New titles from Black Rose Books, Montreal’s radical publisher since 1969. This year’s catalogue includes Freedom or Death, the definitive text on Mikhail Bakunin, titan of the Left; Eros and Revolution, a daring exploration into the history of revolutionary social movements; and Castoriadis Against Heidegger, a critical tour-de-force juxtaposing the politics of these two pivotal philosophers. View our flyer and see our website for more!
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Stephen C. Pollock’s poetry collection Exits explores the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the potential for renewal. It also responds to contemporary anxieties surrounding death and the universal search for meaning.
Musical and multilayered, Exits features a potpourri of styles, ranging from traditional forms to free verse to hybrid works. Many of the images are drawn from nature. In addition, each poem is paired with a piece of artwork intended to resonate with the writing and enhance the reader’s experience.
Exits has been honored with the Gold Medal for poetry in the 2023 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards and the Silver Medal for poetry in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Echoing these accolades, Midwest Book Review declares: “Exits is a book that has profoundly impacted the literary world.”
“Pollock’s poetry is brilliant” —Kristiana Reed, editor-in-chief, Free Verse Revolution
“Exits exemplifies the musicality of language” —Foreword-Clarion Reviews
“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery, Exits is a masterful collection” —IndieReader, 5.0 stars
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members.
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Just published! Pangyrus Press announces Wheatley at 250, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley Peters’s historic and transformative Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral with exciting re-inscriptions by some of today’s most compelling poets: U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Kiki Petrosino, Mahogany L. Browne, and more. View our flyer and learn more at our website.
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With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
[Thanks to our friends at The Book Store on the Hill in Richmond Hill, Georgia, for the image – and Happy Birthday!]
Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey by J. W Young is a book of poetry & writings which deals with the confines of marriage when defined and marred by subjugation, domestic abuse, and censorship in modern times. It is Young’s first published literary work. Though many of the writings were destroyed, this book contains survivors. The poetic expressions served as a means to cope and endure. Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey is a journey of hope, pain, grief and the difficult pathway to reclaiming a sense of self.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: I have so many ghosts and nowhere to put them.
Map Literary and the MFA program at William Paterson University are thrilled to celebrate the publication of Fiona Lu’s How to Become the God of Small Things. Come celebrate with us! View flyer to learn more.
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We succeeded in making it through January! How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding out? Well, if reading more was one of them – great news!
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
On the morning of April 16, 2014, a passenger ferry carrying 476 people was en route from Incheon, South Korea to the island of Jeju. After a dangerous turn against a strong current, the boat began to capsize, with hundreds trapped inside.
The sinking would take the lives of 306 passengers, including 250 schoolchildren and 11 teachers from the outskirts of Seoul onboard for a field trip. The excessive death toll has been largely attributed to the failure of the Korean Coast Guard to mobilize sufficiently, leading to a highly publicized court case and jail time for members of the crew, who abandoned the ship and all aboard.
The tragedy caused public outcry around the world. But none were so bereft as the families left behind, like the main character, Yun-young. As the days turn into weeks and the weeks turn into months, they wait for news of Yun-young’s Unnie (the Korean word for “older sister”), a teacher now missing. As Yun-young embarks on an unfamiliar journey to understand Unnie’s life, she finds herself entangled in a blend of memories and unforeseen revelations, stirring an irresistible yearning. From Korea to America and back again, past and present overlap, as Yun-young tries to piece together the life of her enigmatic older sister.
“I’m a high school teacher in Korea,” writes author Yun-Yun. “At times, when I observe my students immersed in laughter with their peers, I feel a sudden wave of sadness, reminded of all the young lives taken away too soon. I imagine they, too, would have laughed just like that. Writing Unnie, my first novel, I was surprised at how easily the words flowed from me. To this day, I can’t shake the feeling that the lost students were guiding me as I wrote.”
Originally published in 2022, this edition is revised and re-released in honor of the 10-year anniversary of the event.
Red Hawk’s Book of Lamentations opens with the poem, “Come Sisters, Let Us Lament,” which begins, “Where do we go, how / shall we make our way / when the Stars go out?” The collection is divided into sections of poems that seek to answer the question – or take readers on a quest of their own: Lamentations of Innocence: What is Lost, What is Gained; Lamentations of the Animals: Whose Cross is to Bear Our Pain; Lamentations of Experience: What it Costs, What Remains; Lamentations of Conscience: The Holy Ghost in Our Brains.
The author shares his experience that guides his writing, “Red Hawk is not an Indian name, nor was it ever intended to be one or pretend to be one; it is an Earth name, given by Mother Earth many years ago after a 4-day water fast at the Buffalo River in an effort to save my life in one of the darkest periods of my life. It was given as answered prayer. It indicates a deep love & reverence for the Earth which named me, and how it has shaped my life. I stand by it. Love of the Earth is my Spiritual path. It honors Her power to direct the course of our lives. I am Her legitimate son. As the illegitimate son of unknown parents, Robert Moore is my adopted name given to me by 2 people who died of alcoholism; I honor them by the way I live my life.”
Red Hawk is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. He is the author of 11 books of poetry and two books on spiritual practice. He is a student and devotee of the Spiritual Teacher Lee Lozowick and of Lozowick’s Master, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, the Godchild of Tiruvanamali, India. He is also a long-time student of the Spiritual Teacher George Gurdjieff. His root-Guru was Osho Rajneesh. He is the winner of numerous national honors for his writing.
The year is 1971. Lost deep in the woods of West Virginia, a desperate young girl discovers a book of witchcraft and pledges herself to Satan. But the Devil’s checking into town, and he’s got something special in store for this new little witch.
When Black Lavender Luci, the Devil himself, rocks up to Clockmaker, West Virginia in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith, wearing alligator boots, a chinchilla coat, Porkpie hat and a gold-plated grin, he’s got his sights on only one thing: fifteen-year-old Miss Priscilla Carpenter, the baddest witch in town. Tired of being on the receiving end of Old Red—her father’s favorite paddle—Priscilla doesn’t hesitate when she stumbles upon a book of witchcraft and stains the pages with her blood.
At first, signing her soul away to Satan was just an opportunity to have some fun, help the people she loves, and get a little revenge on the townspeople that turned their backs on her and her mother, Lavinia. Flanked by her childhood best friend Joseph and her loyal disciple Big Tommy, Priscilla makes her way through the increasingly demanding spells of her beloved grimoire. But when the Devil calls in his favor and seduces Priscilla deeper into the world of dark magic, drugs, and desire, she unwittingly unleashes a torrent of death on Clockmaker, causing dams to break, women to go missing, and rabbit piss to fall from the sky. And pretty soon, she finds herself the baby mama of Hell himself.
A lifetime buried in the mud, a shadow haunting your past, a creature built from offered scraps – there is something lurking in the dark! In this new collection, 15 writers explore the many shapes that darkness can take, from the monstrous to the stark realities of loss and heartbreak. In tales that embrace both the mundane and the supernatural, nothing is impossible, and realities can be shattered and rebuilt for those willing to dare.
MONARCH: Stories subverts the reader’s common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America’s city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.
The collection is driven by its characters, unsung heroes who are shades of the sufferers and healers in all. An inclusive invitation, MONARCH is aimed at an intimate portrayal of scarred characters on American streets beating the drum of current culture against the fierce rhythm of critical social justice issues. An exploration of the human condition through a lens of the damaged, MONARCH’s characters bear traumas with their bodies, and often, they transgress while learning how to love through small acts of kindness. They break in, break down, and ultimately, break open.
Foreword by Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas.
In Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey, wine merchant–turned–archaeologist and art historian Robert Bradley shares his past twenty-five years of personal discovery about the food of Peru and the history that led to its current culinary fluorescence today. Journeying from coasts to highlands and back again, the author introduces readers to the most interesting aspects of Peruvian cuisine that he encounters along the way, with several recipes included. Bradley sizzles about Peruvian ceviche, pisco and the pisco sour, and the country’s best restaurants—two ranked in the top ten by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023. He does this all while sampling food lore, Andean anthropology, history, linguistics, and the pleasures and perils of travel within Peru.
Robert C. Bradley started out as a wine merchant for New York City’s most acclaimed restaurants. A trip to Central America put him on the path to studying Mesoamerican art history and archaeology at Columbia University. He is now an associate professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Christopher Soden’s poems are never a PR campaign for the author, never self-aggrandizing below a thin veil of manufactured vulnerability. These are not poems created to insight sighs from the audience. They are much more real than that, much more truly vulnerable than that, much more sticky and fun and difficult than that. Often life is solitary, often life is a mother-fucker, but if you are holding this book in your hands then you are not alone, even more than that: you are being held in the arms of an author who may not know you but, in each and every poem, wonders and cares about you. —Matthew Dickman author of Wonderland
Slim Blue Universe: Poems by Eleanor Lerman Mayapple Press, February 2024
Slim Blue Universe is acclaimed author Eleanor Lerman’s seventh collection of poetry. Her work speaks to readers in different voices – the Woodstock generation grown older, social activists still raging at the powers that be, lovers remembering days of paradise, and lonely dreamers still dreaming of better days to come – that weave together both the joys of life and its many afflictions. The poems in this collection ache with longing for what has been lost along the journey through a life shaped by the volatile middle years of the 20th century and with a yearning to look beyond the human horizon to whatever mysterious pathways may lie just up ahead.
Eleanor Lerman established a fifty-year history of published works, including numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and novels. One of the youngest people ever to be named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, she also won the inaugural Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Poets, among other accolades for poetry as well as fiction.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
Forcibly exiled to Honduras at the conclusion of No One Weeps for Me Now, Inspector Dolores Morales returns in Sergio Ramirez’s final, stand-alone volume of The Managua Trilogy, accompanied by a cast of brave priests, corrupt secret service agents, washed up former foot soldiers, and out-for-themselves vestiges of mid-century ideals, all colliding in this exuberant portrait of the depredations of oligarchs and dictators, the human cost of promises deferred, and the implacable hopes and resolve of Nicaraguans.
“Dead Men Cast No Shadows is an enormously entertaining novel about responses to perfidy in high places by one of the most prominent writers in the Spanish-speaking world. It is a courageous act of political defiance; Ramírez has paid a painful price for simply putting pen to paper to tell the truth. . . . He examines a shameful period in Nicaraguan history through the lens of a police/detective yarn and he succeeds magnificently.”— Brooks Geikan, The Arts Fuse
Now living in exile in Spain, Sergio Ramirez is the only Central American author ever to be awarded the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in Spanish language letters.
Tandem: A Novel by Andy Mozina Tortoise Books, October 2023
In Andy Mozina’s novel Tandem, Mike Kovacs is an economics professor who’s trying to get over a bitter divorce. He is barely on speaking terms with his only child. And he has just killed two bicyclists in an inebriated hit-and-run at a deserted Michigan beach.
Claire Boland’s daughter is one of the victims. She’s racked with guilt over what she might have done differently as a parent. Her marriage is buckling under the weight of the tragedy. And yet there’s one person who seems to understand the magnitude of her grief—her neighbor, Mike Kovacs.
Tandem is a dark comedy about two lives that intersect in the most awful way possible. Mozina’s novel details the absurd lengths people go to avoid uncomfortable truths. It’s an exploration of the weight of guilt and the longing for justice—and the extreme lengths we will go to for love.
Andy Mozina is the author of the novel Contrary Motion (Spiegel & Grau) and two story collections: Quality Snacks was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and The Women Were Leaving the Men won the GLCA New Writers Award. He teaches literature and creative writing at Kalamazoo College.
Editor’s Choice is not a paid promotion; selections are made solely at the discretion of the editor; descriptions are from the publisher’s website. To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!
The stories in Sara Hosey’s stunning collection, Dirty Suburbia, trace the lives of girls and women struggling to live with dignity in a world that often hates them.
Dirty suburbias are working-class neighborhoods in which girls who are left to fend for themselves sometimes become predators, as well as affluent communities in which women discover that money is no protection against sexism, both their own and others’.
In Janice Deal’s linked story collection, everyday people navigate the uncertainties of life in the American heartland, seeking order in chaos with a very human mix of resilience and folly.
At first glance, the fictional Ephrem, Illinois, seems a friendly, familiar town—it draws you right in, even if you don’t need supplies at the mall or a snack at Brat Station. But as you come closer, you discover people who are complex and unpredictable. Life itself is capricious, and loneliness can turn a person strange. Yet there’s much affection here, small and large examples of human kindness.
For years, Janice Deal has been publishing award-winning stories about Ephrem. (Reviewers have compared them to Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, and Flannery O’Connor.) Now assembled for the first time, these extraordinary tales offer a masterful snapshot of life in today’s small-town America.
Janice Deal is the author of a novel, The Sound of Rabbits, and a previous story collection, The Decline of Pigeons. Stories from Strange Attractors have won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Janice has also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose.
With Death, an Orange Segment Between Our Teeth by Marie-Claire Bancquart Translated from the French by Wendeline A. Hardenberg Orison Books, November 2023
Marie-Claire Bancquart (1932–2019) was a prolific and prize-winning French poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. In her poetry, she combines an erudite vocabulary and references to classical literature with an earthy sensibility and a fascination with experiencing the smallest moments of everyday life fully. The deceptive simplicity of her poems lays bare the mysteries underlying the world we inhabit and our very existence. Wendeline A. Hardenberg’s careful and skillful translations are sure to broaden the audience for this significant poet as yet too little known outside of France.
The Capture of Krao Farini by Nay Saysourinho Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023
The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough. Nay Saysourinho is a writer, visual artist, and recipient of a 2023 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship. She was previously a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Short Fiction Scholar at Tin House Winter Workshop. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale and has received support from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.
“A tender, transformative novel for all who sometimes feel they don’t fit in, for anyone who’s ever been struck down by scamming or bullying, and for anyone who ever suffers profound pangs of loss—you will never forget this terrific story.” —Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People’s Poet Laureate of the United States 2019 – 2021
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High Lonesome: Poems by Allison Titus Saturnalia Books, October 2023
High Lonesome by Allison Titus is a radio left on in a candlelit room, playing softly into the shadows as the hours fall through the evening. Interruptions of static, a slow confetti of grief drifting into the corners, mysterious white noise dispatches. Here is a meditation on estrangement—from an other, from the world, from the self—and its long aftermath spent learning how to cultivate tenderness and devotion in a world “where nobody / is tender enough,” a practice that alternates between sorrow and transcendence. These poems are little ceremonies of attention to a variety of lonelinesses, both human and non-human.
The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones Rose Metal Press, October 2023
In The Hurricane Book, Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays. Organized around six hurricanes that passed through the island with varying degrees of intensity between 1928 and 2017, The Hurricane Book documents the myriad ways in which colonialism—particularly the relationship between the United States and the island—has seeped into the lives of Puerto Ricans, affecting how they and their land recover from catastrophe, as well as how families and citizens are bound to one another. Through accounts of relatives, folklore, and necessary escape, Acevedo-Quiñones illuminates both the tenderness and heartbreak of bonds with family and homeland.
Uncollected Later Poems (1968-1979) by Ernst Meister Translated by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick Wave Books, November 2023
In these skillful new translations by poet Graham Foust and scholar Samuel Frederick, whose work has previously been shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, each line is gnomic yet ample, opening spaces of reflection on mortality and infinity. Now preserved in this portable, English-language volume, these poems from Georg Büchner Prize winner Ernst Meister’s last decade are oracular and entrancing. While the collections previously published by Wave—Of Entirety Say the Sentence (2015), In Time’s Rift (2012), and Wallless Space (2014) —provide expansive access to Meister’s late work, Uncollected Later Poems (1968–1979) delivers granular, endlessly rewarding profundities.
Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq Saturnalia Books, October 2023
Translated from the French, Cutting the Stems by Virginie Lalucq is a playful, long poem in sections that contains a pastiche of various unlikely influences: manuals on gardening and plant propagation, etymological dictionaries, gemstone and mineral guides, a how-to for florists, and other “un-poetic” texts. Lalucq’s poem incorporates word play, linguistic borrowings, and etymological references, and McQuerry and Bourhis’s translation captures, and, at times, reinvents, that word play for an English audience. Translated by Claire McQuerry and Céline Bourhis.
The title of Carlos Soto-Román’s 11 evokes the “other” September 11: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship. Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 immerses readers in the State-sponsored terror during this period and the effects it would continue to have on Chile. The poetry in this book adopts the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the language emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory. How does censorship translate into another language when translation already involves so many degrees of selective removal? This collaborative version in English, taken on by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.
I am the dead, who, you take care of me by Anthony McCann Wave Books, November 2023
The poems in Anthony McCann’s I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead. Following the poet’s recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is “a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat.” By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. “I want life—but for the living” he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these works ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach Elixir Press, January 2023
DEGREES OF ROMANCE by Peter Krumbach won the 2022 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award. As contest judge Candice Reffe describes the book, these dazzling prose poems are a portal into “a realm where some great secret is to be divulged, the gate to what’s been sought but never found briefly ajar.” Enter. Details of ordinary life—the scraping of a spoon, the “fat blue mailbox bolted to a sidewalk”—shimmer like auras the poet reads in the world around us. Part observation, part divination, the poems send messages in invisible ink that appear when you tip them to the sun, the dispatch you’ve been waiting for.
The Engineers: Poems by Katy Lederer Saturnalia Books, October 2023
In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers, Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is “the self”? What is “the other”? And how to reproduce “one’s self”? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body—or poem—malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body—or poem—attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral “we,” the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world.
Ascent of the Mothers by Noelle Kocot Wave Books, November 2023
Ascent of the Mothers, Noelle Kocot’s ninth collection, is a sagacious testament to the ways in which poetry can shape personhood. “I am nothing” they write, “Or else I have made myself / Too big for words.” The scope of this book is marked by Kocot’s psychic journey punctuated by a near-fatal car crash, which elicited a new understanding of their spirituality and gender nonconforming identity. Generous, self-aware, and resilient, Ascent of the Mothers is a treasure to behold and be shared.
2024… Your Year of More is your go-to book to set goals and mindfully invest your efforts. It appeals to adults of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds who wish to improve their lives. Its pages are packed with something special for everyone.
The pages contain practical ideas from A to Z, thought-provoking questions, and self-reflective exercises that inspire you to live your best life.
The book is an ideal companion during your moments of solitude. You can read it in the early morning before the rest of the world wakes up or during the evenings after a long day. You may also find it enjoyable while writing in your journal or taking a lunch break.
Enthusiastic indie author Noah William Smith knows the blessings and challenges of intelligence, creativity, high sensitivity and being a minority, underdog and outsider. While his books are based on his experiences, they offer valuable insights without being prescriptive or offering advice.
The book’s authenticity and invaluable insights make it a compelling read that will remain relevant for many years!
Are you considering investing in yourself or searching for the perfect gift for someone special? Enjoy this life-changing book that you cannot afford to miss!
They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice—the latest book from award-winning Pittsburgh author Lori Jakiela—is much more than a cancer memoir. It’s a pause between polarities. Cancer is almost an afterthought. Inspired by Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, it celebrates the tiny moments that make up a time capsule of a life.
A weirdly funny book about mortality, Rice is also about family, genetics, nature vs. nurture, the Rust Belt, EPA clean-up zones, emotional support peacocks, box turtles, Emily Dickinson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Andy Warhol(a), and so much more. A fresh voice aligned with the work of classic stream-of-consciousness writers like Richard Brautigan and Virginia Woolf, Jakiela explores the way a mind works—complete with leaps and spirals—while reflecting on a life thoroughly lived against a dire breast cancer diagnosis.
Half new and selected essays, half spiraling memoir, Rice is experimental in both voice and form, and offers a fresh approach to age-old questions about life, love, mortality, and the fine art of living, even so.
This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2022 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jason Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” about one man’s attempt to still communicate with his dead fiancée (San Francisco Chronicle). Second place: Jenna Russell, Penelope Overton, and David Abel, “The Lobster Trap” (The Boston Globe and Portland Press Herald). Third place: Jada Yuan, “Discovering Dr. Wu” (The Washington Post). Runners-up include works by Lane DeGregory, Christopher Goffard, Evan Allen, Mark Johnson, Annie Gowen, Peter Jamison, and Douglas Perry.
The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman University of Iowa Press, October 2023
The Journal of Artists’ Books: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020 contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.
Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg Translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023
Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective. These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.
Tinted Trails: Exploring Writings in English as a Second Language edited by Lisa Schantl, Filippo Bagnasco, Andrea Farber, and Chiara Meitz Tint Journal, November 2023
Literary magazine Tint Journal celebrates its five-year anniversary with the release of Tinted Trails, the first ever printed anthology entirely dedicated to those who write in English as a second language (ESL). This collection offers both authors and readers the chance to meet via the medium of the English language, in a whirl of perspectives, sensibilities, and idiolects.
The book showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry previously published online on Tint Journal and a selection of so far unpublished texts from well-established translingual voices. The breadth and the possibilities of the English language are unlocked by the variety of cultural, geographical, and personal experiences of these writers, each adding a crucial contribution to the present and future development of multilingual literature. Topical introductions by Marjorie Agosín and Juhea Kim add weight and context to the collection, while the themed sections that bring together the various texts—Belonging, (lm)Migration, Upheaval, Identities—guide the reader through the peculiarities of this fundamental collection of ESL writings. A further layer is created through the artworks curated by Vanesa Erjavec and her own text illustrations.
With its origin in such a rich and diverse literary and cultural environment, Tinted Trails proudly joins the ever-growing landscape of global literature in English.
The anthology will be presented at a festival of the same name this November in Graz, Austria, and beyond where participants can experience the variety of ESL literature with authors from all over the globe, try translingual writing themselves at a workshop, and get involved in discussions about literature, art, and life in-between it all.
The Shining by Dorothea Lasky Wave Books, October 2023
As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Lasky guides readers through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s novel or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.
Welcome to the end of October! Hard to believe it is here already, isn’t it? With the ending of October comes our monthly breakdown of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received during the month. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll University of Iowa Press, September 2023
Readers love to sink into Gaiman’s medieval worlds—but what makes them “medieval”? Shiloh Carroll offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have impacted Gaiman’s own use of medieval material. She examines influences from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales in order to expand readers’ understanding and appreciation of Gaiman’s work, as well as the rest of the medievalist films, TV shows, and books that are so popular today.
Holly Melgard’s Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out. From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.
The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett Livingston Press, October 2023
Larry Beckett’s The Book of Merlin is the first translation of Merlin of the Wild’s complete works. How can the writings of a 6th-century poet/prophet speak to us moderns? Page after page of battles and death answer that most succinctly. This is not the Merlin with a wand that you grew up with. Translator Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. His work Beat Poetry is a story of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. Beckett is currently working on a translation of Verlaine’s poetry.
Nadia by Christine Evans moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.
Peter Gizzi has said that “the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.” For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery, and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, “a holding open.” In Gizzi’s voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love.
Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences by Matthew J. C. Clark University of Iowa Press, January 2024
In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, Clark wants nothing less than to understand everything, to make the world a better place, for you and him to love each other, and to be okay. He desires all of this sincerely, desperately even, and at the same time, he proceeds with a light heart, playfully, with humor and awe. As Clark reports on the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor, he also ruminates on gift cards, crab rangoon, and Jean Claude Van Damme. He considers North American colonization, masculinity, the definition of disgusting, his own uncertain certainty. When the boards beneath our feet are so unstable, always expanding and cupping and contracting, how can we make sense of the world? What does it mean to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America?
Furniture Music by Gail Scott Wave Books, October 2023
In Furniture Music, Montreal luminary Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. Scott’s project is polyvocal, also resonating with the voices of a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.
The Book by Mary Ruefle Wave Books, September 2023
Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book. With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.
mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books, it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross’ solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time, it models the daily search for joy and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.