Anthologies & Short Stories

Book SynopsisThe Scent of Buenos Aires offers the first book-length English translation of Uhart's work, drawing together her best vignettes of quotidian life: moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a cacophonous homeowners association meeting. She writes in unconventional, understated syntax, constructing a delightfully specific perspective on life in South America. These stories are marked by sharp humour and wit: discreet and subtle, yet filled with eccentric and insightful characters. Uhart's narrators pose endearing questions about their lives and environments - one asks 'Bees - do you know how industrious they are?' while another inquires, 'Are we perhaps going to hell in a hand basket?'Trade ReviewLonglisted for the PEN Translation Prize "These stories rarely adhere to conventional plots, but as mood pieces they're effective glimpses into the peculiarities of Uhart's characters, who crave order but usually concede that the world's default mode is disarray...A welcome (if, alas, posthumous) introduction to a sui generis writer." — Kirkus Reviews"There’s a wonderfully off-kilter humanity to Uhart’s writing that readers are sure to respond to. This collection feels like a deserved celebration of a writer’s career." — Publishers Weekly"A remarkable introduction to one of the unsung women writers of Argentine letters." — Library Journal"Immersing oneself in this collection – her first book to be translated into English, by Maureen Shaughnessy – is indeed like travelling, as we visit one character’s world and then another’s, inhabiting the revealing mundanities of each life. Little happens in terms of plot; rather, each story is an understated exercise in conjuring a whole existence through a revealing thought or gesture . . . the reader returns from her travels feeling refreshingly unbalanced." – Emily Rhodes, The Guardian "The Scent of Buenos Aires is concerned with the social and communal, but with a wink and a nudge toward the ridiculous habits of people. Uhart suspects, loves, and laughs at each of her characters in equal measure because she knows that, when it comes to the array of human emotion and motivation, “one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.”" — Foreword Reviews "It is clear to me why Uhart is so loved by many Argentine readers . . . Reading her fiction highlights the ways in which much of the discourse about Argentina and Argentine literature . . . steps over Argentines and the place itself in an effort to get somewhere else. Uhart’s quiet insistence upon seeing and hearing the people around her affirms a place and people real and worthwhile in and of themselves." — The Common“Paul Klee famously described drawing as taking a line for a walk and the stories of Hebe Uhart share that spirit, that magic. Deceptively simple, also philosophical, Uhart's work is brilliant and companionable. The Scent of Buenos Aires is translated from the Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy, and Animals, translated by Robert Croll, is out in April next year.” -- Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances, in Restless Books"In the first half of the book, we find stories revolving around the female body and expounding on domestic themes while in the latter half of the book, we encounter tales on politics, activism, and the role of Indian women in these areas...Ambai infuses a deep sense of reality in her stories by making the worlds of these women rich in sensory details - one can almost smell and taste and feel the environment of the characters." — Cleveland Review of Books"The first collection of Argentinian author Hebe Uhart’s work to be published in English features stories of daily life and strange situations with wit and humor aplenty." — Billy Coghill, Omaha Public Library "The stories... are acutely observed, but as if by a foreigner or a newcomer with no previous experience of what is being described; they’re told with a deceptive simplicity that draws the reader into deep labyrinths of everyday life." —Esther Allen, Words Without Borders"(Uhart's stories) steadily, unobtrusively oxygenate the world around them ... Uhart helped shape a generation of writers in Argentina as both a teacher and a writer, her influence both diffuse and impossible to ignore ... Shaughnessy has, in turn, helped us hear English as Uhart might have heard it, displaying a remarkable prowess ... It is because we can now hold these stories in our hands that her insights serve as a second set of eyes, her perspective shaping ours as we look at the world around us." — Music & Literature"Cultivating a sense of respect for (and kinship with) other levels of sentience, Uhart’s manner of acknowledging the interconnectedness of consciousness allows us to see Buenos Aires—any place, really—as its own organism, composed of endless living, breathing parts. Further, Uhart takes us into the internal worlds of these beings, shining light on both the typical and extraordinary ways we perceive our environment and ourselves." — Asymptote "One of Argentina's finest and most beloved authors, Uhart has managed to escape the attention of a wider global readership for some time ... Uhart's stories are concise and filled with both dry and conversational wit and flashes of poignant insight. Uhart is a slice-of-life writer, and the breadth of those slices is almost as impressive as their deceptive depth." — Thrillist"Uhart is concerned not with creating a mythology but with examining humanity, at all ages, in many social classes, jobs and towns. Short stories in translation offer insight into language: its meaning and pronunciation. [The Scent of Buenos Aires] explores means of communication as they amplify female voices and perspectives." — The London Magazine"These witty and sometimes cryptic tales are mostly set in Buenos Aires by a writer’s writer who has an acute eye for the uncanny and the mundane...(Uhart) is one of the most singular and exiting female voices of recent decades in Latin America. Her unique body of work and her unforgettable voice lives on in many of today’s younger generation of writers emerging on the continent." — Morning Star"Hebe approached her subjects from an astonished and oblique angle that, at first, might appear naive. Not so. Her short stories feature protagonists rarely seen in Argentine literature [...] Always rescuing the voices that no one pays attention to, yet not at all in a pompous way, for, if there was one thing that Hebe Uhart never wanted to do, it was to fall into the common position of giving voice to the voiceless and other slogans that she would consider idiotic." — from "Perfect Pitch" by Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire, in Página/12 "I do not like authors who are too satisfied. The best tradition of Argentinean literature was built in these vacillations: the uncertain narrator of Borges or of Hebe Uhart, that idea that meaning is always being constructed, and that opposes other traditions in which the narrator is sure of the order of things." - Ricardo Piglia "Hebe Uhart is the best contemporary Argentinean storyteller." - Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill "[In Uhart's writing] from simplicity one penetrates depths and labyrinths where you can only advance if you participate in the magic of that new world...It neither clarifies nor completes a known reality. It reveals, or rather, it is a unique, distinct reality." - Haroldo Conti "Hebe is the best and the strangest. After decades of writing and publishing narrations, Hebe became an author that dominated a central genre for the Argentine tradition: the short story. However, this has the geographic particularity of being transnational: when we think about stories in Argentina we think about literature created in the Río de la Plata, between Argentina and Uruguay. And that was one of the strongest nuclei in Hebe's literary identity, by which it was not a national but an inherently Río de la Plata literature." - Inés Acevedo "Hebe's texts (her fiction as well as her chronicles) played with the world in a manner that didn't fully coincide with Victor Shklovski's definition of defamiliarization, that disposition of finding the strange and the unfamiliar within the quotidian. This is perhaps because the quotidian perception of Hebe Uhart in the world was, in itself, lacking automatization from the beginning, being always full of amazement, of a cultivated sense of bewilderment. That register was then translated to her texts through a writing that was ingeniously natural, with a simplicity that was only simulated." - Martin Kohan "The world of Hebe Uhart, which so intensely appears in her stories, is abundant, collective and absolutely personal ... She as given Argentine Literature countless unforgettable, exciting characters that establish, when talking or acting, when having certain feelings over others, a way of existing, of resisting, of withstanding." - Elvio E. Gandolfo "I normally tear through books at a blistering pace but not this one. I spent a week lingering over each of the 25 short stories in The Scent of Buenos Aires...I can see why Hebe Uhart is a beloved Argentine author. She knew women. Uhart had a gift for writing stories about the inner life of crazy, eccentric, and curious women." — Meilee Anderson, She Explores Life (blog)"Offbeat, colloquial and witty . . . [The Scent of Buenos Aires] creates magic from the mundanities of life in Argentina . . . There is something of Stevie Smith in her style, a knack for turning sophomoric ore — fairy tales, puns, encounters with animals — into literary gold . . . the economy of her writing both disguises and concentrates its psychic wallop." — Valerie L. Popp, Wasafiri

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Book SynopsisA DREAM COME TRUE collects the complex stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America s greatest author and is regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing.Trade ReviewLonglisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award "In his quest to explore modern forms of being, Onetti also broke new formal ground. His books are complex ... reality itself devolves into a game of telephone ... [Onetti] writes violent, direct tales filled with intrigue and doom in the best manner of Conrad (the writer he most resembles) and even Faulkner (his great hero)." — The New York Times"One of the greatest Latin-American writers of the twentieth century...In Onetti’s fiction, characters are forever in limbo, between the world they actually inhabit and the one they’d prefer to imagine for themselves...The first major English translation of his collected stories, A Dream Come True, brings the author’s talents into full view." — Jonathan Blitzer, New Yorker"(Onetti's) works, like traditional mystery stories, are structured around a chain of clues, but the deductive method the detective uses to expose the criminal and motive here attempts to penetrate the characters’ inner torments, which collapse endlessly, one into the other, like a series of trap doors ... by 1940, with 'A Dream Come True,' (Onetti) had written a masterpiece." — Washington Examiner"Onetti himself seems influenced by Poe by way of Baudelaire—but then filtered through William Burroughs, or perhaps B. Traven. The inhabitants of his imagined Santa María, a port city much like his native Montevideo, are a strange bunch, many of them German and Italian immigrants who are nowhere at home ... Onetti's stories are enigmatic and elegant ... All are strange—and mesmerizing. A welcome, overdue collection by a writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)"In this standout collection, the Uruguayan Onetti, who died in 1994, masterly depicts the seedy disillusionment of characters in a South American backwater . . . There is a hint of Conrad in these misty tales that plunge beyond 'bare facts' and conjure up a world suffused with misanthropy and meditative irony. Readers will be bewitched." — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"In Onetti, the entrance to this murky-watered world isn’t through the fantastic or the magical, like some of his Latin American contemporaries . . . His most unforgettable and sorrowful stories—“A Dream Come True,” “Most Dreaded Hell,” “The Face of Disgrace”—are realist narratives that seem to crush the modern hope of seeing everything. There’s a play between the affirmation and negation of reality—a subterranean current that seems to connect his work to Bolaño’s short stories." — Emilio Fraia"In a bold gesture of defiance toward the current standardization of literary contents on reading lists, Archipelago Books has published A Dream Come True—Katherine Silver’s fearsomely loyal, clean, and brilliant translation of the complete short stories of Juan Carlos Onetti....Onetti was free of the continental love affair with abstract conclusions...his sentences never surrender their narrative vigor to aphoristic simplification...Onetti’s stories feel existential if one reads them in a loose way: extraordinarily well written theme-and-variations about senseless lives in a remote South American port. Nevertheless, as they accumulate in our memory, they distill a scary political meaning that contemporary Americans may find disquietingly familiar." — Àlvaro Enrigue, Bookpost "The stories collected in this volume are sometimes slight but more often long and strikingly original, especially in the way time contracts and dilates and the plot veers off in unexpected directions. They are also more daring than the novels...These stories indicate the broad trajectory of Onetti's career. He was a clear-cut fabulist who turned into a cloudy mythmaker, but who stayed true to his primary vision of a provincial town in the winter rain." --Harper's Magazine"Archipelago Books’ monumental collection of Onetti’s stories, A Dream Come True, spans over 54 years of the author’s dense and difficult to work...Onetti is never satisfied with any singular meaning...How fortunate, then, that Onetti has Katherine Silver rendering his absurd theatrics, a translator whose vocabulary and rhythm provide the engine of this collection...Onetti’s tone is perfectly deadpan, skewering the malaise of the young and rich, their poverty of thought, and their total indifference to humanity...this collection [has] a truly complete feeling." — Three Percent"Time and circumstance, and the particular bend of prevailing literary history, have all but buried Onetti’s fiction in English. And if left unaccounted for, his work–to his readers in translation anyway–is perhaps in danger of being worn away. Onetti himself once admitted that his reign was not of this world; at the time, he hadn’t intended that to be a warning." — Jonathan Blitzer, The NationOnetti’s "stories and novels offer an intoxicating cocktail of solitude, frustrated desire, smoldering anger, defeat, and despair, invariably served with a twist. Somehow they cheer me up.” —Edwin Frank, in Words Without Borders "Onetti is an underappreciated innovator of language. His style is bracing, but never clunky. His use of adjectives is staggering...It would be difficult to find a better pure stylist anywhere in the Spanish language...At a time when Latin American artists are reacting to widespread political violence across the region by rejecting fantasy and whimsy and being justifiably suspicious of totalizing, grandiose projects, it is only proper to look back to Onetti, an intensely skeptical writer whose structural innovations never got in the way of his fundamental task: reacting to life, reconstructing it in writing, peeling away the superfluous, and uncovering the essential." — Harvard Review"Superb . . . While each of these stories stands on its own, they can be interpreted as the movements of a symphony that must be heard in its totality, focusing on its changes in tempo, counterpoints, and developments of recurring themes and characters." — Ana María Hernández, Literature and Arts of the Americas"Every tale in (A Dream Come True) has the air of a detective story; it is guesswork. Characters tell tales, of themselves and of others; read traces and clues; listen to gossip; gather the pieces of the puzzling stories...When you read Onetti, you will find that time stops in order that you may explore its meaning. And at those moments, life will seem richer and more intense." — Christina Soto van der Plas, Public Books"Onetti had the strange quality of being inimitable and at the same time creating an entire school of writing. All of his descendants, myself included, received from him a lesson on narrative intelligence, on wise construction, on an immense love to literary imagination, on risk and irony." - Carlos Fuentes "Onetti is the first modern writer in our language...His world is a dark one, highly pessimistic, with a vision of the human condition that is profoundly desperate, and which we would reject if it didn't reach us with such a wonderful language...I can assure you that, without the great books that I've read, among which I can count Onetti's books, my life would have been infinitely poorer." - Mario Vargas Llosa "Onetti is an epiphany, a celebration of beauty, of emotion and tenderness." - Antonio Muñóz Molina "Onetti's writing is so good, a mere sentence by him will give you goosebumps. If I had to sell my soul to the devil in order to write a sentence in Spanish like someone else, I would think about very few authors: Borges, Onetti." - Carlos Gamerro "Onetti's writing knew that literature is creation, that creation is reality and not repetition or recreation, that it is about finding a good story to tell and then tell it beautifully." - Carlos Liscano

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Book SynopsisSerge Pey's stories are lyrical, vivid vignettes of life during and directly following Spain's violent fascist regime of the thirties and forties. The collection is a defiant ode to the resilience of the human spirit, each story depicting a small act of human resistance. Many of the stories are surreal, fable-like impressions from the perspective of children caught in the midst of political violence. Pey's understated prose renders a brutal landscape with childlike wonder. It is a strikingly original meditation on courage, survival, and hope in the face of oppression.Trade Review"Pey’s haunting, inspired collection captures the lives of refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War...Throughout this remarkable collection, Pey’s startling and memorable images have a poetic logic, building complexity and nuance into the characters’ cries for freedom. This masterful collection stands with the best fiction about war refugees." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Lyrical, oneiric, wrenching . . . [The collection's] beauty speaks to the collective, if precarious, survival of clandestine, resistant communities who, for all the violence they have suffered, refuse to be defined by it." — Carlos Varón González, Public Books • "Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations hold fast to this poetry's unnerving eloquence and simplicity, and its hell-for-leather speed." - T.J Clark on In Praise of Defeat (shortlisted for the 2017 Griffen Poetry Prize) • "Presenting the text en face, translator Donald Nicholson-Smith navigates the poet's many styles and moods with poise and opens this landmark writer's body of work up to nonfrancophone readers." - World Literature Today on In Praise of Defeat

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Book SynopsisLawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life.Trade Review"Tarchetti’s project was not only to entertain, but to challenge and subvert. He is at his best when musing on such philosophical matters as time, beauty, morality and truth. His writing blurs the line between life and death, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, male and female . . . Thanks to [Lawrence] Venuti, and this reprint of his excellent edition from 1992, the first and only English translation of Fantastic Tales, he is brought to our attention once more." -- Esmé O'Keeffee, Times Literary Supplement"If Poe had set out to write Villiers de l'Isle Adam's Cruel Tales, the result might be Tarchetti. Beautifully translated by Lawrence Venuti, these capture Tarchetti's unique and peculiar flavor: his deep Romanticism, his belief in the obsessiveness of desire, and his fascination with the supernatural." -- Brian Evenson, author of Dead Space: Martyr and Song for the Unraveling of the World"Tarchetti's beguiling fantasies are triumphs of imagination as well as masterfully told stories. Tarchetti writes with comic bravura and surrealist invention that makes him a cousin, at least, of Kafka and Isak Dinesen." - Guy Davenport"Tarchetti was pretty much the sole practitioner of the Gothic tale in his own language. Until his death in 1869 at the age of 29, he poured out a stream of freakish and fervid stories that made him moderately famous -- and definitively minor. Does I. U. Tarchetti deserve better? Judging from Lawrence Venuti's elegantly translated collection, "Fantastic Tales," the answer is yes." -James Marcus, The New York Times Book Review "In Lawrence Venuti’s brilliant new translation of nine stories by cult Gothic storyteller Tarchetti, readers will find themselves confronted by the astounding, the uncanny, and the downright disturbing, immersed in the eerie and the macabre, and elbowed in the side by the comical." — CrimeReads"Tarchetti occupies a singular place in Italian literature as an antecedent of the great innovators of this century, including Calvino and Pirandello ... Tarchetti imported his stories from abroad, rewriting works by Mary Shelley, the Alsatian collaborators Emile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, and Theophile Gautier. While the stories are marvelous in and of themselves, in Venuti's thoughtful presentation they serve as entree into an equally strange and marvelous literary phenomenon." -Publishers Weekly"Tarchetti, who also worked as a translator, was heavily influenced by gothic literature from abroad, favoring the morbid, the metaphysical, the socially and sexually outré . . . remarkably vivid and innovative . . . A collection of nine classic macabre tales, exquisitely translated from the Italian by Venuti." -- Kirkus"While current Italian literature in English translation is closely followed by publishers, critics, and readers, the Italian writers of the past...are largely ignored. Lawrence Venuti now presents the nineteenth-century writer Iginio Ugo Tarchetti--a strange, romantic figure now almost forgotten even by Italian readers...Tarchetti is emblematic, the child of his times and their taste. These stories are enjoyable to read simply for themselves, but they also illustrate a literary culture of notable fascination. The translations flow, yet retain the flavor of their period and are true to the style and personality of their curious, gifted author." --William Weaver"[Tarchetti] strived and succeeded in creating his own style which, on the one hand, anticipated elements of the great naturalistic novel by Zola and Verga while, on the other hand, pushed the boundaries of expressivity in an experimental direction." --Enrica Maria Ferrara and Stiliana Milkova, Reading in Translation

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Book SynopsisIn Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to photographs, drawings, and paintings from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other European countries. The stories in this collection spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi's imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view. From inscrutable masks of pre-Columbian gods, stamps of bright parrots and postcars of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to these remote landscapes appear like a 'train emerging from a thick curtain of heat.'Trade Review* Tabucchi's stories...drip with longing and too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magical realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow world" are often indistinguishable - to the reader's great benefit. - Thrillist, Best Books of 2019 * Tabucchi is a master of the form in imagination, beauty, scope, and scale even at the tiniest calibration. - Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub * [Tabucchi's] prose creates a deep, near-profound and sometimes heart-wrenching nostalgia and constantly evokes the pain of recognizing the speed of life's passing which everyone knows but few have the strength to accept...Wonderfully thought provoking and beautiful. - Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered * There is in Tabucchi's stories the touch of the true magician, who astonishes us by never trying too hard for his subtle, elusive, and remarkable effects. - The San Francisco Examiner * In her deft, lyrical translation, Elizabeth Harris captures the multi-layered complexity of Tabucchi's prose, from Joycean rapture to darker musings, in a novel that is once a tribute to experimental narrative and a meditation on Contemporary Italy. - Michael F. Moore, Chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund "Tabucchi's writing is, above all, an artifice, a self-referring stem whose decodification demands a previous knowledge of the intellectual and artistic coordinates of the writer. Tabucchi is one of the most careful observers and original interpreters of the narrative and esthetic tendencies which emerged in Europe during the last two decades." - Anthony Costantini, World Literature Today "Tabucchi is always a disturbing writer. He understands that life (and art) is filled with plots, omens, secrets." - Irving Malin, Review of Contemporary Fiction "Antonio Tabucchi is one of the leading European writers, a man whose new works are eagerly anticipated, and who is widely translated across the continent and beyond. An Italian whose second home is Portugal he writes elegant and clever little books, stories and short novels that are deceptively simple yet manage to pack a great deal in relatively few pages." - The Complete Review

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Book SynopsisScholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent s bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls.Trade Review"Igifu depicts the lives of Rwanda’s Tutsis from their exile in the 1960s to the genocide of the ’90s . . . [Scholastique Mukasonga] mediates the personal through fable to convey the sense of a collective past . . . Mukasonga’s language, in Stump’s translation from the French, is at once intimate and impersonal . . . The devastation in Mukasonga’s stories is only amplified by the short story form." — The New York Times"Haunted though they are by the memory of the unspeakable atrocities visited on her family and her people, these stories by Scholastique Mukasonga breathe upon a vanished world and bring it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness." — JM Coetzee"Mukasonga carefully attends to how individuals’ attempts to negotiate unspeakable tragedy can lead to sad, odd, and even grimly funny situations . . . Igifu is full of deeply human moments. Taken as a whole, it’s an impressive and affecting work of art." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"Reminiscent at times of Iris Origo, Mukasonga writes with world-weary matter-of-factness, her stories understated testimonials to the worst of times. Elegant and elegiac stories that speak to loss, redemption, and endless sorrow." -- Kirkus "Mukasonga has been writing autobiographical stories about her upbringing and Rwanda’s genocide for years, but “Igifu” may be her brightest, most eye-opening work yet." -- LA Times "Mukasonga’s autobiographical short stories about Rwanda plunge the depths of memory and grief, but also love and hope." -- Chicago Review of Books"Mukasonga’s superbly crafted stories leave the reader with a deep sense of desolation, thanks, in part, to her deft use of metaphor...Yet these stories are not devoid of joy and hope. The fortitude and perseverance of the Tutsi women; the bonds that unite neighbors, who put aside grudges and pull together in times of need; the beautiful milking rituals of the Tutsi farmers; the willingness of one woman to raise another’s child, should it be necessary — these particulars leave the reader with profound appreciation for the resilience and generosity of the Tutsi people. With Igifu, Scholastique Mukasonga has written a wonderful and important book, one that will expose most Western readers to unexpected new worlds." — Washington Independent Review of Books"A collection of autobiographical stories set during the Rwandan genocide, Igifu will tear out your heart and piece it back together again. Dealing with themes of poverty, starvation, and death, the stories in Scholastique Mukasonga's new collection will haunt you long after you've finished reading." — Bustle"Mukasonga’s gift lies in illustrating the day-to-day reality of a persecuted minority, the calculations that must be made and the humiliations endured . . . The matter-of-fact psychological probity of Mukasonga’s work is akin to the piercing memoirs of Annie Ernaux and the early novels of Edna O’Brien. She also shares their gift for writing about childhood." — Harper's Magazine"Igifu is a study in collective grief and trauma that finds its strengths through the observations of ritual . . . Scholastique Mukasonga is interested in the inability of the human mind to conceptualize genocide, overwhelming in its evilness and reach. As her characters find themselves unable to articulate what has transpired, her stories verbalize the horror of genocide in ways drastically abstract, beautifully and imaginatively rendered." — Full Stop"Autobiographical elements continue to haunt [Scholastique Mukasonga's] exquisite collection, Igifu, through five wrenching stories...Providing welcome continuity, French professor Jordan Stump translates the book, making Igifu the third of Mukasonga's four English-language titles Stump has translated with graceful agility... Igifu seems to serve as a bridge among Mukasonga's oeuvre, moving from memoirs (debuting in 2006 and 2008 in France) to this short fiction, to her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile... Despite the undeniable terror, Mukasonga's storytelling proves illuminating and resilient." --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, in Shelf Awareness"These stories are intimate portraits of young people with no choice but to carry on. The heartbreaking realities of their plights are balanced by absorbing glimpses into Tutsi culture and the characters’ unquenchable senses of hope. Their resilience is inspiring, while their need to be resilient is a tragic reminder of the consequences of prejudice and unthinking hatred. Igifu is a poignant collection about the effects of trauma on tradition, community, and individuals." — Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews"Combining the authority of traditional storytelling with the techniques of the social novel, [Scholastique Mukasonga's] books explore themes of mourning and remembrance, female community, education and the insidious legacy of Rwanda’s Christianisation. At their centre lies the struggle of Rwandan Tutsis, who suffered decades of violence and displacement before the genocide of 1994." — Julian Lucas, The White Review“I will read anything and everything by Scholastique Mukasonga, who writes in French and is translated by Jordan Stump. Mukasonga’s writing is beautiful, lucid, and moving about the most chaotic and devastating experiences. Her work astounds me in a way that few writers do. I return again and again to the haunting opening of The Barefoot Woman, her memoir about her mother, Stefania, who was murdered in the Rwandan genocide. The memoir itself is how the narrator keeps a broken childhood promise to her mother, ‘my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.’ In September, I look forward to reading Igifu, a story collection published by Archipelago.” -- Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers, in Restless Books"[Igifu] contains nothing less than the heaviness of memory — its oceanic vastness, its vitality to the health and recovery of a community, its weight on the individuals charged with keeping it. Though each story has its narrators, characters, and families, I came away feeling that the main storyteller was both one and many — a we, a collective. In isolation, the stories are glittering gems; together in their own collective, they shed smoothness, and each edge is felt." —Anna Weber, events manager, White Whale Bookstore, in BuzzFeed"Like Primo Levi’s accounts of the Holocaust or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of persecution in Stalinist Russia, Mukasonga faces the very worse people have done without flinching, without bitterness or hatred, but with a steadfast refusal to forget. The stories function like a resurrection, bringing back not only the dead but the people’s relationships, cultural traditions, humour and beauty."— Marisa Grizenko, Plain Pleasures"From the first [story in Igifu], I was ushered to dazzling new outlooks on the world, some tinged with wit, some with terror . . . This is an author who goes well beyond recollection; she’s alert to the signals of other people’s nerve-endings." —John Domini, Brooklyn Rail"Igifu is about displacement and resettlement, about the relationship with foreign lands and outside forces – Hutu, Belgian, Burundian – whose imposition generates devastating and unequal consequences . . . Unsettling as it may be, the choir of voices in the book confers a sense of reality to the stories, which read like chronicles of real people, infusing the reading experience with a sense of responsibility and urgency that the reader cannot ignore." – Anna Giulia Novero, Wasafiri"I read this slim collection of most autobiographical short stories in one sitting. There was no way that I would take a break . . . Stump’s translation is deep-rooted in understanding the Tutsi people, their loss, their trauma, and how to appropriately put it on paper . . . As a reader, all I could do was understand, learn, unlearn, and be left with a sense of empathy and appreciation as to how Mukasonga writes through it all – with great tenacity and resilience." --Vivek Tejuja, The Hungry Reader

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisAfter performing a perilous service for the future Emperor, the peasant Chen Hsi-wei turns down the customary rewards in favor of receiving an education. The Court is astonished by this unheard-of request, but orders the strict teacher Shen Kuo to do what he can with the boy. In the course of copying out the words of the ancient masters, Hsi-wei begins writing poems of his own. As a young man, Hsi-wei leaves the capital for a vagabond life, supporting himself by making straw sandals. He encounters people of all stations and occupations, trekking through landscapes both flat and mountainous. He learns of the terrible price of building the Grand Canal, the miseries caused by floods, droughts, and endless wars. To his astonishment, Hsi-wei gains a degree of fame, first as a curiosity, then as a writer whose poems are beloved by the people and pass into the vast life of China.Trade Review"Hsi-wei Tales is an imaginative, vivid creation that brings historical Sui Dynasty China alive: the rich, the educated, the politically privileged, the working class, and the poorest of the poor, all are tied together by a humble, itinerant shoemaker who is a skilled craftsman and a famous (yet unassuming) poet." Michael L. Newell , poet, whose most recent works are Meditation of an Old Man Standing on a Bridge , and Traveling without Compass or Map"Still, courage, wit, and beauty make their appearance in Hsi-wei Tales, nourishing a troubled world and helping to preserve some of its more admirable inhabitants. Both the poetry and the prose in these tales offer gem-like images of nature... a delight to read." Robert Knox , author of the novels Suosso's Lane and the forthcoming Karpa Talesman."Dear Hsi-wei, from your ancient land of misted mountains and still lakes where you cross borders and thresholds full of strife, leaving poems and peace in your wake, I welcome you to our time. ...Long may your poems be sung!" Elizabeth Cunningham , author of The Maeve Chronicles , The Wild Mother , and others"Wexelblatt's Hsi-wei Tales is a wonderful fusion of poetry and prose that captivates and holds nuggets of wisdom far beyond the fortune cookie kind. ...Like a pair of Hsi-wei's durable sandals, this is a collection worthy of praise and preservation." Nicholas Litchfield , Colorado Review

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Book SynopsisA widowed young woman, her leg broken during an abusive, sexually charged incident with her brutal second husband, attends a child’s birthday party at a seedy indoor play rink. A retired cop can’t stop fixing a brain-damaged war vet’s problems. The Critical List tangles with fraying family ties, while anticipating disasters about to erupt on what Wenke calls “the post-contemporary tundra.” In this world, people teeter on the edge—a former jailbird under house arrest; a would-be teenage parricide; a former philosophy professor, now homeless, mind blown, living in the subway underground.Trade Review"The stories in John Wenke's The Critical List take a look at Americans taking a look at their own mortality. The title comes from the things some of his characters talk about'a freefall of small and large miseries'as they try (without success) to stop the advance of time. In one of Wenke's stories, a boy keeps his father alive by befriending his ghost; in yet another, a drunken attempt at a criminal scheme ends up in a hilarious Christmas celebration. 'Trouble keeps happening' to Wenke's characters, but they keep fighting back, resilient and undaunted. These stories make up an American atlas, a road map from Connecticut to California. Get your copy now. John Wenke's tough-minded, big-hearted America awaits your discovery." John Surowiecki , author of Pie Man , winner of the 2017 Nilson Prize for a First Novel"What's so attractive about John Wenke's stories is their stare-you-down directness Wenke's unflinching, deft (and welcome) conviction about the transportive and redeeming power of what we used to call good old American realism." Richard Ford"These stories showcase smart, resourceful people at the end of their rope, radically reshaping their lives. Within the familiar worlds of home and neighborhood, John Wenke uncovers violence, yearning, and comedy. Yes, there's always something funny, even when the situation's critical. A brilliant collection, where 'everything is calm until everything explodes.'" Cary Holladay , author of Brides in the Sky: Stories and a Novella

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Book SynopsisTransition and change are 21st-century lived experiences. We want to know “what’s next” in our relationships, environment, societies, politics, and everything else that touches our lives. “What’s Next?” is an anthology of short fiction that creatively explores these questions. UTHORS FEATURED IN THE ANTHOLOGY Claire Boyles, Joseph Bruchac, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Toiya Kristen Finley, Tom Gammarino, Amina Gautier, Anthony Lee Head, Meng Jin, Charles Johnson, Pauline Kaldas, Vijay Lakshmi, Clarence Major, Donna Miscolta, Pamela Painter, Jane Pek, Brenda Peynado, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Shannon Sanders, George Saunders, Joanna Scott, Anna Sequoia, Asako Serizawa, Sharyn Skeeter, Tiphanie Yanique, and Ye Chun.

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Book SynopsisWhat If We Were Somewhere Else is the question everyone asks in these linked stories as they try to figure out how to move on from job losses, broken relationships, and fractured families. Following the employees of a nameless corporation and their loved ones, these stories examine the connections they forge and the choices they make as they try to make their lives mean something in the soulless, unforgiving hollowness of corporate life. Looking hard at the families to which we are born and the families we make, What If We Were Somewhere Else asks its own questions about what it means to work, love, and age against the uncertain backdrop of modern America.Trade ReviewPraise for the author's previous work, If the Ice Had Held : "Fox's novel tells the story of the cold and lonely landscape of the Mile High City, with honesty and tenderness, from one woman's perspective. It's a book about harbored secrets and shared discovery, told in lyric style." -- Westword.com"Pick up this beautiful novel today. It's stunningly written and immediately engrossing. I suspect I'll have to extend my reading hour because I don't see myself being able to put this one down before I finish." -- Drink. Read. Repeat."Razor-sharp ... written with incredible grace and assurance. I gave myself over to this story and felt as though I had inhabited these characters." Benjamin Percy, author of The Dark Net "If the Ice Had Held, at its heart a story about second chances, is both haunting and luminous. I was captivated by how, in the aftershock of tragedy, these memorable characters try to find their way toward some brighter place. Expertly shifting back and forth in time, Fox has crafted an intricate mosaic shimmering with gorgeous prose." -- Heather Bell Adams, author of Maranatha Road"Wendy J Fox's prose is both haunting and full of bright spirit. Her latch on language is akin to an insect in amber:tight and solid and sparkling, and in the case of If the Ice had Held, houses perfect, vivid characters awash in the most timeless of troubles, namely, the bearing and rearing of unplanned children and the sleep of unchartered lives. The various perspectives leave us scratching our heads, wondering why we've never before possessed the ability to see the world--and life--in quite this same way." -- Paula Coomer, author of Jagged Edge of the Sky"Wendy J. Fox's If the Ice Had Held is a wonderful novel founded on the sexual union of a lonely girland a high school boy. What ensues is a remarkably told tale of the nearly forty years of lives, principally but far from exclusively, of three women--the sister, the mother, and the child, Melanie. Told without recrimination, in brilliantly crafted and telling snippets that plumb the ordinaries of these lives, this novel veers toward the metaphysical." John Keeble, author of Broken Ground"A kind of suspense is built into the very structure of If the Ice Had Held . I became more and more invested in each character and storyline and more and more eager to see how they would intersectI found it nearly impossible to put the book down." -- Small Press Picks"In this tale of tragedy, family secrets, and hidden identities, Wendy J. Fox weaves--with taut prose and an unflinching eye--a web of intersecting lives whose deceptions, disillusionments, and desires capture your attention and then your heart. She has a gift for writing the pulse of real people." -- Jen Michalski, author of The Summer She Was Under Water"If the Ice Had Held is a stunning novel. From its very first pages, I was captivated by the vivid intimacy of Wendy J. Fox's prose and her generous sense of character. Indelible, insightful, and deeply moving, If the Ice Had Held illustrates the complex bonds of family -- the terrible ways we hurt one another, the sacrifices we make to save one other." -- Jillian Medoff, bestselling author of This Could Hurt"Each story in this addictive collection casts a spell... What If We Were Somewhere Else is Friday night, stay in alone, tell your friends you have other plans, kind of reading." -- Dave Patterson, author of Soon The Light Will Be Perfect"Fox's memorable narrations, ranging from eccentric to evocative, side-splitting to shocking, had me smiling, pondering, and turning the pages for more." -- Cynthia Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookseller and The Glass Forest"I loved this book so much. Fox uses all of these somewhat bleak stories to tap perfectly into what it means to be human. It's the exact type of book that makes me love to read. It's exactly what I want when a book says 'stories.'" -- Meagan Graham, bibliotaphsblog"...diverting...enthralling... Fox successfully delivers small dramas that can pack a powerful punch." -- Publishers Weekly"Fox delivers a realistic, emotionally driven set of interlinked stories... Relatable, affecting, and at times absurd, this collection is for anyone who has felt frustrated at work. It shows us that there is more to life than what we do for a living." -- Booklist"[A] moving and perceptive collection of linked stories... emotionally resonant and memorable." -- Small Press Picks"Fox has a smooth-flowing prose style that helps keep you connected to her characters. She gives each of the characters we follow their own voice in addition to their own story while honoring each with her amazing writing style." -- Dominic Loise, Friction"Fox's prose is laced with tenderness, exploring lives measured in acceptance, kindness and connection. Even while moving insightfully through the more alienating facets of office culture -- networking parties, breakroom concerns -- Fox invests most of all in what makes us people over workers." -- New York Times

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Book SynopsisWith a foreword by Victoria Wilson, Alice Adams’s longtime editor.   Famous for illuminating the hidden workings of human relationships, Alice Adams's work was a staple in The New Yorker and a mainstay of the O. Henry Award collections. The Stories of Alice Adams gathers fifty-three of her most celebrated pieces into one career-defining collection. In Verlie I Say Unto You, the unexpected death of Verlie Jones's lover reveals the unsettling truth about her employers--that, though they couldn't get along without Verlie, their maid of ten years, she is nothing more than a stranger to them. In Berkeley House, a disenfranchised daughter anguished over the sale of her childhood home, discovers that it does not hold the key to her happiness, and perhaps never did. In Greyhound People, a woman repeatedly and purposely takes the wrong bus from work after meeting its warm and disarmingly candid cast of passengers. In story after story, insight joins with grace to show us the truth about the lives of people around us. A moving and elegant collection and the capstone to a brilliant career.

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Book SynopsisA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A “clear-eyed and fearless” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of ten short stories from the award-winning author of Evening “Tender, precise, emotional, insightful, and funny.”—JULIANNE MOORE A writer dryly catalogs the myriad reasons she cannot write; an artist bicycles through a protest encampment in lower Manhattan and ruminates on an elusive lover; an old woman on her deathbed calls out for a man other than her husband; a hapless fifteen-year-old boy finds himself in sexual peril; two young people in the 1990s fall helplessly in love, then bicker just as helplessly, tortured by jealousy and mistrust. In each of these stories Susan Minot explores the difficult geometry of human relations, the lure of love and physical desire, and the lifelong quest for meaning and connection. Her characters are all searching for truth, in feeling and in action, as societal norms are upended and justice and coherence flounder. Urgent and immediate, stunningly observed, deeply felt, and gorgeously written, the stories in Why I Don't Write showcase an author at the top of her form. “Intimate, adventurous, stark and lyrical . . . Few short story collections shine as brightly.”—Portland Press-Herald

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