All I Could Never Be
Anzia Yezierska

Fanya, a young Polish Jew, living and working on the Lower East Side, attends a lecture by a famous educator, Henry Scott, that seems meant specifically for her.  Scott calls America “the meeting ground of all the nations of the world” and exhorts Americans to “blaze a trail to a future where people would be judged not by membership in a group... but as individuals on their own merits.”  
On an impulse, Fanya goes to Scott’s university office and boldly asks him to read the autobiography she has written. After a highly charged exchange, the rational, older, American professor is won over by the young, passionate, Jewish immigrant. She is his fascination; he is her “symbol of all she could never be.”

This moving portrait of a vibrant and talented immigrant woman is based on the author’s true relationship with John Dewey, the important and famous educator who was her most significant influence. It depicts the workings of American society during the 1930s, especially between the privileged class and immigrants who were striving for a better life. It is an early and optimistic story of Jewish assimilation, and grapples with issues still faced by immigrants today.

Anzia Yezierska emigrated from Russian Poland to the United States in 1890. She lived on the Lower East Side and worked her way up through menial jobs and hard-won education to success as a writer about “her people.” Her books are widely read, including the classic novel Bread Givers, How I Found America: Collected Stories, and Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story.

Paperback / $16.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-456-2 / 240 pages / Fiction
 

Download a Teacher’s Guide by co-editor Brice Particelli

View the table of contents.

America Street
A Multicultural Anthology of Stories
Anne Mazer & Brice Particelli (editors)

A Revised Edition of the Classroom Favorite

When published in 1993, America Street was the very first collection of stories about young people growing up in our diverse society. It has informed and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. Now this influential and much-loved anthology is expanded and updated for a new generation. Twenty stories, twelve new and eight returning favorites, focus on life issues, from the personal to the political: from making friends and keeping up traditions to the right to an equal education and to protest.

Authors included are: Duane Big Eagle, Marina Budhos, Norma Elia Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Lan Samantha Chang, Tope Folarin, Rivka Galchen, Joseph Geha, Veera Hiranandani, Langston Hughes, Gish Jen, Edward P. Jones, Francisco Jiménez, Mary K. Mazotti, Toshio Mori, Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Power, Gary Soto, Justin Torres, and Michele Wallace.

“A collection of short stories that brilliantly capture defining moments in the lives of a diverse group of American children and teens. . . . most of the protagonists express a deep but conflicted love of their families and heritages, resulting in nuanced narratives that feel honest and relevant. . . . A lyrical, poignant collection of voices . . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

Anne Mazer is the author of forty-four books for young readers and writers, including the novel The Oxboy, and the editor of four significant and widely adopted Persea anthologies about youth: the first edition of America Street; Going Where I'm Coming From, memoirs; Working Days , stories about teens at work; and A Walk in My World, international short stories.

Brice Particelli earned his Ph.D. in English Education from Columbia University.  He has taught in middle schools and high schools, and was director of the literacy-focused Student Press Initiative at Teachers College.  He publishes regularly in both research and literary journals, and has been honored by fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Wilson Center.  He teaches writing at Pace University.

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-491-1 / 224 pages / Anthology

The Book of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan

Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards Foreword By Natalie Zemon Davis                               

In dialogues with three celestial ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan builds an allegorical fortified city for women using examples of the important contributions women have made to Western civilization and arguments that prove their intellectual and moral quality with men. In this edition, the acclaimed Richards translation of the authoritative Harley 4431 manuscript is updated to correspond to Richard's critical edition of the original medieval French text; the Introduction is augmented to cover the latest scholarship; and a completely new Foreword by the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, Princeton University, is added. 

“The first work in praise and defense of women...available for the first time in print and in modern English—here is a real book event. We owe thanks to the translator for a fine, flowing, readable English prose, and to the publisher for the rebirth of this moving to remarkable work.”
—Barbara Tuchman

“An astonishing, original work...true eloquence resurrected from the silence of the past.”
—Maureen Quilligan, New York Times Book Review

“A volume without which no shelf of women's works should be considered complete.”
—San Fransisco Chronicle

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-230-6 / 281 pages / Fiction

The Book of the Duke of True Lovers
Christine de Pizan

Translated, with an introduction by Thelma S. Fenster with lyric poetry translated by Nadia Margolis

Written in 1405, this charming tale of courtly romance follows the progress of a clandestine love affair between a young knight, the Duke, and a married noblewoman. The Book of the Duke of True Lovers is as readable and entertaining today as it was when it was written. At the same time it provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of late medieval France, its society, fashion, and customs. Based on a new, more complete text of the French original, this translation is accompanied by six illuminations, an introduction, notes, a glossary, and a bibliography.                                                                                             
Christine de Pizan (1365-1429?), France's first woman of letters, is the author of more than twenty distinguished works, many concerning the political life of France or the defense of women. The book is a part of the Persea series of critical translations of the works of Christine de Pizan, which also includes The Book of the City of Ladies, A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies, and The Writings of Christine de Pizan.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-166-8 / 162 pages / Fiction

A Boy From Ireland
Marie Raphael

Set in 1901, this is the exciting story of Liam, a fourteen-year-old, half-Irish, half-English boy who triumphs over a bully and a cycle of hatred through friendship and the love of a horse.  

“A poignant tale unsparing in its depiction of ethnic and racial prejudice and, at the same time, heartwarming in its portrayal of friendship and moral awakening. . . . This is a story you will want to share with every young teenager you know.”
—Howard Zinn

Marie Raphael is the author of the novel Streets of Gold. She has been a teacher in middle school, high school, and college. She lives in Redway, California.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $12.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-426-3 / 224 pages / Young Adult Fiction

Also available as a hardcover

Bread Givers
Anzia Yezierska

Foreword and Introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris

This masterwork of American immigrant literature, set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father’s rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sara’s struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Beautifully redesigned page for page with the previous editions, Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.

“Yezierska captures American hunger with extraordinary intensity.”
—Vivian Gornick, New York Times

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York’s immigrant Jews, including How I Found America and The Open Cage and the memoir Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 

Paperback / $16.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-290-0 / 336 pages / Fiction, Jewish Studies

A Brief Conversion and Other Stories
Earl Lovelace

In thirteen vivid stories, award-winning author Earl Lovelace paints a compassionate, often humorous portrait of everyday life in Trinidad. Ordinary people like Victor the barber, Shoemaker Arnold, Miss Ross, and Blues and Joebell are invested with the magic of their colorful, changing world. Written with Lovelace’s characteristic ear for melody and rhythm, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories is an invaluable contribution to contemporary world literature. 

“Lovelace evoke[s] Trinidad in a generous, torrential prose that seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.”
—New York Times Book Review

“In an island patois that, for all of its richness and color, is always to the point, Lovelace expresses powerful and often subtle ideas with memorable directness.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Lovelace deftly conveys his hallmark theme of the search for a Caribbean and a personal identity.”
—Multicultural Review

Earl Lovelace, the “consummate Caribbean man of letters” (Publishers Weekly), was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His many books include the novels While Gods Are Falling, winner of the Independence Literary Award; Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize; and The Dragon Can't Dance. He resides in his native Trinidad, and is on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 

Paperback / $14.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-271-9 / 150 pages / Fiction

A Cat in the Ghetto
Stories
Rachmil Bryks

Translated from the Yiddish by S. Morris Engel

First published in English in 1959 and long unavailable, Rachmil Bryks’s vivid stories portray Jewish life in the Lodz ghetto and at Auschwitz. In a spare and tragicomic style, they illuminate the small and large absurdities that arise at the limits of human endurance—from the cooking of “roast meat” made of cabbage leaves to the predicament of Jews forced to cooperate in the hierarchy of their own annihilation. Deceptively simple and often humorous, these stories nevertheless mirror Bryks’s nuanced view of major moral dilemmas of the period: action vs. inaction, preserving dignity vs. survival.

This new edition brings together Bryks’s well-known novellas, “A Cat in the Ghetto” and “Kiddush Hashem,” two short stories, an early poem, and his important but little-known essay, “My Credo,” in which he defends his use of black humor in writing about unspeakable tragedy. 

“Unique in world literature.”
—Isaac Bashevis Singer

“One should read it in order not to forget.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Rachmil Bryks was born in Poland in 1912. At twenty-seven he wrote his first book to critical praise. Soon after he found himself behind the barbed wire of the Lodz ghetto. He was transported to Auschwitz, then to a work camp in Germany. In 1949 he came to New York, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1974. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $15.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-327-3 / 154 pages / Fiction

Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works
A Biography
Charity Cannon Willard

The result of more than forty years of research, this definitive biography vividly recounts Christine's rise from society poet to eminent writer, and discusses her work at length and in relation to her life and times. 

“The long-awaited biography...by the scholar who has devoted her career to the study of this 14th-century author...affords pleasure and profit.”
—Joan M. Ferrante, New York Times Book Review

“A valuable contribution to women's history.”
—Regina Minudri, San Francisco Chronicle

“A treasure trove of delights...her crisp and unpretentious prose makes this biography a pleasure to read.”
—Katharina Wilson, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Charity Cannon Willard, a noted scholar of medieval French literature, is internationally recognized as the foremost authority on Christine de Pizan. She is the translator of Christine de Pizan's A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies and the editor of Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan. 

Paperback / $14.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-523-5 / 266 pages / Nonfiction

Crazy Weekend
Gary Soto

It’s summer in East Los Angeles, and Hector and his best amigo Mando are bored. But when they spend the weekend in Fresno with Uncle Julio, a freelance photographer, things heat up.

Uncle Julio takes the boys on a photo shoot up in a rickety old airplane. Flying over the highway, they spot an armored car heist, and Uncle Julio snaps some shots of the robbers. After they report was they saw to the local newspaper, pictures of Hector and Mando appear in the next morning's edition. The robbers—two of the most inept thugs ever to steal anything—decide to teach the boys a lesson. When the two dumb thugs and the two quick-witted boys meet up, the results are hilarious.

“A fun-paced adventure...Crazy Weekend has something for everyone.”
—VOYA

“Lighthearted and fast-paced.”
—The Horn Book

Gary Soto is the award-winning author of many books for adults, young adults, and children, including The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy, Baseball in April, Living Up the Street, Buried Onions, and Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. He lives in Berkeley, California. 

Paperback / $10.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-286-3 / 144 pages / Fiction

The Dragon Can't Dance
Earl Lovelace

In this novel, Carnival takes on social and political importance for the population of a shantytown called Calvary Hill. Usually invisible to the rest of society, these locals join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during the Carnival festivities. For some, these disguises help to realize secret longings and aspirations. But for Aldrick, the dashing “King of the Hill” who is dressed as a glorious dancing dragon, it will take one more masquerade—this time involving guns and hostages—before the illusion of power becomes reality.

“The Dragon Can't Dance is a wonderful work filled with depth, insight, and truth. While the story is grounded in the milieu of Trinidad, its message is universal and timeless.”
—Multicultural Review

“Powerful...memorable”
—Chicago Tribune

Earl Lovelace, the “consummate Caribbean man of letters” (Publishers Weekly), was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His many books include the novels While Gods Are Falling, winner of the Independence Literary Award; Salt, winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize; and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories. He resides in his native Trinidad, and is on the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. 

Paperback / $16.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-272-6 / 240 pages / Fiction

The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy
Recollections and Short Essays
Gary Soto

Set mostly in Soto’s hometown, Fresno, and the San Francisco Bay area, the forty-eight pieces in this volume include the much lauded recollections “The Jacket” and “Like Mexicans,” as well as new, never-before-collected essays, among them “Childhood Worries, or Why I Became a Writer” and the title piece in which Soto fashions himself to be Fresno's own Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer of the 1920s who lived on nothing more than his five senses, who walked around his town observing the ordinary with amazement. 

Gary Soto is the award-winning author of novels, poems, and essays, most notably Buried Onions, Nickel and Dime, Living Up the Street, Crazy Weekend, and the young adult biography Jessie De La Cruz: A Profile of a United Farm Worker. He teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Paperback / $15.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-254-2 / 206 pages / Nonfiction

Exiled Memories
A Cuban Childhood
Pablo Medina

Medina left Cuba with his family at the age of 12. In this short, personal memoir, he depicts a happy, middle-class childhood in pre-revolutionary Cuba in brief vignettes. He also shares the experience of being transplanted to the United States. He writes from the heart, seeking to recapture the essence of being Cuban despite the 30-year effort of Castro to transform Cuba. This volume provides one person's view of what that life was like.

“Medina writes from the heart, seeking to recapture the essence of being Cuban...filled with telling detail and humorous, insightful anecdotes.”
—Library Journal

“A powerful work of literature.”
—Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Yale University

Pablo Medina is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and three novels, including The Marks of Birth and The Return of Felix Nogara. 

Paperback / $14.00 (Can $20.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-280-1 / 144 pages / Memoir

Four Unposted Letters To Catherine
Laura Riding

Like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, this remarkable little book of wisdom and advice refreshes the mind and renews the spirit. Written in 1930 and published in Paris in a limited edition, these letters were addressed to an eight-year-old girl, the “thoughtful and sensible” child of Nancy Nicholson and Robert Graves. But they were also meant for adults who might have such a child in their spirit.
In simple, luminous language, Laura Riding explains the difference between learning and knowing; the value of thinking, of doing, and of not-showing-off; and how it is good to live straight, avoiding the hypocrisies and pretensions of “the muddle.”
Here is a literary treasure to be shared between generations. 

“...a small, miraculous book... With great simplicity and unpretentious sincerity, both comprehensible and enchanting as much to this particular little girl as to any child or even any wakeful grownup at all, Riding addresses some of the most elemental questions of existence — how to live a life of creativity and integrity, why praise and prestige are corrosive objects of success, and above all what it means to be oneself.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Hardcover / $16.95 (Can $22.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-192-7 / 80 pages / Literature

Foxybaby
Elizabeth Jolley

Alma Porch, aspiring dramatist, agrees to teach a course in Trinity College’s “Better Body Through the Arts” summer program for overweight women. There she's surrounded by starving matrons, orgies of sex and gluttony, and a motley array of staff and students eager to improve their minds and diminish their flesh by acting in her play, Foxybaby.

“Delicious and sustaining... shines and shines and shines like a good deed in a naughty world.”
—Angela Carter, The New York Times Book Review

“This is prose, thought, and art of the highest elegance and quality.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A literary romp...merges fiction and fact in a campy style.... Alma Porch is a well-drawn and endearing guide.”
—The Washington Post

“Hilarious, wry, disturbing, and optimistic.”
—The Boston Globe

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Miss Peabody's Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-363-1 / 262 pages / Fiction

Gateway To Paradise
Stories
Matthew Vollmer

In these bold stories set in the mountains and small towns of the South, men and women looking for escape from dull routines and a culture of hype (whether of consumerism, sex, or religion) are led to places of danger and self-reckoning. A dentist on a tryst is seduced by and impregnates an impetuous ghost. A beleaguered young writing professor follows his imagination one step too far while escorting a famous writer he finds darkly alluring. Provoked by a radio talk show, a woman tests who is more intimate, her husband or her dog. In the novella-length title story, a young McDonald’s cashier sets off alone on a harrowing, surreal journey after her domineering boyfriend commits a murder in her name—a journey from nowhere and nothing to an epiphany in Gatlinburg, at the edge of the Smoky Mountains wilderness. 

“[Vollmer] has now conjoined his two writing brain halves, his formal ease with tradition and an impulse to upset your applecart. There is little to nothing else like it.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“A beautifully voiced, precise, hilarious, utterly serious, and extremely impressive book.”
—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

Matthew Vollmer is also the author of inscriptions for headstones, essays. His work has appeared in Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. He directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Virginia Tech.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-466-9 / 184 pages / Fiction

The Girl in the Mirror
A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries
Meg Kearney

Lizzie, now 17, begins to search for her birth mother when another devastating loss overtakes her. Lizzie’s story chronicles how friendship and the profound bond of love between an adoptee and her parents—known and unknown—save her from emotional crisis.

“There is an honesty, a darkness, a steel fragility in these beautifully crafted words.  I suspect there are few readers who would not be swept into the tornado of Lizzie’s destructive grief. Kearney fully engages the reader in this very fine coming-of-age novel.”
—Karen Hesse

“Meg Kearney is a deft magician...It's amazing what [she] does with presences and absences—people who aren't quite there anymore remain potently everywhere—as Lizzie’s life unfolds. This book is a generous gift.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

Meg Kearney is the author of The Secret of Me—the acclaimed novel that introduced Lizzie McLane—, When You Never Said Goodbye, the conclusion of Lizzie's story, and two collections of poetry for adults, most recently the award-winning Home By Now.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $16.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-385-3 / 168 pages / Young Adult

Heart of the Order
Baseball Poems
Gabriel Fried (Editor), Foreword by Daniel Okrent

This anthology gathers together some of the finest poems written on baseball from the past seventy-five years. They represent the entire spectrum of verse-writing about the National Pastime, from stickball and sandlot games to Little League and the Majors, from spectators to scrubs to superstars.  In a myriad of voices—earnest to zany—they capture baseball's poetic sensibility, its rhythms, culture, and timelessness.  They evoke memories of youth and promise, of growing up and growing older. They bring us back to our personal and collective pasts.

Included in the roster are Hall-of-Famers and contemporary All-Stars: Richard Hugo, Marianne Moore, William Matthews, May Swenson, B. H. Fairchild, Linda Gregerson, Donald Hall, Yusef Komunyakaa, Edward Hirsch, Thomas Lux, Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Quincy Troupe, and more than sixty others.

“A welcome addition to growing corpus of baseball poetry. Fried. . .has a keen ear for the sound of good baseball poetry and a good eye for a good baseball tale.”
—Kenneth Sammond, Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature

“Baseball has a long history and season. While instant replay is the newest (though not terribly reliable) way to capture it, the carefully chosen words in Heart of the Order, conveying enthusiasm or disappointment and every emotion in between, remain one of the truest ways to experience it.”
—Patricia Contino, New Pages

Original Trade Paperback / $17.95 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-435-5 / 184 pages / Sports / Poetry / Anthology

How I Found America
Anzia Yezierska

Introduction by Vivian Gornick

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the Jews of New York’s Lower East Side and their struggle to escape poverty and to partake of America’s promise.  

How I Found America gather together all of Yezierska’s short fiction: the two collections published during her lifetime—Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness—and seven additional tales. Each story is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next. Taken together, they constitute an enduring portrait of a time and a people.  

“All the stories in How I Found America are rich with a primitive energy that rises with volcanic force.”
—Los Angeles Times

Anzia Yezierska was born around 1880 in Russian Poland and immigrated to New York City in the 1890s. In addition to her stories, she is the author of many novels, including the classic Bread Givers and The Open Cage, and a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. She died in 1970. 

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-298-6 / 314 pages / Fiction

Human Landscapes from My Country
Nazim Hikmet

An Epic Novel in Verse, Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, Foreword by Edward Hirsch

Written during the Second World War while Hikmet was serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel, Human Landscapes from My Country, uses cinematic techniques to tell the story of the emergence of secular, modern Turkey by focusing on the always-entertaining stories of sundry characters from every social class. As vignettes of Turkish life flash before our eyes at movie-like speed, it becomes clear that the poet is also telling the turbulent story of the twentieth century itself and of the ongoing global struggle between tradition, which trusts in God, and modernity, which entrusts the world to human hands. This is the first complete English translation of Hikmet’s epic masterwork. 

“A human landscape of the twentieth century.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“A lastingly fascinating work.”
—Publishers Weekly

Banned in his own country for thirty years, the poetry of Turkey's foremost modern poet, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), has been translated into more than fifty languages. Today Hikmet is recognized around the world as one of the essential voices of our time.

Paperback / $27.95 (Can $33.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-349-5 / 466 pages / Fiction / Poetry

If There Are Any Heavens
A Memoir
Nicholas Montemarano

On January 6, 2021, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, while the U.S. Capitol is under attack, Nicholas Montemarano drives six hundred miles to see his mother, who is hospitalized with COVID pneumonia and in a critical state. For ten days he lives in a hotel minutes from the hospital, alternating between hope and helplessness. This is the story of those ten days.

Written with visceral urgency in the earliest days of grief, If There Are Any Heavens resists categorization: it is a memoir, a poem, a mournful but loving song. It is an almost real-time account of the anxiety, uncertainty, and sorrow brought on by this pandemic. It is also, finally, a devastating homage to a family’s love in a time of great loss.

“If There Are Any Heavens joins a handful of heartbreaking books written in the white-hot storm of grief. In some ways it is reportage, a document salvaged from the wreckage of our pandemic. In some way it read like a play, a monologue unspooling in real time.”
—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

“A masterpiece that transcends genre. An astonishing achievement. Timely and timeless.”
—Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

Nicholas Montemarano is the author of three novels and a short story collection. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Southern Review, and many other publications. His writing has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the Alumni Professor of Creative Writing and Belles Lettres at Franklin & Marshall College.

Hardcover / $24.00 (Can $32.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-557-4/ 168 pages / Memoir
 

View the table of contents here.

Download a Teacher’s Guide here.

“Whether the collection’s short story characters face structural or interpersonal violence, neglect, or the inevitability of death, they are transformed into or out of liminal space… These authors make variable lives understandable to those who do not live them.”—Lesly-Marie Buer, Good River Review

In the Between
21st Century Short Stories
Edited, with a introduction by Brice Particelli

Collected here are seventeen prose stories and two comics created by established and rising stars in American fiction and graphic narrative, all published since the year 2000—masterful works that vary greatly in style and content but spring from a common source: the desire to forge a future in today’s divided America. They speak to our changing society, presenting characters from differing and often mixed cultural and racial backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ableness. Bold and sometimes unsettling, these intimate stories have the power to open our eyes and our hearts. They urge us to embrace a complex understanding of who we are as a nation and who we can be as individuals.

The authors are: Vanessa Hua, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bryan Washington, Roxane Gay, Alice Hoffman, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Akhil Sharma, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Mister Loki, Rion Amilcar Scott, Maria Anderson, Phil Klay, Joy Baglio, Robert Anthony Siegel, Ryka Aoki, Bryan Hurt, Shivana Sookdeo, Casey Robb, and Nancy Fulda.

Brice Particelli, the editor, teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been named a 2022 Creative Writing Fellow in Literature by the National Endowment for the Arts. He is co-editor (with Anne Mazer) of the multicultural anthology of short stories, America Street, and is currently working on his first book. 

Paperback / $18.95 (Can $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-546-8 / 216 pages / Anthology
 

In the Company of my Solitude
Americans Writing from the AIDS Pandemic
Marie Howe and Michael Klein (editors)

This essential collection encompasses a broad range of voices on the AIDS pandemic: a college student with HIV who hasn't told her parents, the mother of a homeless and addicted daughter who died from AIDS, a worker in a city shelter, a doctor who comes to understand the limits of medical power, a sex workers and AIDS activist, an AIDS hotline volunteer, and more.
These pieces—essays, memoirs, letters, and diaries—are social, political, and spiritual in nature. Whether angry or hopeful, funny or sad, they speak to us about love and stamina, about ordinary courage, alone and in brave company. Each one, powerful and complete, attains the eloquence of witness.

Among the authors included are Harold Brodkey, Tory Dent, Mark Doty, Carol Muske Dukes, Eve Ensler, Paul Monette, Andrew Sullivan, and many more.

Marie Howe is an acclaimed poet. Among her books are The Good Thief and What the Living Do. Michael Klein’s 1900, and his Poets for Life, which he edited, were both Lambda Literary Award winners.  

Paperback / $14.95 (Can $19.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-208-5 / 222 pages / Anthology
 

Jessie De La Cruz
A Profile of a United Farm Worker
Gary Soto

Born into a family of migrant workers, Jessie De La Cruz worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley from the age of 5, picking cotton, grapes, cantaloupes, onions, and more. She rose to become a member of the fledgling United Farm Workers union in 1966, and then, at the request of its leader Cesar Chavez, became its first woman organizer. Jessie fought injustice toward Mexican and all farm workers, seeking ways for workers to purchase their own farmland.  As an activist, she became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, testified before the Senate, and met the Pope.

Jessie De La Cruz is a role model for all– an ordinary person who became extraordinary by making change happen, not only for herself but for others.

“A portrait of a true American heroine.”
—Studs Terkel

“Chicano writer Soto (who worked in the fields in high school and college) has written [De La Cruz’s] biography, based on personal interviews...teens will be caught by the facts of her hardship and struggle.”
—Booklist

“The author effectively personalizes the struggle of farm workers in a manner that will enable students to understand and care about their triumphs.”
—School Library Journal

Gary Soto is a beloved and award-winning author of many novels, stories, memoirs, and collections of poetry, including Crazy Weekend and The Effects of Knut Hamsun on a Fresno Boy. 

Paperback / $11.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-285-6 / 128 pages / Young Adult Nonfiction

The Laura (Riding) Jackson Reader
Laura (Riding) Jackson

Some see Laura Riding and Laura (Riding) Jackson as virtually two separate writers, the former a strikingly original Modernist poet and critic, the latter a supposedly reclusive thinker on man and woman, language, meaning, and truth. However, encountering her work in this rich cross-section, one discovers a remarkable consistency of theme developing throughout, from the earliest poems and stories to the "post-poetic" writings of her final years. The selections presented here span sixty-four years (1923-1987) and include famous works of poetry and prose—some long out of print or difficult to find—significant lesser-known writings, and an important previously unpublished late essay, “Body & Mind and the Linguistic Ultimate.”

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $21.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-263-4 / 380 pages / Criticism

Life’s Good, Brother
Nâzim Hikmet

Translated from the Turkish By Mutlu Konuk Blasing

Set in 1925 in Izmir, Turkey, protagonist-narrator, Ahmet, a Communist Party member who shares many biographical details with Hikmet himself, is hiding out in a stone cottage. Ahmet is being pursued by the secret police as he sets up an underground printing press. Using a cinematic technique, Hikmet experiments with the fluidity of time and memory, flashing back to his/Ahmet’s earlier years in Turkey and Russia and forward to the years and experiences to come. Present events and memory freely mix and merge, capturing everyday exigencies as well as the passionate undercurrents of Hikmet’s tumultuous life.

“One of the first and most important ‘European’ novels written in Turkey: its horizons are not limited to the national issues of Turkey, it explores the basic values of life, and its heroes live cosmopolitan lives.”
—Orhan Pamuk

“A man’s never-ending search for life’s truths and loves...Humorous...exciting...profound.”
—James Burt, ForeWord Reviews

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) is “one of the essential poets of the twentieth century” (Edward Hirsch). Life's Good, Brother has been translated into more than fifteen languages. This first English version is by Mutlu Konuk Blasing, the co-translator (with Randy Blasing) of Hikmet’s poetry and the author of the biography Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-418-8 / 191 pages / Fiction

Living on the Margins
Women Writers on Breast Cancer
Hilda Raz (editor)

In this powerful anthology of personal narratives, essays, shaped journals, and poems, eighteen women writers share their experiences with breast cancer—from diagnosis and treatment, to aspects of marriage, motherhood, friendship, sexuality, work, and recurrence.
Authors included are Lucille Clifton, Carol Dine, Marilyn Hacker, Annette Williams Jaffee, Maxine Kumin, Amy Ling, , Dr. Susan Love, Pamela Post, Mimi Schwartz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and more.

“These writers use their cancer as creative fuel, bringing alive the fullness of an unknown and sometimes frightening world.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune”

“Full of imagery that cracks open the experience of breast cancer....superbly written and well worth reading...”
—Journal of the American Medical Association

Hilda Raz is the editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly Prairie Schooner, and author of many published essays and two collections of poems. She is professor of English at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

Paperback / $15./8 (Can $23.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-270-2 / 286 pages / Anthology

A Mannered Grace
The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson
Elizabeth Friedmann

This authorized biography of Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) sheds clarifying light on the work of this great modernist and American poet and on the controversies of her personal life that have dominated other biographical accounts. Written by the woman that (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence and with full access to all of her papers, here is the accurate story of (Riding) Jackson’s Socialist family origins in New York, her education and rise to literary prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, her literary circle here and abroad, her 13-year relationship with Robert Graves, her many publications, the small press she ran, her activism in Europe during the Second World War, as well as her return to the U. S. in 1939 when she and Graves parted, her last years in rural Florida—until now largely untold—married to Schuyler Jackson, running a citrus grove, avoiding the publishing world but still writing, and concluding with her death in 1991, only months after she received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

“Because of its new material, its depth of scholarship, and it first-hand witness from the subject herself, this is the new standard against which other biographies of Jackson will be read.”
—Laurel Blossom, American Book Review

Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death. She has edited/co-edited many volumes by (Riding) Jackson, including First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding, The Word “Woman,” Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, and Chelsea 69, a special issue of later works. She lives in Florida.

Hardcover / $37.50 (Can $54.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-300-6 / 570 pages / Biography

A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honor
The Treasury of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan

Translated, with an introduction by Charity Cannon Willard and edited, with an introduction by Madeleine Pelner Cosman

This fifteenth-century instruction book—the first written by a woman for women—offers a firsthand glimpse into how medieval women actually lived. Conceived as a companion to her history of women, The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan wrote A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor to offer practical advice on how to live an honorable, “noble” life and thus to qualify for entry into her allegorical, utopian City. 

Just as Christine de Pizan intended in 1405 when this book was written, A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor charms and entertains as it enlightens. For the modern reader, it provides a unique view into the medieval world, the history of women, and the social as well as intellectual history of the period. 

Christine de Pizan (1364-1429?) was France’s first professional woman of letters. She wrote more than twenty distinguished works, most concerning the political life of France or the defense of women. Her Book of the City of Ladies has attained the stature of a world classic.  

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-135-4 / 266 pages / Fiction

Miss Peabody’s Inheritance
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

Miss Peabody, a lonely spinster in a London suburb, writes a fan letter to an Australian novelist, Diana Hopewell. In reply, Hopewell sends installments of her novel-in-progress, the bawdy misadventures of a trio of gently lesbian ladies, a headmistress and two companions, touring Europe with a hapless female student. With each mail delivery, Miss Peabody’s fascination with Hopewell and her characters intensifies, until fantasy and reality poignantly merge. A memorable duet of art and life.

“Wonderful . . . like letters from a faraway friend…. the double narrative ends with a flourish of perfect closure… Jolley’s best surprise.”
—Thomas Disch, New York Times Book Review

“Treads the ‘too thin…line between truth and fiction’ to memorable effect.”
—Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

“Delicately and ironically told, informed by a warm sympathy that tinges even the funniest scenes with rue.”
—Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-370-9 / 157 pages / Fiction

Mr. Scobie’s Riddle
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

An accident lands octogenarian Mr. Scobie in a ramshackle nursing home in Australia, run by the domineering Matron Hyacinth Price. At first he spends his time listening to classical music and reciting Wordsworth and the Bible, but gradually a disturbing side of the home reveals itself: nocturnal card sharks, carousing fueled by medicinal brandy, and an ongoing extortion of the residents’ financial assets. Scobie decides he must get out as quickly as possible. To protect himself (and his fragile memories and dreams) he rebels through a unique recourse—his very simple riddle. Can a voice calling for dignity be heard?

“With the publication of Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, Elizabeth Jolley joins the handful of Australian writers... of whom it may be said that their books are able to alter the direction of one’s inner life.”
—Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

“A satire of great verve and acerbity.”
—Thomas Disch, New York Times Book Review

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, The Sugar Mother, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-369-3 / 226 pages / Fiction

A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing
Essays by Kimberly Grey

Ingenious out of necessity, these essays erupt from the exile of the author by her mother. In them, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources in an effort to create coherence out of absolute dislocation. To do so, she calls on—beseeches—dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists (among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil) to help her survive, if not fully comprehend, her banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, she becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, pondering motherhood even as her daughterhood has been rescinded. Synthesizing creative writing and theory, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing is a powerful testament to the essay’s potential to help us persevere.

"In every page of this uncompromising, inventive book, Grey grabs hold of [...] the devastation of the unrecognized, unloved, and thereby invaded child—and shakes it, dissects it, studies it, and offers it up. What we learn from these pages is the power of language—searing, ingenious language—to remake the self word-by-word, to ‘reassemble’ an ‘I’ in the present tense." —Julie Carr

Kimberly Grey is the author of Systems for the Future of Feeling and The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnisky First Book Prize in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner at Stanford University, she holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati and currently teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Original Trade Paperback / $17.00 (Can. $23.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-575-8/ 152 pages / Essays

The Murderer
Roy Heath

Winner of the 1978 Guardian Fiction Prize

Galton Flood grows up under enormous psychological and cultural burdens. Overpowered by his mother, and too worshipful of his older brother and father, Galton struggles for independence. He leaves his hometown of Georgetown, Guyana, for remote townships to make a life of his own.
He meets Gemma, a woman who fascinates him, and whom he marries. Then secrets in her past emerge and Galton again feels trapped.
Impossible to put down, impossible to forget, The Murderer is at once a stunning portrait of a “character who might have been created by Dostoevsky” (Spectator) and an immersion into the unsettling world of colonial Guyana.

“A beautiful writer and an unforgettable book.”
—Salman Rushdie

“... a hauntingly powerful story.”
—The New York Times

“A picture of a lost soul emerges that is mysteriously authentic and unique as a work of art.”
—The Observer (London)

Roy Heath, originally from Guyana, emigrated to England at the age of twenty-four to study at London University. A teacher, attorney, and poet, and the author of nine novels, including The Armstrong Trilogy, and The Shadow Bride which was nominated for the Booker Prize. He died in 2008.

Paperback / $9.99 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-169-9 / 190 pages / Fiction

Nazim Hikmet
The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet
Mutlu Konuk Blasing

This important critical biography draws from a myriad of Turkish sources and presents Hikmet as neither the dangerous subversive the military feared nor the legendary figure that he came to be, but as the sum of his opposites. Blasing has given us a moving portrait of a poet for the ages whose life was acted out on the world stage of the twentieth century.

“This evocative biography reveals a towering figure who, up to now, has remained largely unknown beyond his homeland and the Republic of Poetry. Nâzim Hikmet captured the spirit of the new nation with simple but deeply stirring words, and also plunged into the great social and political conflicts of his age. Anyone seeking to understand the twentieth century will be enriched by reading the story of his passionate life. It is a tale full of beauty, and beautifully told.”
—Stephen Kinzer

“Nazim Hikmet is one of the heroes of the twentieth-century poetry. His work arrived to poets in the United States with a great rush of purity, power, and inspiration from a literary culture to which and a poet to whom we were all but oblivious. To have a biography of this singular monumental presence who, like Pablo Neruda, embodied so much history in a life of conviction, commitment, and passion for justice is another gift for which we should be grateful.”
—C.K Williams

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, a native of Istanbul and a professor of English at Brown University, is the author of four books of literary criticism, most recently Lyric Poetry (Princeton). She is also the co-translator (with Randy Blasing) of Persea’s renowned English versions of Nâzim Hikmet’s poetry, among them Poems of Nazim Hikmet and Human Landscapes from My Country, and the translator of Hikmet's last work, the autobiographical novel Life's Good, Brother.

Hardcover / $27.95 (Can $29.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-417-1 / 294 pages / Biography

No Mate for the Magpie
Frances Molloy

Belonging in the company of Flann O’Brien and Stevie Smith, this wonderfully original novel tells the story of Ann Elizabeth McGlone, a Catholic girl growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Written in a language of marvelous colloquial vividness, it is actually a series of tiny stories—from Ann’s birth into a large working-class family in Derry to her misadventures os a machinist in a pajama factory, nun (temporary), inmate in a mental institution (treatment for a sore neck), bacon-slicer in Belfast, political demonstrator, and more, until she finally decides to leave “the compellin’ godforsaken shores” of Ireland altogether.
Ann Elizabeth McGlone is an unforgettable character, and No Mate for the Magpie is a gem of a comic novel in the great tradition of Irish storytelling.

“A special story, funny and touching.... You become part of its world.”
—Maeve Binchy

“... Ann Elizabeth McGlone is like a very young, female Irish Candide.”
—The Guardian

Frances Molloy is also the author of Women Are The Scourge Of The Earth. She died in 1991. 

Paperback / $18.95 (Can $24.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-105-7 / 170 pages / Fiction

Available in September

Also by Joy Ladin: Family

Once Out of Nature
Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender
Joy Ladin

This compassionate, constructive volume collects eleven essays written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's “transgender tipping point,” and 2021, as anti-trans laws began metastasizing around America. Drawing on her experiences as a trans parent, spouse, teacher, and author, she writes honestly and insightfully about gender, exploring its intersections with feminisms, psychotherapy, divinity, ontology, and even the poems of Emily Dickinson. Written for any curious reader, these essays teach us about who we are, who we can be, and what it means to be human.

"Joy Ladin is our finest writer on transgender issues." —Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times bestselling author of She's Not There

Joy Ladin is a widely published essayist and poet, literary scholar, and nationally known speaker on transgender issues. From 2003 to 2021, she held the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University; her gender transition and return to teaching in 2008 made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Joy is the author of twelve books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning The Book of Anna, The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Through the Door of Life, and ten books of poetry. She is also a three-time Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Paperback / $20 (Can. $27) / 978-0-89255-586-4 / 192 pages / Essays

One Another
Monique Schwitter

Translated from the German by Tess Lewis

When a writer googles the name of her first love and discovers he committed suicide years ago, she is deeply shaken. Memories of Petrus begin to flood into her mind, followed by the memories of other loves, one after another.  What exactly is love?  How does it come and go?  She begins to search her personal history for answers. Twelve men. Twelve chapters in a novel.  Melancholy Petrus, handsome actor Jakob, Simon with his pet rat, gay Nathanael, a student, her brother.  Her husband’s story is supposed to be the last.  But as story after story unfolds, the past and present entangle until her orderly search is interrupted by present-day complications of love and by a startling event overlooked at home that begins to seize the plotline of both her art and life.
One Another dazzles as Monique Schwitter deftly weaves an intricate, moving, and wonderfully eccentric portrayal of love and art—erotic, chaotic, comedic, tragic, and glorious.

“Nimble, entertaining, and at the same time unobtrusively profound: if only we could say this of books more often”
—Die Presse (Austria)

“Monique Schwitter... [has] the gentlest gaze and the hardest kick.”
—Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)

Monique Schwitter was born in 1972 in Zurich, Switzerland, and now lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is the award-winning author of novels, short stories, and plays. Her first story collection won the 2006 Robert Walser Prize. Goldfish Memory, her most recent collection, is her only other work in English translation, published in 2015.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-497-3 / 224 pages / Fiction

The Open Cage
Anzia Yezierska

Selected and with an Introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris
Afterword by Louise Levitas Henriksen

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the lives of Jews of New York City’s Lower East Side.
The Open Cage collects sixteen of her best stories and excerpts from her autobiography to illustrate her extraordinary storytelling gift as well as her personal experience as an immigrant woman.

“Intensely personal stories and recollections... tightly and effectively told.... Her stories of old age hit the mark...”
—The New York Times

“Magnificently selected and organized....  Yezierska’s work [is] a unique literary contribution to the history of women in this country,”
—Library Journal

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York's immigrant Jews, including Bread Givers and How I Found America, and the memoir Red Ribbon on a White Horse.  

Paperback / $9.95 (Can $14.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-036-4 / 00 pages / Fiction / Autobiography

The Oxboy
Anne Mazer

An ALA Notable Book

“No one can tell that I am the son of an ox. Like my father, I am hardworking, and I have a stubborn, tenacious nature. But so do many pure humans...” In the mythic past, when people and animals lived side by side, were friends, married and had offspring, the oxboy would have been accepted and safe. But now he is an outcast and must hide his true identity—or die.
Anne Mazer’s stunning allegorical fantasy examines our relationship with nature—and our feelings about our own natures—as it reveals and challenges our deepest prejudices. 

A Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies.

“An exquisitely told tale of a purely imaginary mythical world, whose ‘people’ and ‘animals’ are both disturbingly similar to, and quite different from, our own.... The Oxboy leaves one moved and edgy. In other words, it’s a really good book.”
—Chaim Potok

“What happens to the oxboy will keep readers of all ages turning the pages.... a most significant novel.”
—The ALAN Review

Anne Mazer is the author of several widely acclaimed books, including the novel Moose Street, and a picture book, The Salamander Room. She is the editor of the anthologies America Street, Going Where I'm Coming From,  A Walk in My World, and Working Days.

Paperback / $6.95 (Can $9.99) / ISBN 978-0-89255-240-5 / 106 pages / Fiction

“Part Beauty and the Beast, part monk meditation, part pulse-galloping thriller, part Salingeresque coming-of-age with an untamable femme lead, part intoxicated art school sex party, part goldenrod glow the morning after a storm—this novel illuminates how we can rescue others by allowing our own rescue.”— Aimee Seu, Southeast Review

Read a conversation about the book from Ron Slate’s On The Seawall here.

Paradise Close
A Novel
Lisa Russ Spaar

In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.

Decades later, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.

These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.

“Soulful, sexy, extraordinarily lyrical…. If this is what happens when poets write novels, they should all write them.”
—Eleanor Henderson

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Madrigalia, Orexia, Satin Cash, Vanitas, Rough, and Blue Venus, a collection of essays. She is the editor of several anthologies, including More Truly and More Strange. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Hardcover / $25.95 (Can $34.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-551-2 / 232 pages / Fiction

Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown

In seventeen intimate essays, Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—in her case one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy. These essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, from the rural American South of her childhood to the medieval streets of Bologna, Italy.
Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her, inside and out.

“[A] work of great humanity.”
—Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased

“I want to press this book into the hands of everyone I know.”
—Jamie Quatro, author of Fire Sermon

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and, with Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us. She lives in Gambier, Ohio, and teaches at Kenyon College 

Hardcover / $24.95 (Can $31.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-513-0 / 224 pages / Essays
 

Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020

In this “uncommonly wonderful collection of essays” (Rain Taxi), Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—one shaped since birth by cere- bral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder Throughout the book (which now includes an essay on Seamus Heaney, Notre Dame, and the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic), Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry.

“Places I’ve Taken My Body will strike chords in anyone who’s ever questioned their faith, been challenged by their body, or who has ever been vulnerable—which is to say, all of us.” —Jaime Herndon, Foreword Reviews

“Without a trace of self-pity, Places I’ve Taken My Body accomplishes what literature does best: it allows readers an opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes.”—Mia Levitin, Times Literary Supplement

Molly McCully Brown is the author of The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and, with Susannah Nevison, In the Field Between Us. She teaches in the MFA program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-538-3 / 232 pages / Essays
 

Red Ribbon on a White Horse
My Story
Anzia Yezierska

Introduction by W.H. Auden

First published in 1950, Red Ribbon on a White Horse is Anzia Yezierska’s autobiography, her life as she saw it, from the Polish ghetto to the sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side and then to Hollywood, when she was at the height of her success.
Her collection of stories, Hungry Hearts, written with vivid emotional power about the Jews of the immigrant community in which she grew up, was made into a movie by Samuel Goldwyn in 1921. Yezierska offers a sharp portrait ofHollywood in its golden years, as well as an important account of her work with the WPA Writers Project later.
Yezierska’s focus on success and failure—how they felt and what they meant to her as an artist and a woman—make Red Ribbon on a White Horse a universal document.

Anzia Yezierska (ca. 1882-1970) is the author of many stories and novels about New York’s immigrant Jews, including Bread Givers, How I Found America and The Open Cage. 

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-124-8 / 228 pages / Memoir

The Return of Felix Nogara
Pablo Medina

The dictator is dead and suddenly the exiles can return. So begins Pablo Medina’s most compelling work to date, a novel set on Barata, an imaginary Caribbean island (not unlike Cuba). Sent to the United States at the age of twelve, Felix Nogara has remained attached to his native land through dissident fellow exiles and through his family legacy. Thirty-eight years later, he returns, and with a wise and sardonic cab driver as his guide, he travels through the ruined landscape to recover his lost history, his lost happiness.  With wit, imagination, and visionary insight, Medina takes the reader to an island in chaos in order to explore the deepest regions of an exile’s heart. 

“Medina...writes a gritty yet graceful prose. [A] searching and lyrical second novel.”
—John Freeman, Washington Post Book World

“[D]elicious, astute, darkly funny...this novel is right on target.”
—Bob Shacochis, New York Times Book Review

Pablo Medina is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose including Exiled Memories and The Marks of Birth. He is on the core writing faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina, and is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Paperback / $15.00 / ISBN 978-0-89255-279-5 / 272 pages / Fiction

Also available as a hardcover

Salt
Earl Lovelace

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize

Guinea John, mythical ancestor of Blackpeople in Trinidad, put two corncobs under his armpits and flew away from the scene of his enslavement, back to Africa. But his descendants, having eaten salt, were too heavy to fly and would not follow....
One hundred years after official Emancipation, the diverse people of Trinidad—Africa, Asian, and European—still have not settled into the New World. Two men set out to free them from “old captivities” and to welcome them to their island homeland. Around them swirl a cast of unforgettable men and women, each telling his own story in his own voice, each striving with passion and wit to make sense of life in a still-young country where the roles of enslaved and landowner still linger, but “the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom.”

“A novel confident in its rhythms, in the authority of its selling, driven by an exultant compassion for its characters.”
—Derek Walcott

“[Lovelace’s] generous, torrential prose...seems to hold every complexity—of history, of ethnicity, of reason and magic alike—within its rushing energy.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Earl Lovelace was born and still resides in Trinidad. Among his many award-winning books are the novel The Dragon Can't Dance and A Brief Conversion and Other Stories. 

Paperback / $17.95/ ISBN 978-0-89255-235-1 / 260 pages / Fiction

The Secret of Me
A Novel in Poems
Meg Kearney

Fourteen-year-old Lizzie and her older brother and sister were adopted as infants, a fact of life in the McLane household. But dry facts rarely encompass feelings, and what it feels like to be adopted is something Lizzie never dares openly discuss with her loving parents—or with outsiders, including her boyfriend. In this vivid, heartfelt tale, told entirely through her own poetry, Lizzie finds the courage to speak the secret of her identity.

An Afterword by the author discusses her experience as an adopted child and how writing can help make sense of one’s life. Also included are a Guide to this Book’s Poetics, Some Poems Lizzie Loves (reprints of poems by Lucille Clifton, Hayden Carruth, Anne Sexton, Donald Hall, and others), and Recommended Books and Links about adoption and poetry. 

“A sincere, at times poignant, novel-in-verse reads like a memoir…. A real balance of personal exploration as an adoptee and new teenage emotions creates a powerful blend in a warm character ready to connect and sustain that bond to readers.…[Adolescents] will get a good dose of real poetry with unique and inspiring language.… Substantive backmatter… makes this a first-rate offering.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Meg Kearney is the author of An Unkindness of Ravens, When You Never Said Goodbye and The Girl in the Mirror. She is the director of the Solstice Creative Writing Programs of Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. 

Paperback / $13.95 (Can $18.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-336-5 / 136 pages / Young Adult

Streets of Gold
Marie Raphael

It is 1901. Marisia and her family flee Poland ahead of the czar's soldiers. But at Ellis Island, her sister and parents are turned away. Now Marisia and her brother, Stefan, must find their way in the New World alone.

Marisia dreams of becoming an artist. Can she overcome the hardships of immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side, the struggle to find work, and the tyrannical views of those who would stand in her way? With only her wits, her talent, and her feisty spirit to guide her, she sets out to turn dream into reality.

“Streets of Gold will carry young people to another time and place. Readers won't want the story to end!”
—Diana Pardue, Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Marie Raphael is a life-long educator who has worked with young people at many levels and in many situations—from a Harlem pre-school in New York City to college classrooms in Boston and California to a rural junior high school. Presently, she lives in northern California and supervises student teachers at Humboldt State University. She is also the author of A Boy From Ireland.

Paperback / $12.95 / ISBN 978-0-89255-256-6 / 216 pages / Fiction

The Sugar Mother
Elizabeth Jolley

A New York Times Notable Book

Edwin Page, a fussy middle-aged professor, no sooner bids farewell to his obstetrician wife, Cecilia, who accepted a fellowship abroad, when his new neighbors, Mrs. Botts and her sexy, twentyish daughter, Leila, arrive. Since they’re locked out of their house, Edwin invites them in—and then can’t get them to leave. He becomes obsessed with Leila and convinces himself that she is a perfect surrogate mother for the childless Cecilia. “Wickedly amusing ... subversive” (New York Times Book Review), The Sugar Mother undoes the institution of marriage.

“Jolley’s warmest novel, her most moving, and possibly the best introduction to her fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Humor, suspense, and exquisite characterization.... Jolley has us in her able grip.”
—The New Yorker

“A droll domestic comedy…emotionally astute and, at times chilling...as much a character study as it is a thriller...”
—The Washington Post

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, and The Vera Wright Trilogy. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $15.00 (Can $18.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-362-4 / 212 pages / Fiction

Travels in Vermeer
A Memoir
Michael White

Longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction

Part travelogue, part soul-searching investigation into romantic love and intimate discourse on art, this erudite and lyrical memoir encompasses the author’s past—his difficult youth, stint in the Navy, alcoholism, and the early death of his first wife—and ends with his finding grace and transformation through deeply affecting encounters with the paintings of Vermeer, an artist obsessed with romance and the inner life, who has captivated millions, from the seventeenth century until now.

“All the sorrow of love is compressed into White’s memoir.  But so, too, is all the consolation of art. Nothing I’ve read...suggests so eloquently what [Vermeer's paintings] hold for a contemporary viewer…. Figures it took a poet to get it this beautifully, thrillingly right.”
—Peter Trachtenberg

“[Travels in Vermeer] touches on the mysteries of seduction, loss, and the artistic impulse.  It shows how time can be interrupted.”
—Clyde Edgerton

“This book is a treasure and a guide. It is a type of healing for the intellect and the heart.”
—Rebecca Lee

Michael White is the author of four award-winning collections of poetry including Vermeer in Hell. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and heads the creative writing department at UNC-Wilmington.

Paperback / $17.95 (Can $20.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-437-9 / 178 pages / Memoir

The Vera Wright Trilogy
My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife
Elizabeth Jolley

Set in 1940s wartime England, the trilogy follows young Vera, who leaves her cultivated Midlands home to become a nurse in a military hospital and is catapulted into adulthood through unorthodox love entanglements with both men and women, two illegitimate children, and finally emigration to Australia, where, from her new vantage point—now a doctor and writer—she looks back on her life’s journey.
Combining the beauty of Virginia Woolf with the spare, heartbreaking insightfulness of Jean Rhys, the trilogy is both a literary tour-de-force and an accessible, universal portrait of a woman in search of sustaining love. 

“A haunting portrait of a woman who came of age during WWII in England, forging her identity in courageous circumstances. . . [A] lyrically written, imaginatively observed and emotionally compelling work.”
—Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Jolley was born in 1923 in England and moved to Australia when she was in her thirties. She published her first book when she was fifty-three and went on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated authors. In the United States, her novels were excerpted in The New Yorker and elsewhere, and critically acclaimed. Her works include Foxybaby, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance, Mr. Scobie’s Riddle, and The Sugar Mother. She died in 2007.

Paperback / $19.95 (Can $22.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-352-5 / 560 pages / Fiction

When You Never Said Goodbye
An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother
A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries
Meg Kearney

Eighteen-year-old adoptee and aspiring poet, Liz McLane, transfers to NYU in Greenwich Village for two reasons: New York City is the place to be a writer, and it’s where she last saw her birth mother, when, at five months old, she was given away. Liz is determined to find the answers to the questions that have always haunted her: “Who was the woman who gave me life?” and “Why was I given away?” Supported by her sister and friends, and with the help of a compassionate social worker and a private investigator, she pursues her search to its surprising conclusion.

“I loved everyone I met in these pages and felt every moment of deep love and deep loss. When You Never Said Goodbye is a gift to the world, a book you’ll want to read slowly, savoring both the eloquent writing and the brave, beautiful story.”
—Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming

“An all-around sparkling story of self-discovery.”
—Briana Shemroske, Booklist

Meg Kearney is an award-winning poet and author of two previous of books about Liz McLane, The Secret of Me and The Girl in the Mirror.

Hardcover / $17.95 (Can $23.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-479-9 / 280 pages / Young Adult Novel

The Word Woman
Laura (Riding) Jackson

Edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark

Laura (Riding) Jackson was a woman of vision, and at the heart of her work in poetry and prose is a vision of woman. This volume brings together some of her most profound and explicit writings on the subject of woman’s role in the story of human identity. The core piece, “The Word ‘Woman’” was written in Majorca during 1933-35 when she was known as Laura Riding and is published here for the first time. In it Riding searches for an understanding of woman by investigating definitions of the word and it historic and literary usages; what women say about themselves; and the physical body of woman in appearance and impression Among the topics she discusses are motherhood, “man-fever” in women, work satisfaction, sexual equality, and the essential relationship between man and woman.
Also included in this volume are three later essays and two stories.
Laura (Riding) Jackson sought to understand “the woman element in human identity.” She has come very far. The Word “Woman” belongs in the company of other groundbreaking works of gender study.

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Paperback / $11.95 (Can $17.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-185-9 / 212 pages / Gender Studies

The Writings of Christine de Pizan
Selected and edited by Charity Cannon Willard

Christine de Pizan, France’s first woman of letters, is widely known for her classic The Book of the City of Ladies, but very few of her many other distinguished works has been translated into English. 
The Writings of Christine de Pizan offers lengthy excerpts of nearly all of Christine’s works, in authoritative and gracious translations. Edited by Charity Cannon Willard, the foremost authority on Christine, and rendered into English by major scholars and translators, it presents the full range of Christine de Pizan's accomplishment.

Charity Cannon Willard is internationally recognized as the foremost authority on Christine de Pizan. She is the author of the biography, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works, and translator of A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasury of the City of Ladies. She has edited the critical editions of the Livre de la Paix and (with Eric Hicks) the Livre des Trois Vertus. 

Paperback / $13.50 (Can $19.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-188-0 / 384 pages / Nonfiction