Winter 2022 Catalog
CUSTOMS
by Solmaz Sharif
Publication Date March 01, 2022 Poetry
The devastating second collection by Solmaz Sharif, author of Look, a finalist for the National Book Award
In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.
Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.
but I said it
in velvet. I said it in feathers.
And so one poet reminded me
Remember what you are to them.
Poodle, I said.
And remember what they are to you.
Meat.
—from “Patronage”
Solmaz Sharif is the author of Look. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in Granta, the New Republic, and Poetry. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
Customs by Solmaz Sharif
March 1, 2021
978-1-64445-079-6
Paperback $16
72 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit. trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st. ser.: Solmaz Sharif c/o Graywolf Press
IF AN EGYPTIAN CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH
By Noor Naga
Publication Date April 05, 2022 Fiction
Winner of the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, a lush experimental novel about love as a weapon of empire
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer and the author of a verse novel, Washes, Prays. She is winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award, the RBC/PEN Canada Award, and the Disquiet Fiction Prize. She teaches at the American University in Cairo.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
April 5, 2022
978-1-64445-081-9
Paperback $16
192 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st. ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
SHELTER: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore
by Lawrence Jackson
Publication Date April 19, 2022 Nonfiction
A stirring consideration of homeownership, fatherhood, race, faith, and the history of an American city
In 2016, Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job in Baltimore, searched for schools for his sons, and bought a house. It would all be unremarkable but for the fact that he had grown up in West Baltimore and now found himself teaching at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides fodder for this captivating memoir in essays.
With sardonic wit, Jackson describes his struggle to make a home in the city that had just been convulsed by the uprising that followed the murder of Freddie Gray. His new neighborhood, Homeland—largely White, built on racial covenants—is not where he is “supposed” to live. But his purchase, and his desire to pass some inheritance on to his children, provides a foundation for him to explore his personal and spiritual history, as well as Baltimore’s untold stories. Each chapter is a new exploration: a trip to the Maryland shore is an occasion to dilate on Frederick Douglass’s complicated legacy, an encounter at a Hopkins shuttle-bus stop becomes a meditation on public transportation and policing, and Jackson’s beleaguered commitment to his church opens a pathway to reimagine an urban community through jazz.
Shelter is an extraordinary biography of a city and a celebration of our capacity for domestic thriving. Jackson’s story leans on the essay to contain the raging absurdity of Black American life, establishing him as a maverick, essential writer.
Lawrence Jackson is a biographer and critic whose work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, n+1, and Best American Essays. He teaches English and history at Johns Hopkins and founded the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts.
Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore by Lawrence Jackson
April 19, 2022
978-1-64445-083-3
Paperback $17
320 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st. ser., dram.: Serendipity Literary Agency
WHEN I SING, MOUNTAINS DANCE
by Irene Solà
Publication Date March 15, 2022 Fiction
A spellbinding novel that places one family’s tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself
Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain.” He gathers black chanterelles, attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he’d harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, and in it Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain.
Irene Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal, historical, and even geological scale. Lyrical, elemental, and mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies and our triumphs.
Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the Documenta Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
March 15, 2022
978-1-64445-080-2
Paperback $16
208 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Granta Books Trans., dram.: Indent Literary Agency 1st. ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Men In My Situation
by Per Petterson
Publication Date February 01, 2022 Fiction
A tender, merciless portrait of a life going to pieces by the internationally acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses
Men in My Situation, Per Petterson’s evocative and moving new novel, finds Arvid Jansen in a tailspin, unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident. In the aftermath, Arvid’s wife, Turid, divorced him and took their three daughters with her. One year later, Arvid still hasn’t recovered. He spends his time drinking, falling into fleeting relationships with women, and driving around in his Mazda. When Turid unexpectedly calls for a ride home from the train station, he has to face the life they’ve made without him.
Critics have already hailed Men in My Situation as the equal of Petterson’s international best seller Out Stealing Horses, in part for his unflinching portrayal of Arvid’s dark night of the soul. In this moment of faltering hope and despair, Arvid’s daughter Vigdis—who he’s always felt understood him best—has a crisis of her own and reaches out. Now he must find a way to respond to someone who, after everything, still needs him. Reaching the heights of Petterson’s best work, Men in My Situation is a heartrending, indelible story from a celebrated author.
Per Petterson is the author of eight novels, including Men in My Situation and Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than fifty languages. Petterson has received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and the Norwegian Critics Prize. He lives in Norway.
Men in My Situation by Per Petterson
February 01, 2022
978-1-64445-075-8
Hardcover $26
304 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., 1st. ser., audio: Penguin Random House Trans., dram.: Oslo Literary Agancy
ECHOLAND
by Per Petterson
Publication Date February 01, 2022 Fiction
The shimmering, windswept first novel by the internationally acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses
Echoland is the powerful and emotionally resonant first novel from Per Petterson. Written in the mold of his early story collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, it features a young Arvid Janssen, who is now twelve, on the verge of his teenage years and beginning to understand more about the world and his place in it. Set over the course of a single formative summer, the novelcaptures a series of episodes from Arvid’s long visit to his grandparents’ home in Denmark. He rides his bike around town, befriends other children on the beach, fishes for plaice, and weathers misunderstandings with his mother and grandparents, all of which Petterson imbues with the hope and yearning that come with this stage of life. Echoland is an assured and poignant beginning for an author—and character—who would go on to be loved the world over.
Per Petterson is the author of eight novels, including Men in My Situation and Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than fifty languages. Petterson has received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and the Norwegian Critics Prize. He lives in Norway.
Echoland by Per Petterson
February 01, 2022
978-1-64445-076-5
Paperback $15
144 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Penguin Random House 1st. ser.: Graywolf Press
AURELIA, AURÉLIA
by Kathryn Davis
Publication Date March 01, 2022 Nonfiction
An eerily dream-like memoir, and the first work of nonfiction by one of our most inventive novelists
Aurelia, Aurélia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can “try on personae like dresses.” She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions—Woolf, Durrell, Bergman—sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, “climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women, looking for kindling.”
Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings. The preoccupations that mark Davis’s fiction are recognizable here—fateful voyages, an intense sense of place, the unexpected union of the magical and the real—but the vehicle itself is utterly new.
Aurelia, Aurélia explodes the conventional bounds of memoir. It is an astonishing accomplishment.
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, including The Silk Road and Duplex. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.
Aurelia, Aurélia by Kathryn Davis
March 01, 2022
978-1-64445-078-9
Paperback $15
128 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st. ser., dram.: The Wiley Agency Audio: Graywolf Press
AGAINST HEAVEN
by Kemi Alabi
Publication Date April 05, 2022 Poetry
Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Claudia Rankine
Kemi Alabi’s transcendent debut reimagines the poetic and cultural traditions from which it is born, troubling the waters of some of our country’s central and ordained fictions—those mythic politics of respectability, resilience, and redemption. Instead of turning to a salvation that has been forced upon them, Alabi turns to the body and the earth as sites of paradise defined by the pleasure and possibility of Black, queer fugitivity. Through tender love poems, righteous prayers, and vital provocations, we see the colonizers we carry within ourselves being laid to rest.
Against Heaven is a praise song made for the flames of a burning empire—a freedom dream that shapeshifts into boundless multiplicities for the wounds made in the name of White supremacy and its gods. Alabi has written an astonishing collection of magnificent range, commanding the full spectrum of the Black, queer spirit’s capacity for magic, love, and ferocity in service of healing—the highest power there is.
The worlds and little deaths you build
with just your breath and hands.
Silhouettes that singe the walls
with new maps to salvation
till even the floorboards buck and cry jesus.
Even the windows blush and say amen.
—from “How to Fornicate”
Kemi Alabi’s work has been published in Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2, Best New Poets 2019, and elsewhere, and they are the recipient of the 2020 Beacon Street Prize. Alabi is a coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection and lives in Chicago.
Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi
April 05, 2022
978-1-64445-082-6
Paperback $16
80 pages 7" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram: Graywolf Press 1st. ser.: Kemi Alabi c/o Graywolf Press
THE KING'S TOUCH
by Tom Sleigh
Publication Date February 01, 2022 Poetry
A profound encounter with the hyperreality of our time of global upheaval, violence, and pandemic
Tom Sleigh’s poems are skeptical of the inevitability of our fate, but in this brilliant new collection, they are charged with a powerful sense of premonition, as if the future is unfolding before us, demanding something greater than the self. Justice is a prevailing force, even while the poems are fully cognizant of the refugee crisis, war, famine, and the brutal reality of a crowded hospital morgue.
The King’s Touch collides the world of fact and the world of mystery with a resolutely secular register. The title poem refers to the once-held belief that the king, as a divine representative, is imbued with the power of healing touch. Sleigh turns this encounter between illness and human contact toward his own chronic blood disease and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its mounting death tolls. One poem asks, “isn’t it true that no matter how long you / wear them, masks don’t grieve, only faces do?”
In this essential new work, Sleigh shows how the language of poetry itself can revive and recuperate a sense of a future under the conditions of violence, social unrest, and global anxiety about the fate of the planet.
to intubate the moon or hold the little plastic basin
to the sky’s lips. “The sun is an insult,” wrote one.
Millions on millions of stacked-up rooms
where screens become a hive mind
thinking it, seeing it, saying it over and over again.
—from “Little Testament”
Tom Sleigh is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed; Army Cats; and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is also the author of two essay collections, The Land between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees and Interview with a Ghost. Sleigh teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York.
The King's Touch by Tom Sleigh
February 01, 2022
978-1-64445-077-2
Paperback $16
112 pages 6.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st. ser.: Tom Sleigh c/o Graywolf Press
THAT WAS NOW, THIS IS THEN
by Vijay Seshadri
Publication Date January 11, 2022 Poetry
The brilliant new collection from Vijay Seshadri, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 3 Sections
No one blends ironic intelligence, emotional frankness, radical self-awareness, and complex humor the way Vijay Seshadri does. In this, his fourth collection, he affirms his place as one of America’s greatest living poets. That Was Now, This Is Then takes on the planar paradoxes of time and space, destabilizing highly tuned lyrics and elegies with dizzying turns in poems of unrequitable longing, of longing for longing, of longing to be found, of grief. In these poems, Seshadri’s speaker becomes the subject, the reader becomes the writer, and the multiplying refracted narratives yield an “anguish so pure it almost / feels like joy.”
in the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,
in the sadness of my past being passed.
I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquities
and look at the sarcophagi there.
I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,
sagacious mud of my past,
so I wrote you and said I’d be in town and could we meet.
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, and came to America as a small child. He is the author of three collections of poems: 3 Sections, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; The Long Meadow, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and Wild Kingdom. He is currently the Myers Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
That Was Now, This Is Then by Vijay Seshadri
January 11, 2022
978-1-64445-074-1
Paperback $16
80 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st. ser.: Vijay Seshadri c/o Graywolf Press