Search results for ""Vellum Publishing""

A collection celebrating the Centennial of seminal modernist Macedonian poet Aco Šopov. This substantive collection represents Šopov's creative career, starting with his first book of poetry in 1944, when he was fighting in the Yugoslav resistance to the German occupation. In the early 1950s, he published two collections that signaled a new direction for Macedonian poetry as a whole, announcing the arrival of new form “intimate lyricism”. Over the next 25 years, Šopov's work deepened further, acquiring a philosophical cosmic dimension and at times venturing into surrealism. The Long Coming of the Fire shares the work of a consummate craftsman little-known in the Anglophone world, achieving a “penetrating, resonant, and melodic” poetic language with “a lively and pregnant imagery that binds together the experience of the author and reader” (Graham W. Reid).

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One of Moldova’s most awarded poets, Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s style is rich with references at once playful and thematically serious, at times even comic. Canting Arms, the first collection to bring Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s work to Anglophone readers, is comprised of a career-spanning selection of his work produced from 1989-2019. These poems—sardonic and visionary as well as surprising—unsettle the normative poetic form, a reflection of Moldova’s unorthodox national history as a product of the clash of many historical narratives of empire, a crossroad between East and West. This collection, the work of Adam J. Sorkin with six co-translators, shows everything from his earlier poems, full of scriptural and erotic references, to later work full of complex political, historical, and psychological considerations.

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A story of separation and displacement in two fictionalized voices: a person who has migrated, without papers, to the United States for work, and their partner who waits at home. Nostalgia Doesn't Flow Away Like Riverwater / Xilase qui rié di' sicasi rié nisa guiigu' / La Nostalgia no se marcha como el agua de los ríos is a trilingual collection by one of the most prominent Indigenous poets in Latin America: Irma Pineda. The book consists of 36 persona poems that tell a story of separation and displacement in two fictionalized voices: a person who has migrated, without papers, to the United States for work, and that person's partner who waits at home, in the poet's hometown of Juchitán, Oaxaca. According to Periódico de Poesía, a journal based at UNAM (Mexico's national university), when it was published in 2007, this book established Pineda one of the strongest poets working in Zapotec, the [Mexican] Native language with the largest literary production.

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Ivan and Phoebe chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Ukrainian student protests of the 1990s—otherwise known as the Revolution on Granite or the First Maidan and investigates the difficulties and absurdities of a society swiftly shifting from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule. Married couple Ivan and Phoebe grapple with questions about family, tragedy, and independence. Although protagonist Ivan tells the story, Phoebe's voice rings through the text. The two reflect on the harrowing aftermath of revolution: torture at the hands of the KGB and each other. Ivan refuses to talk about his pain, while Phoebe recounts her past wounds through poetic monologues. The story bounces between politically charged cities like Kyiv and Lviv and Ivan's small, traditional hometown of Uzhhorod. As characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, they must also reevaluate the norms of marriage and home life. These initially appear to be spaces of peace and harmony but are soon revealed to be hotbeds of conflict and multigenerational trauma. Through her characters’ vivid voices, Oksana Lutsyshyna creates a his- and her-story of Ukraine: a panoramic view of post-Soviet society and family life through social, political, and economic crises.

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A brilliant, feminist twist on the Book of Genesis from Carmen Boullosa. What if everything they’ve told us about the Garden of Eden was wrong? Faced with what appears to be an apocryphal manuscript containing ten books and ninety-one parts, Eve decides to tell her version of the story of Genesis: she was not created from Adam’s rib, nor was she expelled for taking the apple from the serpent; the story of Abel and Cain isn't true, neither are those of the Flood and the Tower of Babel...In brilliant prose, Carmen Boullosa offers a take on the Book of Genesis that dismantles patriarchy and rebuilds our understanding of the world—from the origin of gastronomy, to the domestication of animals, to the cultivation of land and pleasure—all through the feminine gaze. Based on this exploration, at times both joyful and painful, The Book of Eve takes a tour through the stories we’ve been told since childhood, which have helped to foster (and cement) the absurd idea that woman is the companion, complement, and even accessory to man, opening the door to criminal violence against women. Boullosa refutes this entrenched, dangerous perspective in her foundational and brazen feminist novel.

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Liu Zongyuan's remarkable poetry reflects the complex experience of political exile and observes the natural world of his new home in South China with a caring eye. The Poetic Garden of Liu Zongyuan presents poems by the Tang Dynasty cofounder of the Classical Prose Movement written on the Chinese empire’s southern margins. In these remarkable pieces, Liu intertwines South China’s landscapes and plants—such as scarlet canna, banyan, and white myoga ginger—with reflections on honor, duty, banishment, and belonging in ways unique in the history of Chinese poetry. The two translators, Nathaniel Dolton-Thornton and Yu Yuanyuan, one American and one Chinese, preserve and showcase the singular beauty of Liu's poetic garden for the English-speaking world.

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The tale of a stone-cold frontiersman blasting across his beloved Texas highways in an attempt to retain his sense of daring and independence among friends, family, bookies and under-reported enemies. Beneath the Sands of Monahans introduces Archie Weesatche, a hard working orphan who’s recently sold his oil field hot shot company, Keep On Truckin’. With money in his pocket and time on his hands, Archie launches a long-planned Tour of Texas with best friend Okinawa Watkins, betting with a colorful cast of hand-picked boosters and bookies on high school and college football games. Enter Mexican heiress Josefina Montemayor, who convinces her long-ago lover that Archie’s the only man she trusts to raise the $650,000 she needs to release millions in unrecovered cartel cash. Set in a map’s worth of Texas locations, this quest narrative explores cultural minefields, the precarious nature of oilfield booms and busts, and the tricky world of cash money gambling during a legendary winning streak.

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Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings. In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Corossol Restaurant-Bar, when the broken, rich voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone. Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this unpunished crime. Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince, including Ézèchiel, a poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Waner, a diligent pacifist; and Ronny the American, at ease in Haiti as in a second homeland. Drawing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and tenderly revealing the richness of the lives within.

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Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and her friends: wandering through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, they search for purpose in an increasingly uncertain world. An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the airport. Told through dizzying would-have, could-have conditionals, Ischia overlaps and blurs the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectation. These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports readers into a world of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imagined, hilarious, and surreal experiences.

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A creative cultural history of Dallas through the lens of its defining twentieth century event: JFK's assassination. The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, shocked America. Instantly, Dallas was blamed for the killing, labeled “the City of Hate.” In the half century since the president’s murder, this city’s artists and writers have produced important, if often overlooked, work that speaks to the difficult burden of our civic shaming. Here are the works of poetry, theater, journalism, art, the actions of our citizens and political leaders, all the fragments of our cultural life that address this tortured local history. The City That Killed the President is a fitful discourse offering a window into Dallas itself, a city reluctant to grapple with its past.

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A collection of sensitive, world-bending human portraits from short story writer N. Prabhakaran. A research scholar whose notebook reveals a surreal pig farm... A psychologist in search of the truth about one of his clients... An aspiring writer who emulates Gogol... The unforgettable men and women in N. Prabhakaran's stories have an uncanny ability to expose the fault lines between the real and the unreal, the normal and the mad, as they explore their own inner worlds and psychic wounds. A pioneer of the post-modern aesthetic turn, N. Prabhakaran weaves the nitty-gritty of everyday, small-town lives into his imaginative tales. Set in northern Kerala, these five stories are steeped in folklore, nature, factional politics and the intricacies of human relationships. Brilliantly translated by Jayasree Kalathil, Diary of a Malayali Madman marks the very first time this major Indian writer's work is available in English.

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Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize Available in a new edition, Anne Garréta's sensual portrayal of trysts past. A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss.

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A poetic, autobiographical collection from famed Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, engaging with loneliness, desire, violence, and aging. “I’m sick of biting off and chewing this dust, of scratching with my thin claws, searching for some chunk of literary gold to hell with all the disarrayed images of our homelands reflections of our particular misery.” From eminent Mauritian writer Ananda Devi, a collection that transgresses genre lines with poetic, autobiographical flow. The pieces herein address the resonance of personal memories and regrets, the political world, and sexuality. In light of the complexity of human identity, Devi emphasizes the importance of each word chosen, speaking directly to the reader and asking them to “peel back my skin. Unclothe me of myself.”

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In this debut collection of poetry, the obscure and mundane collide, a fricassee of movement, the cosmopolitan, and intimacy. A Boy in the City uses poems as pillars to interrupt and excavate an interiority that unfolds and interrogates grim thoughts and intimacy. Yarberry weaves a sexy, glitzy journey through their city, where the speaker can “pose” and “compose” in a “trans way, of course.” Clever in its playful allusions to Greek myths, William Blake, and other literary figures, A Boy in the City is a distinct work of joy and liberation that reckons with the language of gender and desire.

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“The Francis Effect was about proposing something completely absurd, as absurd as borders are. If Immigrant Movement was for the thousands of people who went there, The The Francis Effect was just for one person, the pope. But the more people that participated, the more personal it became.” –Tania Bruguera Stemming from a performance that originated at the Guggenheim Museum, The Francis Effect explores Tania Bruguera’s work as an artist, activist, and Cuban immigrant to the US engaging the tension between art’s pragmatic, activist, and aesthetic possibilities. The performance of The Francis Effect follows the guise of a political campaign, aiming to request that the Pope grant Vatican City citizenship to all immigrants and refugees. As a conversational, collaborative project, the resulting book mirrors Bruguera’s artistic practice with essays and conversations from the the curators and Bruguera. In addition, the book-project is embiggened by socially-engaged commissioned essays from art historian Our Literal Speed, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and historian Nicolas Terpstra. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary discussion of borders, Pangaea, sociology, and religious studies, The Francis effect offers art as a vehicle for social change, placing this work in the context of its creative and critical reception.

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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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At The Lucky Hand is an account of the different love stories that revolve around a very peculiar book: My Legacy, by Anastas Branica. At first glance, this is a book where there is no plot or characters, only descriptions. However, that is what makes it a self-sufficient space, a world that can only be inhabited by its readers, which Anastas has written in order to live, within the book, with his beloved. Through what Petrovic called “simultaneous reading”, it is possible to coincide with other people in the same book, and not only that, but also to live beyond what is simply written. Within this experience of reading-while-reading, participants are able to access a meeting place that is outside of reality. How else can we describe what happens to us when we read with true conviction, when books become life, palpable, manifested, when books become part of our physiology, when love is incarnated in the reading that two strangers perform at the same time, hoping that time will be abolished by the mere fact of fixing their gaze on a page? In short, what the reader of this book will surely experience, along with all the other readers who coincide in the experience, will be a state of joyous stupefaction. Above all else, the book is a love letter to the power of literature.

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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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