Fall 2021 Catalog
ON FREEDOM: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
by Maggie Nelson
Publication Date September 07, 2021 Nonfiction
An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
September 07, 2021
978-1-64445-062-8
Hardcover $27
288 pages 6" x 9"
Brit.: Jonathan Cape Trans., 1st. ser., audio, dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates
SUCH COLOR: New and Selected Poems
by Tracy K. Smith
Publication Date October 05, 2021 Poetry
"Tracy K. Smith's poetry is an awakening itself." (Vogue)
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time and delves into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting. Smith’s signature voice, whether in elegy or praise or outrage, insists upon vibrancy and hope, even—and especially—in moments of inconceivable travesty and grief.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in thirty pages of brilliant, excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. This magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
Is the world intended for me? Not just me but
The we that fills me? Our shadows reel and dart.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The world has never had—will never have—our backs?
The world has never had—will never have—our backs.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The we that fills me, our shadows real and dark,
Is the world intended for me?
—from “I Sit Outside in Low Late-Afternoon Light to Feel Earth Call to Me”
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.
Such Color: New and Selected Poems by Tracy K. Smith
October 05, 2021
978-1-64445-067-3
Hardcover $26
240 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
THE TREES
by Percival Everett
Publication Date September 21, 2021 Fiction
An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
Percival Everett is author to more than thirty books. He voted for Joe Biden.
The Trees by Percival Everett
September 21, 2021
978-1-64445-064-2
Paperback Original $16
320 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st. ser., audio, dram.: Melanie Jackson Agency
THE SWANK HOTEL
by Lucy Corin
Publication Date October 05, 2021 Fiction
A stunningly ambitious, prescient novel about madness, generational trauma, and cultural breakdown
At the outset of the 2008 financial crisis, Em has a dependable, dull marketing job generating reports of vague utility while she anxiously waits to hear news of her sister, Ad, who has gone missing—again. Em’s days pass drifting back and forth between her respectably cute starter house (bought with a “responsible, salary-backed, fixed-rate mortgage”) and her dreary office. Then something unthinkable, something impossible happens and she begins to see how madness permeates everything around her while the mundane spaces she inhabits are transformed, through Lucy Corin’s idiosyncratic magic, into shimmering sites of the uncanny.
The story that swirls around Em moves through several perspectives and voices. There is Frank, the tart-tongued, failing manager at her office; Jack, the man with whom Frank has had a love affair for decades; Em and Ad’s eccentric parents who live in a house that is perpetually being built; and Tasio, the young man from Chiapas who works for them and falls in love with Ad. Through them Corin portrays porousness and breakdown in individuals and families, in economies and political systems, in architecture, technology, and even in language itself.
The Swank Hotel is an acrobatic, unforgettable, surreal, and unexpectedly comic novel that interrogates the illusory dream of stability that pervaded early twenty-first century America.
Lucy Corin is the author of The Swank Hotel, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, and two other books of fiction. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship. She lives in Berkeley, California.
The Swank Hotel by Lucy Corrin
October 5, 2021
978-1-64445-066-6
Paperback Original $17
176 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st. ser., dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates
THE HOUSE OF RUST
by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
Publication Date October 19, 2021 Fiction
The first Graywolf Press Africa Prize winner, a story of a girl’s fantastical sea voyage to rescue her father
The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger.
Caught between her grandmother’s wish to safeguard her happiness with marriage and her own desire for adventure, Aisha is pushed toward a match with a sweet local boy that she doesn’t want. But before she can fight her way to independence—as embodied in the book by the mirage-like House of Rust—she must first gain experience and skills to vanquish Almassi, the imprisoned snake-demon ruler of Mombasa. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, The House of Rust is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Mombasarian writer of Hadrami descent and the winner of the inaugural Graywolf Press Africa Prize. Her work has appeared in Enkare Review, Lolwe, and Down River Road among other places. She lives in Mombasa, Kenya.
The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
October 19, 2021
978-1-64445-068-0
Paperback Original $16
272 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st. ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
YELLOW RAIN
by Mai Der Vang
Publication Date September 21, 2021 Poetry
A reinvestigation of chemical biological weapons dropped on the Hmong people in the fallout of the US war in Vietnam
In this staggering work of documentary, poetry, and collage, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the United States abandoned them at the end of its war in Vietnam, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos starting in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as “yellow rain,” caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. And then, to the world’s astonishment, American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited.
Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Yellow Rain calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.
We don’t have the means to give up the absolute.
Too much drains at stake to ratify our own absurdity.
Announce our verdict of confusion we cannot
plan the uninvited but to blend
dichotomies of truth brain-drowsed junked out
crude to concede.
We an impressive debacle.
Here lie
the ashes
of our
sanity.
—from "We Can't Confirm Yellow Rain Happened, We Can't Confirm It Didn't"
Mai Der Vang is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. Her poetry has appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and her essays have been published in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. Her debut collection, Afterland, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in California.
Yellow Rain by Mai Der Vang
September 21, 2021
978-1-64445-065-9
Paperback Original $17
224 pages 7" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
BRICKMAKERS
by Selva Almada; Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott
Publication Date November 02, 2021 Fiction
A piercing and passionate novel, set in rural Argentina, about violence and masculinity
Oscar Tamai and Elvio Miranda, the patriarchs of two families of brickmakers, have for years nursed a mutual hatred, but their teenage sons, Pájaro and Ángelito, somehow fell in love. Brickmakers begins as Pájaro and Marciano, Ángelito’s older brother, lie dying in the mud at the base of a Ferris wheel. Inhabiting a dreamlike state between life and death, they recall the events that forced them to pay the price of their fathers’ petty feud.
The Tamai and Miranda families are caught, like the Capulets and the Montagues, in an almost mythic conflict, one that emerges from stubborn pride and intractable machismo. Like her heralded debut, The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada’s fierce and tender second novel is an unforgettable portrayal of characters who initially seem to stand in opposition, but are ultimately revealed to be bound by their similarities.
Almada enlarges the tradition of some of the most distinctive prose stylists of our time. In Brickmakers, she furthers her extraordinary exploration of masculinity and the realities of working-class rural life. This is another exquisitely written and powerfully told story by a major international voice.
Selva Almada is the author of The Wind That Lays Waste and Dead Girls. She is considered one of the most potent literary voices in Argentina and Latin America and one of the region’s most influential feminist intellectuals.
Brickmakers by Selva Almada
November 02, 2021
978-1-64445-069-7
Paperback Original $16
160 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Charco Press 1st. ser., audio: The Wylie Agency Trans., dram.: Agencia Literaria CBQ
THE ART OF REVISION: THE LAST WORD
by Peter Ho Davies
Publication Date November 02, 2021 Nonfiction
The fifteenth volume in the Art of Series takes an expansive view of revision—on the page and in life
In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision—even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Maria Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject.
Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision—that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of three novels, including A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, and two story collections. The winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the PEN/Malamud Prize, he teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor.
The Art of Revision: The Last Word by Peter Ho Davies
November 02, 2021
978-1-64445-039-0
Paperback Original $14
172 pages 5" x 7"
Brit., 1st. ser., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., dram.: Massie & McQuilkin
PROGNOSIS
by Jim Moore
Publication Date November 02, 2021 Poetry
Jim Moore’s poems “are chips of reality, obsidian flakes of the heart and mind” (Jane Hirshfield)
In his eighth collection, the celebrated poet Jim Moore looks into unrelenting darkness where moments of tenderness and awe illuminate, at times suddenly like lightning in the night, at others, more quietly, as the steady glow of streetlights in a snowstorm. These are poems of both patience and urgency, of necessary attendance and helpless exuberance in the breathing world—something rare in contemporary poetry. Written in Minneapolis amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s masked and distanced loneliness, after the police murder of George Floyd, as an empire comes to an end, Prognosis turns toward the living moment as a surprising source of abundance. Here we find instances of essential human connection animated by a saving grace that pulls us back from depression and despair. Contemplating with playful wisdom what it is to brave the later years of one’s life, Moore revels in the possibilities of joy and mourns the limits of our capacity to greet the unknown with resolve and wonder. The prognosis Moore foresees demands continued stillness, continued movement: “Also known as going home,” he writes. “Also known as getting over yourself.”
I know I call in a time of great sadness and anger,
in a time of such fear: still,
if you can manage to answer
we might talk into the long winter night.
I will still be here when the lights on the bridge
go out and the pink flash at dawn disappears,
when the geranium’s single flower bends over double
under the weight of its own blossoming.
—“I Will Still Be Here”
Jim Moore is the author of seven books of poetry, including Underground, Invisible Strings, and Lightning at Dinner. His poetry has appeared in the Nation, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Spoleto, Italy.
Prognosis by Jim Moore
November 02, 2021
978-1-64445-070-3
Paperback Original $16
104 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st. ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
JUST US: AN AMERICAN CONVERSATION
by Claudia Rankine
Publication Date September 07, 2021 Nonfiction
Now in paperback, Claudia Rankine’s “skyscraper in the literature on racism” (Christian Science Monitor)
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes.
This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness deflect true engagement in our shared problems. Rankine makes unprecedented art out of the actual voices and rebuttals of others: white men responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend clarifying her unexpected behavior at a play; and women on the street expressing the political currency of dyeing their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complement Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Funny, vulnerable, and prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate and urgent book, a crucial call to challenge our vexed reality.
Claudia Rankine is the author of Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine teaches at New York University.
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
September 07, 2021
978-1-64445-063-5
Paperback Original $20
360 pages 6" x 9"
Brit.: Allen Lane trans.: Graywolf Press 1st. ser., audio, dram.: Aragi, Inc.