In 1929, Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Buddenbrooks. While he balked at working with a female translator, his standing in the Western canon can be in part credited to the translating work of Helen Lowe-Porter. Based closely on historical source material, the novel follows a young Helen as she struggles against gender roles in the early-mid 20th century to realize the life she desires as a writer and translator. Married to the charming classicist Elias Lowe, whom she met and fell in love with in Munich, the story weaves one woman’s journey as her husband Elias’s career soars, and her translation work earns Mann the Nobel Prize. The novel celebrates the life of Helen Lowe-Porter as she learns to risk stepping out from the long shadow of the dominating men of her life to become a person of letters in her own right.
ISBN: 9781956907056
The rain-sodden, southern world of David Wesley Williams’ Everybody Knows overflows with satiric fun as it churns up a rich detritus of Biblical allusions, political backstory, musical opinions, literary puns, and local anecdote. The story, set a decade hence, introduces a raft of characters, too, including musicians, an escaped felon, a tyrannical governor atop his state’s old electric chair, various and likable sidekicks and mistresses, and even a writer, the ironic double of the work’s author, whose enthusiasm for his subject matter spills over into strongly opinionated footnotes. And that’s all before the pirates arrive. Original, energetic, and obsessive, Everybody Knows recalls the worlds of Faulkner, Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Kennedy Toole in its broad wit and sorrowful joy.
ISBN: 9781737513469
In eleven fearless, wide-ranging stories, The Sexual Lives of Suburbanites offers us a sometimes absurdist, sometimes satirical but always fresh glimpse into the things that trouble us most. From materialism to regrets and everything in-between, Stenson dissects suburban milieu. Whether narrated by e-trading infants or drug addicts, the characters' worlds unfold with energy and surprise. Variously whimsical, obsessive, charming, and dark, the stories also break your heart.
ISBN: 9781737513452
Barbara Cully's meditations in Back Apart range widely in subject and temperament: from ambushed troops in Afghanistan to the shorelines of her California youth, from Kristallnacht to our present ecological degradations. Driven by an unstable, seeking impulse, "the desire to look and to look away," the poems remain in flux, animated by a constant reckoning of self in history, in landscape, and especially among others.
―Boyer Rickel
ISBN: 9780578875903
Under the Hours is a new-century work, a voicing of Cully's tidal sense of the temporal, her premonitory stillness, written by desert and sea-light, inscribing the endurance of loss, the necessity of vigilance. Her images are beautiful and precise, her sensibility profound. ―Carolyn Forché
ISBN: 9781737330714
Rita Mookerjee’s False Offering, while providing a trenchant critique of the oppressiveness of “white space,” is also glittery, culinary sumptuous, and scythe sharp. Shot through with equal parts “nectar and venom,” Mookerjee’s poems pirouette with muscular grace in a kaleidoscopic whirl of myth and alchemy, gods and feasts, rot and rose gold. False Offering is a feminist ledger of “battle armor meeting ballet.” Like a medieval tapestry, it is piped through with an elaborate galaxy of nightviolets, rosewater, bonedust, “snakes and shibari,” origami, and the KKK. It is a rare book in that even while flipping the middle finger; it has its hands held out in tenderness to those in need.
―Simone Muench
ISBN: 9781956907049
The poem of the natural world, like nature itself, is threatened by harsh forces: sentimentality, obviousness, easy identification. The difficulty in writing about nature only makes the achievement of Trapline that much more remarkable and provoking. Goodwin sees nature and ourselves as we are in all our manifestations, intertwined and inseparable. ―Keith Ekiss
ISBN: 9781737330738
Exquisite and precise, Caroline Goodwin’s newest poetry collection, Old Snow, White Sun, traverses various terrains with grace and a commitment to astonishment. Here, Goodwin brilliantly gathers mothlight, herbal lore, psychedelia, heavy metal, and old charm to capture a world that is bountiful, magnificent, and impermanent...Ferocity and decaying bodies populate these poems, but also tenderness and rhythmic hope. Find in these poems a heron, a river, a hurricane, a floodgate, a levee, a story. “The one where the girl is strong enough. The one where she survives.” Where she dwells and how she rises. —Aileen Cassinetto
ISBN: 9781737330783
Recalling Joni Mitchell’s famous lyric “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot,” Solastalgia is a heart-wrenching and harrowing overview of environmental destruction. Though it is an ominous exploration of the Anthropocene era and the ways humans have contributed to the changing climate and landscape, it spends much of its time honoring all the strange and wondrous creatures—“may you outlast us”— that humans, both intentionally and unwittingly, are shoving toward extinction’s cliff. Solastalgia is an eloquent tribute to all the awe-inspiring flora and fauna that we have failed as a species. I love this book not only for its incisive eco-eye but also for its dazzling language terrains. Using language as the tool to effect change, these poems make you want to be better, do better.―Simone Muench
ISBN: 978-1737513483
Reginald Gibbons' first novel takes place in east Texas in 1910 during the time of white rule—not by law but by lynch mob. Amid the suffocating racism and fear, half-Choctaw, half-white Reuben Sweetbitter and Martha Clarke, a white woman, fall in love… Reuben and Martha's love is strong, but dishearteningly, racism is stronger. Timely in the subject of interracial love, this authentic, richly detailed novel plumps sacrifice, fear, and the loss of one's identity, bringing the anguish of the two young lovers to life. Highly recommended.
—Library Journal
ISBN: 9781737513421
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