Today weโre excited to reveal our Fall 2021 season! Our fall lineup includes seven titles weโre confident you will fall hard for.
Fiction
Letters to Amelia by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Fiction | $23.00 | On Sale September 7th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Underscoring the power of reading and writing letters for self-discovery, Lindsay Zier-Vogelโs Letters to Amelia is, above all, a story of the essential need for connectionโand our universal ability to find hope in the face of fear.
Grace Porter is reeling from grief after her partner of seven years unexpectedly leaves. Amidst her heartache, the thirty-year-old library tech is tasked with reading newly discovered letters that Amelia Earhart wrote to her lover, Gene Vidal. She becomes captivated by the famous pilot who disappeared in 1937. Letter by letter, Grace understands more about Amelia while piecing her own life back together.
When Grace discovers she is pregnant, her life becomes more intertwined with the aviation hero and she begins to write her own letters to Amelia. While navigating her third trimesterโamidst new conspiracy theories about Ameliaโs mysterious disappearance, the search for her remains, and the impending publication of her private lettersโGrace goes on a pilgrimage of her own.
Stacey May Fowles calls Letters to Amelia โ[a] tender portrait of heartbreak and a thoughtful ode to new motherhoodโฆ [c]harming and beautifully rendered, this is a big-hearted hopeful novel, full of life and love.โ Amy Jones writes that โZier-Vogel writes with uncanny empathy about heartbreak, friendship, motherhood, and the common threads that connect women across time, geography, and even between earth and sky. Letters to Amelia is a gorgeous, big-hearted debut that will make you feel like you are flying.โ
Suture by Nic Brewer
Fiction | $20.00 | On Sale September 21st, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Nic Brewerโs Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. This exciting debut novel is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.
To make her films, Eva must take out her eyes and use them as batteries. To make her art, Finn must cut open her chest and remove her lungs and heart. To write her novels, Grace must use her blood to power the word processor. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Evaโs wife worries about her mental health; Finnโs teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearms bones for drumsticks; Graceโs network constantly worries about the prolific writerโs penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
โSuture is a daring, visceral debut that examines the painful side of the creative process,โ writes Catriona Wright. โBlending body horror with meditations on love, art, and forgiveness, this novel will startle and captivate you.โ
Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day That I Was Born by Mona Hรธvring, Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson and Rachel Rankin
Fiction | Literature in Translation Series | $23.00 | On Sale October 5th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Winner of the 2021 Dobloug Prize
Winner of the Norwegian Criticsโ Prize for Literature
Shortlisted for the Norwegian Booksellersโ Prize
Translated by Kari Dickson and Rachel Rankin, Mona Hรธvringโs award-winning novel is as sharp as it is sensitive, and as insightful as it is original when exploring the many distractions of the heart.
In a hotel, high up in a mountain village, two sisters aim to reconnect after distant years that contrast their close, almost twin-like upbringing. Martha has just been discharged from a sanatorium after a mental breakdown. Ella agrees to keep her company in the hope that the clean winter air will provide clarityโand a way back to their childhood connection. Itโs only when plans go awry and Martha disappears in a rage that Ella discovers a new sense of self, an identity outside her filial role. This new identity is reinforced by various encounters, including one with the writing of Stefan Zweig, which has a profound impact on her.
โIt is luminous and vibrant,โ writes Fredrik Wandrup. โThe words embrace the world with sensuality, humour, wonder and a confusion of feelings.โ In its native Norway, Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day That I Was Born won the 2021 Dobloug Prize, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, and was shortlisted for the Norwegian Booksellersโ Prize.
Nonfiction
Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language, Edited by Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza, and Ayelet Tsabari
Nonfiction | Essays | Essais Series No. 12 | $25.00 | On Sale October 26th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
In Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language, twenty-six writers explore their connection with language, accents, and vocabularies, contending with the ways these can be used as both bridges and weapons. This collection of deeply personal essays features contributions by Kamal Al-Solaylee, Jenny Heijun Wills, Karen McBride, Melissa Bull, Leonarda Carranza, Adam Pottle, Kai Cheng Thom, Sigal Samuel, Rebecca Fisseha, Hege Anita Jakobsen Lepri, Logan Broeckaert, Taslim Jaffer, Ashley Hynd, Jagtar Kaul Atwal, Tรฉa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, Sahar Golshan, Camila Justino, Amanda Leduc, Ayelet Tsabari, Carrianne Leung, Janet Hong, Danny Ramadan, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jรณnรญna Kirton, and Eufemia Fantetti.
Some writers explore the way power and privilege affect language learning, highlighting the shame and exclusion often felt by โnon-nativeโ English speakers in a white, settler, colonial nation; some confront the pain of losing a mother tongue or an ancestral language, including the loss of community, and highlight the empowerment that comes with reclamation; other writers celebrate the joys of learning a new language and the power of connection. This vital anthology opens a dialogue about language diversity, and highlights both the importance of language and the ways in which it shapes our identities. All twenty-six contributors underscore how language can offer transformation and collective healing.
Poetry
Umbilical Cord by Hasan Namir
Poetry | $20.00 | On Sale September 14th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Hasan Namirโs Umbilical Cord is a heartfelt book for parents or would-be parents. These warm free-verse poems document the journey that Namir and his husband took to have a child. Between love letters to their young son, Namir shares insight into his love story with his husband, the complexities of the IVF surrogacy process and the first year as a family of three. Umbilical Cord is a joyful collection about parenting, fatherhood and hope.
โTender. Touching,โ writes Betsy Warland. โ[T]his book-length poetic narrative reminds me of Nerudaโs Twenty Love Poems: โEvery day you play with the light of the universe.โ Namirโs love poems to his infant son and partner (interspersed with photos), remind me of Nerudaโs poems interspersed with Picassoโs drawings. Umbilical Cord: two art forms; two fathersโthe narrative of family made anew.โ
Iceland Is Melting and So Are You by Talya Rubin
Poetry | $20.00 | On Sale October 12th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Amidst the phenomenon of our changing planet, another exists closer to home: how the urgency of the climate emergency affects our ability to be human. Talya Rubinโs Iceland Is Melting and So Are You asks us what we have kept frozen and unexamined within ourselves; it explores both the melting of ice sheets and the thawing of the heart. Rubinโs latest poetry collection offers a salve for the vast mysteries of our natural world, our human interior, and the relationship between the two.
Wyn Cooper calls Iceland Is Melting and So Are You โa fierce and melancholy collection of poems that both, directly and indirectly, addresses the central concern of the twenty-first century: global warming.โ Claire Caldwell writes, โLike a drill through an ice floe, Rubin pierces the numbing layers of human denial and selfish desire, reminding us that we, too, are saltwater. At once urgent and elegiac, these poems insist that we feel, fiercely, our โgreat belonging to the earth.โโ
The Absence of Zero by R. Kolewe
Poetry | $28.00 | On Sale November 9th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
R. Koleweโs The Absence of Zero is a triumphantly executed celebration of the long poem tradition. This slow-moving, haunting work is a beautiful example of thinking in language, and a meditation that explores time and memory in both content and form. The Absence of Zero is Koleweโs tribute to the twentieth century, and to the disparate fragments of its ideas, which continue to affect and disrupt our present.