Search results for ""Deep Vellum Publishing""

Inspired by The Decameron and its dark and satirical novellas, Boccaccio in the Berkshires chronicles the foibles of seven women and three men, all in their twenties, who meet in an online chat room for asymptomatic pandemic survivors. They have all endured the deaths of loved ones and decide to shelter together for fourteen days in an Italianate mansion in the Berkshires, offered to the group rent-free. The vacant but furnished villa provides a luxurious, yet bizarre, setting for members of the chat room, who leave their homes in different cities around the United States. Over the course of their stay, they bond together in unexpected ways as they tell each other stories, ranging from the personal to the ludicrous, at times riffing on the absurdity of Boccaccio’s tales. A terrible storm fractures the group and forces the characters to come to terms with their own lives as they pursue love, faith, and the truth that medieval history ultimately reveals.

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Dmitry Lipskerov, an award-winning Russian writer compared throughout his career to Mikhail Bulgakov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, focuses his unbridled imagination on the story of wealthy, satisfied Mr. Iratov, whose virile world is flipped upside-down. Taking a page from Gogol’s satirical story “The Nose,” wherein the protagonist loses his aforementioned facial feature, Lipskerov's novel transposes such a loss onto a more delicate organ. The protagonist awakens one morning bereft of his tool; and the tool, which re-appears, sentient and in a small village far away, without his man. Thus begins a novel both funny and absurd, in which characters come together across disparate social strata and with differing goals to weave the fate of a universe familiar yet fantastical, a perfect satire of the madness of Russian society today. The Tool and the Butterflies, Lipskerov's eagerly anticipated English language debut, is not just a darkly comedic exploration of post-Soviet attitudes towards gender and sexuality, but also a historically and socially grounded narrative rich in naturalistic dialogue and everyday detail, and an engaging story of family and what matters most in life, in the grandest tradition of Russian literature.

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Subversive, visual, and bold, Curaçao-born Dutch Radna Fabias’ explosive debut collection Habitus marks the entry of a genre-altering poet. Habitus is a collection full of thrilling sensory images, lines in turn grim and enchanting which move from the Caribbean island of Curaçao to the immigrant experience of the Netherlands. Fabias’ intrepid masterpiece explores issues of racism, neo-colonialism, poverty, and sexism with a heartbreaking rhythm and endless nuance. Broken into three parts (“View with coconut,” “Rib,” and “Demonstrable effort made”), Habitus explores the profound struggles of melancholic longing, womanhood, religion, and migration. This ambitious, powerful, and compassionate collection has emerged, cheering on ambiguity, fluidity, and a lyrical ego on a quest to find its home.

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Daybook from Sheep Meadow finds Peter Dimock returning to the breakdown of America’s imperialist history that he started exploring in his groundbreaking previous novel, George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time. In Daybook, Dimock expands on what it means to refute the narrative of American greatness – and what happens once one starts on that path. Historian Tallis Martinson has grappled for years with the atrocities of the American condition through meditative notebook entries, wherein he has attempted to create a “historical method” that guide’s an individual ‘s personal thought outside the language of empire. However, when words fail him completely, he commits himself to a psychiatric facility, mute and unable to write. Daybook presents Tallis’ notebook entries, annotated by his brother and editor Christopher Rentho Martinson. Christopher initially follows the entries’ complex guided meditations in hopes of being able to reach Tallis during his visits to the psychiatric facility. Instead, he finds himself immersed in his own family’s implication in the normalized atrocities of his country’s past and present. An experiment in the capacity of literature to re-lay the trajectory of America’s future, Daybook stages a space wherein the reader can register – and, potentially, remedy – the criminal catastrophe of the American political arena.

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Out of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family’s celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a “demented boomerang,” severs her jugular. Her family— an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions—seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence. Fernanda García Lao has been called “the strangest writer of Argentine literature,” and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.

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A Narco-Acid Western told in a series of interlinked poems, Soto’s striking debut collection follows the converging paths of two protagonists through El Sumidero, a fictional US/Mexico border town where an ongoing drug war is raging. The surreal verse of Soto’s poems portrays a bleak political climate as it coincides with the rituals of love & loss, culture & spirituality, & the quest for a better life at all costs. Following the narrative arc of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s classic cult film, El Topo, A Grave is Given Supper builds a world saturated with a mystical aura that describes the finite tensions & complicated desires of lives taking place in the borderland.

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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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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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