Literature & Fiction
Showing 1–32 of 127 results
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Under the Neem Tree
Stories$24.99A exquisitely wrought, deeply personal collection of short stories from a remarkable new voice from Sudan
A young girl grows jealous of her mother’s lemon tree, which may be more sentient than she knows. A college student confronts tragedies past and present when police attack a university protest. A lawyer desperately searches the city for a woman claiming to have been sent from the Hereafter.
In her second collection of stories after Thirteen Months of Sunrise, which was named a finalist for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the unique voice of Sudanese writer and poet Rania Mamoun is on full display. Under the Neem Tree, her first collection to be published in the United States, now in a wonderful translation by Elisabeth Jaquette, is a powerful and intimate collection that blends fiction with memoir to create a rich, multifaceted portrait of Sudanese women—one with a magical edge.
From unexpected love to political defiance, Mamoun brings tenderness and a poetic sensibility to tales of human connection. Grounded in the reality of life and politics in Sudan, while also laced with elements of the surreal and uncanny, these twelve stories will be embraced by fans of Claire Keegan and Marie NDiaye, and by English-language readers eager for emotionally intimate characters, deeply human stories, and a striking, unique voice.
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Other People’s Houses
A Novel$19.99A sixtieth-anniversary edition of Lore Segal’s “immensely impressive” (The New Republic) semi-autobiographical novel of a Jewish girl’s escape to England from Vienna after Hitler’s rise to power—”both moving and newly relevant” (The Guardian)
Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People’s Houses tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who, alongside hundreds of other Jewish children, boards the Kindertransport to England to escape the Nazi occupation and oppression in Vienna in 1938.
Over the course of the next seven years, Lore lives with various families in “other people’s houses”—ranging from the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. As the war looms and Lore becomes enmeshed in the effort to get her parents out of Austria, she also becomes a passionate writer, documenting her struggles and displacement in letters to a variety of potential sponsors. Brilliantly highlighting the cultural differences between Vienna and England, the novel showcases the immigrant experience through the eyes of a young writer who would go on to become the highly acclaimed “brilliant and boundary-breaking” (Los Angles Review of Books) star of international fiction.
Told through the unique and moving perspective of a child forced to grow up quickly, Other People’s Houses is the “groundbreaking and indomitable” (Forbes) tale of one girl’s captivating refugee experience and the strength and bravery it takes to start over—and to survive.
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Shakespeare’s Kitchen
Stories$17.99From the acclaimed author of Her First American, a “charming novel disguised as a book of short stories,” (The New York Times Book Review) exploring belonging, connection, intimacy, and self-acceptance
The thirteen interconnected stories of Shakespeare’s Kitchen capture the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring seven short stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker, including the O. Henry Prize–winning “The Reverse Bug,” and including six additional pieces, Lore Segal’s stunning collection “exhibits a rare insight into the human character” (Publishers Weekly).
Called “an enchanting storyteller” by The Los Angeles Times, Segal unravels a web of human relationships as we meet Ilka Weisz, who, having accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank, reluctantly leaves her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute’s director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza.
Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, Sunday brunches, and long hours of kitchen conversation, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of an outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths.
A magnificent, wholly original “comedy of manners set in academic” (Booklist), Shakespeare’s Kitchen is “filled with all the pomp and depressed glory of a modern day The Great Gatsby . . . these vignettes are hilarious and telling. Segal exhibits a rare insight into the human character that is at once humbling and shamelessly enjoyable to behold” (Publishers Weekly).
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Her First American
A Novel$19.99A fortieth-anniversary edition of the unforgettable, eccentric “truly original novel” (Newsday), an evocative tale of race, romance, and the complexities of the human—experience, by the Pulitzer Prize finalist
She’s Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe, newly arrived in the United States. He’s Carter Bayoux, her first American: a middle-aged, hard-drinking Black intellectual. At first, their relationship is fueled by lust, but also by a shared sense of displacement, with Ilka having fled her homeland and Carter struggling to find his place in a society steeped in racism and prejudice.
In an effort to assimilate and discover “the real America,” Ilka hurls herself into Carter’s chaotic world, helping him navigate depression, alcoholism, and the ghosts of his past—and present. Will Ilka sacrifice her own needs—and future—for Carter’s, or can she save him from the demons and traumas that are tearing him, and them, apart?
First published forty years ago to universal acclaim, called “wonderful” by People magazine, and “quiet, funny, slyly affecting” in a starred Kirkus review, and now featuring a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Jeffrey Renard Allen, Her First American cements its place among the great American novels and introduces a new generation of readers to the brilliant Lore Segal.
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Dealing with the Dead
A Novel$24.99From one of Africa’s greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history
“Alain Mabanckou addresses the reader with exuberant inventiveness in novels that are brilliantly imaginative in their forms of storytelling. His voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect.” —Man Booker International Prize judges’ citation
One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.
Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa’s jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.
Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control, and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.
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Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
$25.99A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
Brilliant thoughts on modern African literature and postcolonial literary criticism from one of the giants of contemporary letters
“One of the greatest writers of our time.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bestselling author
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a towering figure in African literature, and his novels A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood are modern classics. Emerging from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa, he is now known not just as a novelist—one who, in the late ’70s, famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ—but as a major postcolonial theorist.In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngũgĩ gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work—illuminating the intrinsic importance of keeping intact and honoring these native languages throughout time.
Intricate and deeply nuanced, this collection examines the enduring power of African languages in resisting both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. These themes are elucidated through chapters on some contemporaries of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, including Chinua Achebe, Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, and Wole Soyinka—each offering a distinct lens on the liberatory potential of language.
A brave call for discourse and immensely relevant to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas works both as a wonderful introduction to the enduring themes of Ngũgĩ’s work as well as a vital addition to the library of the world’s greatest and most provocative living writers.
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Confidential
A Novel$19.99A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book
The darkly comic tale of three generations of a Jewish family, from one of Poland’s most renowned contemporary authors“A novel sparing only in words and form, not in emotion.”
—Vogue (Poland)Confidential follows on the success of acclaimed photographer, psychologist, and writer Mikołaj Grynberg’s highly acclaimed short story collection, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To, which was a finalist for numerous awards, including Poland’s most prestigious literary prize, the Nike, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award in Prose for Sean Gasper Bye’s translation.
This powerful new novella is a darkly comic portrait of a Jewish family in today’s Poland, struggling to express their love for one another in the face of a past that cannot and will not be forgotten. The grandfather is a doctor, a Holocaust survivor who has now vowed to live only for pleasure. His son, born at the start of the war, becomes a well-respected physicist, but finds himself emotionally unable to attend conferences in Germany, despite the benefit it would give his career. The mother is loving but firm, though she has a secret habit of attending strangers’ funerals so that she can cry.
A masterpiece of concision, Confidential expands on one of the stories in I’d Like to Say Sorry . . . , tackling themes of memory, trauma, and care, as well as enduring anti-Semitism, with unforgettable power, emotional complexity, and Grynberg’s trademark black humor.
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Silver Repetition
A Novel$18.99A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book
A debut coming-of-age novel that delicately illuminates the fullness of identity despite fractures in language, culture, and relationships
In Silver Repetition, Lily Wang’s endless, perfect loops of memory and dream, loss and return, combine to create a formally inventive coming-of-age novel. Told from the perspective of a young Asian immigrant thoughtfully navigating dual identities, grief, family, migration, and modern relationships, this is a novel infused with the rich language of a poet.
Having left China for Canada with her parents as a child, Yuè Yuè yearns to discover who she is as she nears the end of her undergraduate degree and starts a new relationship. In urgent poetic fragments, she seeks common ground with her Canadian-born younger sister and grieves the beloved cousin she lost touch with back home. After Yuè Yuè receives a call from a girl making accusations, her date ghosts her. Meanwhile, her mother’s illness advances like snow. On a walk in the woods, Yuè Yuè sees a little girl digging in the mud, but when she peeks behind the curtain of black hair, her own face haunts her.
In a moving reunion, Yuè Yuè’s cousin comes to visit and everyone is caught, laughing, in the rain. The novel shows how, despite the weight of grief, isolation, and difference, even the most delicate family bonds can knit together tightly enough for the future to overcome the past.
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Charisma’s Turn
A Graphic Novel$19.99 – $22.99Named one of the Young Adult Library Services Association’s 2024 Great Graphic Novels for Teens
From the award-winning author of Pushout, an inspiring graphic novel about what can happen when Black girls are given the opportunity to find their genuine powerMonique Couvson’s trailblazing book Pushout laid the groundwork for understanding how our schools are failing Black girls; her follow-up, Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues, provided a blueprint for their healing and liberation. Now Couvson invites readers to be inspired by her liberatory imagination with an original narrative told from the perspective of the very girls she has been fighting for years to lift up.
Charisma’s Turn is a graphic novel that follows the dynamic story of Charisma, a Black high school student who is grappling with mounting pressures from home and school. When frustrations with her family intersect with a conflict at school, she reaches a crossroads, facing a choice that could change her future. Featuring vibrantly illustrated art from Amanda Jones and a foreword by poet, artist, and arts educator Susan Arauz Barnes, this book will appeal to teens, parents, educators, librarians, and more. Charisma’s Turn exemplifies how Black girls can be truly empowered to reach their full potential when they have supportive educators and community members in their corner.
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Afterglow
Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors$16.99Hopeful and forward-looking futuristic short stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need
“This is a glorious book that challenges our conceptions of bookmaking as much as it questions our conceptions of world-building. We, as earthlings, will be better to the earth after experiencing this book. That is not hyperbole.”
—New York Times bestselling author Kiese Laymon
Afterglow is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world.Inspired by cutting-edge literary movements, such as Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunk, Afterglow imagines intersectional worlds in which no one is left behind—where humanity prioritizes equitable climate solutions and continued service to one’s community. Whether through abundance or adaptation, reform, or a new understanding of survival, these stories offer flickers of hope, even joy, as they provide a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
Afterglow welcomes a diverse range of new voices into the climate conversation to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. A creative work rooted in the realities of our present crisis, Afterglow presents a new way to think about the climate emergency—one that blazes a path to a clean, green, and more just future.
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I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To
Stories$19.99Finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards
Finalist, National Translation Award in ProseAn exquisitely original collection of darkly funny stories that explore the panorama of Jewish experience in contemporary Poland, from a world-class contemporary writer
“These small, searing prose pieces are moving and unsettling at the same time. If the diagnosis they present is right, then we have a great problem in Poland.” —Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize laureate and author of Flights
Mikołaj Grynberg is a psychologist and photographer who has spent years collecting and publishing oral histories of Polish Jews. In his first work of fiction—a book that has been widely praised by critics and was shortlisted for Poland’s top literary prize—Grynberg recrafts those histories into little jewels, fictionalized short stories with the ring of truth.
Both biting and knowing, I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To takes the form of first-person vignettes, through which Grynberg explores the daily lives and tensions within Poland between Jews and gentiles haunted by the Holocaust and its continuing presence.
In “Unnecessary Trouble,” a grandmother discloses on her deathbed that she is Jewish; she does not want to die without her family knowing. What is passed on to the family is fear and the struggle of what to do with this information. In “Cacophony,” Jewish identity is explored through names, as Miron and his son Jurek demonstrate how heritage is both accepted and denied. In “My Five Jews,” a non-Jewish narrator remembers five interactions with her Jewish countrymen, and her own anti-Semitism, ruefully noting that perhaps she was wrong and should apologize, but no one is left to say “I’m sorry” to.
Each of the thirty-one stories is a dazzling and haunting mini-monologue that highlights a different facet of modern Poland’s complex and difficult relationship with its Jewish past.
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The Impudent Ones
A Novel$25.99Published for the first time in English, the debut novel of Marguerite Duras—renowned author of The Lover and The War—is the story of a family’s moral reckoning and a daughter’s fall from grace
Marguerite Duras rose to global stardom with her erotic masterpiece The Lover (L’Amant), which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, has over a million copies in print in English, has been translated into forty-three languages, and was adapted into a canonical film in 1992. While almost all of Duras’s novels have been translated into English, her debut The Impudent Ones (Les Impudents) has been a glaring exception—until now. Fans of Duras will be thrilled to discover the germ of her bold, vital prose and signature blend of memoir and fiction in this intense and mournful story of the Taneran family, which introduces Duras’s classic themes of familial conflict, illicit romance, and scandal in the sleepy suburbs and southwest provinces of France.
Duras’s great gift was her ability to bring vivid and passionate life to characters with whom society may not have sympathized, but with whom readers certainly do. With storytelling that evokes in equal parts beauty and brutality, The Impudent Ones depicts the scalding effects of seduction and disrepute on the soul of a young French girl.
Including an essay on the story behind The Impudent Ones by Jean Vallier—biographer of the late Duras—which contextualizes the origins of Duras’s debut novel, this one-of-a-kind publishing endeavor will delight established Duras fans and a new generation of readers alike.
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Still Life
A Novel$25.99A New York Times Top Historical Fiction Pick of 2020
A stunningly original new novel exploring race, truth in authorship, and the legacy of past exploitation, from the Windham-Campbell lifetime achievement award winner
When Zoëml; Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was hailed by her literary contemporaries and reviewers alike. Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation as being among the most distinguished writers working today and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.
Wicomb’s majestic new novel Still Life juggles with our perception of time and reality as Wicomb tells the story of an author struggling to write a biography of long-forgotten Scottish poet Thomas Pringle, whose only legacy is in South Africa where he is dubbed the “Father of South African Poetry.” In her efforts to resurrect Pringle, the writer summons the specter of Mary Prince, the West Indian slave whose History Pringle had once published, along with Hinza, his adopted black South African son.
At their side is Sir Nicholas Green, a seasoned time traveler (and a character from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). Their adventures, as they travel across space and time to unlock the mysteries of Pringle’s life, offer a poignant exploration of colonial history and racial oppression.
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The Perfect Nine
The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi$23.99A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author Delia Owens says “tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a continent”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novels and memoirs have received glowing praise from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and NPR; he has been a finalist for the Man International Booker Prize and is annually tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and his books have sold tens of thousands of copies around the world.
In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngũgĩ tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine” —and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice.
Ngũgĩ’s epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”
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The Death of Comrade President
A Novel$23.99 -
Suncatcher
A Novel$24.99The internationally celebrated (and Booker Prize–shortlisted) author returns with a dazzling coming-of-age story set in post-independence Sri Lanka
“A master storyteller.”
—The New York TimesCeylon is on the brink of change. But young Kairo is at loose ends. School is closed, the government is in disarray, the press is under threat, and the religious right are flexing their muscles. Kairo’s hardworking mother blows off steam at her cha-cha-cha classes; his Trotskyist father grumbles over the state of the nation between his secret bets on horse races in faraway England. All Kairo wants to do is hide in his room and flick through secondhand westerns and superhero comics, or escape on his bicycle and daydream.
Then he meets the magnetic teenage Jay, and his whole world is turned inside out.
A budding naturalist and a born rebel, Jay keeps fish and traps birds for an aviary he is building in the garden of his grand home. As Jay guides Kairo from the realm of make-believe into one of hunting guns and fast cars and introduces him to a girl— Niromi—Kairo begins to understand the price of privilege and embarks on a journey of devastating consequence.
Taut and luminous, graceful and wild, Suncatcher is a poignant coming-of-age novel about difficult friendships and sudden awakenings set among the tumult of 1960s Sri Lanka, that confirms Gunesekera’s status as one of today’s most lyrical writers.
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Black Moses
A Novel$15.99 – $23.95The “heart-breaking” (New York Times Book Review), rollicking, award-winning novel that has been described as “Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa” (Les Inrockuptibles)
“One of the most compelling books you’ll read in any language this year.” —Rolling Stone
Winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award
Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
Shortlisted for the Albertine Prize
Shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize
Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize
Greeted with wildly enthusiastic reviews on publication, Alain Mabanckou’s riotous novel begins in an orphanage in 1970s Congo-Brazzaville run by a malicious political stooge who makes the life of our hero, Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko—his name means “Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors,” but most people just call him Moses—very difficult.
Moses is also terrorized by his two fellow orphans—the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala—but after Moses exacts revenge on them by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft.
What follows is a “pointed” (Los Angeles Times), “vivid and funny” (New York Times), larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses’s ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive reality of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Ringing with beautiful poetry,” (Wall Street Journal) Black Moses is a vital new extension of Mabanckou’s cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest and funniest fictional projects of our time.
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Springtime in a Broken Mirror
A Novel$23.99"A wise, lonely novel . . . [and an] honest reflection of exile."
—The New Yorker
In the tradition of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, a celebrated classic and heart-wrenching story of a family torn apart by the forces of history, by one of Latin America’s most celebrated writersThe late Mario Benedetti’s work was often ranked with “such esteemed Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortázar” (The Washington Post) and his novel The Truce has sold millions of copies around the world. His extraordinary novel Springtime in a Broken Mirror revolves around Santiago, a political prisoner in Uruguay, who was jailed after a brutal military coup that saw many of his comrades flee elsewhere. Santiago, feeling trapped, can do nothing but write letters to his family and try to stay sane.
Far away, his nine-year-old daughter Beatrice wonders at the marvels of Buenos Aires, but her grandpa and mother—Santiago’s beautiful, careworn wife, Graciela—struggle to adjust to a life in exile.
Published now for the first time in English, Springtime in a Broken Mirror tells with tenderness and fury of the indelible imprint politics leaves on individual lives. Generous and unflinching, it asks whether the broken bonds of family and history can ever truly be mended. Written by one of the masters of the Latin American novel, this is the story of a fractured continent, chronicled through the lives of a single family.
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Minutes of Glory
And Other Stories$24.99A dazzling short story collection from the person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “one of the greatest writers of our time”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree, ” written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States— Ngũgĩ’s collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British, and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.
Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.
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Four Soldiers
A Novel$19.99Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
“Its simplicity lends it grandeur. One thinks of Maxim Gorky, or even the early sketches of Tolstoy.”
—The Wall Street Journal“A small miracle of a book, perfectly imagined and perfectly achieved.”
—Hilary Mantel, author of Booker Prize-winning novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the BodiesA novel of war, revolution, youth, and friendship by the “remarkable” (Ian McEwan) French author of A Meal in Winter
Hubert Mingarelli’s simple, powerful, and moving stories of men in combat have established him as one of the most exciting new voices in international fiction.
In Four Soldiers he tells the story of four young soldiers in 1919, members of the Red Army during the Russian civil war. It is set in the harsh dead of winter, just as the soldiers set up camp in a forest in Galicia near the Romanian front line. Due to a lull in fighting, their days are taken up with the mundane tasks of trying to scratch together what food and comforts they can find, all the time while talking, smoking, and waiting. Waiting specifically for spring to come. Waiting for their battalion to move on. Waiting for the inevitable resumption of violence.
Recalling great works like Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Four Soldiers is a timeless and tender story of young male friendships and the small, idyllic moments of happiness that can illuminate the darkness of war.
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Slave Old Man
A Novel$14.99 – $19.99The “heart-stopping” (The Millions), “richly layered” (Brooklyn Rail), “haunting, beautiful” (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him
“Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed—but every page pulses, blood-warm. . . . The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief.”
—Parul Sehgal, The New York TimesShortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018.
Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person’s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man’s flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself.
Chamoiseau’s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of early nineteenth-century Martinique, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.
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Wrestling with the Devil
A Prison Memoir$25.99A New York Times Editors’ Choice
“A welcome addition to the vast literature produced by jailed writers across the centuries . . . [a] thrilling testament to the human spirit.”
—Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review
“Wrestling with the Devil is a powerful testament to the courage of Ngũgĩ and his fellow prisoners and validation of the hope that an independent Kenya would eventually emerge.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The Ngũgĩ of Wrestling with the Devil called not just for adding a bit of color to the canon’s sagging shelf, but for abolition and upheaval.”
—Bookforum
An unforgettable chronicle of the year the brilliant novelist and memoirist, long favored for the Nobel Prize, was thrown in a Kenyan jail without chargeWrestling with the Devil, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir, begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population.
In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross.
Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ’s account of the drama and the challenges of writing the novel under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.
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Special Envoy
A Spy Novel$24.95Longlisted for the 2019 International Dublin Literary Award“Special Envoy is an exceedingly French spy thriller.”
—New York Times Book Review
A dazzling satirical spy novel, part La Femme Nikita, part Pink Panther and part Le Carré—from one of the world’s preeminent authors
Jean Echenoz’s sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France, where he has won the Prix Goncourt, as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the”most distinctive voice of his generation” by the Washington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work, Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel. When published in France, it stormed the bestseller lists.
Special Envoy begins with an old general in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone to aid the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. Soon after, she is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the lower depths of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for her mission.
What follows is a bizarre tale of kidnappings, murders and mutilations, bad pop songs and great sex, populated by a cast of oddballs and losers. Set in Paris, rural central France, and Pyongyang, Special Envoy is joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and ironic digressions—and, in the words of L’Express, “a pure gem, a delight.”
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Eichmann’s Executioner
A Novel$24.95This acclaimed novel imagining the life of Israeli soldier Shalom Nagar explores the legacy of the Holocaust: “A fascinating book that doesn’t let you go” (Neue Deutschland, Germany).
In May 1962, twenty-two men gathered in Jerusalem to decide by lot who would be Adolf Eichmann’s executioner. These men had guarded the former Nazi SS lieutenant colonel during his imprisonment and trial, and with no trained executioners in Israel, it would fall to one of them to end Eichmann’s life. Shalom Nagar, the only one among them who had asked not to participate, drew the short straw.
Decades later, Nagar is living on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, haunted by his memory of Eichmann. He remembers watching him day and night, the way he ate, the way he slept—and the sound of the cord tensing around his neck. But as he tells and re-tells his story to anyone who will listen, he begins to doubt himself. When one of his friends, Moshe, reveals his link to Eichmann, Nagar is forced to reconsider everything he has ever believed about his past.
In the tradition of postwar trauma literature that includes Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Eichmann’s Executioner raises provocative questions about how we represent the past, and how those representations impinge upon the present.
“Both curiously transparent and full of secrets, a simultaneously dense yet airy fabric of cryptic threads and references. . . . Nothing is gratuitous in this book, nothing coincidental; all is intricately interlaced.” —Frankfurter Rundschau, Germany -
Birth of a Dream Weaver
A Writer’s Awakening$16.99 – $25.95From one of the world’s greatest writers, the story of how the author found his voice as a novelist at Makerere University in Uganda as a student
In this acclaimed memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda—crucial years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born—under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.
Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.
What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of one of the most important living writers—lauded for his “epic imagination” (Los Angeles Times)—the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.
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Cobalt Blue
A Novel$25.99 – $26.99Now a film from Netflix India, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in a changing society through a love triangle between a brother, sister, and their family’s lodger
Recently adapted into a stunning Netflix film, Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity. Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with the same man, an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, in western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future. When he runs away with Anuja, he overturns the family’s lives.
Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them.
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A Meal in Winter
A Novel of World War II$14.99 – $19.95“The book’s deceptive directness and simplicity, and its muted undercurrents of horror, will make many think of . . . Ernest Hemingway. [P]ainful, unconsoling reading . . . a reminder of the power a short, perfect work of fiction can wield.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
This timeless short novel begins one morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, with three German soldiers heading out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution “one of them”—a Jew. Having flushed out a young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp. As they prepare food, they are joined by a passing Pole whose virulent anti-Semitism adds tension to an already charged atmosphere. Before long, the group’s sympathies begin to splinter when each man is forced to confront his own conscience as the moral implications of their murderous mission become clear.
Described by Ian McEwan as “sparse, beautiful and shocking,” A Meal in Winter is a “stark and profound” work by a Booker Prize–nominated author (The New York Times).
“Sustains tension until the very last page.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review -
Here Come the Dogs
A Novel$16.95 – $16.99A “brilliant [novel] . . . Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (Cleaver Magazine).
In small-town suburban Australia, three young men from three different ethnic backgrounds—one Samoan, one Macedonian, one not sure—are ready to make their mark. Solomon is all charisma, authority, and charm; a failed basketball player down for the moment but surely not out. His half-brother, Jimmy, bounces along in his wake, underestimated, waiting for his chance to announce himself. Aleks, their childhood friend, loves his mates, his family, and his homeland and would do anything for them. The question is, does he know where to draw the line?
Solomon, Jimmy, and Aleks are way out on the fringe of Australia, looking for a way in. Hip hop, basketball, and graffiti give them a voice. Booze, women, and violence pass the time while they wait for their chance. Under the oppressive summer sun, their town has turned tinder-dry. All it will take is a spark.
As the surrounding hills roar with flames, change storms in. But it’s not what they were waiting for. It never is.
“This stunning novel has such swaggering exuberance that it will make most other fiction you read this year seem criminally dull. You have been warned.” —Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
“With compassion and urgency, Here Come the Dogs excavates the pain of those who struggle to remain part of a ruthless equation that has been determined by others.” —Los Angeles Times
“A bravado novel about survival and rebirth in a subculture that moves to its own rhythms.” —Kirkus Reviews -
The Queen’s Caprice
Stories$19.95 – $19.99Seven short stories by the Prix Goncourt winner—“the most distinctive voice of his generation . . . master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post).
France’s preeminent fiction writer, Jean Echenoz is celebrated for his ability to craft stories with such precision that readers are caught off guard by the intense emotion and imagination just beneath the placid surface of his writing. As Gary Indiana put it in his essay “Conjuror of St. Germain”, “Echenoz risks everything in his fiction, gambling on the prodigious blandishments of his voice to lure his readers into a maze of improbabilities and preposterous happenings.”
The Queen’s Caprice—seven stories available in English for the first time—reveals Echenoz at the height of his talents, taking readers on a journey across radically different landscapes. The title story explores a tiny corner of the French countryside; “Nelson” offers a brilliant miniaturist portrait of the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar; “In Babylon” sketches the ancient city of Mesopotamia, based on trace descriptions from Herodotus; and other stories visit the forests of England, the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, Tampa Bay, and the interior of a submarine. Amid the thrill and allure of this voyage of words, “again and again we pause to savor the richness of Echenoz’s startling, crystalline observations” (Lydia Davis).
“[A] terrific sense of humor tinged with existential mischief.” —L’Express -
Noontide Toll
Stories$24.99 – $27.99In postwar Sri Lanka, a hired driver observes his passengers—tourists, soldiers, businessmen, and others—in these linked stories by a “master storyteller” (The New York Times).
Vasantha retired early, bought himself a van, and now works as a driver for hire. As he drives through Sri Lanka, carrying aid workers, entrepreneurs, and visiting families; meeting lonely soldiers and eager hoteliers, he engages them with self-deprecating wit and folksy wisdom—while revealing to us their uncertain lives with piercing insight.
On his journey from the army camps in northern Jaffna to the moonlit ramparts of Galle, in the south, Vasantha slowly discovers the depth of his country’s troubles—as well as his own—while catching a glimmer of the promise the future might hold.
From the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of Reef comes a collection of “gracefully crafted road stories” that draws a potent portrait of postwar Sri Lanka and the ghosts of civil war (TheGuardian).
Praise for Romesh Gunesekera
“Monkfish Moon strikes the reader like a hammer blow. . . . Gunesekera’s subtly erotic prose animates Sri Lanka’s natural luxuriance, veined with menace.” —Voice Literary Supplement -
Three By Echenoz
Big Blondes, Piano, and Running$19.95 – $23.00A single volume that gathers together three of the most remarkable novels from Jean Echenoz, the “most distinctive French voice of his generation” (The Washington Post), Three by Echenoz demonstrates the award-winning author’s extraordinary versatility and elegant yet playful style at its finest.
“A parodic thriller sparkling with wit” (L’Humanité), Big Blondes probes our universal obsession with fame as a television documentary producer tries to track down a renowned singer who has mysteriously disappeared. A darkly comedic, noir-style tour de force, it finally answers the age-old question: do blondes have more fun?
“Fluid, never forced…like a garment that fits beautifully even inside-out” (Elle), Piano brings Dante’s Inferno to contemporary Paris, following Max Delmarc, a concert pianist suffering from paralyzing stage fright and alchoholism, as he meets his untimely death and descends through purgatory—part luxury hotel, part minimum-security prison—into a modern vision of hell.
Running is “a small wonder of writing and humanity” (L’Express)—a portrait of the legendary Czech athlete Emil Zátopek, who became a national hero, winning three gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics even as he was compelled to face the unyielding realities of life under an authoritarian regime. -
I’m Gone
A Novel$12.95 – $16.95Winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt and a runaway bestseller, Jean Echenoz’s I’m Gone is the ideal introduction to the sly wit, unique voice, and colorful imagination of “the master magician of the contemporary French novel” (The Washington Post). Nothing less than a heist caper, an Arctic adventure story, a biting satire of the art world, and a meditation on love and lust and middle age all rolled into one fast-paced, unpredictable, and deliriously entertaining novel, I’m Gone tells the story of an urbane art and antiques dealer who abandons his wife and career to pursue a memorably pathetic international crime spree.“Crisp and erudite” (The Wall Street Journal), “seductive and delicately ironic” (The Economist), and with an unexpected sting in its tail, I’m Gone—translated by Mark Polizzotti—is a dazzling, postmodern subversion of narrative conventions and an amused look at the absurdities of modern life. With a wink and a nod and a keen eye for the droll detail, Echenoz invites the reader “to enjoy I’m Gone in the same devil-may-care spirit in which it is offered” (The Boston Sunday Globe).
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