Search results for ""vellum publishing""

"Outstanding political fantasy. Eduardo Rabasa has written a futuristic novel set in the present; its inventiveness is not based on new technologies but rather on new kinds of relationships." -- Juan Villoro A hilarious satire and universal exploration of the origins of power and corruption. A Zero-Sum Game uses the highly-charged election for the presidency of a residents' committee and the influence of a powerful stranger to both expose those in power and to sympathize with individuals who find themselves caught in the paradox of empowerment and impotence that is modern consumer society and the democratic state. Eduardo Rabasa is the founding editorial director of Sexto Piso, Mexico's most prominent independent publishing house, and was selected to the Hay Festival's Mexico20 list of the greatest Mexican authors under the age of forty.

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In his inimitable, recursive, meditative style that reads like a comedic zen koan but contains universes, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River recounts Korean cult writer's Jung Young Moon’s time spent at an artist’s and writers residency in small-town Texas. In an attempt to understand what a “true Texan should know,” the author reflects on his outsider experiences in this most unique of places, learning to two-step, musing on cowboy hats and cowboy churches, blending his observations with a meditative rumination on the history of Texas and the events that shaped the state, from the first settlers to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald. All the while, the author is asking what a novel is and must be, while accompanied by a fictional cast of seven samurai who the author invents and carries with him, silent companions in a pantomime of existential theater. Jung blends fact with imagination, humor with reflection, and meaning with meaninglessness, as his meanderings become an absorbing, engaging, quintessential novel of ideas.

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"If someone in the future asks in frustration, 'What has Korean literature been up to?' we can quietly hand them Vaseline Buddha." -- Pak Mingyu A tragicomic odyssey told through free association scrubs the depths of the human psyche to achieve a higher level of consciousness equal to Zen meditation. The story opens when our sleepless narrator thwarts a would-be thief outside his moonlit window, then delves into his subconscious imagination to explore a variety of geographical and mental locations--real, unreal, surreal--to explore the very nature of reality. Jung Young Moon, 2005 alum of Iowa's International Writing Program, is one of South Korea's most award-winning, eccentric, and handsome authors, often compared to Kafka and Beckett.

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A four-part collection that stretches the possibilities of the poetic form, from the traditional to the experimental; from the simple to the highly complex. Deftly exploring math and science alongside the arts, Knit Ink is a collection that showcases the bounds of formal poetry. The poems in Knit Ink study special or simplified cases of established literary restrictions, such as anagrams and palindromes, and poetic forms, such as triolets and sonnets. Anthony Etherin''s own form, the aelindrome, creates its own constraint, while other invented forms represent structural indulgences—tests of technical complexity whose poetry lies as much in the grandeur of their architecture as in the content of their words. Containing four books whose composition took over a decade, Knit Ink (and Other Poems) sees the quintessential work of a formidable mind combined in a single edition for the first time.

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"Klougart has an unusual ability to create phrases, images and a language that you long to stay in and remember forever."-Dagens Nyheter "One can speak of unbearable beauty, but one can also speak of a linguistic beauty that makes it possible to bear the unbearable."-Politiken In this genre-bending apocalyptic novel Josefine Klougart fuses myriad literary styles to breathtaking effect in poetic meditations on life and death interspersed with haunting imagery. Her experimental novel asks readers to reconsider death, asserting sorrow and loss as beautiful and necessary aspects of living. Hailed as "the Virginia Woolf of Scandinavia," Klougart mixes prose, lyric essay, drama, poetry, and images to breathtaking effect in her writing, and Of Darkness marks the arrival of a wholly new literary talent in world literature. Josefine Klougart (b. 1985) made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Rise and Fall, which was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her third novel, One of Us is Sleeping, forthcoming from Open Letter Books in summer 2016, was also nominated for a Nordic Council Literature Prize, making her the youngest author ever nominated twice for this prominent prize. Her fourth and most recent novel, Of Darkness, appeared in Denmark in 2014 to universal critical acclaim and became a massive bestseller in Denmark and Norway. Translator Martin Aitken has won numerous awards for his translations of Danish literature, and he is currently working with Karl Ove Knausgaard to translate the final volume of My Struggle and his nonfiction.

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“I’m under twenty-five and I am unable to envision the future. I’m not the only one." A singular voice of the French "Bataclan Generation"—those most acutely conscious of the terrorist attacks in the mid-2010s—grappling with issues of memory or post-memory, trauma, and survivors’ dilemmas. ​Survive ​is concerned with the work of grieving for strangers—a grief which does not begin or end, but is rather a structural part of one’s being in the world. For Finkelstein, it is essential “[t]o abide. Deep inside what is dying, in the midst of the bullets going astray and the offenses accumulating, in the midst of the misunderstandings imposed on a face other than my own, on a body other than my own...to build a world that thinks, a world that gives, a world that beats—a living world.” Survive situates contemporary youth in a violence-saturated pr

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In this modern classic of global feminist literature, the only novel by one of Romania's most heralded poets, styled as a long letter addressed to the man she is ready to leave, a woman meanders through a cosmic retelling of her life from childhood to adulthood with visionary language and visceral detail. Like a contemporary Scheherazade, she spins captivating tales that create space in the cosmos for the female experience. Through a dreamlike thread of strange images and passing characters from the small incidents of their lives together to the intimate narrative of her relationship to womanhood, her stories invite the reader into a fantastical vision of love, loss, and femininity.

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The original tale of moral destruction, in a brand-new translation: Faust is a man torn between the urges of the living world and the significance of moral living. He feels nothing, he lives for nothing, and thus engages in a wager with Mephistopheles, the devil himself. Goethe’s master work shares the deep complexity of a human life, rife with pain, mistakes and dynamic complexity. With Faust, the lushly lyrical and philosophically brilliant drama on which the poet spent almost his entire life, Goethe solidified himself as a major literary figure whose work would transcend time and space to create the modern world. Now, this brand-new, dynamic translation demands we ask of our world: who will win, humanity or Mephistopheles?

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The stories in Ukrainian film director, writer, and dissident Oleh Sentsov’s debut collection are as much acts of dissent as they are acts of creative expression. These autobiographical stories display a mix of nostalgia and philosophical insight, written in a simple yet profound style looking back on a life's path that led Sentsov to become an internationally renowned dissident artist. Sentsov's charges seemingly stem from his opposition to Russia's invasion and occupation of eastern Ukraine where he lived in the Crimea. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison in August 2015 on spurious terrorism charges after he was kidnapped in his house and put through a grossly unfair trial by a Russian military court, marred by allegations of torture. Many of the stories included here were read during international campaigns by PEN International, the European Film Academy, and Amnesty International, among others, to support the case for Sentsov across the world. Sentsov's final words at his trial, "Why bring up a new generation of slaves?" have become a rallying cry for his cause. He spent 145 days on hunger strike in 2018 to urge the Russian authorities to release all Ukrainians unfairly imprisoned in Russia, an act of profound courage that contributed to the European Parliament's awarding him the prestigious Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought Sentsov remains in a prison camp in Russia. It is the publisher's hope this book, published in collaboration with PEN Ukraine, contributes to his timely release.

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"Muslim" A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France’s leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani’s narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children’s tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence.

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Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in Heavens on Earth. As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose. Carmen Boullosa is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. Her most recent novel Texas: The Great Theft (Deep Vellum, 2014) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won Typographical Era's Translation Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico.

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From the winner of the 2022 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize: a fractal exploration of a woman''s grief as she moves through disjointed segments of time. Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind. Scenes and images real and imagined gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by cerebral dysrhythmia. Written in scraps and fragmented chapters, Divided Island is a nonlinear narrative best read as a poetic experience, in which the protagonist''s memories and dreams recompose the world and, in doing so, trouble the very notion of the self. This slim volume makes it abundantly clear why Daniela Tarazona belongs in

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Occupy Whiteness is a collection of hybrid erasure poems from inaugural Dallas Poet Laureate and multi-world slam competition winner Joaquín Zihuatanejo.Starting from long-form works of literature by straight, white men, Joaquín Zihuatanejo occupies their pages, erasing words and sections, leaving only his poetry behind — the white space that remains becoming colonized Brown verse. Occupy Whiteness is an act of rebellion that reclaims spaces and highlights a history of erasure of Brown life.An unflinching look at the present day, the collection is haunted and blessed by the image of ancestors who braved the river and desert to travel into border states for the opportunity of freedom. These are poems meant to agitate and create unease, to make the reader realize that neither their author nor the immigrant children he describes are Other. Through poems and interspersed photography from the border, Zihuatanejo poignantly depicts this equall

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Set in 1940s Oklahoma on a red dirt cotton farm, Once in the Blue Moon is grounded in the realities of life near the end of World War II. Maggie and her family are forced to endure a season of fear and failure as they face the loss of their home and their once-amazing Daddy to the whiskey bottle. Up against terrible truths and unforeseeable accidents, Maggie struggles in the dark and lonesome farmhouse. When all seems lost, Maggie, her sisters, and her mother band together to overcome humiliation and tragedy. A tale of willpower in ordinary people who act with courage and grit, this story is ultimately one of resilience, forgiveness, and redemption.

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A profound collection of poetry from Japanese poet Toshiko Hirata, expounding on readership and everyday life. Produced on the same day each month over the course of two years, every poem in Is It Poetry? (a pun also meaning "the seventh day" in Japanese) is a window into everyday life in Japan. Toshiko Hirata''s poems evoke awe and light in the daily minutiae of contemporary life, achieving both prosody and narrative cohesion colored by her dark yet warm artistic sensibility. Beloved and awarded in Japan, Hirata possesses an extraordinary ability to turn an ordinary event like an old man cycling through a park into a journey that elucidates something profound. This translation offers entry into a busy Tokyo brimming with puns, imagery, sounds, and whimsy and asks what is to cherished, feared, loved—and what is not.

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Freedom House is a poetry collection that explores internal, interpersonal, and systemic freedom. In this debut full-length collection, KB Brookins’ formally diverse, music-influenced poetry explores transness, politics of the body, gentrification, sexual violence, climate change, masculinity, and afrofuturism while chronicling their transition and walking readers through different “rooms”. The speaker isn’t afraid to call themselves out while also bending time, displaying the terror of being Black/queer/trans in Texas, and more — all while using humor and craft. What does freedom look like? What can we learn from nature and our past? How do you reintroduce yourself in a world that refuses queerness? How can we use poetry as a tool in the toolbox that helps build freedom? This collection explores those questions, and manifests a world where Black, queer, and trans people get to live.

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Forgetting is a brief but searing sojourn inside the mind of Alma as she navigates the complexity of the past and future within her identity.On her nighttime wanderings through a Paris saturated with cultural and historical meaning, she begins the slow work of grieving for her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and begins to unravel the ways that his experience continues to reverberate across generations. The journey, both inward and outward, simple and infinitely varied, brings Alma to reconsider her whole life and the circumstances that led to her very birth.In Forgetting, Finkelstein sheds new light on the oldest dilemmas, asking: "What to do with the brief time that is given to us?"

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A story of global travel, personal growth, and family responsibility through the lens of teenage girl in 1969. Fifteen-year-old Jane was trapped. Trapped in high school in Dallas, Texas where her classes were too easy and her classmates were too conventional. Trapped in service to her mother, a polio survivor who used a wheelchair. When her parents sold their automobile brake-repair business in 1969, they withdrew Jane from her high school to travel the world, visiting India, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Yugoslavia and Northern Europe. As she traveled, Jane was pushed to reconcile her dual role as responsible daughter and as teen in the late sixties, the era of Bobby Fischer, The Beatles, and Hair. Because the World is Round reckons with what it means to be an individual, a caretaker, and a traveler in a vast and changing world.

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Set in the Andaman Islands over the course of oppressive imperial regimes, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a complex, gripping homage to those omitted from the collective memory. Nomi and Zee are Local Borns—their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory. When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals. Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan’s extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent.

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ABC That Could Be Me is an alphabet picture book written and illustrated to empower Black children across the world. This book champions Black excellence by showing kids they can be doctors, lawyers, the president, and so much more! Read about people like Paul R. William, the first Black architect, Marie Maynard Daly, the first Black chemist, and more who paved the way for the next generation to do great things in this world. This vibrant picture book will give children the confidence to dream big dreams, knowing that there’s a whole alphabet who came before them!

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Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government—but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation's coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.

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In wondrous, singing translation by Mike Soto, these spare, striking poems by Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez explore the infinite solitude of the universe. The poems of Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez reflect a world precariously dependent on the word, but also transfixed by the word. They express a metaphysical shift where the laws of heaven and earth are suspended, transformed into a terrain of the journey inward, reflecting a cosmos of the self. The simplicity of these poems never fail to resonate, reflecting a profound investigation of the world on an elemental level. Ruiz-Pérez's poetry very often reads like the discovery of a formula, an algebra of poetic inquiry that draws together references to Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, and Alejandra Pizarnik. Deftly translated by poet Mike Soto, these poems express a singular vision of the abundance of the world as well as the void, but in these poems even the void is begged to speak.

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Originally written as a series of viral Facebook posts, then released as a cult hit in St. Petersburg, Meshchaninova’s serialized memoir-novel tackles gender politics and abuse with honest, cutting language. Stories of A Life depicts the life of Natasha, a young woman who suffers abuse first at the hands of her stepfather Sasha and then by young men in the village nearby. This powerful, postmodern novel witnesses the Dickensian struggles of provincial life and reckons with the complicity of fellow women. 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. Meshchaninova is held in high regard as part of a new wave of women filmmakers in Russia, and with this collection cements her position as a woman willing to stare down the viewer and demand complicity.

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The poems in Jenei’s collection Always Different: Poems of Memory grapple with childhood, memory, and time. The poet looks back forty years and imagines himself as a boy—the narrator of the poems—looking forward into the future. Thus the poems combine moments with sweeps of time, village scenes with rumblings of societal and technological change. In the tradition of Hungarian writers Péter Nádas and Ágota Kristóf, Jenei grapples with war and destruction, loneliness, desire, and loss. The literary historian Éva Bánki calls Jenei “one of the great masters of Hungarian free verse”—adding that his poems also hold an epic theme, “the strange underworld of the Kádár era, rural Hungary shown through a child’s eye.” Through their storytelling, searching, and rhythms, these poems take us into our communal yet private longing for self-knowledge, history, and home.

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With the loving eye of an amateur botanist, poet Julie Poole has distilled nature to its finest, tender points. Through poems spread delicately across the page, interspersed with images of the pressed flowers themselves, Poole’s poetry gives voice to a meditative expression of flora. Each poem creates an individual cataloged world through which to explore the body, sexuality, strength, and a devout refusal to admit the separation between humans and nature. Inspired by the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center at The University of Texas at Austin, the largest herbaria in the Southwestern United States, Bright Specimen weaves together a written index through the harmony of botanical wonder.

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Following the chance discovery of certain documents, a historian sets out to unravel the mystery of a murder committed in his childhood Mexico City home in the autumn of 1942. Mexico had just declared war on Germany, and its capital had recently become a colorful cauldron of the most unusual and colorful of the European ilk: German communists, Spanish republicans, Trotsky and his disciples, Balkan royalty, agents of the most varied secret services, opulent Jewish financiers, and more. As the historian-turned-detective begins his investigation, he introduces us to a rich and eccentric gallery of characters, the media of politics, the newly installed intelligentsia, and beyond. Identities are crossed, characters are confounded; Pitol constructs a novel that turns on mistaken identities, blurred memories, and conflicting interests, and whose protagonist is haunted by the ever-looming possibility of never uncovering the truth. At the same time a fast-paced detective investigation and an uproarious comedy of errors, this novel cemented Pitol’s place as one of Latin America’s most important twentieth-century authors. Winner of the Herralde Prize in 1984, The Love Parade is the first installment of what Pitol would later dub his Carnival Triptych. “This novel is not only the best that Pitol has written, but one of the best novels in Mexican literature.” —Sergio González Rodríguez, La Jornada “Sergio Pitol in the splendor of his mastery. A great novel.” —Florian Borchmeyer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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A native of the Bay Area, Ross J. Farrar is an internationally renowned singer, songwriter, and lyricist for the post-punk band, Ceremony. In his debut book of poetry, Farrar conjures a narrative voice that evokes Alan Vega of the band Suicide and other New York school artists as he contemplates life outside of music. Farrar’s poems glide between hazy evocations of being young on the West Coast, working at an adult bookstore, and drinking with friends, alongside layers of darker experiences: visiting the graves of friends and loved ones, leaving Cheree, the 2016 election. He mulls over the lost landmarks of his youth in San Francisco and a relationship both heart-wrenching and ultimately failing.

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What really (might have) happened when Jack Ruby, nightclub owner, brass knuckle-slinger, and inveterate fan of Corbusier, decided to kill the killer of JFK? In this first-ever trade publication of Bob Trammell’s work, Jack Ruby mythos loops between fact, fiction, and spectacle to satirize Dallas’ place on the world stage. Jack Ruby & The Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas caricaturizes everyone from Bob Thornton to Joseph Beuys; fodder for JFK conspiracy theorists, innuendo-readers, ingenious speculators, and pursuers of The Truth About Dallas At Large. With an introduction by Ben Fountain and afterword by David Searcy, this volume also includes Trammell’s “Quiet Man” story cycle from over the course of his long, countercultural writing career, lamenting a generation that lost much by embarking on a search for themselves in a city—and world—unwilling to support its brightest artists.

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Life cannot be without purpose. When you look closely, you see how it is all connected; how the fabric of reality is woven together perfectly on the loom of everything. Somehow, the pattern of the universe speaks to all of your senses. As you take it in, the truth emerges. You belong here. A smile breaks across your lips. You realize the beauty that moves through you, within you. This meditation began the day you were born. And now we turn another page. Through a series of lyrical recitations, Dallas-based meditation studio leader Rachel Fox channels her practice into shared confirmations of love and purpose. Meditations on Being pulls readers through life’s bittersweet journeys, one poem at a time, offering the reader a chance to pause, to reflect, and to breathe in the midst of the chaos of life.

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In his first English-language collection, Moroccan-Dutch poet Mustafa Stitou marks his position as one of the most important poets of his generation. Two Half Faces collects work from across Stitou’s career as he grapples in his poetry with his position in a changing reality. Stitou brilliantly parlays his relationship with his two homelands into a chronicle of identity, producing a vital account of cultural friction in poems that range from narrative to lyrical. Humor and seriousness go hand in hand, and the everyday combines with the surreal and the sublime to form a vibrant tension. This collection charts Stitou’s progress as a poet of emotion and intellect, one who poignantly illuminates the ambiguities of cultural identities, and the intersections of our inner and outer worlds.

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A young woman meets a man at a restaurant. They exchange words only briefly, but by the end of the week he has entered her world with an intensity rivaled only by her desire to end her life. Told with the lyrical persistence of a Greek chorus, The Ancestry of Objects unravels the story of the unnamed narrator’s affair with David: married, graying, and in whose malcontent she sees her need for change. Religion, the mystery of her absent mother, and the ghosts of her grandparents haunt her meetings with him. Memories start, stop, and loop back in on themselves to form the web of her identity and her voice—something she’s looked for her whole life. Nothing can fill the voids of time and loss; not God, not memory, not family, and certainly not love. At once intensely sensory and urgently erotic, The Ancestry of Objects parses the multiplicity of selves who become a part of us as we push to survive. This is Ryckman – a master of the obsessive, desirous, complex exhaustion of human relationships – in peak form.

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BALLROOM HARRY: Volume II picks up the trail of actor-artist Harry Goaz as he’s reprised his infamous role on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Harry Goaz has been an avid photographer since he was in his teens, and he shares his work in book form for the first time in this collection of photography. This collection pulls from his more recent travels as he returns to Los Angeles, visiting with a keen eye, like seeing long lost old friend. The Ironic juxtaposition of the subtitles under the images peel away another layer of his persona while deftly avoiding direct explanation. This is his second collaboration with creative production group Talented Friends.

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In the 1990's, Dallas was a basketball wasteland. Along came Dirk Nowitzki, a towering Würzburg, Germany native with a cool efficiency and the ability to make shots from seemingly impossible angles. In the years thereafter, Nowitzki would spend his entire 21-season NBA career with the Dallas Mavericks, the longest tenure of any one player with one team in the league's history, and lead them to their first and only NBA championship, while being named a 14-time All-Star, a 12-time All-NBA Team member, and the first European player to receive the NBA's Most Valuable Player Award. Zac Crain, award-winning journalist for D Magazine who moved to Dallas the same year that Nowitzki began his career in the city, memorializes Nowitzki’s career through a lyric essay reminiscent of Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain that mixes the author's story with the basketball legend's, charting the highs and lows (and mostly highs) of the Mavs' all-time statistical leader’s career. By paying homage to Dallas’ star basketball player, author Zac Crain connects the Mavs’ success with the growth of the city itself, and what the sport means to Dallas’ now basketball-obsessed citizens.

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In The Outlaw, the third and final volume in his acclaimed trilogy, former Reykjavik mayor and comedian Jon Gnarr returns to face the dark teenage years with his signature humor and candor. Raging with music, poetry, life, loneliness, and questions of right and wrong, Jon, a fourteen-year-old punk rock misfit, is sent to boarding school in the Westfjords region of Iceland. There he decides Crass is the only worthy punk band, discovers an unrequited interest in girls, and chooses drugs and self-harm to cope with mental anguish and intense thoughts of alienation and despair. Two years later he returns to Reykjavik, no longer a naive adolescent, and recounts the restless years spent drifting through a life of parties, drugs, and anarchy--until it all fades to black. The Outlaw is the devastating anthem to what it means to grow up, to fit in, and to stand out.

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"We can read The Magician of Vienna not just as a work of literature but as one of the Holy Books in which we store humanity's imaginary." -- Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty Salon The heartbreaking final volume in Sergio Pitol's groundbreaking memoir-essay-fiction-hybrid "Trilogy of Memory" finds Pitol boldly and passionately weaving fiction and autobiography together to tell of his life lived through literature as a way to stave off the advancement of a degenerative neurological condition causing him to lose the use of language. Fiction invades autobiography--and vice versa--as Pitol writes to forestall the advancement of degenerative memory loss. "Pitol's writing -- the way he constructs sentences, inflects Spanish, twists meanings and stresses particular words -- reflects the multiplicity of languages he has read and embraced. Reading him is like reading through the layers of many languages at once." -- Valeria Luiselli, author of The Story of My Teeth Sergio Pitol, the greatest living Mexican writer, winner of the Juan Rulfo and Cervantes prizes, is profoundly influential to the current generation of Spanish-language writers, including Valeria Luiselli, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Yuri Herrera.

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The River of Goodness is a lyrical, global exploration of the ways we can create a more just and sustainable world for all, from the author of The River Always Wins and I Am a Teacher Every day, posits Marquis, every single human has to make a choice: accept the world the way it is or work to make it better. Each of us can pursue the work of goodness in many ways. The River of Goodness, the second volume in Marquis’s River Trilogy, provides real-world examples of people who have taken on the work of goodness, whether through thankless tasks or in dangerous and challenging circumstances. This follow-up to Marquis’s beloved first volume, The River Always Wins, argues that making the world better is rooted in the hard daily work of creating change that lasts.

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A Blind Salmon engages in Julia Wong Kcomt''s characteristically unflinching plumbing of the human body and traces fanged emotions with sticky precision, exploring mothering, multilinguality, and madness. Tusán writer Julia Wong Kcomt’s sixth collection of poetry, A Blind Salmon is her first full-length collection available in English. Written while she was living in Buenos Aires, the collection crosses borders between Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chepén, Tijuana, and Vienna. It takes up sameness and difference, shot through with desert sand. In these poems, Wong Kcomt renders homage to writers such as the Peruvian poet and visual artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who died in Milan as she was writing them. She fingers the filmy line between poetry and narrative prose to build a lyrical menagerie all her own.

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After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily – the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combination of George Saunders and Samanta Schweblin. Characters real and unreal, seductive, shape-changing, and baffling come together in smooth prose that, ultimately, defies fact and fiction.

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Winner of Sweden's most prestigious literary prize for young readers, Girls Lost is a thriller featuring three teenage girls: Kim, Bella, and Momo. The three occupy a challenging limbo between childhood and adulthood, made only more difficult by the steady provocation of their malicious male classmates and pubescent bodies that are changing beyond their control. They are on the precipice of a grown-up world that seems to be broken into two groups: male and female; public and private; assailant and target. Eager to escape, the girls seek refuge in Bella’s greenhouse, a free zone where their imaginations run wild and their talents can flourish. After their classmates’ violations escalate, the three friends plant a strange seed in the greenhouse, and a shimmering, magical flower blossoms. Intrigued, they drink the nectar from the flower, and suddenly find themselves transformed from girls to boys until the next morning. The three return each night to drink from the flower, anxious to explore their world — and new, older male friends — with agency and freedom. As they fall deeper into the boys’ world, they discover a new reality, one of power and violence, of gangs and drugs. When their nightly escapades turn darker, two of the teens grow wary, ready to turn back and face the reality of womanhood; but Kim is determined to see their discovery to its catastrophic, fiery end. In this tale, the body is a battlefield, and masculinity is a drug. Brilliantly poetic and deeply poignant, this magical story was adapted into an internationally-renowned feature film exploring how we shape our identity, and how we cope with our own transformations.

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An Entropy Magazine "Best of 2016: Fiction Books" selection Included in World Literature Today's "75 Notable Translations of 2016" A Foreword Reviews Reviewers' Choice Selection for "14 Favorites of 2016" "A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation and recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp and terrifying that bites back." -- Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop "A novel of genius and disturbing intelligence." -- Enrique Vila-Matas, author of The Illogic of Kassel This powerful, profound autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind and increasingly dependent on those closest to her. Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, and caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, science, and human relationships. Lina Meruane (b. 1970), considered the best woman author of Chile today, has won numerous prestigious international prizes, and lives in New York, where she teaches at NYU.

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