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The Seminary Co-op is committed to stocking books that would rarely get shelf space elsewhere—writing from university presses and niche publishers, as well as older titles, previously lost volumes, and soon-to-be classics. Across our sections are voices underrepresented in mainstream publishing and big-box bookstores. It is no surprise, then, that our stacks are filled with books from small presses. Indeed, it is not simply the nature of good writing which draws us together; rather, it's our shared commitment to representing diverse and debut voices, heralding unconventional narratives, and showcasing merit beyond the bestsellers lists which anchors our central (and shared) pursuit: championing books which endure.

As you flip through this celebratory Small Press issue of The Front Table, you'll find writing from Audre Lorde to Layli Long Soldier, from narrative non-fiction to translated literature and gothic fiction. Some titles are new and others, like the Seminary Co-op, are close to celebrating their 60th anniversary. Every title is a staff favorite or a publisher-nominated must-read. Palpable in each of these selections are the tenets central to small press publishing: risk, experimentation, beauty, discovery, and awe.

With this edition, we welcome you to browse beyond the books too and take in interviews with publishers, musing from small press editors and founders, and glimpse our shared pursuits in action. As you'll find in these pages, there's nothing small about the ambitions of small presses. We hope you discover new names, new ideas, and new favorites.

With care,

The Booksellers at the Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books 

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Agate Press

The Color of Love
Marra B. Gad

This powerful memoir details Marra B. Gad’s experiences growing up as “a mixed-race, Jewish unicorn.” In Black spaces, she was not “Black enough,” and in Jewish spaces, she was mistaken for the help, asked to leave, or worse. Even in her own family, as she explores throughout her book, Gad faced racism and rejection from her loved ones. At turns heart-wrenching and heartwarming, The Color of Love is a story about what you inherit from your family—identity, disease, melanin, hate, and most powerful of all, love.

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Dolly Parton: In Her Own Words
Ed. by Suzanne Sonnier

This collection of quotes has been carefully curated from Parton’s numerous public statements—interviews, speeches, social media posts, and more. It’s a comprehensive picture of her legacy as one of America’s most recognizable music superstars, whose considerable impact can be felt well beyond popular culture.

Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater
Mark Larson

Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater, by Mark Larson, which Agate published in 2019, is an 800-page monument to the glories of Chicago theater. As such, it’s the first in what I hope will be a series of oral histories from Agate that treat signal features of our city’s cultural life. We have a Chicago restaurant culture book in the works right now, and after that I hope to do a book on Chicago architecture. One of the underappreciated aspects of Chicago theater, I think, is its larger impact on American entertainment—especially film and theater. There is probably no single feeder of talent to film and TV that compares with the relatively small and unsung Chicago theater world. The new Mike Nichols bio tells the story of the first major national talents to come bursting out of Chicago more than 60 years ago—the revolutionary Nichols and May, who met at the University of Chicago and honed their craft in the Compass Players (their colleague Edward Asner earned TV immortality about a decade later when he was cast in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”) Ever since, a torrent of performers who learned their craft in Chicago have found their way from stage to screens, including some of the biggest stars of the past half-century. Learn more about the ones who left—and the ones who stayed, and why—in the pages of Ensemble. –Doug Seibold, Founder of Agate Press

Archipelago Books is a not-for-profit press devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature. In their first fifteen years, they have brought out close to two hundred books from more than thirty-five languages.

Stories with Pictures
Antonio Tabucchi, trans. by Elizabeth Harris

In Stories with Pictures, Antonio Tabucchi responds to paintings, drawings, and photographs from his dual homelands of Italy and Portugal, among other countries. This collection’s varied writings – stories, essays, journal entries, poems – spring forth from the shadows of Tabucchi’s imagination, as he steps into worlds just hidden from view, and into intimate conversation with the artists and their works. From quiet windows, stamps of bright parrots, postcards of yellow cities, portraits of devilish Portuguese nuns, the way to Tabucchi’s remote landscapes appears like a “train emerging from a thick curtain of heat.” Reading these pieces, one feels the pendulum current, and the desire in this remarkable author to hold the real in the surreal and to reflect, always, on the nature of art and life, as he converses with the artworks that have “often moved [his] pen.”

Igifu
Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. by Jordan Stump

Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent’s bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba’s mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival.

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SEMCOOP.COM Archipelago Books

The Distance
Ivan Vladislavić

In his youth in 1970s suburban Pretoria, Joe falls in love with Muhammad Ali. He diligently scrapbooks newspaper clippings of his his hero, recording the showman’s words and taking in his inimitable brand of resistance. Forty years later, digging out his yellowed archive of Ali clippings and comic books, Joe sets out to write a memoir of his childhood. Calling upon his brother Branko for help, their two voices interweave to unearth a shared past. Reconstructing a world of bioscopes, Formica tabletops, Ovaltine, and drop-offs in their father’s Ford Zephyr, conjuring the textures of childhood, what emerges is a collision of memories, patching the gulf between past and present. Meaning arises in the gaps between fact and imagination, and words themselves become markers of the past and the turbulent present.

A Change of Time
Ida Jessen, trans. by Martin Aitken

Ida Jessen’s writing is understated, delicate, and perceptive. I gave myself over to the narrator’s quiet adamance, to her deep-rooted emotions, to the relaxed rhythm that gives us room to breathe, feel, and think. —Jill Schoolman, Publisher of Archipelago 

Absolute Solitude
Dulce María Loynaz, trans. by James O'Connor

Absolute Solitude is a comprehensive selection of the prose poems from Dulce María Loynaz’s Poems Without Names. First published in Spain in 1953, Poems Without Names achieved both critical and popular success. Absolute Solitude also contains a selection of prose poems from Autumn Melancholy, published posthumously in 1997. This is the first major selection dedicated to Dulce María Loynaz’s prose poetry, and it brings to American readers one of Cuba’s most celebrated poets, a poet Juan Ramón Jiménez described as “archaic and new, a phosphorescent reality of her own incredibly human poetry, her fresh language, tender, weightless, rich in abandon.” 

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SEMCOOP.COM Archipelago Books

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SUPPORT THE CO-OP Biblioasis

Reaching Mithymna
Steven Heighton

In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the frontlines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother’s native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY—a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. In a town deserted by the tourists that had been its lifeblood, Heighton—alongside the exhausted locals and under-equipped international aid workers—found himself thrown into emergency roles for which he was woefully unqualified.

Against Amazon
Jorge Carrión

Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret
Ondjaki

By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he’s willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop’s Beach.

Idler's Glossary
Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell

“Dawdler.” “Layabout.” “Shit-heel.” “Loser.” For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, which is to say ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. Mark Kingwell’s introductory essay offers a playful defence of the idler as homo superior, while Joshua Glenn’s glossary playfully explores the etymology and history of hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases, while offering both a corrective to popular misconceptions about idling and a foundation for a new mode of thinking about working and not working.  The Idler’s Glossary is destined to become The Devil’s Dictionary for the idling classes, necessary reading for any and all who wish to introduce more truly “free” time into their daily lives.

Biblioasis is a literary press based in Windsor, Ontario, committed to publishing the best poetry, fiction and non-fiction in beautifully crafted editions.

Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann

Presented largely as a single meandering sentence, Lucy Ellmann's novel drops you into the thoughts of a housewife and baker in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Kaleidoscopic and panicked, it captures the frenzied nature of an unbroken news cycle, social media feeds, local gossip, internal monologues, and the ways in which information connects and lingers in our minds. Disparate ideas become married, patterns emerge and morph, making the world puzzling and tragic. It iterates everything until, suddenly, it clarifies, and in that clarity, settles dramatically into calm and beauty. —Bryce

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SEMCOOP.COM Biblioasis

Founded in 1955, with nearly 300 books in print, City Lights publishes cutting-edge fiction, poetry, memoirs, literary translations and books on vital social and political issues.

Every Day We Get More Illegal
Juan Felipe Herrera

In this collection of poems, written during and immediately after two years on the road as United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera reports back on his travels through contemporary America. Poems written in the heat of witness, and later, in quiet moments of reflection, coalesce into an urgent, trenchant, and yet hope-filled portrait. The struggle and pain of those pushed to the edges, the shootings and assaults and injustices of our streets, the lethal border game that separates and divides, and then: a shift of register, a leap for peace and a view onto the possibility of unity. Every Day We Get More Illegal is a jolt to the conscience—filled with the multiple powers of the many voices and many textures of every day in America. 

Eat the Mouth that Feeds You
Carribean Fragoza

This stunningly original collection of stories illuminates a spectrum of Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women's voices. In confrontations with fraught matrilineal lines, absent or abusive fathers, and the effects of historical violence, these women and girls navigate a male-dominated world where they rely on a resilient mujer network to get them through sometimes supernatural obstacles. Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with an authentic, sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Heaven Is All Goodbyes
Tongo Eisen-Martin

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s vision of the poet as gadfly of the State could not find a more brilliant incarnation than Tongo Eisen-Martin: "A poet of any station is secondary to the people. A poet of any use belongs to the energy and consciousness of the people.One of art’s most important incarnations is as an expression of mass resistance; but really what art teaches us with it’s psychic invincibility…with it’s indomitable energy — the indomitable energy of a line by Audre Lorde, the indomitable energy of a Coltrane idea — is that it's the oppressors themselves who are in the social position of resistance. Bigger than any imperialist hegemony is a hegemony of natural, cosmically reflected liberation. The power is ours. It is oppressors who are resisting…resisting humanity. Resisting our rights to determine our reality. Resisting a coming epoch of liberation.” —Tongo Eisen-Martin, upon being named the new Poet Laureate of San Francisco —Elaine Katzenberger, Publisher and Executive Director

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SEMCOOP.COM City Lights Press

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City Lights Press

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Poem of the Deep Song (Poema del Cante Jondo)
Federico García Lorca, trans. by Carlos Bauer

The magic of Andalusia is crystallized in Federico García Lorca's first major work, Poem of the Deep Song, written in 1921 when the poet was twenty-three years old, and published a decade later. In this group of poems, based on saetas, soleares, and siguiriyas, Lorca captures the passionate flamenco cosmos of Andalusia's Romani people, "those mysterious wandering folk who gave deep song its definitive form." Fearing that the priceless heritage of deep song (cante jondo) might vanish from Spain, Lorca, along with Manuel de Falla and other young artists, hoped to preserve "the artistic treasure of an entire race." In Poem of the Deep Song, the poet's own lyric genius gives cante jondo a special kind of immortality.

"Lawrence Ferlinghetti has always thought of City Lights as a lighthouse of possibility and a place of refuge to think about the long skyline of possible future and prospects." ––Paul Yamazaki in a 2020 Interview

During the century-long span of his life, Lawrence Ferlinghetti accomplished so much. He was a poet, a painter, a novelist, an activist, and, of course, a bookseller. As booksellers, we salute Lawrence’s profound legacy. He taught us that bookselling is a cultural commitment, and that bookstores are critical community spaces that foster a certain kind of unfettered questioning and a certain aimlessness that allows the mind to wander in new and original directions. We know from Paul, Elaine, Andy, Peter, and the incredible booksellers currently stewarding City Lights Bookstores, that Lawrence’s vision remains brilliant.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. The groundbreaking feminist's timely collection of nonfiction writings on race, gender, and LGBTQ issues is now for the first time in Penguin Classics as part of the Penguin Vitae series, with a foreword by poet Mahogany L. Browne.

The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory
Marilyn Fyre

The Politics of Reality includes essays that examine sexism, the exploitation of women, the gay rights movement and other topics from a feminist perspective.

"This is radical feminist theory at its best: clear, careful and critical."--SIGNS

"For anyone first coming to feminism, these essays serve as a backdrop . . . for understanding the basic, early and continuing perspectives of feminists. And for all of us they provide a theoretical framework in which to read the present as well as the past."--Women's Review of Books

"The style is both scholarly and direct without being ponderous. Frye makes a concerted effort to stimulate discussion, as opposed to arguing unopposed, so that much of the work is novel and candid. . . . An important addition to a complete feminist library."--Choice

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 
Audre Lorde

“ZAMI is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs

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SEMCOOP.COM  Crossing Press

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Dorothy Project

Exposition
Nathalie Léger

Exposition is the first in a triptych of books by the award-winning writer and archivist Nathalie Léger that includes Suite for Barbara Loden and The White Dress. In each, Léger sets the story of a female artist against the background of her own life and research—an archivist’s journey into the self, into the lives that history hides from us. Here, Léger’s subject is the Countess of Castiglione (1837–1899), who at the dawn of photography dedicated herself to becoming the most photographed woman in the world, modeling for hundreds of photos, including “Scherzo di Follia,” among the most famous in history. Set long before our own “selfie” age, Exposition is a remarkably modern investigation into the curses of beauty, fame, vanity, and age, as well as the obsessive drive to control and commodify one’s image.

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The White Dress
Nathalie Léger

Winner of a 2020 French Voices Award Fiction.The White Dress is the third in Nathalie Léger's award-winning triptych of books about women Here, Léger grapples with the tragic 2008 death of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hiking from Italy to the Middle East in a wedding dress to promote world peace. A harrowing meditation on the risks women encounter, in life and in art, The White Dress also brings to a haunting conclusion Léger's personal interrogation--sustained across all three books--of her relationship with her mother and the desire for justice in our lives.

Suite for Barbara Loden
Nathalie Léger

Suite for Barbara Loden doesn't just juxtapose biography, criticism, and narrative; it sews the three together into a new fabric altogether. As sparse and bleak as the source film itself, the book tells a fragmented story of life on the margins (of society, of artistic recognition, of a stable mental state) in a delicate and surprising way. At the same time, it challenges us to reconsider notions of viewership, authorship, and truth in art. —Alena

Me & Other Writing
Marguerite Duras

In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras’s curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from Flaubert to the “scattering of desire” to the Holocaust; within the body of her essays overall, style is always evolving, subject matter shifting, as her mind pushes beyond the obvious toward ever-original ground.

Me & Other Writing is a guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction. From the stunning one-page “Me” to the sprawling 70-page “Summer 80,” there is not a piece in this collection that can be easily categorized. These are essayistic works written for their times but too virtuosic to be relegated to history, works of commentary or recollection or reportage that are also, unmistakably, works of art.

Dorothy, a publishing project is an award-winning feminist press dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women. Each fall, they publish two new books simultaneously, paring different aesthetic traditions, encouraging a conversation between the two. The press is named for its editor’s great-aunt Dorothy Traver, who on each birthday gave her niece a book stamped with an owl bookplate.

The Complete Stories by Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life.

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), The Complete Stories captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist’s life.

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SEMCOOP.COM Dorothy Project

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Europa Editions
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The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante

Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman’s headlong descent into what she calls an “absence of sense” after being abandoned by her husband. Olga’s “days of abandonment” become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again.

Breasts and Eggs
Mieko Kawakami

Challenging every preconception about storytelling and prose style, mixing wry humor and riveting emotional depth, Kawakami is today one of Japan’s most important and best-selling writers. She exploded onto the cultural scene first as a musician, then as a poet and popular blogger, and is now an award-winning novelist. Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own.

Europa Editions is a independent New York-based publisher of literary fiction, high-end mystery and noir, and narrative non-fiction from around the world.

Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo
Philippe Lançon

Paris, January 7, 2015. Two terrorists who claim allegiance to ISIS attack the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The event causes untold pain to the victims and their families, prompts a global solidarity movement, and ignites a fierce debate over press freedoms and the role of satire today. Philippe Lançon, a journalist, author, and a weekly contributor to Charlie Hebdo is gravely wounded in the attack. This intense life experience upends his relationship to the world, to writing, to reading, to love and to friendship. As he attempts to reconstruct his life on the page, Lançon rereads Proust, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and others in search of guidance. It is a year before he can return to writing, a year in which he learns to work through his experiences and their aftermath.

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The Echoing Ida Collection
Kemi Alabi

Founded in 2012, Echoing Ida is a writing collective of Black women and nonbinary writers who—like their foremother Ida B. Wells-Barnett—believe the "way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." Their community reporting spans a wide variety of topics: reproductive justice and abortion politics; new and necessary definitions of family; trans visibility; stigma against Black motherhood; Black mental health; and more. This anthology collects the best of Echoing Ida for the first time and features a foreword by Michelle Duster, activist and great-granddaughter of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. These essays affirm the powerful combination of #BlackGirlMagic and the hard, unceasing labor of Black people to reimagine the world in which we live.

Feminist Press

A World Between
Emily Hashimoto

Hashimoto has written the whimsical, heart-wrenching, thoughtful Asian American lesbian rom-com we all wanted. At its core, it really is a lighthearted read about the intense romantic entanglements between two women with complex identities, and how they shift over time. More than anything, the novel is important in that it simply normalizes the centering of fully developed queer, diverse characters in an age-old romantic genre. —Mrittika

Life in the Iron Mills
Rebecca Harding Davis

First published anonymously in a 1861 edition of Atlantic Monthly, Life in the Iron Mills is a foundational text in American realist fiction, exposing the brutal working conditions of industrial capitalism. The Feminist Press originally reissued the work in the 1970s, and their recent edition has paired the short work with ample critical material.

Davis’s characters are ground down by resentment, alienation, and utter desperation, and we follow—bleakly—their attempts to maintain dignity and to care for one another in the face of the crushing reality of their class. Drawing on her deep interest in female-led and Christian-based social reform, Davis writes with a keen awareness of the dehumanizing conditions of industrial capitalism and how they affect, particularly, immigrants and women. It is an essential text for those seeking to understand American labor history, and especially the role of immigrants in that history, the development of feminist thought, the shape of American literature, and the environmental concerns of anti-capitalist movements. —Alena

But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women's Studies
Ed. by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith

Originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies is the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship. Featuring essays by Alice Walker, the Combahee River Collective, and Barbara Smith, and original resources, this book is vital to today's conversation on race and gender in America.

The Feminist Press is an American independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. It publishes writing by people who share an activist spirit and a belief in choice and equality.

RECIPIENT OF IVAN SANDORF LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

Founded in 1970 by the legendary Florence Howe, the Feminist Press has consistently challenged conceptions of struggle and transformation in contemporary society. They focus on publishing and reprinting critical, subversive titles from writers from across classes, nations, and identities. Subjects range from memoir and folklore to immigration studies and reproductive rights, with each work committed in some way to insurgency, activism, or, more broadly, the feminist cause.

We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival
Ed. by Natalie West

This collection of narrative essays by sex workers presents a crystal-clear rejoinder: there’s never been a better time to fight for justice. Responding to the resurgence of the #MeToo movement in 2017, sex workers from across the industry—hookers and prostitutes, strippers and dancers, porn stars, cam models, Dommes and subs alike—complicate narratives of sexual harassment and violence and expand conversations often limited to normative workplaces.

Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country
Cristina Rivera Garza

Grieving is Cristina Rivera Garza’s hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border. Drawing together horror theory and historical analysis, she outlines how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking—culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs”—has shaped her country. 

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SEMCOOP.COM Feminist Press

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Graywolf Press SUPPORT THE CO-OP

Corridor: Poems
Saskia Hamilton

Corridor, Saskia Hamilton's third collection, is a study of motion and time. Its glanced landscapes, its lives seen in passing, render the immeasurable in broken narratives. These poems are succinct in order to travel quickly--they have unexpected distances within their reach. They are dauntless and alert in their apprehension of the natural kingdom at the frontier of so many unnatural ones. And they inhabit the realm of contemplation which, for Hamilton, is charged with eros.

WHEREAS
Layli Long Soldier

Besides having great people that work there, they publish so many wonderful books. My pick for favorite book would be Layli Long Soldier’s powerful book of poetry WHEREAS, and I also have fond memories of working two book events with the author. ––Fred

Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems
Tony Hoagland, Martin Shaw

Cinderbiter collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling. In the spirit of recasting these legends and voices for new audiences, celebrated mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw and award-winning poet Tony Hoagland have created extraordinary new versions of these bardic lyrics, folkloric sagas, and heroes' journeys, as they have never been rendered before.

"You may know that I have a fondness for Irish literature, music, and the occasional Guinness, so when I discovered this book, which finds the authors transfiguring Celtic folktales into vivid poetry, I knew it'd be deadly." ––Adam S. 

Bunk: The Rise of  Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News 
Kevin Young

The award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P. T. Barnum's "humbug" culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's "fake news." Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and "What Is It?," an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.

Graywolf Press is a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of twenty-first century American and international literature. We champion outstanding writers at all stages of their careers to ensure that adventurous readers can find underrepresented and diverse voices in a crowded marketplace.

Homie
Danez Smith

Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family--blood and chosen--arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours.

"Homie by Danez Smith was one of my favorite poetry releases last year. I go back and reread some of those poems at least once a month." ––Talia

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SUPPORT THE CO-OP Grove Atlantic

theMystery.doc
Matthew McIntosh

A postmodern story about identity, writing and decay, this deceptively short book about an amnesiac writer wanders through a massive variety of voices, literary styles and forms of presentation. From the empty and cryptic pages to the constantly shifting perspectives, there is literal and figurative space to explore in the structure and plot of this novel. Although hefty in size, theMystery.doc rolls with a pace that makes hundreds of pages feel like dozens as prose, web pages, symbols and photographs flicker by and create a truly memorable reading experience.  ––Bryce

Endgame & Act Without Words I
Samuel Beckett

Grove is committed to keeping seminal works from the long-dead in print; their stewardship of Beckett’s titles is a prime example.

Endgame is Beckett's masterpiece (or at least one bookseller thinks so), a one-act that dangles us over the abyss and demands that we laugh about it. This exceptional work of minimalism has it all: blindness, a very small room, a probably obliterated outside world, an inescapable end, a dab of insecticide, and a pair of parents living in trash cans. ––Alena

Grove Atlantic is an American independent literary publisher based in NYC. Their imprints: Grove Press, Atlantic Monthly Press, Black Cat, and Mysterious Press.

Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart is another novel set in working class Scotland during the eighties. Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize and was also nominated for the National Book Prize, is a heartbreaking story of a mother and son. This debut novel was rejected by over 30 publishers before being accepted by Grove Atlantic. ––Fred

Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata

The English-language debut of one of Japan's most talented contemporary writers, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of "Smile Mart," she finds peace and purpose in her life. It's almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

Open Water
Caleb Azumah Nelson

In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty.

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SEMCOOP.COM Grove Atlantic

Electric Arches
Eve Ewing

Dr. Ewing's first book heralded all the brilliance we have seen from this singular scholar-artist-activist. Her verbal dexterity, imaginative speculations, emotional honesty, commitment to mastering and then questioning forms, her moral clarity about America's systemic iniquities, and her celebrations of Black brilliance are all present at the inception of her already legendary career. We are all lucky to live in the time of Ewing! —Jeff

We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
Mariame Kaba

We are very excited to be publishing Mariame Kaba's first non-fiction book.. We Do This 'Till We Free Us is a reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation. —Rory Fanning, Haymarket

What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. 

Too Much Midnight
Krista Franklin

I practically devoured Too Much Midnight by Krista Franklin. This book is fantastic––equal parts art piece and prose, Franklin expertly weaves together her vibrant collage work with her energetic poetry. It helps that she's local, too! —Talia

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SEMCOOP.COM Haymarket Books

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Haymarket Books SUPPORT THE CO-OP

Citizen Illegal
José Olivarez

José Olivarez's Citizen Illegal is full to the brim with dazzling wit and honest, heartwarming prose. Tackling issues from immigration and culture shock, to education, Olivarez's poems lifted me up and made me look at Chicago through a different lens. Citizen Illegal is one of the most exciting--and not to mention timely--collections of poetry I've read this year.  —Talia

Black Queer Hoe
Britteney Black Rose Kapri

Britteney Black Rose Kapri's Black Queer Hoe is biting, rhythmic, and real. This chapbook is a celebration and a prayer. Kapri's engrossing and frank prose left me gasping at every poem, and she didn't let me look away.  Despite how demanding and heavy some of the poems in this collection get, I had fun reading it, i enjoyed myself, I laughed out loud. I want to share this with everyone I love, because Kapri just gets it. Although this book is meant for/exists as a love letter to black queer women, everyone should experience it's bravery. ––Talia

Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell
Marta Russell

It is increasingly recognized that conceptions of disability are constituted by capitalism: one is “disabled” with regard to capacities for capitalist labor.  Russell explores the history of that constitution clearly and carefully. She for example relates disablement to the tendency of capitalism to render populations superfluous to capitalist accumulation, and to then subject those populations to administrative control and incarceration. She further explores the emergence of what she calls “handicapitalism” – the subsumption of potentially oppositional impulses under profit logics. Rejecting identity-political bases of activism, Russell demonstrates that a rigorous approach to the politics of disability must demand the supercession of capitalism, and thereby that this book should be of broad interest. —Mark

Shirley Chisholm: The Last Interview 
Shirley Chisholm

Twilight in Hazard: An Appalachian Reckoning 
Alam Maimon

When Maimon took the job and arrived in Hazard, Kentucky as the Journal’s regional bureau chief, he realized that he was reporting on a much bigger story than the county’s otherness. It was a region in the grip of ecological devastation, a man-made prescription pill epidemic, and where the aftermath of September 11th was taking an outsize toll. He witnessed first hand the enchroaching structural forces that would keep the region in poverty for decades to follow, even as many of those forces remain unacknowledged today.

Every Man Dies Alone 
Hans Fallada, trans. by Michael Hofmann

"One of my favorite books from the Melville House backlist is Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, because in a lot of ways it so deeply embodies the company's mission: To be brave and try to make the world a better place. It's the story of an uneducated, working-class married couple who live in World War II-era Berlin, and who decide they've got to do something to stop the Nazis. They realize there's little the two of them can do against such a killing machine — and that whatever they do it will be just the two of them, and it will probably be futile, not to mention fatal. But they do it anyway. It's an old-fashioned absorbing story that's deeply stirring, and presents an uncanny portrait of a country and its people gripped by a murderous mass hysteria. I've never given it to anyone who didn't come back in gratitude, and often enough in tears. I'm proud that it became a worldwide sensation after I discovered it forgotten amidst the literary rubble of post-war Berlin. But mostly I'm proud to have been able to get such an important, and helpful, work of literature to a large readership. I know it's been a force for good." ––Dennis Johnson, co-founder and co-publisher

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview 
Ursula K. Le Guin, Edited by David Streitfeld

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Melville House Publishing

Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview 
Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Kit Maude

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Milkweed Editions

Braiding Sweetgrass 
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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Dēmos 
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

‘You tell me how I was born   what I am,’” demands Naka-Hasebe Kingsley—of himself, of the reader, of the world. The poems of Dēmos: An American Multitude seek answers in the Haudenosaunee story of The Lake and Her children; in the scope of a .243 aimed at a pregnant doe; in the Dōgen poem jotted on a napkin by his obaasan; in a flag burning in a church parking lot. Here, Naka-Hasebe Kingsley places multiracial displacement, bridging disparate experiences with taut, percussive language that will leave readers breathless.

Hearth: A Global Conversation of Community, Identity, and Place
Annick Smith, Susan O'Connor

A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.

A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.

Selected Poetry of Vincente Huidobro
Vicente Huidobro

The genius of Vicente Huidobro, the underappreciated (in the U.S.) Chilean poet, is clear from this extraordinary collection. Here are some characteristic lines: “All the languages are dead/ Dead in the hands of the tragic neighbor/ We must revive the languages/ With raucous laughter/ With wagons of giggles/ With circuit breakers in the sentences/ And cataclysm in the grammar…A beautiful madness in the life of the word/ A beautiful madness in the zone of language” ––Jeff

Harbart
Nabarun Bhattacharya

A classic of Bengali literature, Harbart is a powerful, wild, and stylistically stunning novel. You might recognize the book’s translator, Sunandini Banerjee, as the brilliant artist behind Seagull Books’s  (see page 40) distinctive book designs, and their chief editor. Harbart and his losses will haunt you long after you finish the book. ––Jeff

Água Viva
Clarice Lispector, trans. by Stefan Tobler

Água Viva might not be a novel or a prose poem or a meditation or a book-length prayer, but it certainly resembles all of them, and serves as one of our great testaments to creativity, identity, and the ecstatic experience. This is one book that repays re-reading, slow reading, and even slightly unfocused reading; it is an experience.  ––Jeff

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New Directions Publishing SEMCOOP.COM

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SUPPORT THE CO-OP New Directions Publishing New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.”

Our Riches
Kaouther Adimi, trans. by Chris Andrews

This short novel, which is rooted in imagined history, is the story of Bookstore Les Vraies Richesses in Algiers, Algeria that survived over 80 years until recently—including the imprisonment of the founder by French authorities, a World War, two bombings during the Algerian War of Independence, and a civil war during the 90s. It is also the story of its founder Edmond Charlot. The bookstore was also the first publisher of Albert Camus in 1936, who makes an appearance in the novel.  —Fred

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
Anne Carson

"Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks."
Anne Carson's newest venture, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, fuses the stories of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe in an implication of the destructive powers of beauty. Even just the script captures history's strange fascination with the two women as its narrator constructs his own play, slipping between disorientation and intense clarity of the pain, futility, and lives these two women led. Carson once again bridges millennia with her poetic verse in this absolutely beautiful script. —Emma

Cronopios and Famas (1999)

Julio Cortazar, trans. by Paul Blackburn

New Directions Publishing

The Marvelous Equations of the Dread (2018)

Marcia Douglas 

 

Nikolai Gogol (1961)

Vladimir Nabokov

New Directions Publishing

Count Luna (2020)

Alexander Lernet-Holenia, trans. by Jane B. Greene

The Guest Cat (2014)

Takashi Hiraide, trans. by Eric Selland

New Directions Publishing

Envelope Poems (2016)

Emily Dickinson

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SUPPORT THE CO-OP New Directions Publishing

Angels and Saints
Eliot Weinberger

from "John Climacus":

A man who has heard himself sentenced to death will not worry about the way theaters are run.
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A small hair disturbs the eye.
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An angry person is like a voluntary epileptic.
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A lemon tree lifts its branches upward when it has no fruit. The more its branches bend, the more fruit you will find there. The meaning of this will be clear to the man disposed to understand it. ––Jeff

The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

Pessoa writes an autobiography without incident or action. This masterful exploration of our attempts at understanding death, longing, and the uncanny is one for the ages. ––Jeff

Malina
Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. by Philip Boehm

Malina is a brilliant, dizzying, and difficult exploration of cruelty and madness. Bachmann was one of the 20th-century’s most brilliant novelists and poets (Zephyr Press’s edition of her poetry, Darkness Spoken, is a world unto itself). The translator, Philip Boehm, updated his 1990 translation in 2019, correcting inaccuracies and using the current scholarship, as well as his more mature approach to translation. Don’t miss the Celan-Bachmann correspondence from Seagull Books on page 41.––Jeff

"I read successively The Dry Heart and Happiness as Such from Natalia Ginzburg. While translated and published simultaneously, they were written 20 years apart. While radically different, these two novels demonstrate equally the genius of Natalia Ginzburg: an ability to touch us deeply, to bring us into her characters’ lives while keeping us in appearance at distance, daring to approach without sentimentality the coldest as the warmest of what makes the fabric of human relationships." —Stéphanie

The Dry Heart
Natalia Ginzburg, trans. by Frances Frenaye

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: "I shot him between the eyes." As the tale--a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness--proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?

Happiness, as Such
Natalia Ginzburg, trans. by Minna Zallman Proctor

At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence--an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink--created by a family's only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives. Natalia Ginzburg's most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

Vertigo
W. G. Sebald, trans. by Michael Hulse

I loved Vertigo, and I need to read more and get lost in the Sebald universe. I would argue that Vertigo should not be labeled a novel, but what is it? It is a book in four parts including a section about Stendhal, a section about a journey to Italy, a section about Kafka, and lastly, a journey to one’s own home village.  —Fred

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The New Press
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Paul Robeson: No One Can Silence Me: The Life of the Legendary Artist and Activist (Adapted for Young Adults)

Paul Robeson was destined for greatness. The son of an ex-slave who upon his college graduation ranked first in his class, Robeson was proclaimed the future “leader of the colored race in America.” Although a graduate of Columbia Law School, he abandoned his law career (and the racism he encountered there) and began a hugely successful career as an internationally celebrated actor and singer. The predictions seemed to have been correct—Paul Robeson’s triumphs on the stage earned him esteem among white and Black Americans across the country, although his daring and principled activism eventually made him an outcast from the entertainment industry, and his radical views made many consider him a public enemy. 

The New Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher of books to build social change, by authors and activists in criminal justice reform, progressive education, labor and environmental movements, marginalized histories and more.

Suncatcher: A Novel
Romesh Gunesekera

Ceylon 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.

Spring Time in a Broken Mirror
Mario Benedetti, trans. by Nick Caistor

The 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.

Fatal Invention:  How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century 
Dorothy Roberts

This groundbreaking book by the acclaimed Dorothy Roberts examines how the myth of the biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.

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SEMCOOP.COM The New Press

After Claude
Iris Owens

Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

“A strange, wicked proto-slacker satire set at the legendary Chelsea Hotel, where a Solanis-esque anti-heroine meets a Manson-esque guru and things get twisted fast.” —Alex

Machines in the Head
Anna Kavan

A darker, sadder Kafka (sorry to resort to comparison). Mostly in the first person, which makes it more despairing and intimate than Kafka. If you've ever nightmared about being psychologically pried open by unnamed doctors/agents of the state while also worrying about which bus you'll catch home, read this. —Alena

Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick

Sleepless Nights is a book that I’ve returned to many times and, each time, I find I experience it anew. The book’s form—a series of fractured assemblages of memories, reflections, and ideas—aids in this experience; there’s no one exact way to understand the totality of Sleepless Nights, an autobiographical project Hardwick undertook later in her literary career. And it’s that inability to see a whole memory or experience a complete narrative that makes the elusiveness of this novel so compelling: where we see parts and pieces, Hardwick has given us space to play, imagine, and create narratives of our own.—Clancey

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New York Review of Books SEMCOOP.COM

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The Resurgence of Central Asia
Ahmed Rashid

The Resurgence of Central Asia is Ahmed Rashid’s seminal study of the states that emerged in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. All have Muslim majorities and ancient histories but are otherwise very different. Rashid gives a history of each country, including its incorporation into Tsarist Russia, to the present day, provides basic socioeconomic information, and explains the diverse political situations. He focuses primarily on the underlying issues confronting these societies: the legacy of Soviet rule, ethnic tensions, the position of women, the future of Islam, the question of nuclear proliferation, and the fundamental choices over economic strategy, political system, and external orientation that lie ahead.

Thus Were Their Faces
Silvina Ocampo, trans. by Daniel Balderston

Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious.

The Cowshed
Ji Xianlin, trans. by Chenxin Jiang

The Chinese Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and led to a ten-year-long reign of Maoist terror throughout China, in which millions died or were sent to labor camps in the country or subjected to other forms of extreme discipline and humiliation. Ji Xianlin was one of them. The Cowshed is Ji’s harrowing account of his imprisonment in 1968 on the campus of Peking University and his subsequent disillusionment with the cult of Mao. As the campus spirals into a political frenzy, Ji, a professor of Eastern languages, is persecuted by lecturers and students from his own department. His home is raided, his most treasured possessions are destroyed, and Ji himself must endure hours of humiliation at brutal “struggle sessions.” He is forced to construct a cowshed (a makeshift prison for intellectuals who were labeled class enemies) in which he is then housed with other former colleagues. His eyewitness account of this excruciating experience is full of sharp irony, empathy, and remarkable insights into a central event in Chinese history.

 Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.

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Ban en Banlieue
Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue follows a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, in 1979, is the axis of this startling work of overlapping arcs and varying approaches. By the end of the night, Ban moves into an incarnate and untethered presence, becoming all matter— soot, meat, diesel oil and force—as she loops the city with the energy of global weather.

Skyland
Andrew Durbin

This book made its way to me because it's built around the narrator's trip to Greece in search of an elusive painting of Hervé Guibert. Though it is gratifying to share passion for Guibert's work, the porous nature of the novella also gives the joy of discovering Samos's taverns, the motley passenger crowds on the ferries that ride between islands, and even a story of a family jewelry piece. Through the scarcity of Internet on the island, we gently lose touch with the strict ticking of time and soar over made commitments. —Marina

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
Larry Mitchell, illus. by Ned Asta

I've recommended it before, I'll recommend it again. This book provides a real yet optimistic, unapologetically crass vision of what community-based resistance to the status quo does and could look like. Filled with whimsical illustrations, it is the kind of book you easily pick up and flip to your favorite parts now and again just for the pick-me-up. —Michelle

The Roving Shadows
Pascal Quignard, trans. by Chris Turner

Quignard is a marvel and Seagull has published quite a few of his wonderful books. The Roving Shadows is a lovely meditation on time and literature told in a style that resembles the run of a river, with its pulses, eddies, currents, tributaries, and delta. —Jeff

Mother of 1084
Mahasweta Devi, trans. by Samik Bandyopadhyay

Mother of 1084 is one of Mahasweta Devi’s most widely read works, written during the height of the Naxalite agitation—a militant communist uprising in the 1960s–70s that was brutally repressed by the West Bengal government, leading to the widespread murder of young rebels across the state. The novel focuses on the trauma of a mother who awakens one morning to the shattering news that her son is lying dead in the police morgue, reduced to a mere numeral: Corpse No. 1084. Through her struggle to understand his revolutionary commitment as a Naxalite, she recognizes her own alienation—as a woman and a wife—from the complacent, hypocritical, and corrupt feudal society her son had so fiercely rebelled against. 

Time Within Time
Andrey Tarkovsky, trans. by Kitty Hunter-Blair

The incredible diversity of life experience that Tarkovsky entrusts to the diaries make them truly fascinating documents. From shopping lists for his new home and endless turmoils with the government over his work, to reflections on the birth of his son; on literature, freedom, God, and History. A must-read for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky's oeuvre. —Marina

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SEMCOOP.COM Seagull Books

Correspondence
Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. by Wieland Hoban

Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post-World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence. Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living—as a woman, as a man, as writers. Seagull Books

Seagull Books

Seagull Books

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Semiotext(e)

The Making of the Indebted Man
Maurizio Lazzarato, trans. by Joshua David Gordon

Debt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.

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Seasonal Associate
Heike Geissler, trans. by Katy Derbyshire

Heike Gessler's Seasonal Associate, a Sem Co-op staff favorite, is a striking and devastating work of autofiction. A grueling portrayal of the conditions of human life under modern day late capitalism, Gessler's tale, rooted in her experience working at a European Amazon warehouse, delivers a firsthand account of the physical, emotional, and psychological toll endured by today's worker. Switching between first and second person narration, the work subtly implicates the reader by facilitating the empathetic occupation of Gessler's place, mindset, and emotional condition, thoroughly driving home the underlying truth that while this may be Gessler's experience in particular, it could easily be any of ours. —Meghana 

Written in Invisible Ink
Hervé Guibert, edited and trans. by Jeffrey Zuckerman

This must be the most comprehensive collection of Hervé Guibert's writings in English to date. Unfortunately, he's decisively under-translated, but thankfully more publications are on the way. Written in Invisible Ink, among many wonderful things, contains the full manuscript of Death Propaganda––Guibert's debut. The book is an amusing interplay of body and language, where, in Guilbert's own words, the writing dissects the body and the act of writing itself, which is sort of in line with Pierre Guyotat text "Langage du corps,” included in the first edition of Polysexuality Journal, also published by Semiotext(e). —Marina

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Why Different?
Luce Irigaray

For Luce Irigaray, one of the most original French feminist theorists, deconstructing the patriarchal tradition is not enough. She begins this project by analyzing and interpreting the absence of the feminine subject in the definition of dominant cultural values. She then wonders how these new values can be constructed without simply reversing the roles. Far from implying a hierarchy, difference affirms the coexistence and fruitful encounter of two different identities. These two heterogeneous identities, masculine and feminine, are not socially but ontologically constructed and describing the feminine requires establishing methods other than those already used by the masculine subject. Why Different? is a collection of interviews, conducted in both France and Italy, that deal explicitly with the relationship between daughter and mother, the sexuation of language, the symbolic order, and the importance of both history and philosophy for the liberation of the feminine subject.

Heroines
Kate Zambreno

 I first read Heroines over five years ago and seldom does a day go by where I do not think about the power and force of Zambreno’s project. Through biographical excavation and personal reflection, Heroines offers a re-reading of the female figures of Modernism which enlivens and rescripts the narratives around Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald, and more. This book’s project is undergirded by an intense, emotional force which brings visibility to the historical echoes of women’s silence and subjugation in the present.—Clancey

Revolt, She Said
Julia Kristeva

May '68 in France expressed a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to succeed, but freedom to revolt. Political revolutions ultimately betray revolt because they cease to question themselves. Revolt, as I understand it--psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt--refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances. In this book, Julia Kristeva extends the definition of revolt beyond politics per se. Kristeva sees revolt as a state of permanent questioning and transformation, of change that characterizes psychic life and, in the best cases, art. For her, revolt is not simply about rejection and destruction--it is a necessary process of renewal and regeneration.

Frail Sister
Karen Green

Some readers might know artist-writer Karen Green by her first book, Bough Down, a narrative and visual collage work that was remarkable in its evocation of her love for husband whom she lost to suicide and her summoning of a creative will in the face of such devastation. The book evolved out of writing exercises gifted by her friend Claudia Rankine (to whom the book is dedicated) to help navigate the grief (and it was Claudia who first told me about the work and read the a few pages to me on the phone). Her second book Frail Sister shares the same dark humor and poetic precision, but it is a bolder book in its visual inventions and narrative expanse. She asks the very layered question, "how does a woman disappear?” and answers with a fictional archive of letters, altered photos, drawings, and other artifacts from a missing woman’s life. I love this book, but I also love that Karen has emerged from the crucible of grief as a rare species of artist-writer who is as masterful with language as she is with image. It's a book I'm very proud of having published.. —Lisa Pearson, Publisher of Siglio 

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Siglio Press
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Since its founding in 2008, Siglio has shown a deep devotion to subversion of all sorts, publishing books that show absolutely no interest in adherence to genre. Each work challenges its audience to modulate between the roles of reader and viewer in some way, to stretch the page into canvas or to realign images into words. Their catalog—featuring Cecilia Vicuña, Marcel Broodthaers, Madeline Gins, Bernadette Mayer, and many, many more—is rich with experiment and exploration, demonstrating a profound commitment to idiosyncratic artistic vision.

The Address Book
Sophie Calle 

The Address Book, a key and controversial work in Sophie Calle's oeuvre, lies at the epicenter of many layers of reality and fiction. Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals--in essence, following him through the map of his acquaintances.

"Calle’s exploration of and intrusion into this man’s life illuminate the themes coursing throughout her work—the slippage between public and private spheres, the unsettling ease with which a stranger might appropriate your life for their own ends, the dissolving borders of identity. Her balance of playfulness and disquieting focus are remarkable, and her methods are all the more noteworthy when we consider how state, corporate, and individual surveillance shape our lives today." —Alena

About to Happen
Cecilia Vicuña

Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña weaves personal and ancestral memory to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century. C About to Happen, which accompanies an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry.

Torture of Women
Nancy Spero

Torture of Women is Nancy Spero’s contribution to contemporary art, to feminist thought and action, and to the continuing protest against torture, injustice, and the abuse of power. This 125-foot-long collage weaves ancient and modern stories of oppression and resistance by juxtaposing mythological imagery with written first person accounts by victims of torture, news reportage of missing women, and definitions of torture from the 13th and 20th centuries.

Black Panther: Paradigm Shift or Not? 
Edited by Herb Boyd, Haki R. Madhubuti

The anthology, which includes more than forty writers, film critics, scholars, and activists, has a timely appearance and should be able to reap some of the renewed media attention the film has sparked. Among the contributors are Nicole Mitchell Gantt, Jelani Cobb, Brent Staples, Abdul Alkalimat, Bobby Seale, Robyn Spencer, Diane Turner, Greg Tate, Maulana Karenga, Marita Golden, and Molefi Keta Asante, et al. As may be discerned from the contributors the anthology is a compilation of mixed views and opinions--with both praise and a critique of the film. "The film has aroused a variety of conclusions, a wellspring of differences that we felt compelled to give them a forum," said Boyd. "Like the film, the views expressed in the book are often very provocative.

A Reader of Afri-Centric Theory and Practice: Philosophical and Humanistic Writings of Aminifu R. Harvey
Aminifu R. Harvey

Dr. Aminifu R. Harvey's compilation of his selected writings is enormously important for those interested in Afrocentric theory and practice. Dr. Harvey has provided the necessary confluence between Afrocentric theory and practice and how this link can be used to explain and resolve the pressing mental and social problems that have afflicted people of African ancestry. His work is seminal because he is the first trained social worker in the U.S. to incorporate the cultural principles and practices of traditional Africa into the social work/human service profession's written knowledge base. 

Taught By Women: Poems as Resistance Language: New and Selected 
Haki R. Madhubuti

Taught By Women, Poems as Resistance Language, New and Selectedby Haki R. Madhubuti, marks a return to his roots. It is his first single-authored book of poetry in over nine years. In it, he pays homage to the many women who have influenced him and contributed to his unique worldview. Readers are urged not to forget various women who have nurtured, encouraged, challenged and strengthened us despite our sometimes dismal circumstances. Madhubuti asks that we remember these women, long distance runners, who give hope, optimism and courage to the next generation of children who need their strength, perseverance and quiet power.

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Wakefield Press SUPPORT THE CO-OP

The Subversion of Images 
Paul Nougé, trans. by M. Kasper

The Wakefield Press catalog is full of little gems. They are making available in English untranslated or unpublished texts often from underrepresented authors. Many of these are translated from French (Leon Bloy, Pierre Louÿs, Marcel Schwob, Henri Michaux, just to name a few). It is fantastic to know that these essential texts are not rarities anymore, and are now available in English too. This year, what stood out for me was Paul Nougé’s photo-essay "The Subversion of Images" (2019): a poetic, Surrealist manifesto for a different use of photography, in a facsimile of the original edition. Simply beautiful.. —Stéphanie

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
Georges Perec, trans. by Marc Lowenthal

For three days in 1974, Georges Perec sat at a cafe on Place Saint-Sulpice and recorded, in the fragmented prose of a field observer, what unfolded before him. Starting with an “outline of an inventory of some strictly visible things” and sketching out the constant movement of pigeons, buses, people, the narrator obviously fails at exhausting anything. Instead, with each sparse line, he asks what totality would look like, asks what we could ever know about a bell peal, shopping bag, or weeping child. He stops writing on the third day, at 2pm, with no period to mark the occasion. —Alena

Murder Most Serene
Gabrielle Wittkop, trans. by Louise Rogers Lalaurie

I religiously collect Gabrielle's books, and all of them are translated and published by small presses, to whom I am forever grateful. Murder is my second favorite of Gabrielle's. A baroque tale set in the corrupt and decomposing Venetian Republic, it follows the life of an elderly bookish aristocrat. The main story is woven into the city's grotesque festivities, night encounters of conspirators, whose identities we can only guess as volto masks cover their faces. We hear something about poisonings; secret letters on embossed paper are passed discreetly; someone is dumping bodies in the river at night. An exquisite memento mori, in other words. The book is also rich in historical detail and is inspired by Wittkop's interest in toxicology, morbid aesthetics, and the history of fashion. (Beautiful cover too.) —Marina

The Book of Monelle
Marcel Schwob, trans. by Kit Schluter

When Marcel Schwob published The Book of Monelle in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarmé, Alfred Jarry, and André Gide. A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales, and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work over a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the fruit of Schwob’s intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a “girl of the streets” named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into Monelle, the innocent prophet of destruction, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusion, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.

The Physiology of the Employee
By Honoré de Balzac, trans. by Naffis-sahe

If Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living addressed one crucial pillar of modernity--the "mode" itself, fashion--his Physiology of the Employee examines another equally potent cornerstone to the modern era: bureaucracy, and all of the cogs and wheels of which it is composed. Long before Franz Kafka described the nightmarish metaphysics of office bureaucracy, Balzac had undertaken his own exploration of the dust-laden, stifling environment of the paper-pusher in all of his roles and guises. "Bureaucracy," as he defined it: "a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs." In this guidebook, published for mass consumption in 1841, Balzac's classic theme of melodramatic ambition plays itself out within the confined, unbreathable space of the proto-cubicle, filtered through the restricted scale of the pocket handbook

The Trumpets of Jericho
Unica Zurn, trans. by Christina Svedsen

Though slim, this work is as grotesque as anything Zürn has written (or drawn, for that matter). An isolated woman—the word “troubled” might be used, but it is utterly insufficient for the twisted and terrifying psyche we are exposed to—struggles against the parasite-son growing within her, while we ourselves travel into the depths of her mind (and, it sometimes feels, her flesh). Resisting any logic we might hope to apply to her, Zürn instead summons the horrors of the human body through her writhing, nightmarish visions. The result is tide of repulsion from and wonder at the act of creation and the responsibility it entails. —Alena

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X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (Urbanomic)
Thomas Moynihan

Essential reading for pandemic times: a cultural history of human extinction—or the notion of such an event, which Moynihan shows is a fairly modern concept.

Dizziness: A Resource (Sternberg Press)
Edited by Ruth Anderwald, Karoline Feyertag, and Leonhard Grond

Dizziness as method, dizziness as philosophy, dizziness as vibratory, potentially production instability. A range of artistic and philosophical treatments of something everyone has experienced, but a topic I haven’t encountered in this manner before.

Last Loosening: A Handbook for the Con Artist & Those Aspiring to Become one
(Twisted Spoon Press)
Walter Serner

Walter Serner was the most nihilistic, cynical, and unnerving of the Dadaists. To be is to swindle, and vice versa.

Antisemitism  (Rixdorf Editions)
Hermann Bahr

An incredible document: interviews on the titular topic undertaken in 1893 Vienna by a former anti-Semite with 38 contemporaries, from such well-known figures as Ibsen and Haeckel to now-forgotten politicians and writers.

Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully
(Strange Attractor Press)
Amy Hale

A critical biography of the British occult Surrealist, who has until recently been too often relegated to footnote status. I’ve mainly known her for her notorious 1940 painting The Pine Family, but I’m looking forward to learning more.

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Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From 
Sawako Nakayasu

In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and as characters that take up residence between the thick border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing conventions, literary and otherwise. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, mordant, and jagged.

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Photos from the exhibition of the book, DMZ Colony, courtesy of DAAD in Berlin. 

DMZ Colony
Don Mee Choi

Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.

Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition
Lisa Fishman

Spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations, Lisa Fishman's Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition upends time itself in lyric, prose, and visual forms. Sharing Paul Klee's intuition that "the eye travels along the path cut out for it in the work," this deeply multifaceted book moves between observational directness and maddened speech, places and persons, humor and alarm. Tempted by Laura Riding's renunciation of poetry yet rich with life-forms of all kinds (vegetable, animal, processual), it is a work of immediate presence and continuous change, enacting an ever-renewing ecology of connection in peril.

Underworld Lit
Srikanth Reddy

Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

Madness, Rack, and Honey
Mary Ruefle

Madness, Rack, and Honey is a singular work. Billed as “lectures,” these reflections, flights of fancy, aphorisms, poems, and essays created one of the most unique and fulfilling reading experiences I have had in years. Where else will you learn about the idea of retiring a word every time an author dies (Nabokov: quiddity), education as the curriculum one has to run through in order to catch up with oneself, the Oblomov for President bumper sticker, and the way in which you, the reader, are a sign of order in the world? ––Jeff

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