Title

Spring 2023 Catalog

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Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

by Roger Reeves

Publication Date August 1 Nonfiction

A crucial book that calls for community, solidarity, and joy, even in—especially in—these dark days

In his debut work of nonfiction, award-winning poet Roger Reeves finds new meaning in silence, protest, fugitivity, freedom, and ecstasy. Braiding memoir, theory, and criticism, Reeves juxtaposes the images of an opera singer breaking the state-mandated silence curfew by singing out into the streets of Santiago, Chile, and a father teaching his daughter to laugh out loud at the planes dropping bombs on them in Aleppo, Syria. He describes the history of the hush harbor—places where enslaved people could steal away to find silence and court ecstasy, to the side of their impossible conditions. In other essays, Reeves highlights a chapter in Toni Morrison’s Beloved to locate common purpose between Black and Indigenous peoples; he visits the realities of enslaved people on McLeod Plantation, where some of the descendants of those formerly enslaved lived into the 1990s; and he explores his own family history, his learning to read closely through the Pentecostal church tradition, and his passing on of reading as a pleasure, freedom, and solace to his daughter, who is frightened the police will gun them down.

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Shy

by Max Porter

Publication Date May 2 Fiction

A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone

This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.
 
You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.
 
He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.
 
Got your special meds, nutcase?

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Owlish

by Dorothy Tse; Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce

Publication Date June 6 Fiction

A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong

With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?

In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who has tantalizingly sprung to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

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The Kingdom of Surfaces

by Sally Wen Mao

Publication Date August 1 Poetry

A virtuosic new poetry collection from Sally Wen Mao, “a consistently inspiring and exciting voice” (Morgan Parker)

In her garden, Empress Leizu watched the fat white worm
feasting on the mulberry leaves,
its mouth a gutter,
 
a hole, a maw so consumed by consumption
it falls through a hole it has eaten
 
into her teacup, and once steeped in that bitterness
the silkworm unravels, retching spools and spools
of thread soft as magnolia, fragrant too,
 
and the Empress remembered a childhood hunger
so great it turned red like the mulberries
—from “On Silk”

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Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time

by Kapka Kassabova

Publication Date May 16 Fiction

A search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene by the award-winning author of Border

In Elixir, in a wild river valley and amid the three mountains that define it, Kapka Kassabova seeks out the deep connection between people, plants, and place. The Mesta is one of the oldest rivers in Europe and the surrounding forests and mountains of the southern Balkans are an extraordinarily rich nexus for plant gatherers.
 

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Fat Time and Other Stories

by Jeffery Renard Allen

Publication Date June 20 Fiction

A ferocious, innovative story collection about Black lives in the past, present, and future

In Fat Time and Other Stories, Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Along with them are characters of Allen’s invention: two teenagers in an unnamed big city who stumble through a down-low relationship; an African preacher visits a Christian religious retreat to speak on the evils of fornication in an Italian villa imported to America by Abraham Lincoln; and an albino revolutionary who struggles with leading his people into conflict.

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Still Falling

by Jennifer Grotz

Publication Date May 2 Poetry

A searching new collection by a poet who “pays exquisite attention to everything she encounters” (The Washington Post)

I thought of my mother, who’d once lain in bed
at the brink of dawn, very peaceful.
Very pleasantly, she said, for once
she felt no pain, she heard the birdsong
and knew death was right there if she chose.
It had been a preparation, she thought.
But later I understood: though they were gone,
I didn’t want to go to them, there was no other
place to go, Earth’s the right place for love.
—from “In Sicily”

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Men in My Situation

Per Petterson; Translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey

Publication Date July 11 Fiction

A tender, merciless portrait of a life going to pieces by the internationally acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses

Arvid Jansen is in a tailspin, unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident. He spends his time drinking, falling into fleeting relationships with women, and driving around in his Mazda. A year ago, his wife Turid took their three daughters and left him. When Turid  unexpectedly calls for a ride home from the train station, he faces the life they’ve made without him.

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