🍂🍁Fall 2021 Season Reveal🍁🍂
Today we’re excited to reveal our Fall 2021 season! Our fall lineup includes seven titles we’re 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-Vogel’s Letters to Amelia is, above all, a story of the essential need for connection—and 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 trimester—amidst new conspiracy theories about Amelia’s mysterious disappearance, the search for her remains, and the impending publication of her private letters—Grace goes on a pilgrimage of her own.
Stacey May Fowles calls Letters to Amelia “[a] tender portrait of heartbreak and a thoughtful ode to new motherhood… [c]harming and beautifully rendered, this is a big-hearted hopeful novel, full of life and love.” Amy Jones writes that “Zier-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.”
Suture by Nic Brewer
Fiction | $20.00 | On Sale September 21st, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
Nic Brewer’s 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. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearms bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
“Suture is a daring, visceral debut that examines the painful side of the creative process,” writes Catriona Wright. “Blending body horror with meditations on love, art, and forgiveness, this novel will startle and captivate you.”
Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day That I Was Born by Mona Høvring, 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 Critics’ Prize for Literature
Shortlisted for the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize
Translated by Kari Dickson and Rachel Rankin, Mona Høvring’s 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 clarity—and a way back to their childhood connection. It’s 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.
“It is luminous and vibrant,” writes Fredrik Wandrup. “The words embrace the world with sensuality, humour, wonder and a confusion of feelings.” 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 Booksellers’ 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, Téa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, Sahar Golshan, Camila Justino, Amanda Leduc, Ayelet Tsabari, Carrianne Leung, Janet Hong, Danny Ramadan, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jónína Kirton, and Eufemia Fantetti.
Some writers explore the way power and privilege affect language learning, highlighting the shame and exclusion often felt by “non-native” 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 Namir’s 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.
“Tender. Touching,” writes Betsy Warland. “[T]his book-length poetic narrative reminds me of Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems: ‘Every day you play with the light of the universe.’ Namir’s love poems to his infant son and partner (interspersed with photos), remind me of Neruda’s poems interspersed with Picasso’s drawings. Umbilical Cord: two art forms; two fathers—the narrative of family made anew.”
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 Rubin’s 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. Rubin’s 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 “a fierce and melancholy collection of poems that both, directly and indirectly, addresses the central concern of the twenty-first century: global warming.” Claire Caldwell writes, “Like 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 ‘great belonging to the earth.’”
The Absence of Zero by R. Kolewe
Poetry | $28.00 | On Sale November 9th, 2021 | Available Now for Pre-order
R. Kolewe’s 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 Kolewe’s tribute to the twentieth century, and to the disparate fragments of its ideas, which continue to affect and disrupt our present.
