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Title

Winter 2026 Catalog

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Questions 27 & 28

by Karen Tei Yamashita

Publication date April 28, 2026 fiction

A masterful polyvocal history of Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II

In February 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing the secretary of war to remove 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and corral them into inland concentration camps. To be considered for release, they were required to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked the inmates—who had been imprisoned without cause by the US military—whether they were willing to serve in combat for the US military. Question 28 asked them—many of whom American citizens who had never visited Japan—to renounce allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Answering these questions caused volatile divisions within the camps, tore families and friends apart, and had lasting repercussions in the decades postwar.

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Autobiography of Cotton

by Cristina Rivera Garza; Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney

 Publication date February 3, 2026 fiction

A novel about how cotton workers transformed the Mexico-US borderlands, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author

In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which became the basis of his landmark novel Human Mourning. In her own groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields as it intersects with Revueltas’s life in a vivid and evocative history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-US border.

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Swirl & Vortex

by Larry Levis; Edited by David St. John

Publication date February 3, 2026 poetry
 
All the blazingly original work by Larry Levis, “one of the greatest poets of a generation” (Carolyn Forché)
 
What do you do when nothing calls you anymore?
When you turn & there is only the light filling the empty window?
 
When the angel fasting inside you has grown so thin it flies
Out of you a last time without your
 
Knowing it, & the water dries up in its thimble, & the one swing
In the cage comes to rest after its almost imperceptible,
 
Almost endless, swaying?
 
—from “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage”
 
The poetry of Larry Levis increasingly occupies a legendary place of reverence among poets and readers—the spell of his reputation only continuing to widen in the thirty years since his death. From the briefer lyrics and deep image-making of his early books to the long sequences and operatic narratives of his last works, Levis’s poems have an unmistakable signature, a way of expressing the sweep of history, perception, and heartbreak. Over his career, his poetic lines broadened to accommodate the cinematic aperture of his observations on American empire, poverty, landscape, migrant workers, political violence, addiction, and art. Levis’s expansive poems came to resemble the interconnecting patterns just discernible in the eddies of a stream or the leaves circling in a wind.
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Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl

by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Publication date February 17, 2026 literary collections

Seventeen ingenious essays devoted to snails’ and aquatic invertebrates’ uncanny ways of living

Mollusks’ innermost selves are absolute secrets because, not only do they hide in shells or distant habitats, but also that’s just how it is with innermost selves.
 
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl collects Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood. In graceful linked essays, Wong wonders: What constitutes a self if a starfish can twist off one of his arms to explore the seafloor on its own? What is an animate being, considering a living snail is also an inanimate shell? What does love mean to a jellyfish, or time to an octopus? Her encounters with nonhuman animals reshape her language into different forms from collage to fragments, and prompt uncommon engagements with various texts. She looks behind words like “invasive” and “endling” in scientific articles and in poetry, questions natural selection with a bubble-rafting snail, sees the bivalve in Dostoevsky, and studies a speculative treatise about a “vampire squid from hell.”

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The Spoil

by Maile Chapman

Publication date March 17, 2026 fiction

A mesmerizing novel about the perplexities of memory, Las Vegas real estate, DIY projects, and demons
In a rambling split-level house on the outskirts of Tacoma in the 1970s, a young girl is preoccupied by the anomalous phenomena she reads about in magazines: alien visitations, ESP, pyramid power, the Bermuda Triangle. Meanwhile, she and her stepbrother, thrown uneasily together by disaster and divorce, grow increasingly convinced that a malevolent presence resides in their house, and they develop elaborate strategies to live with it.
 
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The Memory Museum

by M Lin

 Publication date April 21, 2026 fiction

An expansive debut collection exploring the complex lives of women in China and the Chinese diaspora

Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China’s One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.
 

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City Like Water

by Dorothy Tse; Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

 Publication date March 3, 2026 fiction

A potent and disorienting new book by the author of Owlish, a National Book Critics Circle prize finalist 

The city you grew up in is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—classmates, teachers, counterfeit watches, the erotic toe cleavage that used to lead the way down secret passages. Yet you still catch snatches of conversation lingering in the air and glimpse sun-dazzled residents retreating into dark crevices.

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Hide

by Carolina Ebeid

 Publication date March 3, 2026 fiction

A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile’s impact on memory, identity, and futurity

into an index of blue
blue cellophane blue crinoline
spun sugar blue
dissolving on a tongue
Another leap and another down
to touch the bottom through
a glitch band of electric snow
Every sound underwater blooms like iron
—“Home Movie: Maria Jumps into the Pool”

Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid's Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.

 
 
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Overtakelessness

by Daniel Moysaenko

Publication date April 7, 2026 poetry

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Alberto Ríos

In bed, leaves whipping the roof hard
as hail, I watch the news on my phone:

A muffled shaky video from Ukraine
like the one shot by my cousin.

A crater
        a crater
                a crater
                   a crater
—from “They Began Their Stories ‘When the War Ended’”

 
Overtakelessness is a powerful reckoning with war, its ruinous proximity to daily existence and the dissonance of experiencing it from afar. These poems trace the long history and the present circumstance of the ongoing and devastating war in Ukraine, a country whose origins far predate Russia’s, despite Moscow’s propagandist claims. Through the lens of the Ukrainian diaspora witnessing the current violence from America, Daniel Moysaenko attempts to square a centuries-old motherland with a newly aggrieved contemporary nation. A third country emerges in these poems: one that, though spectral, exists in a perpetual future, “astounded at what’s left of living.”
 
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Charlottesville

Charlottesville

by Deborah Baker

Publication date April 21, 2026 history

Now in paperback, the story of the torch march and rally that shocked the nation

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.
 

 
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