedetto, translated by E. Allen
Paperback; $16.95
The Silentiary takes place in a nameless Latin American city during the early 1950s. A young man employed in middle management entertains an ambition to write a book—but first he must establish the necessary precondition, which the crowded and noisily industrialized city always denies him. The Silentiary, along with Zama and The Suicides, is one of the three thematically linked novels by Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation. Together they constitute, in Juan José Saer’s words, “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish.”
The President Shop
Fiction by Vesna Maric
Paperback; $18.95
The President, the founder of the Nation, is an old man now, but his young and unifying spirit stands steadfastly at the heart of Maric’s debut novel. “The President Shop is a marvelous, timeless book that sweeps between the personal and the panoramic as it asks, Does every family, or country, contain an axis, around which the rest of it spins? Can you hear the voice of a stone? How clearly can anyone see the past or future? For which tyrannies have we been unwittingly waving flags?” —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Certain American States
Fiebre Tropical
Fiction by Juliána Delgado Lopera
Paperback; $17.95
Winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, Fiebre Tropical follows a Colombian teenager’s coming-of-age. Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá into a Miami townhouse, Francisca is miserable in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church—but there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates, Francisca falls in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.
The Books of Jacob
Fiction by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by J. Croft
Hardcover; $35
The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. Visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. Narrated through the perspectives of his contemporaries—those who revere him, those who revile him, the friend who betrays him, the lone woman who sees him for what he is—The Books of Jacob captures a world on the cusp of precipitous change.
Slug and Other Stories
Fiction by Megan Milks
Paperback; $17.95
A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral and absurd. Slug is a revised and expanded edition of a contemporary cult classic. Finally back in print, this collection is a testament to the messy anti-logic of queer feelings by a revelatory new voice.
Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body
Fiction by Megan Milks
Paperback; $17.95
At age twelve, Margaret was head detective of the mystery club Girls Can Solve Anything. Margaret and her best friends led exciting lives solving crimes and having adventures. But now that she’s entered high school, the club has disbanded and Margaret is unmoored—she doesn’t want to grow up, and she wishes her friends wouldn’t either. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body reimagines ’90s adolescence in a queer coming-of-age tale that puzzles through the evasive questions of growing up.
The Roots of Heaven
Fiction by Romain Gary, translated by J. Griffin
Paperback; $18.95
The Roots of Heaven takes as its subject the hunting of elephants for their ivory. Morel, a former dentist whose survival in a Nazi camp he attributes to his fixation on the freedom of elephants, travels to Africa intent on stopping the slaughter. He soon gains a following—some drawn by his cause, some by political expediency, some by a need to believe in something. He is chased and cornered at Lake Kuru, where this novel concludes in a brilliant climax. A huge bestseller in France, this novel won the Prix Goncourt.
January 2022
Present Tense Complex
Poetry by Suphil Lee Park
Paperback; $18
“The poems in this fearless debut, which entangle themes of identity, family, gender, and landscape, are gorgeous, elliptical, and delightfully strange. “Her softening grip of reality. / As if capsized, hull forced into the cold / current, she was out of the blue beautiful.” Suphil Lee Park’s transmissions are equal parts lush and violent. Present Tense Complex bridges the beautiful and the grotesque to access a new view of human loneliness.” —Claudia Rankine
Ten Thousand Selves
Poetry by Chloe Martinez
Paperback; $18
“These multi-layered lyrics tell stories in abundance—of emperors, peacocks, pre-school drop-offs, falling snow—but their logic is mandala-like, rather than linear. Instead of onward towards meaning, they lead us inward towards mystery. Martinez understands the power of story to transmute experience into knowledge. Her scope is global, her vision historical.” —Suzanne Buffam
Poetries
by Georges Schehadé, translated by Austin Carder
Paperback; $18.95
The first book-length translation of works by this important Egyptian-born, Lebanese-French poet, Poetries presents the core of Georges Schehadé’s (1905-1989) œuvre. Despite having received wide admiration from his contemporaries—including Octavio Paz and André Breton—the poetry of Schehadé is virtually unknown today. In his translator’s note, Austin Carder calls this collection “a lullaby or an enigmatic fairy tale told before bed … Schehadé’s broken-off parables convulse with the dual beauty of both hymn and elegy.”
Bright Archive
Essays by Sarah Minor
Paperback; $18
In Sarah Minor’s adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor’s grandparents’ hometown in Iowa, these essays delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities.
Demystifications
Poetry by Miranda Mellis
Paperback; $18
“With humor and grace, bite and tenderness, these ninety-nine poems structure an archive of a Miranda Mellis mind map. ‘Demystifications is a key ring,’ each page a passkey. From Orange Is the New Black to Etel Adnan, Mellis expands the visible—not to hide the cracks, but ‘to see the fissure in the fix.’ She also gives us the possibility of ‘a forgiveness cloak’—a one size fits all garment—to help us see through other minds besides our own in these darkest of times.” —Lynn Marie Kirby
Footwork
Poetry by Severo Sarduy, translated by David Francis
Paperback; $15
Sarduy was one of the most groundbreaking Latin American writers of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1937, he moved to Havana in 1956 to study medicine, but soon gave up his scientific pursuits for the arts. From 1960 until his death in 1993, the poet lived in Paris where he worked with Barthes and others on the literary magazine Tel Quel. Although his novels have been translated into English, this is the first collection of his poetry to appear in English. Footwork represents poems from throughout his life, following the thrilling trajectory of a great thinker. This poetry makes it clear why Gabriel García Márquez once called Sarduy the best writer in the Spanish language.
Yellow Fax and Other Poems
Poetry by Mariano Bàino; translated by G. Rizzo &
D. Siracusa
Paperback; $18.50
Mariano Bàino’s is among the most interesting poetry to be published at the end of last century; it is constantly straddling the border between different linguistic codes and is capable of reaching the reader without compromising the complexity of its experimentation, continuing a tradition whose immediate predecessors are the neo-avant-garde of Novissimi and Gruppo 63.
Bomarzo
Poetry by Elsa Cross, translated by L. Schimel
Paperback; $17
The open mouth of the Orcus, in the front-cover photograph, represents an entrance to the underworld, according to all the symbolism embedded in the Gardens of Bomarzo, built in the 16th Century, in central Italy. And this book actually seems to play with different strata of reality and perception, as well as different states of the mind—as well as the soul. It proceeds from the concrete to the oneiric; from the past, constantly weighting down the present, to the timeless moment that perhaps in the final poems gives meaning to—or annihilates—all the dense phantasmagoria that courses through its pages.
The Light That Burns Us
Poetry by Jazra Khaleed, translated by K. Van Dyck
Paperback; $16
The English debut of one of Greece’s most radical and original poetic voices. “[Jazra Khaleed] stands up to fascism by writing and performing Greek-language poetry that is unmatched in technical bravura, emotional depth, and political urgency. He performs his poetry at a lightning clip—so fast the Nazis can barely keep up, let alone talk back—a hip-hop emcee in a fever.” —Max Ritvo, LA Review of Books
The Still Flight
by Claudio Borghi, translated by V. Armanini
Paperback; $20
Featuring selected and unpublished poetry and prose, 1978 – 2017. “Borghi melancholically observes, yet joyfully sees the beauty of the world, the resulting beauty of the fragmented world, made, crushed, created, formed after the division of the original thing, which we all remember, with greater or lesser nostalgia: the moods alternate both the known painful feeling of being entangled in the formal trap—and admiration and song for creation, identified in the primordial beauty of the roses, which re-evoke the original wonder.” —Maria Grazia Calandrone
Short Prose
Fiction by Dumitru Tsepeneag
Paperback; $17.95
In the late-1960s Romania, during the relative cultural thaw of the post-Stalinist period, Tsepeneag emerged as an innovative writer of short prose and the pioneer of oneirism, a subversive theory of literature that challenged not only socialist realism in particular but realism in general. By the early ’70s, following a cultural crackdown by the totalitarian state, oneirism had been banned and Tsepeneag was forced into exile in France. Short Prose collects the three volumes of short stories that Tsepeneag published in Romania before going into exile, along with previously unpublished shorter texts from the same period.
The Traveller
Fiction by Stuart Neville
Paperback; $16.95
A darkly glittering collection of Northern Irish noir by award-winning author Stuart Neville. The thirteen stories in this collection, which includes never-before-published pieces, span the decade since the publication of the now-classic The Ghosts of Belfast, and in his revelatory personal introduction Neville describes how each story fit into his career as a writer. Complete with a foreword from Irish crime fiction legend John Connolly, this volume is the perfect indulgence for fans of ghost stories and noir, and is a must-have for devotees of Neville’s prizewinning Belfast Cycle novels.
Gentefication
Poetry by Antonio de Jesús López
Paperback; $16.95
Gentefication asks, what are the hauntings of a tongue that is repeatedly told, “one must learn English in order to succeed in this country”? What is the psychological trauma deployed by white liberal institutions that give scholarships to Latinx students, but nevertheless prop up white supremacy by viewing their payments as charity? How do Latinx students become complicit in this tokenizing? In an American moment dealing with scandals across multiple universities, this work is a timely intervention that advocates for first-generation audiences, for readers of color, and for all those vested in the protracted struggle for our fair shot.
December 2021
Tongue of a Crow
Poetry by Peter Coyote
Paperback; $16.95
Peter Coyote’s first collection of poetry takes us on a whirlwind tour of an eclectic and exciting life as an actor and Zen Buddhist priest, meandering from love affairs to marriage to divorce to the Sixties to psychedelic spirituality and beyond. Written over several decades, these poems read as a collage, each piece distinct and contributing to a cohesive narrative. “Peter Coyote’s poems are… rich and lively, sweet and perplexed, full of sorrow and laughter, love and lovers, soul and bodies … disappointment, resurrection; ie, Life with a capital L.” —Anne Lamott
Latitude
Poetry by Natasha Rao
Paperback; $15
Chosen as the winner of the 2021APR/Honickman First Book Prize by Guggenheim Fellow Ada Limón, Natasha Rao’s debut collection Latitude abounds with sensory delights, rich in colors, flavors, and sounds. These poems explore the complexities of family, cultural identity, and coming of age. By turns vulnerable and bold, Latitude indulges in desire: “In my next life let me be a tomato/lusting and unafraid,” Rao writes, “…knowing I’ll end up in an eager mouth.”
How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
Paperback; $20
How to Carry Water celebrates both familiar and lesser-known works by one of America’s most beloved poets, including 10 newly discovered poems that have never been collected. These poems celebrating black womanhood and resilience shimmer with intellect, insight, and joy, all in Clifton’s characteristic style—a voice that Toni Morrison described as “seductive with the simplicity of an atom, which is to say highly complex, explosive underneath an apparent quietude.” Selected and introduced by Aracelis Girmay, this volume of Clifton’s poetry is fitting for today’s tumultuous moment.
Sho
Poetry by Douglas Kearney
Paperback; $18
Kearney’s Sho aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks. Navigating the complex penetrability of language, these poems are sonic in their espousal of Black vernacular strategies, while examining histories and current events through the lyric, brand new dances, and other performances. Sho is a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, and irony. In his “stove-like imagination,” Kearney has concocted poems that destabilize the spectacle, leaving looky-loos with an important uncertainty about the intersection between violence and entertainment.
Come Clean
Poetry by Joshua Nguyen
Paperback; $16.95
Nguyen’s sharp, songlike, and often experimental collection compartmentalizes past trauma through the quotidian. Poems aim to confront the speaker’s past by physically, and mentally, cleaning up. Here, the Asian-American masculine interrogates the domestic space through the sensual and finds healing through family and in everyday rhythms. Infused with the Shinto-inspired organizing practices of KonMari, the poems in Come Clean unpack life’s messy joys with intimacy, grace, and vulnerability.
Superdoom: Selected Poems
Poetry by Melissa Broder
Paperback; $18.95
Featuring a new introduction from the author, Superdoom brings together the best of Broder’s three cult out-of-print poetry collections—When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone—as well as the best of her fourth collection, Last Sext. Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, with humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder’s language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness and raw intimacy.
Arcadia
Fiction by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, translated by Ruth Diver
Paperback; $19.95
Farah moves into Liberty House—a community in harmony with nature—at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune’s spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches free love and uninhibited desire for all, regardless of gender, age, or ability. At fifteen, Farah learns she is intersex and begins to go beyond the confines of gender, exploring the arc of her own desires. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What does it mean to be part of a community? Bayamack-Tam delivers a celebration and a critique of innocence in the contemporary world.
Girls Against God
Fiction by Jenny Hval, translated by Marjam Idriss
Paperback; $19.95
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice, and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begins cooking up curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a black metal band, pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost…. Hval’s latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, gender and art.
Prepare Her
Fiction by Genevieve Plunkett
Paperback; $16.95
Prepare Her tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power. The crossroads in their lives are not always the obvious kind—divorce, motherhood, coming of age—but sometimes much more private and dramatic. Tempered by its rural and often haunting Vermont setting, this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering. Through this lens, we can see the many subtle, yet staggering injustices endured by the women at the center of these stories.
In Light of Stars
Poetry by Bruce Willard
Paperback; $16.95
Often rooted in domestic encounters, the poems of this collection rise up (much like the clouds over his oft-traversed Rockies), as the speaker throws his attention to earth and sky, better to understand his own dynamic and shifting inner weather. “In Light of Stars presents a poetry that engages the larger questions of our place on earth, a poetry that lifts us beyond personal loss to moments cherished and made brilliant by close attention to and appreciation of the natural world.” —Christopher Buckley
A Good Map of All Things
Fiction by Alberto Álvaro Ríos
Paperback; $19.95
In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—the United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and not the only thing to think about. The people in A Good Map have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul. Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort and warmth.
Salt Water
Fiction by Josep Pla, translated by Peter Bush
Paperback; $20
Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Pla’s foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers headfirst into its mysterious depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. Ever the authority on the brisk etiquette of sailing, eating, and smuggling, Pla is our stalwart captain through each windy, sun-soaked tale.
If You Kept a Record of Sins
Fiction by Andrea Bajani, translated by E. Harris
Paperback; $18
A sly, prismatic novel that Jhumpa Lahiri says “accumulates with the quiet urgency of a snowstorm,” If You Kept a Record of Sins records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she’s building in Romania. Lorenzo, a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life. With piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of sentimental education and unconditional love.
The Dog of Tithwal
Fiction by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated by Khalid Hasan and Muhammad Umar Memon
Paperback; $22
Widely considered a master of the modern short story, Manto vividly conjures life on the streets of Bombay—its prostitutes, pimps, artists, writers, and those caught in the fore of the India-Pakistan partition. Deeply opposed to partition, Manto is best known for his portrayals of its violence and absurdities. This collection illuminates Manto’s most vital work, and—half a century later—remains a prescient text illuminating so many of the silenced conflicts that plague humanity today.
November 2021
Arthur’s Whims
Fiction by Hervé Guibert, translated by Daniel Lupo
Paperback; $17.50
Arthur and his beloved Bichon—a young man who, after drinking Arthur’s tears, becomes pregnant with his child—drift through a stream of identities and circumstances: birdcatchers for a French taxidermist; sailors shipwrecked in an ice fortress; explorers of the Isles of Traitors, Babies, and Sadness; famous magicians in Oklahoma; religious and medical marvels. Arthur’s Whims is an anarchic, outrageous novel, in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Comte de Lautréamont, now available in English for the first time in translation by Daniel Lupo.
And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey
Poetry by Amy Beeder
Paperback; $18.95
Beeder’s third collection brims with lyrical invention and dark wit. In this lush universe, Hermes moonlights as a process server and malaria croons a love song; saints emerge from beans while Kronos and Eros argue at a local bar: “love’s nothing/but glimmer-to-wither, dawn’s fireflies expired.” In language singularly baroque and hypnotic, Beeder takes us on a wild poetic adventure: this book is, as Dana Levin says, “a treasure-house wizarding through time,” through landscapes ancient and present, real and reimagined.
Roofwalker
Fiction by Susan Power
Paperback; $15
When Susan Power burst onto the literary scene with her first book, The Grass Dancer, critics called it “the real thing” (Los Angeles Times) and “extravagantly inventive” (Washington Post). Power’s novel of Native American life went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award and become a national bestseller. In Roofwalker, Power returns with equally magical prose to tell the stories of both imaginary and real figures who live mostly away from the reservation yet palpably feel its influence. Roofwalker evokes a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.
What I Did
Graphic novel omnibus by Jason
Hardcover; $24.99
This omnibus comprises three of the acclaimed cartoonist’s earliest graphic novels: Hey, Wait…, the first of Jason’s books to be translated to English, which tells the story of two childhood friends and an event that changes their lives forever; Sshhhh!, the cradle-to-grave life of one of Jason’s bird-headed characters; and The Iron Wagon, an ingenious murder mystery set in early-20th-century Norway, adapted from a classic Norwegian novel.
The Haunted Lady
Fiction by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Paperback; $15.95
The arsenic in her sugar bowl was wealthy widow Eliza Fairbanks’ first clue that somebody wanted her dead. The nightly plagues of bats and rats unleashed in her bedroom were the second indication, an obvious attempt to scare the life out of the delicate dowager. So Eliza calls the cops, who send Hilda Adams to go undercover and investigate—and from the moment Adams arrives at the mansion, it’s clear that something unseemly is at work in the estate. Reissued for the first time in over twenty years, The Haunted Lady is the thrilling follow-up to Miss Pinkerton (the books can be read in any order).
When We Cease to Understand the World
by Benjamín Labatut, translated by A. N. West
Paperback; $17.95
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. At a breakneck pace, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.
Chasing Homer
Fiction by László Krasznahorkai, with paintings by Max Neumann and music by Szilveszter Miklós
Hardcover; $19.95
In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed, careening through Europe. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death. Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful paintings by Max Neumann and the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed via QR codes).
Cremation
Fiction by Rafael Chirbes, translated by Valerie Miles
Paperback; $20.95
Along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain, real-estate developers scramble to transform the once pastoral landscape into tourist resorts and beachfront properties. The booming post-Franco years have left everything up for grabs. In a rich mosaic narrative, Cremation explores the coked-up champagne fizz of luxurious parties shadowed by underworlds of political corruption and ruthless financial speculation. The novel enters that melancholy ouroboros of capitalist greed that led to the financial crash and captures something essential about our values, our choices, and our all too human mistakes.
Garden Physic
Poetry by Sylvia Legris
Paperback; $16.95
With illustrations, photographs, and maps, Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: gardening! Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.
Refractive Africa
Poetry by Will Alexander
Paperback; $16.95
“The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a history dominated by the Occident. Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity is swirling with magical laterality and recovery.
The Art of Revision: The Last Word
Nonfiction by Peter Ho Davies
Paperback; $14
Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject, taking examples of revision from his own novels, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver. Davies also recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision—that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving.
Brickmakers
Fiction by Selva Almada; translated by A. McDermott
Paperback; $16
Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Selva Almada’s fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities. Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time in an exquisitely written and powerfully told story.
Prognosis: Poems
Poetry by Jim Moore
Paperback; $16
In his eighth collection, celebrated poet Jim Moore looks into unrelenting darkness where moments of tenderness and awe illuminate. These are poems of both patience and urgency, of necessary attendance and helpless exuberance in the breathing world—something rare in contemporary poetry. Written in Minneapolis amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s distanced loneliness, after the police murder of George Floyd, as an empire comes to an end, Prognosis turns toward the living moment as a surprising source of abundance.
October 2021
Woolgathering
Memoir by Patti Smith
Paperback; $14.95
A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a child finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, “a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me.” The National Book Award–winner Patti Smith updates this treasure box of a childhood memoir about “clear unspeakable joy” and “just the wish to know” with a radiant new afterword, written during the pandemic and reflecting on current times. This expanded paperback edition also includes new photographs by the author.
H of H Playbook
Literature by Anne Carson
Hardcover; $22.95
A gorgeous facsimile edition (reminiscent of Carson’s classic book-in-a-box, Nox), H of H Playbook is a stunning re-creation of Euripides’s famous play, with illustrations by the author.
The House of Rust
Fiction by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Paperback; $16
When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters…. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a fabulist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadhrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, this is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.
The Wrong Turning: Encounters with Ghosts
Introduced and edited by Stephen Johnson
Hardcover
A curated selection of chilling ghost stories from world literature, introduced and edited by broadcaster Stephen Johnson. What these tales of the supernatural have in common is the theme of taking a ‘wrong turning’ in which the protagonists are made to face their darkest fears. In the spirit of a fireside storyteller, each tale has an afterword by Stephen Johnson, to suggest what the story might really be telling us. With contributions from Alexander Pushkin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tove Jansson, Penelope Lively, Flann O’Brien and more, this uniquely curated anthology brings together some of the most chilling—and enigmatic—stories from around the world.
God of Nothingness
Poetry by Mark Wunderlich
Paperback; $16
In these poems, honed to a devastating edge, Mark Wunderlich asks: How is it we go on as those around us die? And why go on at all? Some poems are moving elegies addressed to mentors, friends, and family recently gone, while others remember a rural midwestern coming-of-age and, chillingly, an encounter with the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Exquisite in its craft, God of Nothingness is an unflinching journal of solitude and survival.
The Swank Hotel
Fiction by Lucy Corin
Paperback; $17
At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she waits to hear news of her sister, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her. The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first century America.
Yellow Rain
Poetry by Mai Der Vang
Paperback; $17
As the U.S. abandoned them at the end of its war in Vietnam, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos. This substance, known as “yellow rain,” caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a biological weapon had been used against the Hmong. In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning.
The Trees
Fiction by Percival Everett
Paperback; $16
The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in a rural town in Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, the coroner, and a string of racist townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is a powerful novel of lasting importance.
Murder in the Age of Enlightenment
Fiction by Ryunosuke Akutagawa; translated by B. Karetnyk
Paperback
The stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, to a lantern festival in Tokyo, to the Emperor’s court, they offer glimpses into moments of madness, murder, and obsession. Vividly translated by Bryan Karetnyk, they unfold in elegant, sometimes laconic, always gripping prose. Akutagawa’s stories are characterised by their stylish originality; they are stories to be read again and again.
Lives and Deaths: Essential Stories
Fiction by Leo Tolstoy; translated by Boris Dralyuk
Paperback
Tolstoy’s stories contain many of the most acutely observed moments in his monumental body of work. This new selection of his shorter works showcases the peerless economy with which Tolstoy could render the passions of a life. These are works that take us from a self-interested judge’s agonising deathbed to the bristling social world of horses in a stable yard, from the joyful vanity of youth to the painful doubts of sickness and old age. With unwavering precision, Tolstoy’s eye brings clarity to the simplest materials.
And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon
Fiction by Nikolai Gogol; translated by O. Ready
Paperback
No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Gogol. Strikingly modern in his depictions of society’s shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul.
September 2021
Awake
Fiction by Harald Voetmann; translated by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen
Paperback; $14.95
In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed dictating new chapters of his Natural History. Fat, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose—there’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.
Water Statues
Fiction by Fleur Jaeggy; translated by Gini Alhadeff
Paperback; $13.95
Even among Jaeggy’s singular works, Water Statues is a peculiar book. Concerned with wealth’s odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy recluse who keeps statues in his flooded basement. Water Statues—with its band of loosely related souls (milling about as often in the distant past as in the mansion’s garden full of intoxicated snails)—delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life.
Stranger to the Moon
Fiction by Evelio Rosero; translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean
Paperback; $13.95
Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of Colombia’s history. Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside history and geography, but taps into the dark myths of his country’s harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, the novel describes what ensues when a single “naked-one” privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Stranger to the Moon is a powerfully brave and distinctive novel by a writer who is arguably Colombia’s greatest living author.
On Freedom
Nonfiction by Maggie Nelson
Hardcover; $27
So often deployed as a jingoistic rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
Love and Youth: Essential Stories
Fiction by Ivan Turgenev; translated by N. Slater
Paperback
An icon of Russian literature, Turgenev was able to contain the narrative sweep of a novel in a single short story. His protagonists experience the joy and painful turbulence of first love, the thrilling adventures of youth, and the layered reflections of maturity. This collection, in a lyrical new translation by Nicolas Slater, places Turgenev’s great novella “First Love” alongside a selection of his classic stories.
HOMES
Poetry by Moheb Soliman
Paperback; $17.95
Moheb Soliman’s HOMES maps the shoreline of the Great Lakes. This poetic travelogue offers an intimate perspective on an immigrant experience as Soliman drives his Corolla past exquisite vistas and abandoned mines, through tourist towns and midwestern suburbs, seeking to inhabit an entire region as home. Against a backdrop of environmental destruction and a history of colonial oppression, the vitality of Soliman’s language brings a bold lens to bear on the relationship between transience and belonging in the world’s largest, most porous borderland.
Storm
Fiction by George R. Stewart
Paperback; $17.95
With Storm, first published in 1941, Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a meteorologist takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects. Stewart’s novel tracks the storm’s progress through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.
Foucault in Warsaw
Nonfiction by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated by Sean Gasper Bye
Paperback; $15.95
In 1958, Foucault arrived in Poland to work on his thesis. While he was there, he became involved with a number of members of the gay community, including a certain “Jurek,” who eventually led the secret police to Foucault’s hotel room, causing his subsequent exit from Poland. That boy’s motivations and identity were hidden among secret police documents for decades, until Ryziński stumbled upon a report and uncovered the truth about the situation. Nominated for the Nike Literary Award, Foucault in Warsaw reconstructs a vibrant picture of gay life in Poland under communism.
And Miles To Go Before I Sleep
Fiction by Jocelyne Saucier; translated by R. Mullins
Paperback; $21.95
Gladys might look old and frail, but she is determined to finish her life on her own terms. And so, one September morning, she leaves Swastika, her home of the past fifty years, and hops on the Northlander train, eager to put thousands of miles of northern Quebec between her and the improbably named village, and leaving behind her tormented daughter, Lisana. Our mysterious narrator, who is documenting these disappearing northern trains, is eager to uncover the truth of Gladys’s voyage. A stunning meditation on aging and freedom, Saucier offers a unique outlook on self-determination in this unsettling story about a woman’s disappearance.
August 2021
Variations on the Body
Stories by María Ospina, translated by Heather Cleary
Paperback; $16.95
In six connected stories, Variations on the Body explores the obsessions and idiosyncrasies of women and girls from different strata of Colombian society. A former FARC fighter adjusts to urban life and faces the new violence of an editor co-opting her experiences. A woman adrift in the city she left as a child looks for someone to care for, even if it has to be by force, while another documents a flea infestation with a catalog of the marks on her flesh. Combining humor and heartbreak, Ospina constructs a keen reflection on the body as a simultaneous vehicle of connection and alienation in vibrant, gleaming prose.
Rein Gold
Elfriede Jelinek, translated by G. Honegger
Paperback
Originally written as a libretto for the Berlin State Opera, Jelinek’s Rein Gold reconstructs the events of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle and extends them into the present day. Brünnhilde diagnoses Wotan, father of the gods, as a victim of capitalism because he, too, has fallen into the trap of wanting to own a castle he cannot afford. In a series of monologues, they chart the evolution of capitalism from the Nibelungen Saga to the 2008 financial crisis. Written with her trademark zeal, Rein Gold is a ferocious critique of universal greed.
Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader
Edited by Jamie Townsend
Paperback; $21.95
Beautiful Aliens is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.
Purgatorio
Poetry by Dante Alighieri; translated by Mary Jo Bang
Paperback; $20
Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her version of Inferno. In Purgatorio, still guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante emerges from the horrors of Hell to begin the climb up Mount Purgatory. In her signature lyric style, accompanied by her wise and exuberant notes, Bang has produced a stunning translation of this fourteenth-century text, rich with references that span time, languages, and cultures.
Everything Like Before
Fiction by Kjell Askildsen; translated by S. Kinsella
Paperback; $21
A man and a woman in a remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café—Askildsen’s characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat or a nail in a cherry tree reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen’s characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest short-story writers, Askildsen captures life as it really is.
In A Shallow Grave
Fiction by James Purdy
Paperback; $14.99
Championed by writers as diverse as Tennessee Williams and Jonathan Franzen, Purdy (1914-2009) is now being rediscovered as a major figure in American literature. In this novel, Garnet Montrose returns home from Vietnam to Virginia with injuries so terrible that people become ill at the sight of him. Seeking companionship in his isolation, Garnet hires two male caretakers, Quintus and Daventry, and in the handsome Daventry he finds a transformative love unlike anything he has experienced before. In this story of the moving relationship of these three men, Purdy has crafted one of his most memorable novels.
The Red Spider
Fiction by Delphi Fabrice; translated by B. Stableford
Paperback; $16
“Delphi Fabrice” (the pseudonym of Gaston-Henri-Adhémar Risselin, 1877-1937) is credited with authoring over one hundred books. None, however, is more bizarre than The Red Spider, here presented in English for the first time. The novel features Andhré Mordann, an ether-drinking hero seemingly modelled on Lorrain himself, who, in this “black, black, black tale”—a tale of true horror—traverses the boulevards of decline, hobnobbing with drunken prostitutes and homosexual strong-men, licentious merrymakers and waterfront idlers—and, of course, the dancer gloved in imperial crimson.
A Cheerful Soul and Other Stories
Fiction by Hersh Dovid Nomberg; translated by Daniel Kennedy
Paperback; $15
Now largely forgotten, Hersh Dovid Nomberg was once one of the most popular Yiddish writers of his generation, best known for his short stories delving into the concerns and psychologies of those on the margins of society. These eight stories, collected and translated by Daniel Kennedy, center around a motley cast of wanderers and exiles: modern Jews who have left their homes to join Europe’s counterculture of bohemians, artists, aesthetes and freethinkers.
The Aunts
Fiction by Cyriel Buysse; translated by David McKay
Paperback; $14.95
The Aunts, a gem-like masterpiece of Flemish literature by the great Belgian writer Cyriel Buysse, is presented here for the first time in English in a magnificent translation by David McKay. This short novel, set in the early 20th century, tells the tragic story of the petit-bourgeois Dufours. Buysse’s powerful indictment of hidebound rural Flemish society is leavened by memorable dialogue, humorous moments, and lyrical evocations of light and landscape. His critique of hypocrisy and inherited wealth is still scorchingly relevant, and the tender irony with which he portrays his characters will fascinate today’s readers.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf
Fiction by Kathryn Davis
Paperback; $18
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is a novel as thrilling in its virtuosity as it is moving in its homage to the power of art. Frances Thorn, waitress and single parent of twins, finds herself transformed by the dazzling magnetism of Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer of operas. At the heart of what binds them is “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a prideful girl. Helle’s final opera, based on this tale and unfinished at the time of her death, is willed to Frances—a life-changing legacy that compels Frances to unravel the mysteries of Helle’s story.
Pilgrim Bell
Poetry by Kaveh Akbar
Paperback; $16
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.
On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal
Nonfiction by Rachel Greenwald Smith
Paperback; $16
This is an argument against liberal society’s tendency to view compromise as an unalloyed good. In a series of convincing essays, Greenwald Smith discusses the dangers of thinking about compromise as an end, rather than as a means. She recounts her stint as a bass player, and then moves outward to the Riot Grrrl movement, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and other wide-ranging topics. Closing with a piercing discussion of the uncompromising nature of the pandemic and how global protests against racism point to a new future, On Compromise is a vital book for our time.
Animals
Prose by Hebe Uhart; translated by Robert Croll
Paperback; $20
Animals tells of piglets that snack on crackers, parrots that rehearse their words at night, southern screamers that lurk at the front door of a decrepit aunt’s house, and, of course, human animals, whose presence is treated with the same inquisitive sharpness and sweetness that marks all of Uhart’s work. Animals is a joyous reordering of attention towards the beings with whom we share the planet.
Glyph: Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory
Graphic poetry by Naoko Fujimoto
Paperback; $21.95
“I was wandering around the house of poetry and this book showed me to a door I didn’t know existed. Now, on the other side, nothing is the same. By layering and arranging found art, original drawings, washi, photos, paint, and bits of leaf, Naoko Fujimoto has created a stunning contemporary emaki engaged with Japanese heritage, the horrors of war, and daughterhood, offering us a dynamic accumulation on the page that feels as delightful and devastating as life itself.” —G. Bates
The Beginners
Fiction by Anne Serre; translated by Mark Hutchinson
Paperback; $14.95
Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy Guillaume when she suddenly falls in love with Thomas. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. “How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem.” Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd—and unforgettable.
A Collapse of Horses
Fiction by Brian Evenson
Paperback; $16.95
With minimalist literary horror, Brian Evenson’s stories work a nightmare axis of doubt, paranoia, and everyday life. A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. “Evenson’s fiction is equal parts obsessive, experimental, and violent. It can be soul-shaking.” —New Yorker
The Whole Singing Ocean
Poetry by Jessica Moore
Paperback; $19.95
Part long poem, part investigation, this true story begins with a whale encounter and then dives into the affair of the École en bateau, a French countercultural school aboard a boat. The École was based on the ideals of ’68, but also twisted ideas about child psychology, Foucault’s philosophy, and an abolition of the separation between adults and children. As more troubling details are revealed, the text touches on memory, trauma, and grief, ultimately leading to buried echoes from the author’s own life and family history.
July 2021
Notes from Childhood
Nonfiction by Norah Lange
Paperback; $13.62
Beginning with her family’s departure from Buenos Aires in 1910, Lange’s Notes from Childhood is a glimpse into the author’s sometimes magical, sometimes painful evolution into and beyond her roles as a daughter, watcher, and thinker. These intimate moments serve as windows onto a world of innocent voyeurism and surreal misunderstanding, as Lange’s family learns to live with the eccentric little spy in their midst—and vice versa. This series of luminous vignettes weave the childhood memories of Argentina’s great, rediscovered literary innovator into a tapestry of Proustian brilliance.
The City of Good Death
Fiction by Priyanka Champaneri
Hardcover; $28
India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges holds one promise for Hindus: it is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation. After ten years in this city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife and their daughter; a hapless assistant; and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Told in lush, vivid detail, this a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual.
Father of Lies
Fiction by Brian Evenson
Paperback; $16.95
Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn’t sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson’s fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims. “Evenson’s literary genius lay in his ability to spread reasonable doubt and blur lines of inquiry.” —New York Journal of Books
Slipping
Fiction by Mohamed Kheir, translated by R. Moger
Paperback; $16.95
A struggling journalist is introduced to a former exile with an encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt’s obscure, magical places. Together, as explorer and guide, they step into the fragmented, elusive world the Arab Spring left behind. Musical and parabolic, Slipping seeks to accept the world in all its mystery. An innovative novel that searches for meaning within the haze of trauma, it generously portrays the overlooked miracles of everyday life, and attempts to reconcile past failures with a daunting future. This is a profound introduction to the imagination of Mohamed Kheir, one of the most exciting writers working in Egypt today.
Walking on Cowrie Shells
Fiction by Nana Nkweti
Paperback; $16
In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.
Pere Gimferrer
Poetry by Pere Gimferrer, translated by A.N. West
Paperback; $16
Pere Gimferrer has been writing poetry for more than fifty years in several languages, expanding upon avant-garde tendencies in poetry that had been abandoned in Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Of his second book, The Sea Aflame, Octavio Paz wrote: “Our language will be, already is, larger by one poet.” In 1970, with Mirrors, Gimferrer turned to Catalan, his mother tongue. Since then, he has won major Catalan and Spanish prizes for his work. This bilingual edition, the first to draw on all phases of Gimferrer’s career as a poet, is an ideal introduction to a writer who, in the words of Roberto Bolaño, “knows everything.”
Rabbit Island
Fiction by E. Navarro; translated by C. MacSweeney
Hardcover; $19.95
These eleven stories from one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists” combine gritty surrealism with explosive interior meditations, traversing the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called “non-inventor” brings snow-white rabbits to an island inhabited exclusively by birds, with horrific results. Elsewhere in these stories that map dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities, and graveyards, an unsightly “paw” grows from a writer’s earlobe and a grandmother floats silently in the corner of the room.
Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg
Memoir by Emily Rapp Black
Hardcover
An amputee’s personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life. At first sight of Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” Emily Rapp Black felt an instant connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs. Kahlo sustained lifelong injuries after a bus crash and her right leg was eventually amputated. In Kahlo’s art, Rapp Black recognized her own life. Here, Rapp Black tells her story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to accept her body. She writes of how Frida Kahlo inspired her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.
Novel 11, Book 18
Fiction by Dag Solstad; translated by S. Lyngstad
Paperback; $15.95
Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, an uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author’s remarkable gifts. Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress. Now he contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever. He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope and complicates matters.
The Netanyahus
Fiction by Joshua Cohen
Paperback; $16.95
Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics.
June 2021
Bug
Fiction by Giacomo Sartori; translated by F. Randall
Paperback; $18
The young, deaf narrator of Bug does not have many people to talk to. His father, a data analyst for Nutella, is clueless about humans; his Buddhist beekeeper mother is in a coma after a terrible car accident. Just when his family’s survival in their converted chicken coop seems most precarious, someone new enters his life: Bug, who seems to know all about his family and has some creative, if not strictly legal, ideas about how to help. With wicked humor and imagination, Sartori brings us a madcap story of a family living outside the bounds.
Animal Days
Poetry by Joshua Beckman
Paperback; $18
Enacting both the pain and heightened awareness of a body in crisis, Beckman’s latest collection of poetic fragments seeks to elucidate the synthetic reality of being sick and being medicated. Written from inside of illness and gathered over several years, these fragments or moments invite readers to contemplate how the compromised body transforms our conceptions of selfhood and our sense of the world. With a sincere reaching curiosity, the poems present a record of daily experience, but with the constant undermining presence of decay, memory, and death.
A Door Behind a Door
Fiction by Yelena Moskovich
Paperback; $16.99
In Moskovich’s spellbinding novel, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia.
Fred Rogers: The Last Interview
Paperback; $16.99
Fred Rogers’s gentle spirit and passion for children’s television takes center stage in this collection of interviews spanning his long career. Rogers remains a source of fond memories for generations who grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Over the course of his career, Rogers revolutionized children’s television and changed the way experts thought about the educational power of media. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was demonstrating the power of simply being nice to other people. In this collection of interviews, including his fiery (for him) 1969 senate testimony that saved PBS, Rogers’s compassionate approach to life continues to be an inspiration.
To Write As If Already Dead
Memoir by Kate Zambreno
Paperback; $18
To Write As If Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno’s failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Throughout this rigorous, mischievous not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert’s work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, “What is an author?” Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency.
Last Dream
Poetry by Giovanni Pascoli; translated by G. Brock
Paperback; $16
Giovanni Pascoli stands as a towering figure at the threshold of modern Italian poetry, yet he is little known in English. He wrote his best poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, in an extraordinary burst that included his three most important collections, Myricae, Canti di Castelvecchio, and Primi poemetti. In this volume, translator Geoffrey Brock offers a personal anthology that conveys the wide-eyed spirit and formal beauty of the originals.
Savage Pageant
Poetry by Jessica Q. Stark
Paperback; $18
Savage Pageant recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood’s show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, Savage Pageant reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.
Nakedness Is My End
Poetry, translated by Edmund Keeley
Paperback; $16
A new translation of poetic masterpieces spanning Greece’s Archaic and Golden Age to Byzantium. In these beautiful renderings Edmund Keeley—”the definitive translator of 20th-century Greek poetry into English” according to the New York Times Book Review—displays his sensitivity as a translator and his imagination as a poet. The verses spring to life for a new generation of readers who will delight in the inventiveness, wit, and honesty of essential ancient Greek voices such as Plato, Leonidas, Callimachus, Meleager, Honestus, Strato, and Palladas.
Collected Poems of Robert Conquest
Hardback
This volume brings together eight decades of work by a writer described in the Dictionary of National Biography as “a man of letters, attaining equal distinction as poet, historian, and political commentator.” Robert Conquest’s many honors include the PEN Brazil Prize (for the best long poem about the Second World War) and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. Conquest neatly skewered pretension wherever he found it, but throughout his long life also wrote eloquent poems of love, longing, and loss.
A Ghost in the Throat
Memoir by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Paperback; $22.95
An Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year and Guardian Best Book of 2020, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is “a powerful, bewitching blend of memoir and literary investigation” (New York Times).
Something Indecent
Poetry, edited by Valzhyna Mort
Paperback; $19.95
Seven contemporary Eastern European poets—Adam Zagajewski, Vera Pavlova, Tomaz Salamun, Ales Steger, Nikola Madzirov, Eugenijus Alishanka, and editor Valzhyna Mort—introduce us to poems by writers who have become for them windows onto the world. Spanning thousands of years and thousands of miles, their surprising, often unpredictable choices—and the reasons for those choices—are collected here, forming the latest entry in a poetic conversation carried across centuries, countries, and traditions.
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
Memoir by Jean Daive; translated by R. Waldrop
Paperback; $15.95
An arresting memoir of the final years of one of twentieth-century Europe’s greatest poets, published on the centenary of his birth. Paul Celan (1920–1970) is considered one of Europe’s greatest post-World-War II poets, known for his astonishing experiments in poetic form. Under the Dome is French poet Jean Daive’s haunting memoir of his friendship with Celan, a precise yet elliptical account of their daily meetings and walks through Paris, a routine that ended suddenly when Celan committed suicide. Daive’s grief at the loss of his friend finds expression in Under the Dome.
Festivals of Patience: The Verse Poems of Arthur Rimbaud; translated by Brian Kim Stefans
Paperback; $18
Poet of sexual freedom, inveterate modernist, Symbolist, and inspiration to beatniks and punks, Rimbaud wrote some of the most enduring poems of world literature. His career lasted all of five years, between 1870-1875. Here is a collection of all of his poems in verse, in a new translation by American poet Brian Kim Stefans. With Rimbaud’s sense of songcraft in mind, Stefans has retained the French meters in his English versions. He is the first to have done this, and CAConrad declares, “Brian Kim Stefans sets us ablaze with his astonishing new Rimbaud, proving it takes a worldly, genius poet to translate another!”
To the Lake
Nonfiction by Kapka Kassabova
Paperback; $18
Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova’s maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother’s place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads. By exploring on water and land the stories of poets, fishermen, and caretakers, misfits, rulers, and inheritors of war and exile, Kassabova uncovers the human destinies shaped by the lakes. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy, Kassabova locates a deeper inquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations.
Nervous Conditions
Fiction by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Paperback; $16
Two decades before Zimbabwe ended white minority rule, thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke embarks on her education. She yearns to be free of the constraints of her rural village and thinks she’s found her way out when her wealthy uncle offers to sponsor her schooling. But she soon learns that the education she receives at his mission school comes with a price. A timeless coming-of-age tale, and a powerful exploration of cultural imperialism, Nervous Conditions won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has been “hailed as one of the 20th century’s most significant works of African literature” (NYT).
Pricks in the Tapestry
Poetry by Jameson Fitzpatrick
Paperback; $18
“This book is a record of my thinking and feeling during my mid-to-late-twenties. Like any record, it is incomplete and imperfect—I do not always identify with the speakers of these poems, even as I recognize their speech (and sometimes, their desires) as my own. I think of this collection as a bildungsroman of sorts: the story of a young poet coming to know, belatedly and with difficulty, the insufficiencies of the self as a subject and the lyric as a mode.” —Jameson Fitzpatrick
Two Stories
Fiction by Osvaldo Lamborghini; translated by Jessica Sequeira
Paperback; $16
The writing of the late Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940—1985) resists almost any attempt to characterize. An iconoclastic figure of the Latin American literary milieu of the mid-to-late twentieth century, Lamborghini melded the baroque and the low-brow to often outrageous effect (Bolaño said he could only read a few pages of him at once). Rendered into English for the first time here are two long short stories, “The Morning” and “Just Write Anything!”, an accurate sample of his work in much the same way that a bucket of seawater is an accurate sample of the ocean.
Spooky Action at a Distance
Poetry by Dalton Day
Paperback; $18
Spooky Action at a Distance is a repeated attempt to reconcile the absurdity of loss. Dalton Day uses their signature cause-and-effect “logic” to jump from Laika the Russian space dog to Deborah Sampson to Dennis Gabor to Bruce Springsteen, all so they can ask: how are we supposed to look at a space that was once occupied? These humorous yet desperate poems couldn’t sit still if they tried, and, if their narrator is to be believed, that’s all they are trying to do.
May 2021
Town Crier
Poetry by Sarah Matthes
Paperback; $15.95
The poems in Town Crier wryly express the pervasive nature of loss, how it suffuses all aspects of a life: memories, hopes, love, sex, lunch. The death of the author’s dear friend, the late poet Max Ritvo, becomes the cornerstone of the book, a foundational pain along which the poems are aligned. The poems grieve. They try to cope. They come up short. They try again, insisting as they do that language holds consequential, redemptive powers. Matthes is equal parts jester and conjurer, sensing the precious alchemy of laughter and lament.
Good Behaviour
Fiction by Molly Keane, introduction by Amy Gentry
Paperback; $16.95
Is it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keane’s Booker Prize–short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead… Keane’s brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.
Poets in a Landscape
Nonfiction by Gilbert Highet
Paperback; $19.95
Highet was a legendary teacher at Columbia University, admired both for his scholarship and his charisma as a lecturer. Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places where they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them to life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work.
Water I Won’t Touch
Poetry by Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Paperback; $16
Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won’t Touch is concerned with the vitality of trans people living in an inhospitable landscape. Through the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body’s healing from a mastectomy―in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction―these ambitious poems put new form to what’s been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.
Out of the Cage
Fiction by Fernanda García Lao
Paperback; $15.95
After a freakish death, a young Argentinian woman is left to observe the world outside of the “cage” of her body; through jarring vignettes and ruminations, acclaimed author Fernanda García Lao creates a complex, intelligent, and subversive theater of the absurd. García Lao has been called “the strangest writer of Argentine literature,” and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo.
Other Worlds
Stories by Teffi
Paperback; $17.95
Though best known for her comic and satirical sketches of pre-Revolutionary Russia, Teffi was a writer of great range and human sympathy. The stories on otherworldly themes in this collection are some of her finest and most profound, displaying the acute psychological sensitivity beneath her characteristic wit and surface brilliance. Other Worlds presents stories from across the whole of Teffi’s long career, from her early days as a literary celebrity in Moscow to her post-Revolutionary years as an émigré in Paris.
The Essential June Jordan
Poetry, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller
Paperback; $18
The Essential June Jordan honors the enduring legacy of a poet fiercely dedicated to building a better world. In this definitive volume, featuring an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jericho Brown, Jordan’s generous body of poetry is curated to represent the very best of her works. Written over the span of several decades, Jordan’s poems are at once of their era and tragically current, with subject matter including police brutality, violence against women, and the opportunity for global solidarity amongst people who are marginalized. Jordan is a powerful voice of the time-honored movement for justice, a poet for the ages.
Winter in Sokcho
Fiction by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Paperback; $14.95
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. Elisa Shua Dusapin’s voice is distinctive and unmistakable.
The Souvenir Museum
Stories by Elizabeth McCracken
Hardcover; $26.99
Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date. In these stories, the mysterious bonds of family are tested, transformed, fractured, and fortified. With sentences that crackle and spark and showcase her trademark wit, McCracken traces how our closely held desires—for intimacy, atonement, comfort—bloom and wither against the indifferent passing of time. Her characters embark on journeys that leave them indelibly changed—and so do her readers.
Dialogues with Rising Tides
Poetry by Kelli Russell Agodon
Paperback; $16
In Kelli Russell Agodon’s fourth collection, each poem facilitates a humane and honest conversation with the forces that threaten to take us under. The anxieties and heartbreaks of life―including environmental collapse, cruel politics, and the persistent specter of suicide―are met with emotional vulnerability and darkly sparkling humor. Dialogues with Rising Tides does not answer, This or that? It passionately exclaims, And also! Even in the midst of great difficulty, radiant wonders are illuminated at every turn.
At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers
Fiction by Goran Petrović; translated by P. Agnone
Paperback; $16.95
An award-winning Serbian novel that explores what it means to read and be a reader—ultimately acting as a love letter to the power of literature. At The Lucky Hand is an account of the different love stories that revolve around a very peculiar book: My Legacy, by Anastas Branica. At first glance, this is a book where there is no plot or characters, only descriptions. However, that is what makes it a self-sufficient space, a world that can only be inhabited by its readers, which Anastas has written in order to live, within the book, with his beloved. What the reader of this book will surely experience will be a state of joyous stupefaction.
April 2021
The Crash Palace
Fiction by Andrew Wedderburn
Paperback; $22.95
Audrey Cole has always loved to drive. Anytime, anywhere. Years ago she found herself chauffeuring around the Lever Men, a B-list band relegated to playing empty dive bars. That’s how she found herself at the Crash Palace, an isolated lodge. And now, one night, while her young daughter is asleep at home, Audrey is struck by that old urge and finds herself testing the doors of parked cars in her neighborhood. Before she knows it, she’s headed north to the now abandoned Crash Palace in a stolen car, unable to stop herself from confronting her past. The Crash Palace is a funny, moving, and surprising novel, and Audrey is unlike any character you’ve met before.
Nancy
Fiction by Bruno Lloret
Hardcover; $19.95
Alone again in a Chile punctuated by graves and crosses, Nancy looks back on her life. Before her husband’s death, before she fled home hidden in the back of a truck, she spent her youth at Playa Roja, hearing rumors of disappeared girls while swimming alongside her friends and the creepy old gringos. Her family lost to alcohol and violence, Nancy has been forced to fend for herself in a world designed to crush her. She keeps going despite it all. And now, recounting her story from her deathbed, Nancy takes this life in her hands and turns it into something else: a wholly original testament to the quiet dignity of a difficult journey.
Subdivision
Fiction by J. Robert Lennon
Paperback; $16
A woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her past, the narrator ventures out in search of an apartment, a job, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel.
frank: sonnets
Poetry by Diane Seuss
Paperback; $16
These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss’s working-class childhood in Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and—in a word—frank.
The Wild Fox of Yemen
Poetry by Threa Almontaser
Paperback; $16
By turns aggressively reckless and fiercely protective, always guided by faith and ancestry, Almontaser’s incendiary debut asks how mistranslation can be a form of self-knowledge and survival. A love letter to the country and people of Yemen, a portrait of young Muslim womanhood in New York after 9/11, and a composed examination of what it means to carry in the body the echoes of what came before, Almontaser’s polyvocal collection sneaks artifacts to and from worlds.
Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories
Stories by Guadalupe Nettel
Paperback; $15.95
Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Guadalupe Nettel’s stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories collects six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.
The Twilight Zone
Fiction by Nona Fernández; translated by N. Wimmer
Paperback; $16
It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and begins to talk to a reporter. The narrator of Nona Fernández’s mesmerizing novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man’s face on the magazine’s cover with the words “I Tortured People.” His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime haunts the narrator into her adulthood. The Twilight Zone reminds us that the work of the writer in the face of historical erasure is to imagine so deeply that these absences can be, for a time, spectacularly illuminated.
Family and Borghesia
Fiction by Natalia Ginzburg
Paperback; $14.95
Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s.
Wild Swims
Stories by Dorthe Nors
Paperback; $15
In fourteen effervescent stories, Nors plumbs the depths of the human heart, from desire to melancholy and everything in between. Just as she did in her English-language debut, Karate Chop, Nors slices straight to the core of the conflict in only a few pages. But Wild Swims expands the borders of her gaze, following people as they travel through Copenhagen, London, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. Here are portraits of men and women full of restless longing, people who are often seeking a home but rarely finding it. These stories sound the darker tones of human nature and yet find the brighter chords of hope and humor as well.
Abundance
Fiction by Jakob Guanzon
Paperback; $16
Evicted from their trailer on New Year’s Eve, Henry and his son have been reduced to living out of a pickup truck. Henry, barely a year out of prison for pushing opioids, is down to his last pocketful of dollars, and little remains between him and the street. In an ingenious structural approach, Guanzon organizes Abundance by the amount of cash in Henry’s pocket. Set in an America of big-box stores and fast food, this incandescent debut novel trawls the fluorescent aisles of Walmart and the booths of Red Lobster to reveal the inequities and anxieties around work, debt, addiction, incarceration, and health care in America today.
Trafik
Fiction by Rikki Ducornet
Paperback; $15.95
Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, entertains himself by surfing the records of the obliterated planet Earth for Al Pacino trivia and fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through space. Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-earth universe.
One Night Two Souls Went Walking
Fiction by Ellen Cooney
Paperback; $16.95
A young interfaith chaplain is joined on her hospital rounds one night by an unusual companion: a rough-and-ready dog who may or may not be a ghost. As she tends to the souls of her patients—young and old, living last moments or navigating fundamentally altered lives—their stories provide unexpected healing for her own heartbreak. Balancing wonder and mystery with pragmatism and humor, Ellen Cooney returns to Coffee House Press with a generous, intelligent novel that grants the most challenging moments of the human experience a shimmer of light and magical possibility.
Ramifications
Fiction by Daniel Saldaña París
Paperback; $16.95
Folding and refolding origami frogs, extracting the veins from leaves, retreating to an imaginary world in his closet: after Teresa walked out the door one July afternoon in 1994, her son filled the void she left with a series of unusual rituals. Twenty-three years later, he lies in bed, reconstructing the events surrounding his mother’s disappearance. He dissects his memories of that fateful summer until a startling discovery shatters his conception of his family. This is an emotionally rich anti-coming-of-age novel that wrestles with the inherited privileges and atrocities of masculinity.
The Elephant of Belfast
Fiction by S. Kirk Walsh
Hardcover; $27
Inspired by true events, The Elephant of Belfast is a complicated and beguiling portrait of hope and resilience—and how love can sustain us during the darkest moments of our lives. This vivid and moving story of a young woman zookeeper and the elephant she’s compelled to protect through the German blitz of Belfast during WWll speaks to not only the tragedy of the times, but also to the ongoing sectarian tensions that still exist in Northern Ireland today—perfect for readers of historical and literary fiction alike.
The Dark Library
Fiction by Cyrille Martinez
Paperback; $20.95
In Martinez’s library, the books are alive: not just their stories, but the books themselves. Meet the Angry Young Book, who has strong opinions about who reads what and why. Meet the Old Historian who mysteriously vanished from the stacks. Meet the Blue Librarian, the Yellow Librarian, and spend a day with the Red Librarian, trying to banish coffee cups and laptops. The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free.
Funeral Diva
Nonfiction/poetry by Pamela Sneed
Paperback; $16.95
In this collection of essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on Black Queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed’s poems also converse with her literary forebears, whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. The collection closes with Sneed’s reflections on the two pandemics of her time, AIDS and COVID-19, and the disproportionate impact of each on African American communities.
The Clerk
Fiction by Guillermo Saccomanno
Paperback; $15.95
Men and women head to their desks every day in a city laid to waste by guerrilla incursions, menaced by hordes of starving people, murderous children and cloned dogs, patrolled by armed helicopters, and plagued with acid rain. Among them is the Clerk, who is willing to be humiliated in order to keep his job—until he falls in love and allows himself to dream of someone else. To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream? The Clerk tells a story that happened yesterday, but that still hasn’t happened, and yet is happening now. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dostoyevsky.
Love and Other Poems
Poetry by Alex Dimitrov
Paperback; $17
Dimitrov’s third book is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure, Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.
Circles of Dread
Fiction by Jean Ray
Paperback; $15.95
Circles of Dread, Jean Ray’s fourth short-story collection, was first published in 1943. Ray takes the reader from the quiet streets of Ghent to the scrambled streets of London to the Flinders river in Australia, with tales spun from such materials as the iron hand of Götz von Berlichingen, the black mirror of John Dee, a Moustiers ceramic plate, and the extradimensional menace of a predatory cemetery. All to illustrate, in the language of pulp fiction, that what constitutes dread is what lies outside our metaphysical prisons, some of which we may escape only at our own peril.
March 2021
Popular Longing
Poetry by Natalie Shapero
Paperback; $17
The poems of Natalie Shapero’s third collection highlight the ever-increasing absurdity of our contemporary life. With her sharp, sardonic wit, Shapero deftly captures human meekness in all its forms: our senseless wars, our inflated egos, our constant deference to presumed higher powers―be they romantic partners, employers, institutions, or gods. Punchy, fearlessly ironic, and wickedly funny, Popular Longing articulates what it means to share a planet with other people.
Yi Sang: Selected Works
Poetry by Yi Sang
Paperback; $25
Formally audacious and remarkably compelling, Yi Sang’s works were uniquely situated amid the literary experiments of world literature in the early twentieth century and the political upheaval of 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea. Presenting the work of the influential Korean modernist master, this selection assembles poems, essays, and stories that ricochet off convention in a visionary and daring response to personal and national trauma, reminding us that to write from the avant-garde is a form of civil disobedience.
The Regal Lemon Tree
Fiction by Juan José Saer
Paperback; $15.95
One of the late Juan José Saer’s most beloved novels, The Regal Lemon Tree shows a master stylist at his best. Set during the day and night of New Year’s Eve—building up a barbecue that takes on ritual significance—the novel focuses on a couple in the north of Argentina who lost their only son six years prior. Wenceslao spends the day with his extended family and his memories while his wife—truly paralyzed by grief—refuses to leave their island, which is home to an almost magical lemon tree that blossoms at all times of the year. Its recurring, circular structure creates an eeriness that calls to mind the work of David Lynch.
Eleven Sooty Dreams
Fiction by Manuela Draeger
Paperback; $14.95
A group of young leftists trapped in a burning building after one year’s Bolcho Pride parade plunge back into their childhood memories, trading them with each other as their lives are engulfed in flames. Draeger, a heteronym for the acclaimed French writer Antoine Volodine, and a librarian in a dystopic prison camp, gives post-exoticism an element of tenderness, and a sense of nostalgia for children’s tales that is far less visible in the other post-exotic works. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her first book written for adults, a moving story of the constancy of brotherly, loving faithfulness.
Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From
Poetry by Sawako Nakayasu
Paperback; $18
In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing conventions, literary and otherwise.
Munchausen and Clarissa
Fiction by Paul Scheerbart
Paperback; $14.95
It is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As eighteen-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge from an uninspiring Berlin on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. With Munchausen and Clarissa, Scheerbart presents—through the mouthpiece of the fabulous Munchausen and the framework of a fantastical Australia—his unifying vision for the arts and philosophy, and offers a new conception of the sublime for a skeptical age.
The Giant’s House
Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
Paperback; $17
The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt—the “over-tall” eleven-year-old boy who’s the talk of the town—walks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person who’s ever really understood her, and as he grows ever taller, so does her heart and their most singular romance.
Niagara Falls All Over Again
Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
Paperback; $17
In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters—from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey—as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families. An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest—and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.
The Gentle Barbarian
Nonfiction by Bohumil Hrabal
Paperback; $14.95
This is Bohumil Hrabal’s homage to Vladimír Boudník, one of the greatest Czech artists of the 1950s and 1960s, whose life came to a tragic end shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Boudník and Hrabal had a close and often contentious friendship. For a brief period they worked together in the Kladno steel works and lived in the same building in Prague. Written in the early seventies, Hrabal’s portrait of Boudník captures the strange atmosphere of a time in which the traditional values and structures of everyday life in Czechoslovakia were being radically dismantled by the Communists.
Mostly Dead Things
Fiction by Kristen Arnett
Paperback; $15.95
What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father’s suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. It’s not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities. Arnett’s breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss.
The Odyssey
Homer; translated by Emily Wilson
Paperback; $18.95
A fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop” and brings an ancient epic to new life. The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage, family and identity. This vivid new translation—the first by a woman—matches the number of lines in the Greek original, striding at Homer’s sprightly pace. It’s an engrossing tale told in a compelling new voice that allows readers to luxuriate in Homer’s descriptions and to thrill at the tension and excitement of its hero’s adventures.
Exhausted on the Cross
Poetry by Najwan Darwish
Paperback; $16
Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish records what Raúl Zurita describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”—a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be a “colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion.” Darwish’s poems cross cultures and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. Poem after poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.
The Voices & Other Poems
Poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke; translated by K. Minta
Paperback; $14
In The Voices, Rilke presents a series of portraits of pariahs, outcasts, the down-and-outs, turning his often inward gaze toward The Other in a way that pleasantly undermines our notions of his poetic interests. In this brilliant new translation, Kristofor Minta breathes new life into these poems, which exude a kind of heat, if only enough to warm your hands by. This collection includes the original German on facing pages.
Edinburgh Notebook
Poetry by Valerie Mejer Caso
Paperback; $20
A book-length epitaph for her late brother Charlie, Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook is a captivating, startling expression of grief. Following a trail of breadcrumbs, Mejer Caso’s poems shift between memories, cities, philosophies, echoes and landscapes of quicksand, oceans, deserts, apocalypse. Featuring photographs by Barry Shapiro, Edinburgh Notebook contains a profound archive of cultural history coursing with illuminating poems.
World of Wonders
Nonfiction by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Hardcover; $25
From award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.
February 2021
Allegria
Poetry by Giuseppe Ungaretti
Paperback; $18
Ungaretti’s early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction. These are the kinds of poems that can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry and was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings.
The Distance
Fiction by Ivan Vladislavić
Paperback; $20
In his youth in 1970s suburban Pretoria, Joe falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He diligently scrapbooks newspaper clippings of his hero, taking in his inimitable brand of resistance. Forty years later, digging out his archive of clippings, Joe sets out to write a memoir of his childhood. Calling upon his brother Branko for help, their two voices interweave to unearth a shared past. In this formally inventive novel, Vladislavić evokes the beauty, and the strangeness, of remembering and forgetting.
Fantastic Tales
Fiction by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti
Paperback; $20
In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper. First published by Mercury House in 1992.
In Memory of Memory
Fiction by Maria Stepanova
Paperback; $19.95
With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, letters, and diaries: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Barthes, Sebald, and Sontag, In Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms, Stepanova offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
In the Land of the Cyclops
Nonfiction by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Hardcover; $28
Knausgaard explores art, philosophy, and literature with piercing candor and intelligence in this collection of cultural criticism. Paired with full-color images throughout, his essays render the shadowlands of Cindy Sherman’s photography, illuminate the depth of Stephen Gill’s eye, and tussle with the inner-workings of Ingmar Bergman’s workbooks. Each essay bristles with Knausgaard’s searing honesty and longing to authentically understand and experience the world.
Ellis Island
by Georges Perec
Paperback; $11.95
Perec, employing prose meditations, lists, and inventories (of countries of origin, of what the immigrants carried), conjures up in Ellis Island the sixteen million people who, between 1890 and 1954, arrived as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet; his mother perished in Auschwitz) is wide-awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: “To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere” Ellis Island is a slender Perec masterwork, unique among his many singular works.
A World Between
Fiction by Emily Hashimoto
Paperback; $17.95
In 2004, college students Eleanor and Leena meet in an elevator. Both girls are on the brink of adulthood, each full of possibility and ideas, and they fall into a whirlwind romance. Years later, Eleanor and Leena collide on the streets of San Francisco. Although grown and changed and each separately partnered, the two find themselves, once again, irresistibly pulled back together. Narrated in sparkling prose, Emily Hashimoto’s debut novel follows two strikingly different but interconnected women as they navigate family, female friendship, and their own fraught history.
The Voice of Sheila Chandra
Poetry by Kazim Ali
Paperback; $17.95
“Kazim Ali’s newest collection of poems is brilliant and chilling and filled with sound. The Voice of Sheila Chandra is alive with formal invention and innovation that will surely be a fixture in contemporary poetry for years to come. Part researched document, part song, part deep excavation of the soul, there is much to learn from this book. Ali forces us to contend with history and the present in order to imagine a future where we survive.” —Sam Sax
The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts
Unica Zürn; hardcover
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Zürn of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognized as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here, in which she demonstrates how her familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as a vital source for her artistic output.
January 2021
Alexandria
Fiction by Paul Kingsnorth
Paperback; $16
One thousand years from now, a small religious community lives in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world’s last human survivors. Now they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, a force that offers them a promise and a threat: a place called Alexandria. Kingsnorth’s radical new novel is a work of matchless, mythic imagination. It is driven by elemental themes: community versus the self, the mind versus the body, machine over man—and the tension between an unstable present and an unknown, unknowable future.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
Stories by Julián Herbert
Paperback; $16
In this madcap story collection, Herbert brings to vivid life people who struggle to retain a measure of sanity in an insane world. The antic and often dire stories in Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino depict the violence and corruption that plague Mexico today, but they are also deeply ruminative explorations of the narrative impulse. Herbert asks: Where are the lines between fiction and reality? What is the relationship between power, corruption, and survival? The stories in this explosive collection showcase the fevered imagination of a significant contemporary writer.
Fugitive Atlas
Poetry by Khaled Mattawa
Paperback; $18
Fugitive Atlas is a sweeping account of refugee crises, military occupations, and ecological degradation, a probing journey through a world in upheaval. Mattawa’s chorus of speakers finds moments of profound solace in searching for those lost, even when the power of poetry seems incapable of providing salvation. With extraordinary formal virtuosity, these poems turn not to lament for those regions charted as theaters of exploitation, but to a poignant amplification of the lives and dreams that exist within them.
My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree
Poetry by Yi Lei
Paperback; $18
Yi Lei published her poem “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim—and with outrage—for her frank embrace of women’s erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems in this collection celebrate the joys of the body, ponder the miracle of compassion, and proclaim an abiding reverence for the natural world.
Dispatch
Poetry by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Paperback; $15.95
In his second collection (a 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award Winner), Cameron Awkward-Rich reckons with American violence, while endeavoring to live and love in its shadow. Set against a media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, these poems grapple with news of racial and gendered violence in the United States today and in the past.
Divide Me By Zero
Fiction by Lara Vapnyar
Paperback; $15.95
Award-winning author Lara Vapnyar delivers an unabashedly frank and darkly comic tale of coming of age in middle age. Divide Me by Zero is almost unclassifiable—a stylistically original, genre-defying mix of classic Russian novel, American self-help book, Soviet math textbook, sly writing manual, and, at its center, a universal story with unforgettable lessons for us all. The New Yorker calls Divide Me by Zero “elegiac yet funny,” while The New York Times Book Review declares it “resplendent.”
The Butchers’ Blessing
Fiction by Ruth Gilligan
Hardcover; $25.95
Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter. The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. Thrilling, dark, and richly atmospheric, The Butchers’ Blessing conjures a family and a country on the edge of irrevocable change.
Agaat
Fiction by Marlene van Niekerk
Paperback; $18.95
In 1940s apartheid South Africa, Milla de Wet discovers a child abandoned in the fields of her family farm. Ignoring the warnings of friends and family, Milla brings the girl, Agaat, into her home. But the kindness is fleeting, as Milla makes Agaat her maidservant and, later, a nanny for her son. At turns cruel and tender, this relationship between a wealthy white woman and her Black maidservant is constantly fraught and shaped by a rigid social order. Hailed as an international masterpiece, Agaat is a haunting and deeply layered saga of resilience, loyalty, and betrayal.
Negotiations
Poetry by Destiny O. Birdsong
Paperback; $16.95
What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power.
Ark of Martyrs
Poetry by Allan deSouza
Paperback; $16
Ark of Martyrs is a rewriting of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness. In the vocal traditions of gospel, toasting, and rap, Allan deSouza replaces Conrad’s words with ones that loosely rhyme to form an autobiography of V, whose story consists of the mental chatter, unspoken and unspeakable desires, avarice, anxieties, and political resentments of guests at a wedding party on a cruise ship that’s adrift and under quarantine.
The Fish & The Dove
Poetry by Mary-Kim Arnold
Paperback; $18
“Arnold’s lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea, through the delicate tethers between biological mother, adoptive mother, motherland and daughter, and through the permeable membranes which exist between person and place; here, we follow an adopted Korean-born speaker from ‘American Girlhood’ through womanhood and motherhood, witnessing what it means to be a woman in this world.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen
The Recognitions
Fiction by William Gaddis
Paperback; $29.95
The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful and true emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a minister, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. Dismissed by reviewers on publication in 1955, The Recognitions is now established as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique.
Women in the Waiting Room
Poetry by Kirun Kapur
Paperback; $16.95
“One of the best books I’ve read this decade … I held my breath for swaths of language so virtuosic the lines sing and shout violence, beauty, rage, and love. Then I fell into the silences Kapur records and creates. The women whose stories she shapes echo our deepest shared narratives; they are set as much within each of us as in the book’s steel mills, strip malls, white picket lines, and cities—from Delhi to Houston, Toronto to Dubai. Sweeping from the granular (‘encrypted tracks of beetles’) to incalculable truths (‘for a girl to be innocent she has to be dead’), Kapur’s poems make us ‘behold: a word of witness.'” —Rachel DeWoskin
Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas
Paperback; $19.95
“In 1968, a young Black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. He was thirty-three years old when he was killed, but in those thirty-three years, he had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes. He was brilliant.” —Toni Morrison
Wild Peach
Poetry by S*an D. Henry-Smith
Paperback; $20
Wild Peach is a multisensory roaming of landscape and interior, often (but not always) in near stillness and varying light. In this project, poetry and photography warm the taste of memory, exploring nonlinear, non-narrative time through the sonic offerings of image and text. Black Secrecy demands and provides a spirit of collaboration, study, and play. Rest without guilt. Two steppin’ in the parking lot. Screaming into the night sky. In the garden and the noise, what must be learned from the garble? We listen.
Peach Blossom Paradise
Fiction by Ge Fei; translated by Canaan Morse
Paperback; $17.95
In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of extraordinary hope—brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.
Danger Days
Poetry by Catherine Pierce
Paperback; $16
The poems in Catherine Pierce’s new Danger Days celebrate our planet while also bearing witness to its collapse. In poems steeped deep in the 21st century, Pierce weaves superblooms and Legos, gun violence and ghosts, glaciers and contaminant masks, urging us to look closely at both the horror and beauty of our world. As Pierce writes in “Planet,” “I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it.”.
Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain
Johanna Hedva
Paperback; $18
Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labor of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.
Dream Boat
Poetry by Shelley Feller
Paperback; $18
“Feller anatomizes, churns, palpitates, then spews onto the page a powerful exorcism of self-loathing that non-cishet, non-binary souls like them have been forced to imbibe and digest all their lives. Feller does what others have not dared. They literally turn upside down, inside out, even metaphorically flip off the gaze of those who come to the page for easy catharsis. Don’t expect the sense-making that anesthetizes the pain and suffering you’ve come to want to see.” —L. Lamar Wilson