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Title

Spring 2024 Catalog

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Bluff

by Danez Smith

Publication date August 20, 2024 poetry

“Danez Smith is a powerhouse of poetry.”—Literary Hub

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.  

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Jellyfish Have No Ears

by Adèle Rosenfeld; translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Publication date August 6, 2024 fiction

A deeply moving debut novel about the flaws of language, the fear of silence, and the power of imagination

Since she was little, Louise has been not quite hearing and not quite deaf—her life with this invisible disability has been one of in-betweenness. After an audiology test shows that almost all her hearing is gone, her doctor suggests getting a cochlear implant. The operation will be irreversible, making the decision all the more fraught. The technology would give Louise a new sense of hearing—but it would be at the expense of her natural hearing, which, for all its weakness, has shaped her unique relationship with the world, full of whispers and shadows.

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The Long Run

by Stacey D'Erasmo

Publication date July 9, 2024 nonfiction

The author of The Art of Intimacy asks eight legendary artists: What has sustained you in the long run?

How do I keep doing this—making art? Stacey D’Erasmo had been writing for twenty years and had published three novels when she asked herself this question. She was past the rush of her first books and wondering what to expect—how to stay alive in her vocation—in the decades ahead.

 

 

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The Age of Loneliness

by Laura Marris

Publication date August 6, 2024 nonfiction

A vital, intimate inquiry into the astonishing connections between personal and ecological loneliness

In this debut essay collection, Laura Marris reframes environmental degradation by setting aside the conventional, catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species. She asks: How do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what's missing in the landscapes closest to us?

 

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Anima

by Kapka Kassabova

Publication date August 20, 2024 nonfiction

A dramatic evocation of the intimate bond between people and animals in one of Europe’s last wild places

In Anima, Kapka Kassabova introduces us to the “pastiri” people—the shepherds struggling to hold on to an ancient way of life in which humans and animals exist in profound interdependence. Following her three previous books set in the Balkans, and with an increasing interest in the degraded state of our planet and culture, Kassabova reaches further into the spirit of place than she ever has before. In this extraordinary portrayal of pastoral life, she investigates the heroic efforts to sustain the oldest surviving breeds of our domesticated animals, and she shows us the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance—the seasonal movement, on foot, of a vast herd of sheep, working in tandem with dogs. She also becomes more and more attuned to the isolation and sacrifices inherent in the lives shaped by this work.

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Not a River

by Selva Almada; translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott

Publication date May 7, 2024 fiction

A novel that conjures a river thick and dark as ink, teeming with life, memory, and ghosts

It’s not a river, it’s this river.

A hot, motionless afternoon. Enero and El Negro are fishing with Tilo, their dead friend’s teenage son. After hours of struggling with a hooked stingray, Enero aims his revolver into the water and shoots it. They hang the ray’s enormous corpse from a tree at their campsite and let it go to rot, drawing the attention of some local islanders and igniting a long-simmering fury toward outsiders and their carelessness. It’s only the two sisters—the teenage nieces of one of the locals, Aguirre—with their hair black as cowbird feathers and giving off the scent of green grass, who are curious about the trio and invite them to a dance. But the girls are not quite as they seem. As night approaches and tensions rise, Enero and El Negro return to the charged memories of their friend who years ago drowned in this same river.

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Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

by Catherine Barnett

Publication date May 7, 2024 poetry

Catherine Barnett's new poems move beautifully and unpredictably through loneliness, comedy, intellect, and love

The loneliness that collects in mirrors and faces—at bedside vigils and in city streets—quickens Catherine Barnett’s metaphysical poems, which are like speculative prescriptions for this common human experience. Here loneliness is filled with belonging, which is in turn filled with loneliness, each state suffused and emptied by the other. Barnett’s fourth collection is part manifesto, part how-to manual, part apologia: a guide to the homeopathic dangers and healing powers of an emotion so charged with eros, humor, and elusive beauty it becomes a companion both desired and eschewed, necessary and illuminating.

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Don't Let Me Be Lonely

by Claudia Rankine

Publication date July 9, 2024 nonfiction

A new edition of the first groundbreaking installment in Claudia Rankine’s American trilogy

A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars—doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.

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Shy

by Max Porter

Publication date June 4, 2024 fiction

New in paperback, a novel by “contemporary fiction’s bard of ugly beauty and exultant despair” (The New Yorker)

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?
 
He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.
 
The night is huge and it hurts.
 

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