Search results for ""vellum publishing""

FROM THE ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF DEAR MICHAEL, LOVE DAD & OUT OF THE MADHOUSE 'I am Ian Wilkerson. 54 years old. Married forever. Three children. I have been made redundant. I believe I have cancer. And... I am losing my mind.' The announcement of a baby - his first grandchild - tips Ian's world upside down. As he struggles with his thoughts and feelings, a short walk with Bernard, his Jack Russell, turns into their longest journey. A story of love, loss and family ties, Ian and Bernard's funny, thought-provoking and emotional adventure will stay with you long after it comes to its dramatic ending.

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From bestselling, internationally acclaimed author Dorota Masłowska comes a hilarious and devastating satire of consumer culture. Set in a bizarro, all-too-real imaginarium of American pop culture, Honey, I Killed the Cats introduces us to two independent young women struggling to live the lives that television and glossy magazines have promised them. In a collision of street slang and mass-media sloganeering, Masłowska's electrifying prose drives a propulsive story about spiritual longing in a dispirited world. Masłowska’s novel examines the ways we attempt to exist and find meaning in lives defined by what we buy. In this warped world saturated by advertising and materialism, where everything can be bought, from personality and physical traits to religion and self-fulfillment, Joanne and Farah, two very different women form a friendship both bonded in and ultimately destroyed by the manipulations of consumer culture. Joanne has everything the commercials say you should want—confidence, a carefree life, happiness to excess. Farah is a self-loathing, envious, germophobic malcontent. Through a shared metaphysical dream experience that spills over into their increasingly troubled day-to-day lives, these best friends find themselves consumed by their equal-and-opposite obsessions. Widely regarded as Polish literary sensation Masłowska’s best novel yet, Honey, I Killed the Cats is a powerfully emotional, hilariously grotesque satire of Western consumer culture and the trends that go along with it.

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"This is much more than a survival story. It is the story of how the scars of a woman can be and are passed through generations. It is about being a woman, a mother, and a daughter."--Gabriela Almeida, Continente "An infinite work."--O Estadao de Sao Paulo A groundbreaking use of storytelling to bear witness to the Holocaust features three generations of women's own voices--Lili's diary written upon liberation from Auschwitz; daughter Noemi Jaffe exploring the power of memory, survival, and bearing witness; and granddaughter Leda, Noemi's daughter, on the significance of the Holocaust and Jewish identity seventy years after the war.

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Six of the most remarkable contemporary Russian poets present their groundbreaking verse in a bilingual poetry collection published in partnership with PEN America’s Writers in Dialogue project. In 2020, as international travel skidded to a halt, PEN America’s Writers in Dialogue project—which opens the exhilarating world of contemporary Russian poetry to American readers by bridging the American and Russian literary communities—went remote, using online connection to foster collaborations between daring emerging or undertranslated poetic voices and dexterous translators. In this remarkable volume, the Russian poets and American translators who were paired for this initiative present their collaborative work in a bilingual format, along with conversations about the pleasures, challenges, and intimacies of translation. English-reading audiences will have an opportunity to experience the boldness and range, stylistic and thematic, of Russia’s vital poetry scene. Featuring Ainsley Morse, Maria Galina, Catherine Ciepiela, Aleksandra Tsibulia, Anna Halberstadt, Oksana Vasyakina, Elina Alter, Ivan Sokolov, Kevin M.F. Platt, Ekaterina Simonova, Valeriya Yermishova, and Nikita Sungatov.

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Mario Bellatin’s complex dreamscape, offered here in a brand-new translation, presents a timely allegorical portrait of the body and society in decay, victim to inscrutable pandemic. In a large, unnamed city, a strange, highly infectious disease begins to spread, afflicting its victims with an excruciating descent toward death, particularly unsparing in its assault of those on society's margins. Spurned by their loved ones and denied treatment by hospitals, the sick are left to die on the streets until a beauty salon owner, whose previous caretaking experience extended only to the exotic fish tanks scattered among his workstations, opens his doors as a refuge. In the ramshackle Morgue, victim to persecution and violence, he accompanies his male guests as they suffer through the lifeless anticipation of certain death, eventually leaving the wistful narrator in complete, ill-fated isolation.

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A bold, multilingual anthology of Yazidi poetic voices. Ten years have passed since 2014 and the seventy-fourth genocide of the Yazidis, a people who have faced ongoing persecution, displacement, and ethnic cleansing from their ancestral lands in the Kurdish regions. In the wake of this genocidal violence, new poetic voices have emerged in university campuses and IDP camps along the borders of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey, as well as from across the Yazidi diaspora. With globalizing forces compounding the erasure of their culture and traditions, the Yazidi poets in this multilingual anthology firmly stand their ground, their art a testament to Yazidi resistance and presence. This anthology joins in the poetic tradition of the Yazidis, which has historically preserved and documented instances of their traditions, dispossessions, and erasures. It is its own act of witnessing to recount the 2014 genocide for future generations. Translated from both Ar

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In the inner sanctum of an elite 1960’s boarding school, boys test their boundaries and class when they welcome an outsider. One New England boys’ boarding school, a bastion of the WASP aristocracy, has been holding out stubbornly against pressure to diversify. Grudgingly, St. Philip’s School in New Hampshire opens its doors to its first scholarship student: young Woodrow Skaggs from Pontiac, Michigan, the tough, rough-edged son of an autoworker. Things do not go smoothly—the world portrayed in Pontiac may be shockingly inappropriate to the readers of today. The attitudes of the St. Philip’s students toward gender and sex cruelly predict the treatment girls will receive twenty years later when many of these schools become coeducational. And yet in their awkward, often violent attempts to figure each other out, the boys of St. Philip’s also provide a window to better, more tolerant times ahead. Told through m

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Through free verse, personal photographs, and prosaic gestures, Watcha by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal serves as a watching manifesto that unfolds, layering genres and media. The reader becomes a spectator of a gallery that curates Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous art through ekphrastic poetry. On occasion, the viewer sees theoretical or anecdotal prose contextualizing art observation through introspection. With the codeswitching between English and Spanish as well as with the political implications of the artwork and personal history, the book’s trajectory charts a vast terrain that ranges from an artistic standpoint, to border crossing, to belonging, to portraiture, to self-portraiture, to abstraction, to death, to a call for action. Watcha invites inquiry, a space for sight, memory, and consciousness.

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Who hasn’t peeked over the shoulder of the person reading next to them on the subway, curious about the book in their hands? Who doesn’t secretly love skipping the party to stay home and read? Who hasn’t daydreamed of catching the eye of a future significant other as you discover from across the room that you’re reading the same book? If you’re a reader, you know you’ve been there, and probably in so many other weird places as well, right? That’s what happens with readers, they have these strange traits, these particular ways, that separate them from the rest. Reading Quirks explores, in 72 lighthearted four-frame cartoons, all these weird things readers do, from the existential dilemma of picking your next read to the frustrations of watching an overzealous dog-earer in action. The series was written and created by a bookstore in Dallas, The Wild Detectives, originally as a social media campaign—a way to connect with other readers over a shared understanding of what it means to be crazy about books. Laura Pacheco’s adorable illustrations introduce a cast of endearing characters, whose flaws and obsessions range from disarming good nature to mischievous playfulness. Reading Quirks is a witty and light-hearted ode to the immense pleasure of reading and its resulting byproduct: neurosis.

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"Sigurdsson is without a doubt one of the best writers of his generation." —Frettabladid DailyAfter a grueling solo expedition on Vatnajökull Glacier, Austrian toponymist Bernhardt Fingerberg returns to civilization, barely alive, and into the care of Dr. Lassi. The doctor, suspicious of his story, attempts to discover his real motives for venturing into the treacherous wastelands of Iceland—but the secrets she unravels may be more dangerous than they're worth.Ófeigur Sigurðsson (b. 1975) has published six books of poetry and two novels, including Jón (2010), the first Icelandic novel to receive the European Union Prize for Literature.

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"One of the most original and talented novelists writing in Spanish today." —Alberto ManguelWith sensuous imagery and musical cadence, renowned Oulipian Eduardo Berti conjures an exquisite, star-crossed love story in pre-revolutionary China. The desires of a young girl, visited in her dreams by her grandmother's ghost, clash with the strict expectations of her parents, exploring the delicate balance between modernity and tradition, mysticism and memory.Eduardo Berti (b. 1964) was admitted to the Oulipo in 2014, becoming the group's first Argentinian writer. In 2011 he won the Emecé Prize and the Las Américas Prize for his book The Imagined Land.

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Best Literary Translations is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the translators who create and literary journals that publish this work. Best Literary Translations 2024 features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages—including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu—brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid pieces were drawn from nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2023 that spanned more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages. The four series coeditors, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, selected the finalists from over five hundred nominations. By spotlighting work from top literary j

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From political fictionalist Alisa Ganieva: a neo-noir portrait of a legal system in which everything is broken and no one is innocent. Offended Sensibilities chronicles a series of sudden deaths that occur among officials of a provincial Russian town. The events follow a notorious 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 that resulted in their arrest. With this novel, Ganieva moves beyond the Dagestani setting of her previous award-winning books, published in English by Deep Vellum: The Mountain and the Wall and Bride and Groom. In Offended Sensibilities, Ganieva seeks to address nationalism, Orthodox religiosity, sexuality, and political corruption. Suffused with a light touch and at times rollicking sense of humor, this timely, entertaining and thought-provoking novel can be read as an allegory for the current political, social, religious, and cultural climate in Russia today.

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Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride tells the tale of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought at age fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man. As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek village in the Caucasus, Maria and her parents flee and find shelter in a refugee camp across the border in Ottoman territory. Cholera and plague are impending, and the priest running the camp takes a desperate measure, arranging to marry Maria off to a wealthy Ottoman Turk in the capital. She and her best friend, Lita, then travel toward the Black Sea coast through a fascinating world of ancient and forgotten Ottoman mountain communities. They encounter escalating violence, sniper attacks, and marauding troops amid the Empire’s collapse, as breakaway provinces declare themselves independent caliphates in defiance of the Sultan. And when Lita escapes, Maria is left to face her fate alone. A story of war, struggle, and ultimate success, based on the life of Constantine’s grandmother, The Purchased Bride sheds light on a turbulent and dangerous part of history.

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The Law of Conservation is a poetry collection intensely attuned to landscape, both geographic and metaphorical.Borders blurred as cities cede to rural land; the body as a changing place on an equally unstable map; the subsoil of sexuality; the terrain of memory, both rich and painful; new countries traveled and new roots set down as an adult, navigating desire, loneliness, and love.In the context of gender and sexual identity, Spada’s work pays subtle, incisive attention to the inextricable relationship between transformation and conservation: transformation toward the experience of honoring and protecting our deepest and most abiding truths. At the same time, her poems also unsparingly explore the external shifts (in the speaker’s surroundings and even her memories) that make it so challenging to retain an unassailable sense of self.

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In this brilliant fiction debut from a legendary visual artist, thirteen interconnected stories explore friendship and intimacy, loneliness and dislocation, and the physical contours of a dilapidated American landscape. These stories, which first appeared as part of Coursey’s solo exhibition at The Pollock Gallery of SMU's Meadows School of the Arts, demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the broken-down and discarded relics of industry and labor. Coursey’s stories are laced with humor, conspiracy, paranoia, and compassion, exploring the ripple effects of violence, the mystery of a car found in a well, house-boat culture, Texas landscapes of machinery and dust. Objects possess a totemic importance as Coursey catalogs the detritus of American culture. These ornate vignettes present a colorful cast of characters and vivid scenery, demonstrating the author’s eye for detail both inanimate and human. Coursey spotlights work and deeds done by hand, and the artful, sculpted sentences reveal the writer’s care and facility as a linguistic craftsman.

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Full of wit, music, and a rollicking cast of characters, The Villain''s Dance shows Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with a bang. Zaire. Late 90''s. Mobutu''s thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . . Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the "Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines." Things are drawing to a head, but at the Mambo de la Fète, they still dance the Villain''s Dance from dusk till dawn.

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From one of Mexico’s premier poets, the award-winning Tedi López Mills, a hybrid, genre-defying book of essays following the unusual and surprising complexities of everyday life. Through thirteen essays, Tedi López Mills explores the minutiae that at first glance go unnoticed. In “Improper Nouns,” she explores the history and destiny of an uncomfortable name, asking whether the way we name what surrounds us affects the fabric of its essence. In “How Time Passes, In Consciousness and Outside,” one’s individual experience of time splits from how it passes outside us. The following essays allude to conscience, pain, private histories, dreams, wisdom, and the most difficult of memories that build one’s own identity. Throughout, López Mills traces the trail of her own history, journeying into her own conscience and the mysteries of existence.

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penny candy: a confection, which had its acclaimed premiere at the Dallas Theater Center in 2019, follows one family as they seek to balance their responsibilities to their community and to one another. Growing up in a candy house sounds like every kid’s dream. But for 12-year-old Jon-Jon, helping his father run Paw Paw’s Candy Tree out of their run-down one-bedroom apartment isn’t quite a dream come true. As their neighborhood of Pleasant Grove, Dallas sees a surge of violence fueled by epidemic drug use and increasing racial tensions, the business begins to fail and danger looms immediately outside the family's front door.

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“One of Russia’s best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next.” —The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These “adult fairy tales” ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.

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"If Italo Calvino decided to make one of his invisible cities visible, the result might look something like Pfeijffer's Genoa." -- Benjamin Moser An absolute joy to read, La Superba, winner of the most prestigious Dutch literary prize, is a Rabelaisian, stylistic tour-de-force about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side in mysterious and exotic Genoa, centering on the stories of migration and immigration, legal and illegal, telling the story of modern Europe. Part migrant story, part perverse travel guide, La Superba is a wholly postmodern ode to the imagination that lovingly describes the labyrinthine and magical city that Pfeijffer calls home: Genoa, Italy, the city known as La Superba for its beauty and rich history. Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968), poet, dramatist, novelist, renowned in the Netherlands as a master of language, is the only two-time winner of the Tzum Prize for "the most beautiful sentence written in Dutch" (including one in La Superba!).

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Set in Rural Montana, LOOKOUT centers on the dual coming-of-age of a girl and her father amid the natural and cultural forces that shape their family. LOOKOUT tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana. Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs. LOOKOUT offers a gripping dual coming-of-age: Cody’s from stoic ranch kid to hotshot firefighter to resilient woman learning to rely on others, and Josiah’s as he struggles to thrive in a world that has misunderstood him. Bound by their love of the land, the Kinzlers work to bridge the gaps created by what they leave unspoken. LOOKOUT brings to life a family coming out to itself, at home in a new and nuanced American West.

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"One of Mexico's most culturally complex and composite writers." —Publishers WeeklyFrom the renowned Mexican literary master and author of the Trilogy of Memory (Deep Vellum) comes Mephisto's Waltz, bringing together the best short stories from celebrated writer Sergio Pitol's oeuvre. The Xavier Villaurrutia award-winning collection includes the titular story, Pitol's personal favorite. Selected by the author, each story is a glimpse into the works that first gained Pitol his status as one of the greatest living Mexican writers and showcases the evolution of his unique literary style.Sergio Pitol (1933-2018) was one of Mexico's foremost writers and winner of the prestigious 2005 Cervantes Prize. He is the author of the three books in the Trilogy of Memory series: The Art of Flight, The Journey, and The Magician of Vienna, published in English by Deep Vellum. He is renowned for his intellectual career in both the fields of literary creation and translation.

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One of BBC's "10 Books to Read in August" "an altogether fresh take on the coming-of-age story...Boullosa manages to merge humor with panic seamlessly." -- Publishers Weekly Starred Review "Carmen Boullosa is, in my opinion, a true master."--Alvaro Mutis Part bildungsroman, part ghost story, part revenge novel, Before tells the story of a woman who returns to the landscape of her childhood to overcome the fear that held her captive as a girl. This powerful exploration of the path to womanhood and lost innocence won Mexico's two most prestigious literary prizes. Carmen Boullosa, one of Mexico's leading writers, has published nearly twenty novels. Her most recent novel, Texas: The Great Theft, won the 2014 Typographical Era Translation Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Translation Award.

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"Bae Suah offers the chance to un-know--to see the every-day afresh and be defamiliarized with what we believe we know--which is no small offering."--Music & Literature The meeting between a group of emigrants and a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station sets the stage for Recitation, a fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel, and memory by South Korea's most prominent contemporary female author. As the actress recounts the fascinating story of her stateless existence, an unreliable narrator and the interruptions of her audience challenge traditional notions of storytelling and identity.

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Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2016 "...rich, tragic, yet playful novel..." -- Nancy Kline, New York Times Book Review "Formally dazzling, playful and affecting, a new Oulipian classic." -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse and The End of Oulipo? This debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michele Audin retraces the lives of French mathematicians over several generations through World Wars I and II. The narrative oscillates stylistically from chapter to chapter--at times a novel, fable, historical research, or a diary--locking and unlocking codes, culminating in a captivating, original reading experience. Michele Audin is the author of several works of mathematical theory and history and also published a work on her anticolonialist father's torture, disappearance, and execution by the French during the Battle of Algiers.

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"An Icelandic-punk version of Catcher in the Rye." -- Dallas Morning News "If there were more people like Jon Gnarr the world wouldn't be in such a mess."-- Oliver Sacks The second book in a trilogy chronicling the troubled childhood of international sensation Jon Gnarr, The Pirate revisits his teenage years with sincere compassion and great humor: bullied relentlessly, Jon receives rebellious inner strength through the Sex Pistols and Prince Kropotkin--punk rock and anarchy offer the promise of a better and more exciting life. Jon Gnarr, the most famous comedic actor in Iceland, founded the Best Party, ran for mayor of Reykjavik as a joke and won, and served as mayor of Reykjavik 2010-2014, in the process becoming an international sensation and symbol of true alternatives to the political process worldwide.

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"A beautiful but disturbing portrait of a misfit painfully aware that he's not like anyone else." --NPR Former comedian (and mayor) Jon Gnarr now turns his lens from politics to tell his life story in his literary debut.The Indian is a highly entertaining and bittersweet literary memoir by Jon Gnarr, the world-famous Icelandic comedian and former Mayor of Reykjavik,Iceland, revisiting his troubled childhood. Diagnosed as "retarded" because of his severe dyslexia and ADHD, Gnarr spent time in a "home for retarded children" before getting out, only to find himself subjected to constant bullying, leading the young Gnarr to identify with the Indians against bully cowboys on TV. The Indian is the first book in a trilogy that looks back at Gnarr's childhood and adolescence, providing the unparalleled coming of age story of an outcast who overcame the odds and matured into a world-renowned comedian, actor, writer, and politician. Each book in the trilogy is told with the warmth and humor that defines Gnarr's unique personality, allowing readers of all ages to identify with his story.

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Despite moral pressure and exhaustion, Sentsov''s records display his diligence and objective eye as filmmaker and activist. A remarkable two-book volume: Diary of A Hunger Striker, the first-hand account of celebrated Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, jailed unfairly as a political prisoner, during his 145-day-long hunger strike in a Russian prison; and Four and a Half Steps, his newest collection of short stories. Sentsov’s prison diary begins three days into his indefinite hunger strike, as he calls for the release of all political prisoners in Russia. Frank, sharp, and detailed, the diary recounts day after day of observations and thoughts about his daily life, from interactions with guards, police officers good and bad, to his thoughts on fellow writers and the world outside his cell.

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The work of a masterful novelist and translator collide in this visionary and hilarious debut from acclaimed French writer Brice Matthieussent. Revenge of the Translator follows Trad, who is translating a mysterious author's book, Translator's Revenge, from English to French. The book opens as a series of footnotes from Trad as he justifies changes he makes. As the novel progresses, Trad begins to take over the writing, methodically breaking down the work of the original writer and changing the course of the text. The lines between reality and fiction start to blur as Trad's world overlaps with the characters in Translator's Revenge, who seem to grow more and more independent of Trad's increasingly deranged struggle to control the plot. Revenge of the Translator is a brilliant, rule-defying exploration of literature, the act of writing and translating, and the often complicated relationship between authors and their translators.

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WINNER OF THE 2021 WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS—ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS POEMS IN TRANSLATION CONTEST No Gods Live Here, the first book-length collection by a woman from São Tomé to appear in English, is grounded in the lush islands'' history of slavery, colonialism, and independence. A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country''s past alongside the poet''s own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation''s distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place. Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.

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Follow the classic tale of the trickster Brer Rabbit in a one-of-a-kind trilingual edition, featuring Nahuatl, Spanish, and English languages alongside traditional amate bark paintings. Uncle Rabbit has been gazing longingly at a garden across the river where his favorite foods are planted. Finally, he tricks Old Man Crocodile into giving him a ride to the other side of the river, only to find that he has bitten off more than he can chew! Uncle Rabbit and the Wax Doll beautifully recounts a Nahuatl version of Brer Rabbit, one of the most widespread tales of both the Old and New Worlds, in three languages. Told by master storyteller Silvestre Pantaleón and illustrated on amate bark paper by Inocencio Jiménez, a self‐taught artist from the same village in Guerrero, Mexico, this book tells the story of trickster Uncle Rabbit as he cleverly makes fools out of his eternal adversaries: Old Man Crocodile and Uncle Coyote. Pre

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The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played explore a world that is increasingly mediated through technology; the personal and political struggle for meaning, connection, and reality run like a fever dream through the schizophrenic circuits of television, cyberspace, and virtual existence.The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played reveal an extremely online persona who finds life IRL challenging. In the reality of these poems, the reader confronts the difficulties and nuances of a world rendered more accessible, more instantaneous, but also more isolating, uncertain, even terrifying thanks to the internet. The speaker faces a social sphere that is bigger, faster, more politically unstable. Lyricism and personal expression are interlaced with the language and syntax of chat rooms, gamers, e-commerce, in a way that troubles the dividing lines between the human and the inhuman, the authentic and the artificial, the real and the hyperreal. The self morphs into a sequence of failed firewalls and emotions. And yet, the speaker continues questing for answers, for meaning, for connection. These poems provide an unflinching look at a wired existence, but they never lose their capacity for wonder, feeling, surprise.

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Herostories reveals tales untold by most history books: the harrowing journeys and vital triumphs of nineteenth - and twentieth century midwifery in the vast landscape of Iceland. Composed from the memoirs and biographies of 100 Icelandic midwives, poet-historian Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s found poems illuminate the dangers and valor of birthwork. Forgoing traditional sagas of androcentric conquest, these poems center the adventures of ljósmæður, “mothers of light.” Tómasdóttir leverages epic elements—dashing mountain treks, rivers forded on horseback, unyielding compassion—to challenge how and by whom stories become legend. The follow-up to Tómasdóttir and Thors’ award-winning, PEN-nominated Stormwarning, Herostories documents the professional achievements of Iceland's first women to work outside the home, precursors to today’s midwives who remain central to contemporary health care on the island. Beyond archival recognition, the text's formally ambitious poetics render gender-based battles for literacy and education alongside narratives of selfless womanly caretaking, pressurizing the fundamental tensions between feminine self-actualization and the romanticized service of these trailblazing figures.

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Otherworldly forces, dark phantasmagoria, the horrors of underground life, adolescence and rebellion, myth and fairy tale all swirl in Alla Gorbunova's audacious and spectacular novel. Children, students, beggars, young poets: Alla Gorbunova's heroes and heroines live their lives intensely, experiencing the longing, joy, anticipation, and heartbreak of youth in 1990s Saint Petersburg. But Gorbunova's interconnected episodes don't limit themselves to the realm of the everyday, as they move from harsh, material realities to delirious dark fantasies. Characters escape, decline, self-destruct, and transform. In vivid prose she conjures a fragile and haunted society, and renders it with frank and uncompromising tenderness. A stunning work of fiction, It's the End of the World, My Love is a compassionate, terrifying, and rewarding book from an undeniable literary voice.

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A collection of love poems addressed to an adverb, Anon meditates on the temporal “at once” between desire and language. From the playful verses of Slovenia's Tomaž Šalamun to the brushstrokes of an Edo period painting, Two Gibbons Reaching for the Moon by Japan's Ito Jakuchu, a character for the displaced Beloved emerges in this tapestry of time and art across borders. In Anon, the Beloved reflects: How might translating a human experience, from one language to the next, be an act of longing for the anonymous Other? Or how might this longing for beauty, and the wordless face, heal us both? How might Eros, in exile, respond? With these questions, Vietnam's Mekong delta becomes the book's central force. Endangered gibbons swing from the ruins of ecocide, and each image―rose, ape, and river―weaves itself into an undercurrent of postcolonial time.

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This memoir of one man's coming-of-age through the Civil Rights movement follows his childhood innocence of white supremacy during the 50’s to his awakening as a full-time organizer in the deep south, and the petrifying costs he was bound to pay. Standing serves up an authentic memoir of a young Black boy growing up in a highly segregated environment: the heart of Dallas, Texas, during the era where segregation was the law of the land. Ernest McMillan came of age within an loving family and a nurturing community, virtually shielded from the outside--rampaging tides of white supremacy and a caste system squarely based on color. Dallas is often portrayed as a city in which the Civil Rights movement bypassed, but those claims are mythical in word and deed. McMillan's emergence into manhood fighting for equal rights in the “Black Belt” South and his return to his birthplace to challenge the status quo of the white power structure brought him face to face with forces that were dead set on wiping him off the planet entirely, or imprisoning him in perpetuity.

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From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, New York Times bestselling author and Russia’s greatest living absurdist, comes an elaborate family drama, social satire, and burlesque of twists, coincidences, and hijinks. Kidnapped is a madcap crime spree that caroms from crisis to crisis, through lands real and imagined. It tells the tale of Sergei Sertsov, not one but two boys from Moscow with more than just a name in common, and the women who go to great lengths to protect them. The story unfurls in a whirlwind of deceit and double crossing—babies are switched at birth, documents forged, palms greased, identities assumed, deaths faked, and authorities duped. Across decades and continents, the narrative veers from a trade office in tropical Handia, to Russia as it plunges through perestroika and into post-Soviet free fall, to a mansion in opulent Montegasco at the start of the twenty-first century. With a dizzying array of characters and settings, Kidnapped is a hilarious saga of determined women triumphing over their many oppressors to save the people they love.

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Alive to the beauty and anxiety of new worlds and people, Iguana Iguana imagines a tough and tender soundtrack for tumbleweeds in search of roots. Recursive, deliberate, and as adaptive as their titular lizard, these poems invite us to listen so as to better hear “…the sweet shriek / of those far-off trains you suspect are coming / to claim you. To lay open the hills you haven’t seen.” Caylin Capra-Thomas writes towards understanding the strangers we meet and knowing the stranger within. In doing so, she maps a blueprint for "lay[ing] into the world / like it's good enough".

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Winner of the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus, these experimental linked poem-threads move across time, linking a young Cypriot to ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants through striking, disparate polyphony. In this bilingual collection of linked poems, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early 20th Century Cyprus, 16th Century Scotland, a sailor on Christopher Columbus’ ship La Pinta, 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. In this way, the readers take part in the production of meaning by pulling the threads together, stitching together their own reading of the story. Through the reading of these threads, time remains fluid, creating a masterful declaration about the function of poetry: perhaps history is nothing more than the presence of innumerable human voices, some more and some less powerful, coexisting in an eternal present.

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In this four-story suite, a modern master of Italian literature delves into the wonder and strangeness of the human condition.Eerie, fabulist, and elegant, each of Moresco’s stories features a central character at a different time of his life: childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In these beautiful and unsettling narratives, a dreamlike logic governs a vivid and strange physical world. In “Blue Room,” the adolescent protagonist carries on a voyeuristic relationship with a blind old woman in a mysterious house. In “The Hole,” a young boy becomes fascinated by an outhouse toilet, a portal through which he observes bodily wastes, curiosities, and portents. In the title story, an act of violence deepens the nightmarish tones and mood of disorientation. And in “The King,” a child narrator—who may or may not be present—witnesses a horrific visit from an exiled ruler.Full of bodily parts, functions, and desires, Moresco’s stories distort time and reality to summon a world of carnal immediacy and uncanny haziness. A spectral and unnerving work of art, expertly translated by Richard Dixon, Clandestinity is a testament to Moresco’s genius.

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