Search results for ""deep vellum publishing""

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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Winner of the 2014 Prix Fémina & 2015 French Voices AwardAfter she is found washed up on shore, Cétoute Olmène Thérèse, bloody and bruised, recalls the circumstances that led her there. Her voice weaves hauntingly in and out of the narrative, as her story intertwines with those of three generations of women in her family, beginning with Olmène, her grandmother.Olmène, barely sixteen, catches the eye of the cruel and powerful Tertulien Mésidor, despite the generations-long feud between their families which cast her ancestors into poverty. He promises her shoes, dresses, land, and children who will want for nothing…and five months after moving into her new home, she gives birth to a son. As the family struggles through political and economic turmoil, the narrative shifts between the voices of four women, their lives interwoven with magic and fraught equally with hope and despair, leading to Cétoute’s ultimate, tragic fate.Yanick Lahens was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953 and is one of Haiti’s most prominent authors. She published her first novel in 2000, was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina in 2014 for Moonbath, and is the 2016 winner of a French Voices Award.

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"Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself." -- Daniel Saldana Paris, author of Among Strange Victims The debut work in English by Mexico's greatest and most influential living author and winner of the Cervantes Prize ("the Spanish language Nobel"), The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as a legendary author, translator, scholar, and diplomat. The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight imaginatively blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do. Sergio Pitol Demeneghi (b. 1933 in Puebla), one of Mexico's most acclaimed writers and literary translators, studied law and philosophy in Mexico City, and served for over thirty years as a cultural attache in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe, which is reflected in his diverse and universal writing. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of literary work, Pitol was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language world. George Henson is currently completing a PhD in humanities (with an emphasis on literary and translation studies) at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his BA from University of Oklahoma, and his MA from Middlebury College. His most recent published translations have included new works by Elena Poniatowska and Andres Neuman.

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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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"A welcome volume of stories from Russia's finest contemporary fiction writer, Mikhail Shishkin, full of his typical fusing of mysticism and modernist experimentation." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal The first English-language collection of short stories by Russia's greatest contemporary author, Mikhail Shishkin, the only author to win all three of Russia's most prestigious literary awards. Often included in discussions of Nobel Prize contenders, Shishkin is a master prose writer in the breathtakingly beautiful style of the greatest Russian authors, known for complex, allusive novels about universal and emotional themes. Shishkin's stories read like modern versions of the eternal literature written by his greatest inspirations: Boris Pasternak, Ivan Bunin, Leo Tolstoy, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Shishkin's short fiction is the perfect introduction to his breathtaking oeuvre, his stories touch on the same big themes as his novels, spanning discussions of love and loss, death and eternal life, emigration and exile. Calligraphy Lesson spans Shishkin's entire writing career, including his first published story, the 1993 Debut Prize--winning "Calligraphy Lesson," and his most recent story "Nabokov's Inkblot," which was written for a dramatic adaptation performed in Zurich in 2013. Mikhail Shishkin (b. 1961 in Moscow) is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature. A former interpreter for refugees in Switzerland, Shishkin divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland, and Germany.

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An unabashed exploration of queerness, excess, identity, and tenderness from award-winning poet Dorothy Chan. The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy. Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her ide

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A new edition of the biography of Dallas' own Deep Ellum. Just outside of downtown Dallas lies a section of the city called Deep Ellum, where graffiti and murals decorate the walls of trendy shops, loft apartments, restaurants, nightclubs, art galleries, and tattoo studios. The area has been home to a remarkable array of businesses, creatives, and artistic practices since its birth 150 years ago as a Black center of business. Because of the area’s long association with blues and jazz musicians, Deep Ellum has been shrouded in myth and misconceptions which obscure its actual history. Alan Govenar and Jay Brakefield—using oral histories, old newspapers and photographs, city directories and maps, as well as more traditional public records and secondary sources—reveal another side of Deep Ellum which includes Central Track (formerly called Central Avenue), an area lined with Black-owned businesses which served both Black and white patrons during its heyday in the 1920s and 30s. In the Deep Ellum and Central Track areas, African Americans and whites, primarily Eastern European Jews, operated businesses from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, creating a unique social climate where cultural interaction took place. Much of the information in the book is presented through the stories of remarkable individuals, including professionals, pawnbrokers and other merchants, police officers, criminals, and the blues and jazz musicians who had a lasting impact on American popular music.

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A new biography of the beloved but mysterious Blind Lemon Jefferson, famous blues musician. Born in 1897, Jefferson was a blind street musician who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and his untimely death in 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling blues singer in America. Although his recordings are extensive, details about his life are relatively few. Through Govenar and Lornell's extensive interviews and research, See That My Grave is Kept Clean gathers the scattered facts behind Blind Lemon Jefferson's mythic representations.

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The second novel in Pitol's Carnival trilogy following The Love Parade continues his daring, genre-melding, picaresque style.From the famous Mexican author, Sergio Pitol, comes his 1988 classic translated by George Henson. Taming the Divine Heron tells the semi-autobiographical story of a novelist working on his newest masterpiece. The protagonist struggles to tell the perfect story—his own imagined protagonists mere imitations of the likes of Lord Jim and Alyosha Karamazov. To help eradicate writer’s block, Pitol uses his vessel to praise his own favorite authors. Pitol applauds Bakhtin’s world building, Gogol’s “carnivalesque [literary] breath,” and Dante’s dizzying intensity. The character finds a muse in Marietta Karapetiz, whom he aptly dubs Dante C. de la Estrella, and the two debate the literary greats. As the pair attempts to pull from the techniques of the world’s best writers, Pitol creates a love letter to literature from around the globe while simultaneously telling his own magical story. To quote Pitol’s protagonist, “the quality of the story, its effects, its brilliance, its intensity, ma[k]e the most absurd circumstances plausible.” Taming The Divine Heron, second in a trilogy including already-published The Love Parade (Deep Vellum, 2022), houses history, hyperrealism, myth, folklore, and memoir; to read Pitol is to appreciate the power of language.

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Taut and contemplative, these poems ruminate on family, exile, love, and the vagaries of human perception. Love Training encapsulates Andrés Neuman’s work as a poet, spanning two decades in a single unified collection. The book is divided into three sections that complement and respond to each other. The first, “Love Training,” focuses on family, loss, relationships, desire, and a sense of anchoring in the world. The second, “Fictions of Sight,” is concerned with questions of perception, perspective, language and creativity. The third, “I Don’t Know Why,” is a whimsical set of interconnected poems that ask unanswered questions, serving as a kind of coda. While Andrés Neuman is a rightly celebrated and widely translated novelist, he is also a lucid—and quite prolific—poet. Love Training is the first volume to make his sensitive, incisive poems available in English.

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Toska derives its title from the Russian word which denotes a melancholic longing without a singular cause, longing for a better world than the late-stage capitalist hell we live in. Toska explores a sense of rootlessness and a sort of anti-nationalism; how the pervasive sense of being an immigrant or "in but not of" a place never quite dissipates, particularly amid the dissonance and alienation felt within U.S. culture gunning towards a vision of imperialist capitalist white-supremacist hegemony. These poems come to the weary conclusion, time and time again, that sexual liberalism/liberation and hedonism are only one sort of revelation — that this sort of openness and exploration isn't enough to save anyone from despair or the existentially weary feeling of toska from which the title takes its name. But desire is not just Eros — the poems carry a strong desire for a different world, for everyone.

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Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Stories aims to bring the riches of contemporary Ukrainian literature—and of contemporary Ukraine, too—to the world. While Ukraine is under sustained attack, many in the West have marveled at the nation’s strength in the face of a barbaric invasion. Who are these people, what is this nation, which has captivated the world with their courage? By showcasing some of the finest Ukrainian writers working today, this book aims to help answer that question.There are war stories, but there are also love stories. Stories of aging romantics in modern Ukraine, and of modern Ukrainians in Vienna and Brooklyn, a fantastical tale set on a mysterious island where people never die, a wild lovers’ romp through modern-day Ukraine, a sobering account of an American war photographer, and a post-modern tale of a botanist in love. Some of these stories have been published before—indeed, many are award-winning and acclaimed—while some are appearing for the first time, making their rightful debut on the world stage. The range of voices, settings, and subjects in this vivid and varied collection show us how to “love in defiance of pain”—an apt phrase taken from the very first story in this book. Readers will be delighted and moved, and will gain insight into the proud history and contemporary life of Ukraine.Authors include: Sophia Andrukhovych, Yuri Andrukhovych, Stanislav Aseyev, Kateryna Babkina, Artem Chapeye, Liubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Vasyl Makhno, Tanja Maljartschuk, Taras Prokhasko, Oleg Sentsov, Natalka Sniadanko, Olena Stiazhkina, Sashko Ushkalov, Oksana Zabuzhko, and Serhiy ZhadanProceeds from the sale of this collection will be donated to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

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A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

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A bold, imaginative collection of short stories set in Southern Iraq from prolific, award-winning novelist Diaa Jubaili. Influenced in turn by the long tradition of Arabic folktales and the magical realism of Latin America, the stories in No Windmills in Basra reflect a reality tinged by the city’s history with war. Yet the fantastic and playful peek through, offering an astounding breadth of images in only a few lines per story. In “Mubarak,” a security guard for a chicken plant discovers his own wings after a bomb explosion. In “The Taste of Death,” long-buried Iraqi and Iranian soldiers rise from their unmarked graves, dissatisfied with the landscape’s returning verdancy. Set in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where the author still lives, these fleeting stories oscillate between whimsy and tragedy.

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The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life. The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Venice, drawing on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, and spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson,The Traces is an ecstatic, insightful, and original debut.

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An award-winning cyberpunk novel set in mid-21st century Cuba, Freeway: La Movie crosses the absurdity of American pop culture with the deep, fragmented unease of Cuban-US relations. A novel-in-stories set in mid-twenty-first century dystopian Havana, Freeway narrates the adventure of two misfits wandering the construction site of a colossal freeway-to-be — a mysterious feat of engineering that slices through Havana, designed to connect the US and Cuba. The two embark on a futile journey, overlaid with the elusive filming of a documentary about the freeway construction. Both film quality and interior monologues drift aimlessly, haunted by Cuban history and US pop culture. Freeway: La Movie is a satirical novel that attempts to reconcile what might be hopelessly irreconcilable: the body and the machine; analog and digital; post-industrial overdevelopment and post-socialist underdevelopment; Cuba and the US; reality and fiction; the plasticity of personal identity and rigid categories such as gender, class, and nationality. Through the clash of utopian promises and dystopian realities, Freeway reveals the unease of contemporary culture from the US to Cuba.

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“Dhumketu is a wonderfully gripping storyteller, and translator Jenny Bhatt has certainly done him justice in this excellent selection.” —Jennifer Croft, translator of The Books of JacobThe tragic love story of a village drummer and his dancer lover . . .A long-awaited letter that arrives too late . . .A teahouse near Darjeeling, run by a mysterious queen . . .The Shehnai Virtuoso brings together the first substantial collection of Dhumketu’s work to be available in English. A legend of Gujarati literature, Dhumketu revolutionized the short story in India. Characterized by a fine sensitivity, deep humanism, perceptive observation, and an intimate knowledge of both rural and urban life, his fiction has provided entertainment and edification to generations of Gujarati readers and speakers.Beautifully translated for a wide new audience by Jenny Bhatt, these much-loved stories—like the finest literature—remain remarkable and relevant even today.

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A book of testimonies in verse, Winter Phoenix is a collection of poems written loosely after the form of an international war crimes tribunal. The poet, a daughter of a Vietnamese refugee, navigates the epigenetics of trauma passed down, and across, the archives of war, dislocation, and witness, as she repeatedly asks, “Why did you just stand there and say nothing?” Here, the space of accusation becomes both lyric and machine, an “investigation" which takes place in the margins of martial law, the source material being soldiers’ testimonies given during three internationally publicized events, in this order—The Incident on Hill 192 (1966, Phù Mỹ District, Vietnam); The Winter Soldier Investigation (1971, Detroit, USA); and The Russell Tribunal (1966, Stockholm, Sweden; 1967, Roskilde, Denmark). Ultimately, however, Winter Phoenix is a document of resilience. Language decays. A ceremony eclipses its trial, and the radical possibilities of a single scream rises from annihilation.

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The powerful, long-repressed classic of Dallas history that examines the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in the city. Written by longtime Dallas political journalist Jim Schutze, formerly of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer, and currently columnist at D Magazine, The Accommodation follows the story of Dallas from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement, and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s. Known for being an uninhibited and honest account of the city’s institutional and structural racism, Schutze’s book argues that Dallas’ desegregation period came at a great cost to Black leaders in the city. Now, after decades out of print and hand-circulated underground, Schutze’s book serves as a reminder of what an American city will do to protect the white status quo.

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A baby is born with gills. Foxes raise and then lose a human child. A man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever-dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage. The stories in Farthest South, the second story collection from renowned writer Ethan Rutherford, find characters in the most unexpectedly menacing of circumstances, in which their sanity, happiness, and safety are put to the test. Formally ambitious, with an eye toward the strange, with an inimitable style all Rutherford's own, each story is nonetheless firmly grounded by a deep, human concern: the anxiety of family connection and humanity.

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Garréta’s first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister is subsumed by concrete. Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garréta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.

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From the groundbreaking author of Beauty Salon, The Large Glass, Jacob the Mutant, Mario Bellatin delivers a rousing, allegorical novel following the widowed keeper of a mysterious garden. When art student Izu’s teacher asks her to visit the famous collection of Mr. Murakami, she publishes a firm rebuttal to his curation. Instead of responding with fury, the rich man pursues her hand in marriage. When we meet her in the opening pages, Mrs. Murakami is watching the demolition of her now-dead husband’s most prized part of the estate: his garden. The novel that follows takes place in a strange, not-quite-real Japan of the author’s imagination. But who, in fact, holds the role of author? As Mr. Murakami’s garden is demolished, so too is the narrative’s authenticity, leaving the reader to wonder: did this book’s creator exist at all? Mario Bellatin has revolutionized the state of Latin American literature with his experimental, shocking novels. With this brand-new, highly anticipated edition of Mrs. Murakami's Garden from lauded translator Heather Cleary, readers have access to a playful modern classic that transcends reality.

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“The centrifugal pull of great literature, as embodied by the work of these twenty-five writers, draws us into a fuller realization of our humanity.” – Daniel Simon, editor-in-chief of World Literature Today For the last fifty years, The Neustadt Prize has been one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, second only to the Nobel. Poets, novelists, and playwrights from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Czeslaw Milosz and Dubravka Ugresic are listed among the ranks of laureate. Now, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters gathers the acceptance speeches of these twenty-five pioneering writers into one volume, edited and with an introduction by World Literature Today editor-in-chief Daniel Simon.

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A literary triumph by one of Mexico's most promising young authors, Red Ants is the first ever literary translation into English from the Sierra Zapotec. This vibrant collection of short stories by Pergentino José updates magical realism for the 21st century. Red Ants paints a candid picture of indigenous Mexican life -- an essential counterpoint to cultural products of the colonial gaze. José's fantastical stories tackle themes of family, love, and independence in his signature style: unapologetically personal, coolly emotional, and always surprising.

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"An exuberantly dark first novel." — NPR's Fresh Air w/ Terry Gross**Nominated for the Man Booker International Prize 2016****Winner of the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Debut African Fiction**Two friends, one a budding writer home from abroad, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the most notorious nightclub—Tram 83—in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.**One of Flavorwire's 33 Must-Read Books for Fall 2015**Fiston Mwanza Mujila (b. 1981, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo) is a poet, dramatist, and scholar. Tram 83 is his award-winning and much raved-about debut novel that caused a literary sensation when published in France in August 2014.

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A road novel, a coming-of-age tale, and a raunchy slapstick comedy that tells—in careening, charismatic prose—the (true) story of the theft of the body of Saint John of the Cross.In August 1592, a bailiff and his two assistants arrive at the monastery of Úbeda, with the secret task of transferring the remains of Saint John of the Cross, the great Carmelite poet and mystic, to his final abode. When they exhume him, they find the saint's body as incorrupt and fresh as when he died. Thus commences a series of adventures and misfortunes populated by characters that seem to be drawn from mythology. Luis Felipe Fabre masterfully incorporates Saint John's verses into his prose, as if the saint had prophesied the delirium that would surround his own posthumous transfer. This funny, highly entertaining novel manages to honor the mystical poetry of the Carmelite while inviting the reader to reflect on issues such as the sacred and the profane, the body and the soul, and spiritual (as well as carnal) ecstasy.

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