The much-anticipated follow-up to acclaimed graphic novelist Lee Lai's Stella-shortlisted Stone Fruit, a funny, dark, emotionally turbulent slice of friendship strife.
We arrive to wreckage a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heatwave, we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down. Yet when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out
In Cannon, Lee Lai's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai's sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
'In Cannon, Lee Lai has performed a rare and powerful act of alchemy the images, narrative, and writing not only capture a life, but combine so that the book itself feels alive.' Torrey Peters
'Beguilingly drawn, Cannon depicts a wide spectrum of adulthood with nuance and complexity. From one story unravels many stories, about friendships, situationships, work, familial obligations. I was struck by its attention and care.' Ling Ma
'A beautifully drawn slice of life, filled with the kind of intimate, specific details that make the best fiction seem autobiographical.' Adrian Tomine
'It's rare, and precious, when a moment in a movie, in a poem, in a comic surges up at you as being True. And in Cannon, Lee Lai does it again and again.' Eleanor Davis
]]>Intent on keeping Ed and his flowers alive, Fifi follows his cues into a world on the brink of climate collapse. But when Ed becomes demanding, urging her towards the people and places that left her scarred, Fifi realises that preserving his life could mean risking her own. How far will she go to keep him blooming?
Set in a future that feels all too real, Emily Buchanan's startlingly original debut explores the right to protest amidst climate chaos, the importance of community in weathering life's storms and the resilience of love and hope in a world that seems beyond saving.
'Send Flowers is so much more than its brilliantly out-there concept: a climate activist's dead boyfriend comes back as a houseplant. Equal parts funny and furious, it's a book that blooms as you read it.' Bobby Palmer, author of Isaac and the Egg
'Radical, hopeful stories are exactly what the world needs right now and through her characters, Buchanan gets to the heart of what drives activism now and throughout history: the simple hope that a better world is possible.' Will McCallum, Executive Director, Greenpeace UK
'A warm, witty take on grief both for lost loved ones and for our ailing planet...Buchanan's spirited message will renew your appreciation for nature and leave your inner activist inspired.' Mikki Brammer, author of The Collected Regrets of Clover
'Witty, original and aching with feeling...Buchanan has made a powerful contribution to the new body of climate fiction...A novel for our times.' Seth Insua, author of Human, Animal
'A prescient love letter to activism and the natural world that serves as a timely call to arms for people and planet.' Henry Fry, author of First Time for Everything
]]>Fourteen-year-old Billie rarely crosses the boundaries of her high-rise housing estate. By the end of the month their money just about stretches to pasta with ketchup, but her mother, Marika, lights up Billie's world with her imagination and big heart.
One day they receive an unwelcome visit from her Hungarian grandmother, and Billie loses much more than the colourful everyday life she shared with her mother. No longer able to ask Marika questions, Billie sets off alone in their old Nissan determined to meet the father she never knew and find out why she keeps dreaming about the sea, even though she's never been there.
Longlisted for the German Book Prize 2023, Paradise Garden is a spellbinding journey and a deeply affecting story of class, resilience and belonging.
'Elena Fischer writes so lovingly about sadness that it is comforting.' Alina Bronsky
'An accomplished debut about the courage to get to know one's own origins and to accept them as they are.' Ursula Nowak for Deutschlandfunk, Cologne
'This novel is a small miracle and a big surprise.' Claudio Armbuster / ZDF, Mainz
]]>Elena Fischer has been nominated for the German Book Prize and for the Harbour Front Literary Festival's Debut Prize 2023.
]]>Tash was thrilled when the dramatic rights to her surprise-hit feminist novel were snapped up. But now a big-shot director has taken charge and he wants 'the dirty version' of her book.
Despite her best efforts to stall, the studio assigns Tash its golden-boy intimacy coordinator to help her add spice to the script. Tash resents Caleb from the first word of the first sentence they write together but as the story continues, the romantic tension spills off the page.
Just when Tash feels it's all coming together, the whole plot falls apart. Can she find a narrative that saves her show and her own love story, or are both lost forever?
'This debut really stood out for me...Bold, smart, with a heroine I loved and lots of interesting things to say about sex, art and entertainment.' Beth O'Leary, bestselling author of The Flat Share and The Road Trip
]]>A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she's landed her ideal job. But when a client vanishes, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate - and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit.
Part literary mystery, part family story, The Verifiers is a clever and incisive examination of how technology shapes our choices and the nature of romantic love in the digital age.
'Your go-to summer read...Really fun and will keep you hooked.' Emily Henry, author of Beach Read
'This book is exhilaratingly well-written. I loved it so much that I didn't want it to end.' Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
'Pek's engrossing debut novel gives us a thoroughly modern twist on classic detective fiction.' New York Times (Editors' Choice)
'Clever, dryly funny...This is a fascinating, carefully layered mystery novel as well as a love letter to New York City and complicated families.' Washington Post
]]>Often a small and seemingly insignificant event can change the course of our lives.
Not long after starting a new job, Neil meets Chrissie. Romance soon blossoms and together they move to a lavish flat in Edinburgh. Everything seems to be falling into place perfectly.
But an innocuous, throw-away comment unintentionally causes Neil's career to collapse, and, at the same time, a cruel betrayal shatters the life he thought he knew.
His only option is to escape to the secluded, remote beauty of a breathtaking Hebridean island. Here, he finds a different way of life, and new friendships develop. But he can't escape the past forever, and soon he must confront a life-changing decision once more.
'... fans will find it rippling with gentle observational comedy.' Sydney Morning Herald / The Age
'His latest book is something of a departure. It encompasses very present issues in the UK: cancel culture, workplace bullying, and the changing world of academia...an exploration of character...a call to arms for better society.' BBC Radio 4 Front Row
Praise for Alexander McCall Smith's writing:
'The author's prose has the merits of simplicity, euphony and precision. This is art that conceals art.'Sunday Telegraph
'Bags of warmth and wisdom and easy, accomplished writing that begs for a comfy chair.'The Times
'Charming, delightful, feel-good stuff.' Daily Express
]]>Compelling and strange, Ben Walter's debut poetry collection explores our eccentric connections to the natural world the flora and fauna, water and wind that burst through the valleys and peaks of the lithosphere, the hard, rocky crust of the Earth that makes all life possible.
Driftwood groans towards the ocean, meadows of grass overrun a mountain, ruined teahouses serve up snow and the bushranger Rocky Whelan roars from his cave. With striking, shimmering language, Lithosphere delves into the peculiarities hidden in our relationship with the world outside.
]]>'Get in loser. Brace yourself. Liam Ferney's new book has landed and it's punchy, raw and raucous as well.
'The Shark of Messina is a book for the new roaring twenties; it's recent history as a kind of rock and roll comic book fantasia, complete with characters we know, or think we know Trump and Rambo, Keanu and Satan. Haters rule. This book is full of lines you'll probably want to quote and pass off as your own, for instance, "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts / And their neighbors." As Ferney implies, we're all "losers" in that world' Rae Armantrout
]]>'Toby Davidson is a master of the run-on line, and his end words often create a form of spell-making that works like a lit fuse. These poems move from the accessible, fine-boned lyric to complex narratives that invite close scrutiny and make invitations, not detour signs, towards understanding. The Grand Reopening is a compelling third collection.' Anthony Lawrence
'Whether through observing a pod of passing whales, Dublin's seagulls or a drowning cicada or in musings on love or dental treatment Davidson's unfailingly precise diction and compression, and disciplined, deeply-considered structural decisions, bring us a new collection which crackles with intense, unpredictable energy. And the final sequence is a knockout.' Marcella Polain
'The Grand Reopening is a searing book of love and mortality. In its taut, short lines, the long sequence "His Blood Whisper Scolds the Deathless Intelligence" enters the mind and heart and simply will not leave.' Kevin Hart
]]>The collection features The Grape Picker[s], shortlisted for the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (2025).
]]>Writing is a world
where oceans are tiny.
]]>Anji works as a castle servant, cleaning laundry for a king she hates. So when a rare opportunity presents itself, she seizes the chance to cut his throat. Then she runs for her life. In her wake, the kingdom is thrown into disarray, while a bounty bigger than anyone could imagine lands on her head. On her heels are the fabled mercenaries of the Menagerie, whose animal-shaped masks are magical relics rumored to give them superhuman powers. It's the Hawk who finds Anji first: a surly, aging swordswoman who has her own reasons for keeping Anji alive and out of the hands of her fellow bounty hunters, if only long enough to collect the reward herself. With the rest of the Menagerie on their trail, so begins an alliance as tenuous as it is temporary and a race against death that will decide Anji's fate, and may change the course of a kingdom.
]]>Etsy Beaucarne is an academic, who needs to get published. So when a journal, written in 1912 by a Arthur Beaucarne, a Lutheran pastor and her grandfather, is discovered within a wall during renovations, she sees her chance. She can uncover the lost secrets of her family, and get tenure.
As she researches, she comes to learn of her grandfather's life, and the life of a Blackfeet called Good Stab, who came to Arthur to share the story of his extraordinary life. She discovers the journals detail a slow massacre, a chain of events charting the history of Montana state as it formed. A cycle of violence that leads all the way back to 217 Blackfeet murdered in the snow.
A blood-soaked and unflinching saga of the violence of colonial America, a revenge story like no other, and the chilling reinvention of vampire lore from the master of horror.
]]>One night, Jess, a struggling actress, finds a five-year-old runaway hiding in the bushes outside her apartment. After a violent, bloody encounter with the boy's father, she and the boy find themselves running for their lives.
As they attempt to evade the boy's increasingly desperate father, horrifying incidents of butchery follow them. At first Jess thinks she understands what they're up against, but she's about to learn there's more to these surreal and grisly events than she could've ever imagined.
And that when the wolf finally comes home, none will be spared.
]]>Welcome to Jamie Pike's Fairharbour a city stuck in perpetual winter, its windows and doorways bricked shut to keep out the freezing cold, its residents striving to survive in the arctic conditions. Welcome to Esther Pike's Fairharbour a city stuck in constant summer, its walls crumbling in the heat, its oppressive sunlight a relentless presence. Winter and Summer alike, have both fallen under the yoke of oppressive powers, that have taken control after the cataclysm. But both Fairharbours were once a single, united city. And in certain places, at certain times, one side can catch a glimpse of the other. As Jamie and Esther find a way to communicate across the divide, they set out to solve the mystery of what split their city in two, and what, if anything, might repair their fractured worlds.
'A beautifully strange and unique fable.' The Guardian's Best SF of 2024 on Aliya Whiteley
'A unique and memorable work.' The Guardian's Best SF of 2024 on Oliver K. Langmead
'An elegantly told meditation on how we can't leave ourselves behind.' Esquire's 30 best SF Books of 2024 on Oliver K. Langmead
]]>Aliya Whiteley's is the author of The Beauty, The Loosening Skin, Skein Island, From the Neck Up, The Arrival of Missives and more. Her novels and novellas have been shortlisted for multiple awards including the Arthur C. Clarke award, British Fantasy award, British Science Fiction award and a Shirley Jackson award. Her short fiction has appeared in The Guardian, The Dark, Interzone, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Strange Horizons, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and anthologies such as This Dreaming Isle, 2084 and Lonely Planet's Better than Fiction.
]]>Lorna Blake is a woman able to create her own reality: a swindler with nerves of steel, gifted manipulator and devoted single mother to two daughters. When her eldest needs lifesaving treatment she cannot afford, Lorna begins a risky but thrilling scheme; taking her daughters to the hallways of London mansions to beg with tales of a husband at turns dangerous, deserting and dead. But as years pass and Lorna continues to wring pity and pounds from wealthy strangers, her victims start closing in.
Acted out in the hallways of London mansions and across several continents, The Woman in the Hall is part psychological drama, part cat-and-mouse chase, as well as a darkly comic portrait of how the figure of a single mother could wring pity from 1930s society.
]]>Lying awake after a hotel party on holiday in the Mediterranean, Daisy Simpson reflects on her lacklustre social performance and muses on the impression her confident and graceful half-sister Daphne may have made on the other guests. What is it that makes Daphne, Daphne and Daisy, Daisy? And which of the two will attract the attentions of one of their hosts, Raymond, whom they have both fallen for?
Returning to London, Daisy's life is strained by the efforts of presenting the right elements of her personality to the right people, resulting in embarrassments, difficulties and deceits as she navigates her relationships and social standing. Rose Macaulay's novel, first published in 1928, offers a sharp and witty commentary on how we twist our identities to fit, delivered in an intelligent and innovative style.
]]>Ancient tales of mythical gods and monsters are embedded deep in the world's cultures, and as weird fiction developed, a haunting sub-genre emerged in which these eternal beings and their power to wreak havoc and enthral mortals remained alive in sacred ruins, cursed relics and the hushed whispers of their followers.
Delving into the rich lore of Greek, British, Norse and Egyptian myth and through lost pantheons from Carthage to Mesoamerica, Katy Soar has unearthed fourteen strange stories of beasts and deities tyrannizing the modern world. Offering classics and rare finds by Stephen Baxter, John Wyndham, Flavia Richardson and more, this collection also includes notes on the mythical figures of each tale.
]]>Standing stones, stone circles, tumps, barrows and ancient clearings still remain across the British Isles, and though their specific significance may be obscured by the passing of time, their strange allure and mysterious energy persist in our collective consciousness.
Assembled here in tribute to these relics of a lost age are accounts of terrifying spirits haunting Stonehenge itself, stories of awful fates for those who impose modernity on the sacred sites and grim tales in which unwitting trespassers into the eternal rites of pagan worship find themselves part of an enduring legacy of blood. To represent the breadth of the sub-genre, authors include Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and Rosalie Muspratt alongside lesser-known writers from the periodicals and journals of the British Library collections.
]]>'From time to time there is published a mystery story which is also a piece of good writing. Such a novel is Cat and Mouse...a mystery novel for the connoisseur.' Glasgow Herald, 1950
'This department has never before admitted its inability to put a book down. But I had trouble with Cat and Mouse...A fine melodrama, with a cheerful disregard for the sterile rules of the detective game.' News Chronicle, 1950
]]>Night falls in the capital, and a "London particular" pea-souper fog envelops the city. In Maida Vale, Rose and her family doctor Tedwards struggle through the dark after a man has telephoned from Rose's house, claiming to have been attacked. By the time they arrive the victim, Raoul Vernet, is dead. The news he brought from Switzerland for Rose's mother has died with him.
Arriving to the scene, Inspector Cockrill faces a fiendish case with seven suspects who could have murdered their guest family members and friends with alibis muddled by the suffocating fog and motives wrapped in mystery. Now, the race is on to find the truth before the killer strikes again.
First published in 1952, London Particular was Brand's favourite among her own books, and it remains a fast-paced and witty masterpiece of the genre, showing off the author's signature flair for the ruthless twist.
]]>Mary Darling is a pretty wife whose boring husband is befuddled by her independent ways. But one fateful night, Mary becomes the distraught mother whose three children have gone missing from their beds. After her well-meaning uncle John Watson contacts the greatest detective of his era (but not that great), Mary is Sherlock Holmes's prime suspect in her children's disappearance.
To save her family, Mary must escape an attempt to have her locked away as mad, and to travel halfway around the world. Along the way, her allies include a Solomon Islander whose village was destroyed by Western civilisation; a Malagasy woman on an island that is run by women; Captain Hook and the crew of the Jolly Roger; and of course, Nana, the faithful dog and nursemaid.
This adventurous and witty novel will appeal to fans of classic Victorian tales, as well as those who are looking for a new take on the British Empire.
'Pat Murphy reveals powerful characters who've had to hide in plain sight while saving their world. The result is a rip-roaring tale of magic and mystery.' Andrea Hairston, author of Archangels of Funk
]]>The fair is in town in Ashton Mead and everyone is keen to join in the fun that is until a young woman falls from the Ferris wheel and all fingers point to Emily's new friend, Dana. With her outsider status, mysterious past and penchant for stretching the truth, who else could it be?
As the villagers grow increasingly suspicious of the fairground people and tensions start to bubble, Emily vows to clear Dana's name and protect her friend, much to the dismay of those closest to her. But can Emily and her dog Poppy find the real culprit before the town erupts, or will Emily risk her life for nothing?
Page-turning and heart-warming, The Poppy Mystery Tales are perfect for fans of Richard Coles' Murder Before Evensong, Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club, Ian Moore's Death and Croissants and SJ Bennett's The Queen Investigates series.
]]>Not knowing what to expect, Emily sets off for the village, hoping to make a new life for herself. In Ashton Mead, she soon makes friends with Hannah who runs the Sunshine Tea Shoppe and meets other residents of the village where she decides to settle.
All is going well... until Emily's ex-boyfriend turns up and against the advice of her new friends, she takes him back. When Emily decides to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a neighbour, she unwittingly puts her own life in danger...
]]>Alongside her popular DI Geraldine Steel detective novels, Leigh Russell is the author of the Poppy Mystery Tales, a brand new cosy crime series set in an idyllic English village. The stories feature Poppy, a lively puppy who helps her owner solve mysteries. Leigh has an MA in English Literature from the University of Kent. She has been shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award, the CWA Dagger in the Library, and the People's Book Prize. Keen to support new writers, Leigh chairs the CWA Debut Dagger Judges, and is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. Leigh lives in London, near her two daughters and granddaughter. One of her daughters has a rescue puppy who inspired the Poppy Mystery Tales.
]]>Emily has settled in the picturesque village of Ashton Mead, where she lives with her puppy, Poppy. Life is finally going well for Emily. She has a cottage of her own, a job she likes and friends. Then she stumbles on the body of a woman who apparently drowned in the river.
The other villagers suspect foul play and are quick to blame Richard, Emily's next-door neighbor and a newcomer to the village. Emily finds it hard to believe her friendly neighbor could be a cold-hearted murderer. When she meets his attractive son, Adam, her feelings become more complicated. Determined to find out the truth behind the death in the village, Emily travels to London to track down the man with whom Richard's wife was having an affair.
Unfortunately for Emily, her visit does not go as planned. Instead of helping clear Richard's name, she finds her own life is in danger...
]]>Unlike the other villagers, Silas Strang and his mother have a bad reputation. Rude and aggressive, they terrorise their neighbours and no one stops them. That is until Silas sets his sights on Emily's beloved dog Poppy, which Emily won't stand for. After a public altercation, Silas is mysteriously murdered. To Emily's dismay, the police view her as their number one suspect.
Assisted by her friends, Hannah and Toby, Emily sets out to establish the truth and clear her name...but her enquiries have frightening consequences.
]]>In the 1980s, Anna McCormick was an anti-nuclear peace activist. She was used to taking on those abusing their political power, but when she was targeted by abuse herself, it left a wound so deep it would still be reverberating through her life decades later.
In 2020, Anna is teaching nine-year-olds on Zoom, navigating a relationship interrupted by enforced distance, and coping with a teenaged son who cannot leave the house. When an unstamped envelope arrives overnight, the traumatic past she had tried to bury begins to cast its own long shadow on the present.
This is a twisty, heart-racing page-turner and an incisive look at the personal impact of the violence of the state, the police and the villains much closer to home.
]]>At an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the centre of everyone's attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father's abandonment of his family, as well as the spectre of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. Since she's an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.
When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.
Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?
Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.
]]>Recreate signature dishes from the game, accompanied by the Gourmet Supremos, the game's iconic cooking quest givers.
With prefaces from Michelin star chefs Paul Pairet and Mory Sacko, this book invites you to explore, taste, and experience the adventure of Genshin Impact in an entirely new way.
Featuring new and accessible recipes for chefs of all abilities, let the magic of cooking transport you into the world of your favourite game!
]]>The filming of Jaws is regarded as a landmark event in both the history of motion pictures and the quaint New England island of Martha's Vineyard, where the geographic isolation necessitated the hiring of hundreds of locals to work as actors and laborers. Among this virtual army of hometown participants were numerous professional and amateur photographers, each with full access to the production's inner workings. This compiles their behind-the-scenes photographs and stories for the first time into a treasure trove of Jaws rarities into a unique compendium, the first to focus on the production's local participants.
Movie buffs, special effects enthusiasts, and fans of the watershed film will thrill in this definitive volume's special features:
A must-have for the worldwide legions of Jaws fans who can't get enough of the greatest action-adventure picture of all time.
]]>Steven Spielberg is an award-winning Hollywood movie director.
]]>What does a Klingon warrior get up to in his downtime?
What song would he choose at a karaoke bar? How does a trip to the barber work out for him?
From sports to shopping, hobbies to holidays, pets to personal grooming, discover how an honourable warrior takes on the challenges of day-to-day life, and learns how to relax, in this very funny collection of cartoons.
]]>Over 40 years ago, in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Admiral Kirk and his crew embarked on a perilous mission to retrieve Spock's body and reunite his soul with his physical form, defying Starfleet orders and facing off against Klingon enemies to save their friend.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film delves into the untold stories behind the making of one of the most pivotal films in the Star Trek saga. From the pressures of continuing the iconic story after The Wrath of Khan to Leonard Nimoy stepping into the director's chair, this book explores the creative challenges, technical innovations, and behind-the-scenes drama that shaped the film. Featuring interviews with cast, crew, and production staff, it uncovers the intricate world-building, the special effects that brought Klingon battles and the Genesis Planet to life, and the emotional weight of Spock's resurrection.
Featuring a foreword from Robin Curtis, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film is a must-read for Trek fans and film enthusiasts alike, celebrating the legacy of a film that solidified the franchise's place in pop culture history.
]]>Maria Jose Tenuto has been a sociology professor for 23 years. Her research on Star Trek has been featured in Wired, USA Today, and on CBS, Grayslake Il.
]]>Gilbert & George and the Communists is more than just a picaresque and deeply funny riot through art history: it is a first-hand account of how, just as one global giant died, another was born.
]]>Michael Hodges has reported extensively from Russia and the Middle East. He has written for many newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times, the Financial Times, Time Out, New Statesman and Esquire. He is the author of AK47: THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE'S GUN. He is currently editor-at-large of the Radio Times and he lives in London with his family.
]]>School teacher Rosy Winter is dying.
Her husband Charlie offers all the relief he can. Rosy's sister-in-law, Sally, offers none.
But Rosy feels something growing in her. A hard knot in her chest.
Beyond the homeopathic remedies, the dinner party obligations, the snatched whispers on wards and in staffrooms, a force murderous, feminine, feverish is stirring within her...
]]>In work that is playful, political and provocative, borrowing from many forms and produced over many mediums, Jeremy Deller enjoys critical acclaim in the UK and across the world.
Art is Magicis the first book in which the artist reflects on the entirety of his career, his life and his art.
]]>His projects over the past two decades, such asBattle of Orgreave (2001), We're Here Because We're Here(2016) as well as the documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2019) have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art.
]]>In this bold fictionalisation, Sinclair enters the underworld of Deakin's life and imagination, pursuing his subject across continents, in dive bars, and bedrooms. The result is an engrossing, utterly unique portrait of a man who some felt was a fallen angel, and others, the devil himself.
'His lexicon is occult as well as criminal. This is a world of negatives, dark rooms and transparencies. He inverts the old anthropological canard about groups [...] believing that the camera steals the soul. Sinclair presents Deakin's imagined life as a form of botched exorcism, with the subjects warped, distorted and smeared like sitters in a Bacon painting.' Stuart Kelly, The Spectator
'[Pariah Genius] gives us a rollicking account of the celebrity criminals, obliging osteopaths and screaming queens of the seedy quarter. This "brotherhood of the damned" was caught by Deakin's unforgiving camera, his prints bringing out their terror and melancholy. [...] Sinclair gives brilliant, pungent accounts of the sacred sites: Wheeler's oyster bar, the Colony Club, the Waterman's Arms and the French House. [...] Sinclair is particularly imaginative with his cinematic and literary parallels and digressions.' Roger Lewis, The Times
'The result is a remarkable fictional biography or "psychobiographic fiction" - written in Sinclair's highly poetic and dazzlingly allusive prose.' Tancred Newbury, Literary Review
]]>From the desolation at the heat-death of the universe to the impassable distance between two people talking, and from the trust exercise of walking in darkness to experiments on the vacuum, Absence searches for what's missing and what we never had.
Starting with the problem of how to represent that that isn't there, and ending with the end of love, Absence takes in the ache for a vanished god, the permanently delayed doomsday of millenarian cults, and the overflowing life inside our seemingly empty buckets and stomachs.
Ali Lewis's poems mirror, undermine, reframe and rephrase each other in a voice that feels as precise and scientific as is it playful and warm. Absence is both intricate and ambitious, comic and tragic.
It is a book of restless curiosity and revelation.
'Deft, ingenious, funny and metaphysically gymnastic. What an absolute gift it is.' Abigail Parry
'I love this. Ali Lewis's poems have an unparaphrasable quality, as if they're not read but inhaled, like a clear vapour which leaves you giddy, tranquil and troubled all at once. Read it, you'll see what I mean.' Caroline Bird
]]>He frequently collaborates with composers and settings of his work have featured on Radio Three and Radio France Musique.
He holds a PhD from Durham University. Absence is his first book.
]]>The echo of a question permeates the collection where does a person grow up? moving restlessly between rural Wales, London and the American South; between the esoteric spaces of the internet; between the artlessness of childhood and adolescence transfigured inexplicably into a disquieting adulthood, with its attendant weirdness of rent-paying, cohabiting, the churn of mindless work and alienation.
The generous abundance of Cowboy's references memes, early noughties television shows, pop songs, cities and their suburbs, video games bring anxiety and pressure, joy and glory to this singularly impressive debut.
]]>Sarah Fletcher's dazzling debut collection pushes at the world, reaching towards the 'beyond' of its title poem to explore questions of power, romance, pain and the sublime. These poems challenge, play and press, but also carry an anxiety around borders: what is 'beyond'? What happens when you reach the boundary and keep going?
With a sharp, Plathian interrogative voice Fletcher's poems prowl the bars and night-haunts of Madrid and London, and in rich, mythic language plumb the below-places where discoveries are made, drowned, and left behind.
]]>The 15th of the 24 Marvel Cinematic Universe Infinity Saga film titles being published as a complete set.
Fresh off the heels of his first adventure with the Avengers in Marvel Studios' Captain America: Civil War, Peter Parker is back in action! With a mentor like Tony Stark-a.k.a. Iron Man-it looks like Spider-Man's about to hit the big time. But New York's newest villain has other plans. Go behind the scenes in this keepsake volume continuing the Marvel Infinity Saga series! Discover exclusive concept art, production stills and commentary from cast and crew as Marvel Studios brings Spider-Man into the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe!
Discover everything you need to know about the making of the movie from all the key players-including Director Jon Watts, Head of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding, Producer and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, and the talented cast, concept illustrators, costume designers, and other talented individuals who worked on the set and behind the scenes to create the art of Marvel Studios' Spider-Man: Homecoming.
]]>But cracks have begun to form in the community's idyllic facade, and Elijah's increasingly erratic behaviour begins to test the loyalty of the women who love him, especially when he reveals his intention to take a fourth wife, sixteen-year-old Mim. Deceived and isolated by the husband they share, Aoife, Ruth, and Deborah must set years of animosity aside and come together as danger mounts within their isolated community.
A powerful story of coercive control, motherhood and extraordinary women, The Wives of Halcyon asks questions about how we perceive faith and family.
'A brilliant and completely addictive read.' Ruth Hogan
'[A] dazzling debut.' Good Housekeeping
'A powerful read.' Prima
'A gripping page-turner which celebrates the strength and resilience of women.' Carole Hailey
'An astonishing and extraordinary debut.' Charlie Carroll
'A fascinating story.' Ilona Bannister
'An extraordinary debut novel.' Anne Cater
'A stunningly written, powerful tale of power and control, and what happens when people lose themselves in the face of cohersion.' Jessica Ryn
'I loved this fierce and perceptive book.' Janet Ellis
'Masterfully crafted narrative about strength, solidarity and faith.' Ruby Sloane, @xrubyreadsx
'An enthralling tale of female strength. One of the best books I've read this year.' Matina Tzoumerka, @breathing_pages
'Uniquely compelling and profound.' Poppy Smith, @poppysreads
'Absolutely gripping, with unforgettable characters I'm still thinking about...This novel took my breath away.' Seth Insua
'A needle sharp contemporary fable that consumed me. It is unflinching. It is brutal. It is tender. And it lingers long after the covers close.' Lucy Rose
'A MUST-read for every book club! With strong female leads and an unputdownable story...an incredible debut that will have you hooked from start to finish.' The London Girls Book Club, @londongirlsbookclub_
]]>Kate Mayer has always been troubled by visions of the future. No matter what she does, her disturbing premonitions are always realised often with terrible consequences. But Kate has a secret: swirling, romantic dreams of a strange boy, and a chance meeting in the woods.
Oliver returned from the Great War disabled, disillusioned, and able to see the dead. Haunted by the death of his best friend and his traumatic memories of the trenches, Oliver realises that his ability to communicate with spirits may offer the chance of closure he desperately seeks.
Nora Jo's mother and grandmother were witches, but she has never nurtured her own power. Always an outsider, she has made a place for herself in the town as Chatuga's schoolteacher, clinging to the independence the job affords her. When her unorthodox ideas lead to her dismissal, salvation comes in the form of a witch from the mountains who offers her a magical apprenticeship. Yet as she begins to fall for another woman in town, her loyalties pull her in disparate directions.
Rumours of a dark force stalking the town only push Kate, Oliver, and Nora Jo onwards in their quest to determine their own destinies. But there are powers in the world stronger and stranger than their own, and not all magic is used for good...
]]>A universe cursed with life after death.
It all started deep beneath the Yucatan peninsula, where an archaeological discovery took us into a new age, bringing us face-to-face with our origins and destiny.
Michael Altman had a theory that no one would hear.
It cursed our world for centuries to come.
This, at last, is his story.
A prequel to Dead Space, the novel focuses on the birth of Unitology. In this novel set centuries before the events of the main series, geophysicist Michael Altman investigates an alien artefact called The Black Marker. We have seen the future. A universe cursed with life after death. It all started deep beneath the Yucatan peninsula, where an archaeological discovery took us into a new age, bringing us face-to-face with our origins and destiny. Michael Altman had a theory that no one would hear. It cursed our world for centuries to come. This, at last, is his story.
]]>Like Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and Vallejo, Gazan poet Nasser Rabah embodies the magnificent possibilities of the human spirit and imagination under extreme conditions.
'Nasser Rabah is my favorite living poet in Palestine. The musicality of his lines could replace my heartbeats and I would feel more than alive.' Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear
Born in Gaza in 1963, Rabah spent some of his formative years in Egypt, before returning to Gaza in his early twenties, where he has lived ever since. There, among the generations who built its neighborhoods and populate its villages, in a place of great natural beauty and vibrant cities, living under constant surveillance, military occupation, blockade, siege and regular attack, in a culture steeped in literary and spiritual tradition, Rabah developed his distinctively singular vision and poetics.
This is Rabah's first book in English translation. The poems include a selection from three of his published collections, along with new poems written after October 2023, during the full-scale Israeli assault on Gaza. Throughout, we find a combination of irreverence and fidelity to tradition, a sense of surrealism infusing the depiction of everyday incomprehensibilities, and an unsettling, delicate tenderness always on edge in an atmosphere of sensory inundation and emotional saturation. Rabah's poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one's relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it. His poetry constantly interrogates-sometimes playfully and sometimes in utter existential despair-the paradoxes and difficulties of expression and of writing itself. Nasser Rabah is a poet we have much to learn from.
This is a bi-lingual edition and includes the original versions in Arabic.
]]>Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic, and scholar whose over 20 books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future, Islanders, and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books, and Follow the Person: Archival Encounters.
Emna Zghal is a visual artist and professional interpreter with an acute sense of poetry in a number of languages.
Khaled al-Hilli is a life-long student of the Arabic language and grammar and now professor of Arabic whose own life journey has immersed him in various Arabic milieus, from Iraqi to Lebanese and Levantine.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. His new book of poems is Forest of Noise. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his 'Letter from Gaza' columns for The New Yorker.
]]>Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the 'power to narrate', as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.
HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere. Contributors include Refaat Alareer, Mahmoud Darwish, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mohammed El-Kurd, A.D. Lauren-Abunassar, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah, and Heba Abu Nada, and many other voices, both established and ascending.
]]>'Witty, witchy, darkly brilliant' Andrea Barrett
'A wunderkammer of beauty and sorrow.' Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
A lovesick nanny slays a dragon. The devil tries to save her mother. A girl drowns and becomes a saint. Three kids plot to blow up their dad, a grieving mother sails the sea to find her son's grave, a scientist brings a voice to life, and a mermaid falls into the power of a witch. Here, historical fiction, horror, and fantasy tangle together in a queer garden of love, grief, and longing.
]]>In 'Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance', a cloud-based contractor finds a human war criminal clinging to the hull of the ship. The clones of 'All the Colours You Thought Were Kings', about to attend their coming-of-age ceremony, are also plotting treason. During 'A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime', two outlaws go on the run after stealing a device from a space cult.
Take a faster-than-light trip to the future. Discover where memes rise and fall in moments. Here are the new, adventurous, and extremely efficient takes on interstellar battles, sentient spaceships, and galactic intrigue. The future is sooner than you think, and there's only so much time to visit.
]]>A sinister blues recording pressed on vinyl in blood conjures lethal shadows with its unearthly wails. In order to rescue Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn traverses the shifting horrors of the aptly named Dread Island. In the weird Wild West, Reverend Jebidiah Mercer rides into a possessed town to confront the unspeakable in the crawling sky. Legendary detective C. Auguste Dupin uncovers the gruesome secrets of both the blue lightning bug and the Necronomicon.
Exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche, here is a lethally entertaining journey through Joe Lansdale's twisted landscape, where ancient evils lurk and sanity hangs by a rapidly fraying thread.
'Joe Lansdale squares up to the Great Old Ones and taps into rich veins of awe and wit, with always a backbeat thrum of cosmic terror.' Kim Newman, author of the Anno Dracula series
]]>No one could have been prepared for the day when orcs, trolls, and dragons fell from portals in the sky. But the world fought back against the invaders as best it could, with soldiers, tactical weapons, and even some rudimentary magic.
Now a tough but not-quite-prepared platoon of Marines is trapped on the wrong side of the portals. The enchanting landscape looks like Middle Earth but to the dismay of the nerdiest soldiers is nothing like it. While the Marines fend off dangerous, improbable, and very rude assailants, their mission is to escort a VIP (Very Important Princess) who could broker a strategic alliance between worlds.
]]>Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanised wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai. But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out, and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.
]]>The life of the youngest musketress of Ninetha has been one of hard training. But Lilith's days have also contained many pleasures, the royal privileges of her family's guardianship of the Cornucopia, a mystical source of limitless bounty. Lilith has never seen a book, and she never expects to encounter one within the safety of the citadel.
When Ishmael, an outcast librarian, shows up outside the Afriq Gate, Lilith saves him from immediate execution by her father's second-in-command, the zealot Kira. As Lilith's curiosity draws her to Ishmael, she lets slip her family's most dangerous secret, sparking a deadly rebellion and an unexpected journey full of stunning revelations.
'With A Stranger In The Citadel, Tobias Buckell writes to the moment we live in, with a clarity and urgency that only fable can provide. Read it.' - John Scalzi, author of The Kaiju Preservation Society
]]>After burying his father, Floyd Betts is returning to Galveston, Texas. He is not alone in his journey, riding out of town with two orphaned siblings he has rescued. Descended from a long line of witches, Nellie struggles with visions from other people's minds. Her impulsive younger brother Hank just wants to break out his oversized revolver.
On the way to Galveston, Floyd, Nellie, and Hank rescue a lost, two-legged amphibian, Charlie Fish. But dangerous men, who want to profit from the spectacle of Charlie, are hot on their trail.
As Nell forms a strong psychic bond with Charlie, Floyd, still grieving, is struggling to protect this strange new family. Ominous winds are picking up from an impending hurricane. Meanwhile, all Charlie wants is to return to his home at sea.
With the taut intensity of an impending storm, Josh Rountree has created a unique Western, neo-gothic novel that demonstrates exactly why he is a rising star of American fiction.
'Odd, creepy, funny, The Black Lagoon meets the Six Gun universe. High up on the way-cool factor. You need this.' - Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of the Hap and Leonard series
]]>Includes:
When Shai is caught replacing the Moon Scepter with her nearly flawless forgery, she must bargain for her life. An assassin has left the Emperor Ashravan comatose, a circumstance concealed only by the death of his wife. If the emperor does not emerge after his hundred-day mourning period, the rule of the Heritage Faction will be forfeit and the empire will fall into chaos.
Shai is given an impossible task: to create - to Forge - a new soul for the emperor in fewer than one hundred days. But her soul-Forgery is considered an abomination by her captors. She is confined to a tiny, dirty chamber, guarded by a man who hates her, spied upon by politicians, and trapped behind a door sealed in her own blood. Shai's only possible ally is the emperor's most loyal councillor, Gaotona, who struggles to understand her true talent.
Time is running out for Shai. Forging, while deducing the motivations of her captors, she needs a perfect plan to escape...
'The forgery was a masterpiece, an almost perfect replica of a priceless work of art. The minor inconsistencies were all but impossible for even an expert to detect. However, Shai had been betrayed. Now awaiting execution, Shai would be reprieved if she could do the impossible. As a Forger, Shai is a skillful artist who can apply complex magical glyphs to rewrite the history of the item to change it completely. Although Forgers are despised, the Empire needs Shai to accomplish the unthinkable: to Forge a new soul for the Emperor. Verdict: Sanderson, the best-selling author of the Mistborn Trilogy and The Way of Kings, has set this novella in the same world as Elantris, one of his earlier novels, but it is totally independent. Fantasy fans will love both the compelling story and the creative magical setting.' - Library Journal
'Sanderson proves to be an exceptionally talented writer in the pages of this book ... The Emperor's Soul is one of those rare high fantasies that feels fresh and is filled with a sense of wonder.' - Charles de Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction
'A fascinating study of clashing beliefs, another inventive magic system, and highly entertaining action sequence, The Emperor's Soul is the book I would recommend to anyone who wants to find out for the first time what Sanderson is all about.' - Fantasy Book Review
'If you're going to pick up one book by Brandon Sanderson, this should be it.' - The Illustrated Page
'A wonderful balance with the world, characters, and magic building.' - Open Book Society
'Fast-paced, clever, and fun.' - Fantasy Book Critic
'Just absolutely magical and engaging.' - Hidden in Pages
'An excellent fast read, highly recommended for readers looking for unique story worlds and magic systems.' - Flight of the Dragon
'It truly is a work of art.' - Pendemon
]]>Despite his ability to control the ambient digital cloud, a foster teen falls for a clever con-man. Luring bullies to a quarry, a boy takes clearly enumerated revenge through unnatural powers of suggestion. In the aftermath of a shapeshifting alien invasion, a survivor fears that he brought something out of the Arctic to infect the rest of the world. A rebellious group of queer artists create a new identity that transcends even the anonymity of death.
Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City, The Art of Starving, shows his savage wit, unrelenting candour, and lush imagery in this essential career retrospective collection, taking his place alongside legends of the short-fiction form such as Carmen Maria Machado, Carson McCullers, and Jeff VanderMeer.
'Highly recommended for any reader interested in speculative fiction that concerns itself with queer themes, particularly messy or emotional ones.' - Booklist
'Miller's sheer talent shines through in abundance...Boys, Beasts & Men is an outrageous journey which skillfully blends genres and will haunt you with its original, poetic voices as much as its victims, villains, and treasure trove of leading actors.' - Grimdark Magazine
]]>When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris's ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik - a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.
Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation - a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness - are just the beginning of irrevocable change.
At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive ... and even evolve.
'It's all of science fiction distilled into a single book.' - Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Gun Machine
]]>This collection of nearly a hundred pieces of very short fiction spans five decades and reveals James Kelman's mastery of the form. As ever, Kelman insists on his characters telling their stories in their own voices, whether in working-class Glaswegian dialect or the dull menace of bureaucratic babble. Everyday tragedy and bleak humour colour these marvels of narrative efficiency, yet at their core they are tender and full of human truth.
]]>Taking time for nature poetry is an act of reverence for the natural world, and a path to understanding our part in it. The poems in this pocket sized anthology will transport you, sending you into the garden, forests, mountains, and shores with searching hands and open eyes.
Through centuries of storytelling, nature poetry has shapeshifted through the major upheavals in our relationship with the landscapes, plants and other species with whom we share the Earth. As our environment is destabilized and threatened by the climate crisis today, we find renewed meanings in these poems once again. They become sources of joy or hope, and catalysts for action.
Together, they show what we have in common across countries and centuries: an undeniable kinship with nature and a fierce will to protect it.
]]>A runaway seeks shelter from violence with a pack of wild coyotes. A young woman falls into a hypocritical crew of white Christian YouTube influencers. A mother witnesses her daughter's prophecy about the end of the world come true. In Sympathy for Wild Girls, young Black women yearn for intimacy and hunt for belonging in a subtly warped version of our world, where social mores loom like shadows and bigotry shape-shifts.
Skirting the chasms that lurk in our common notions of 'girlhood' and their heightened peril for queer women of colour Demree McGhee's characters track the prints of their desire and pain to the edges of reality, finding refuge in unlikely places. Fighting self-loathing and societal abuse, they explore the bounds of their feral strength and ugliest truths, howling at the moon to be known.
]]>When Margaret Hale, a minister's daughter, relocates with her family to Milton in the north of England she witnesses firsthand the brutal working conditions in Milton's factories and mills. Her liberal education has given her strong convictions, but little common sense, and her pity finds a mostly unsympathetic ear among the gruff mill workers and their families.
Magaret is most vexed by a local industrialist and mill-owner, John Thornton, whom she considers contemptuous and bull-headed. But through her clashes with Thornton and her growing affinity for the workers and their plight for survival, Margaret comes to see the world as a much more complicated place, and that her earlier pity was not charity but a kind of arrogance.
Thunderously philosophical and compulsively readable, North and South is a vivid portrayal of not only unthinking conformity or selfish individualism, but the power of vulnerability and change.
]]>Adrienne Garcia-Specht is a writer and Elizabeth Gaskell enthusiast. She earned a master's degree in English from Syracuse University and lives on California's Central Coast.
Morgan Spector is an actor and producer who is best known for his leading role as George Russell in The Gilded Age.
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.
]]>Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review. A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her work has also appeared most recently in The Atlantic, Esquire, New York, and Vanity Fair, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman also writes (albeit more sporadically) the “Crime Lady” newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between. She lives in New York City.
]]>Life is peaceful at old Audley Court until the arrival of Robert Audley Sir Michael's nephew and his friend George Talboys, who is home again after making his fortune in Australia.
When George mysteriously disappears, Robert takes it upon himself to find him again. Developing a detective's eye, following disturbing clue after clue, Robert becomes convinced his alluring Aunt Lucy isn't as innocent, or possibly as sane, as she seems.
Lady Audley's Secret first appeared in Robin Goodfellow magazine in 1861, establishing it as a 'sensational' novel to rival Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860). A cunningly plotted mystery novel as sensual as a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, Lady Audley's Secret probes mid-Victorian anxieties about the rapid rise of consumerism with the invention of one of literature's great villainesses who goes to great lengths to secure her greatest desires.
]]>Rachel Vorona Cote is the author of TOO MUCH: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. She has written essays and criticisms for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Poetry Foundation, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Washington Post, and a number of other publications. In a past life, she was ABD at the University of Maryland, where she studied Victorian literature. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C.
Sarah Weinman is the author of three books: Without Consent, forthcoming in 2025; Scoundrel, named a Best Book of 2022 by Time, Esquire, CBC, and NPR and a NYT Editor's Choice; and The Real Lolita, named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, BuzzFeed, The National Post, Literary Hub, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vulture, and winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award in Nonfiction. She also edited several anthologies, including Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning; Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession, winner of the Anthony Award for Best Nonfiction/Critical Work; Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America); and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin).
Weinman writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review. A 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for Reporting and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her work has also appeared most recently in The Atlantic, Esquire, New York, and Vanity Fair, while her fiction has been published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and numerous anthologies. Weinman also writes (albeit more sporadically) the 'Crime Lady' newsletter, covering crime fiction, true crime, and all points in between. She lives in New York City.
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA. She lives in Los Angeles.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures, The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is an Acquiring Editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. He lives in NYC.
]]>'It is the English edition to acquire.' Washington Post
Pulitzer Prize winning poet and translator, Richard Howard, gives readers the true voice of Baudelaire in this masterful translation. Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time.
In 'Spleen et ideal', Baudelaire dramatises the erotic cycle of ecstasy and anguish of sexual and romantic love.
'Tableaux Parisiens' condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict.
'Le Vin' centres on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of 'Fleurs du Mal' while rebellion is at the heart of 'Revolte'.
'Howard's achievement is such that we can be confident that his Flowers of Evil will long stand as definitive, a superb guide to France's greatest poet.' The Nation
]]>Richard Howard was one of the most prolific and respected twentieth-century literary critics and translators. He won a Pulitzer Prize, a PEN Translation Prize, a National Book Award (for Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)), a Literary Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Fellowship, the title of Chevalier from France's L'Ordre National du Merite, and the position of Poet Laureate of New York.
]]>The year is 2011, and our aging narrator has returned to Alto da Vigia to say goodbye to the house where her family spent summers during her childhood. Divided into three sections, one for each day that she spends at the home, Midnight is Not in Everyone's Reach unspools in torrents of dialogue and surreal, feverish scenarios.
Over these three days, the dead return to life, time splinters and freezes, and conversations flow from the past into the present and back again, as we journey across the narrator's corrosive psyche toward our real destination the place inside herself where the family's grief-stricken secrets are kept.
]]>Elizabeth Lowe, born in New York City, has translated over thirty works by Lusophone writers from Brazil, Portugal, and Africa. She was one of the first to translate Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, Nelida Pion, and Antnio Lobo Antunes. She is the author of The City in Brazilian Literature (1982), and co-author with Earl E. Fitz of Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature (2008), along with many scholarly articles and book chapters. She is a recipient of an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants for language preservation projects, Fulbright fellowships to Colombia and Brazil, and recognition by the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Her memoir, Translating from the Portuguese: A Life Translated, is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
]]>It's 1897, and a new fashion for thin threatens to end the career of proudly fat vaudeville performer Evelyn Cross. Enter Thomas Gallier, the man behind the new palace of entertainment promising to be the apex of New York City's theatrical scene. He's in search of a star for his vaudeville spectacular, and when he hears Evelyn sing, he knows exactly who he needs to grace his stage.
In a grand finale, present-day narrator Phoebe steps in to reveal secrets and show readers what it really means to claim self-love. Inspired by the true story of a Progressive Era troop of plus-size dancers, this is a story about the spirit of community and the power of romance.
]]>Featuring original stories from Hugo, Nebula, and Lambda Literary Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, UNITY author Elly Bangs, Kiera Jessica Bane, Ava Kelly, Juliet Kemp, Rafi Kleiman, Tucker Lieberman, Nathan Alling Long, Ether Nepenthes, Lane Fox Marcus Woodman, and Nebula-nominated M. Darusha Wehm, and an introduction to the new edition by Microcosm publisher Joe Biel.
]]>Eric LaRocca (he/they) is the author of several works of horror and dark fiction, including the viral sensation Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and currently resides in Boston, MA with his partner. For more information, please follow @hystericteeth on Twitter/Instagram or visit ericlarocca.com.
]]>'Layers of a mysterious past must be unraveled to solve a murder in the present in this intimate journey through time.' John Farrow, author of The Storm Murders Trilogy
]]>While Romeo begins to think that the dead woman may be linked to violence against several homeless people in the city, the search for justice in both cases is thwarted by societal apathy and ignorance, even as the killer is stalking the frigid streets of Montreal, preying on and terrorising its most vulnerable citizens.
'...another simply riveting suspense thriller of a read and continues to showcase the author's natural knack for the kind of narrative storytelling that keeps the reader's riveted attention from beginning to cliff-hanger style ending.' Clint Travis / Midwest Book Review
'It's a red-hot potboiler that effectively pierces through any kind of bone-chilling cold.' Stuart Nulman / The Montreal Times
]]>When Magnus' plans for a dramatic environmental protest take a dark turn, Romeo and Marie are forced to abandon their honeymoon in the Laurentians in order to catch a killer, unearthing long-buried secrets along the way. Fast-paced and chilling, Whale Fall is a riveting tale of love, vengeance, and climate justice.
'[Ann Lambert] has produced her third stunning murder mystery after The Birds That Stay and The Dogs of Winter, combining terrific whodunits with subtle messages of social justice and marvellous characterization... Whale Fall is a rare reminder that just one murder is a tragedy; you don't need bloodshed and gore and gunfire to have a crackerjack of a story.' Nick Martin / Winnipeg Free Press
'A simply riveting novel with a narrative story line the includes love and romance, retaliatory vengeance, and environmental climate justice, Whale Fall by Ann Lambert is especially and unreservedly recommended for the personal reading lists of dedicated mystery fans, as well as community library Contemporary Mystery & Suspense collections.' Midwest Book Review
]]>When one of the greatest museums in the world gave the illustrator Zelba free rein to make a graphic novel about great art, she knew exactly what she would do: address a double standard. She'd seen the Louvre's halls filled with sexualized female bodies, ogled at by crowds and sometimes even groped, and wanted to turn the tables. What if, she dreamed, those naked bodies refused to be the objects of our gaze? What if the female nudes in the Louvre went on strike?
The result, a co-edition with Editions Louvre, is a critique of great artists and great museums. Awarded the prestigious Prix Sceneario and the Prix Artemisia in France, the pages are filled with unforgettable characters, such as a heroic cleaner who can speak to statues and a museum director who secretly offloads his work onto his sister. Featuring well-known masterpieces, this entertaining romp displays one of the world's greatest art collections in a whole new light.
]]>Alice Yang is a PhD student in French at Yale University. Her translation ofAbounding Freedom, a collection of prose poetry by Julien Gracq, was published by World Poetry Books in 2024. She divides her time between New Haven, Conneticut, and Lyon, France.
]]>'Searching, honest, funny, and beautiful.' Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
"I laugh-sobbed my way through The Mother, so loudly my children came to check on me.' Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother
In this hilarious and harrowingly honest graphic memoir,New Yorker cartoonist Rachel Deutsch, aka @weirdmomart on Instagram, shares the story of her journey into motherhood.
Rachel Deutsch had always wanted a baby. She wanted to press her face into theirs and feed them from her body. Eventually her child might hate her a little. But they'd be on speaking terms most of the time. Wait...or was that just Rachel's experience with her mum? Had she processed her own childhood enough to raise a child herself!?
The Mother is about the constant dualities and contradictions of motherhood. The collision of future Rachel and past Rachel. Desperately wanting to get pregnant while fearful of being pregnant. Loving a new identity while missing an old one. Celebrating a new family while mourning the previous incarnation of a partnership.
Funny, provocative, and unabashedly candid, Deutsch's memoir embraces both the joys and the challenges of modern parenthood in a way that will resonate with new and seasoned parents.
]]>Perfect for Halloween and illustrated in Norm's own gorgeous style.
'Every village has its stories - those of the living - and those of the dead.'
After the sudden death of his twin sister, 14 year old James Reynolds becomes obsessed with her tale of a black hound, a folkloric creature that is regarded as a portent of death. Enlisting the aid of his elderly neighbour, who the local children call 'The Witch', he delves into the centuries of village history, folklore, and ghosts, until he uncovers a deeper secret beyond his darkest nightmares, beyond the sight of most, and beyond the mortal veil.
Set in the South Downs of England, a place that has been home to Celts, Romans, and Vikings, James's story is interwoven with tales from his village that also blur the line between the living and the dead.
]]>With demons for parents, and supernatural powers of their own, Milly and Billy are now firmly involved in the world of the supernatural. The shadowy forces of their parent's monstrous relatives and rival demons are flourishing, and the twins must survive the nightmares to come from the mysterious band of mortals who wish to control them.
Eisner Award-winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda (winner of Best Painter/Multimedia Artist Eisner for The Night Eaters: Her Little Reapers), continue the story of Night Eaters in Her Little Reapers, spinning an epic tale of gods and monsters!
Eisner Award-winning and bestselling author Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda continue the story of Night Eaters in Her Little Reapers, spinning an epic tale of gods and monsters!
]]>Prepare to be captivated by another masterpiece from the mind of Akira Kanou, where fantasy meets reality, with Outsiders Volume 1. Delve into a world where vampires and werewolves clash in the shadows, and humans unravel the secrets of an ancient feud.
Navigate the world of dark fantasy alongside Ema, a high school student who is full of energy and determination. She embarks on a perilous path that will challenge her beliefs and reshape her destiny.
The courageous, young protagonist finds that she possesses special abilities, but will those same gifts attract unwanted attention? Will her curious nature help her uncover secrets, or lead to her demise?
With mesmerising artistry, Akira brings this dark tale to life, capturing the bustling streets of Japan and the eerie shadows where otherworldly creatures lurk. Although Akira thrusts readers into a treacherous war between fantastical creatures, it is in a world not so different from our own.
These monsters aren't from another dimension, they are from ours and have been fighting an age-old battle within the shadows. Outsiders Volume 1 casts that same shadow over the reader, who is caught in the chaos and conflict and left on the edge of their seat.
]]>Six's journey leads him to fight a tough foe to save an old acquaintance. Fans of mecha fights and anime will find a perfect fit with this action-packed Manga!
The eleventh volume of Atom: The Beginning marks the team's return from their adventures in Vietnam, where they were able to uncover clues about the 'robot boy' from the future.
They have the chance to ponder the various pieces of information they gathered, whilst resuming their research and daily life. But before everything can become completely normal again, an unexpected visitor disrupts the harmony.
Someone that the team does not get along with the team turns up, out of the blue, at Lab-7. Their appearance leads to some unsettling revelations that could bring them even closer to the truth about the 'robot boy', but at what cost?
Volume 11 of ATOM: The Beginning, created by Masami Yuki and Tetsuro Kasahara, seems as if it's leading our heroes towards the secrets of the iconic Osamu Tezuka creation, Astro Boy, an icon known across the world from the hugely successful manga and anime. However, it's slowly becoming a truth that might be better left untouched.
]]>Masami Yuuki is a manga artist and member of the artist group Headgear. He is most known for his celebrated manga series Mobile Police Patlabor, which has spawned many spin-offs and adaptations into anime, movies, live-action projects, novels, video games, and more.
Osamu Tezuka was a Japanese manga artist, cartoonist, and animator whose revolutionary comics earned him the title of manga no kamisama ('God of Manga'). His body of work is one of the largest and most prolific in all of Japanese culture, including the iconic Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Black Jack, Dororo, Message to Adolf, and Princess Knight. Tezuka passed away in 1989.
]]>A thrilling, propulsive story of escape as a small-time crook goes on the run across Australia with a stolen secret that will change the world, perfect for fans of William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, Richard Morgan and Ghost in the Shell.
Jackson Nguyen is a petty crook living slim on the mean streets of Melbourne. When he crosses paths with a desperate, but wealthy, Chinese dissident, begging for his help, Jack responds in the only natural way: he steals her shoes.
And yet, despite every effort to mind his own damn business, a wild spiral into the worst kind of trouble begins - Murder, mayhem, fast cars, fast-talking, bent cops, and long straight highways into the terrible beauty of the vast Australian Outback.
In Jack's world, taking a stand against the ruling class is the shortest path to a shallow grave. But when an Earth-shattering technology falls into his hands, he must do everything he can to stop the wrong people taking it. In a world of pervasive government surveillance and oppressive corporate control, it's up to a small-time criminal to keep the spark of human rebellion alive.
]]>Danged Black Thing is an extraordinary collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, patriarchy and womanhood, from a remarkable and original voice. Traversing the West and Africa, they celebrate the author's own hybridity with breathtaking sensuousness and lyricism.
Simbiyu wins a scholarship to study in Australia, but cannot leave behind a world of walking barefoot, orange sun and his longing for a 'once pillow-soft mother'. In his past, a darkness rose from the river, and something nameless and mystical continues to envelop his life. In 'A Taste of Unguja' sweet taarab music, full of want, seeps into a mother's life on the streets of Melbourne as she evokes the powers of her ancestors to seek vengeance on her cursed ex. In the cyberfunk of 'Unlimited Data' Natukunda, a village woman, gives her all for her family in Old Kampala. Other stories explore with power what happens when the water runs dry and who pays, capture the devastating effects on women and children of societies in which men hold all the power, and themes of being, belonging, otherness.
Speculative, realistic and even mythological, but always imbued with truth, empathy and Blackness, Danged Black Thing is a literary knockout.
'Eugen Bacon gives us a cornucopia of dark fruitfulness. Her writing is equal parts fecund earth and fine-cut jewels; her stories juxtapose the scarred and abused with the powerfully magical, the numinous and the deceptively mundane. They travel the known world, remaking all its parts as they go, and they pull new worlds, fully formed, from Bacon's unfettered imagination.' - Margo Lanagan
'Lyrical, rich,oftentimes darkandsometimes hopeful,Danged Black Thing is a speculative fiction collection that takes the reader on a journey from Africa to Australia. The cities and villages the stories are set in are sometimes familiar, while others are plucked fully formed from author Eugen Bacon's imagination, providing a vast backdrop to her exploration of the emotional costs of being a woman...Where men rule, there will be women who suffer. With the lyricism of Toni Morrison and the worldbuilding of Ken Liu, Bacon secures herself as an important voice in Australian genre fiction. Danged Black Thingis the feminist sciencefiction debut that brings women and Blackness to the forefront.' - Jing Xuan Teo, Books+Publishing
]]>After living in a Singapore dog shelter for five years, Gucci a vaguely Dalmatian-like crossbred is losing hope of ever being rescued. One day to his surprise he is adopted by her, a writer, and moves to inner city Sydney. On arrival, however, an anti-dog war breaks out in their apartment block; Gucci's owner receives a letter threatening the possibility of 'euthanasia'. The incident triggers nightmares in her and brings back distressing childhood memories.
My Name Is Gucci is a charming novel about the relationships between pets and their owners and about how the past shapes the present. This bold ex-shelter dog narrated fable beautifully unravels Gucci's and his adopter /guardian's secrets, which have been intertwined for decades through their recurring reincarnations.
Sun Jung understands the deep connections that exist between animals and humans. You won't need to be a dog lover to be entranced by this story; it is brimming with warmth, wit and wisdom.
'A comic and moving Homeric odyssey about Gucci the dog, who must deal with, and outwit, the most problematic species of all humans.' Louis Nowra, author of Sydney: A Biography
'A magical novel that will capture your heart.' Andrea Carter, author of A Body Falls
]]>**Winner, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry**
**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
**Shortlisted, NSW Literary Awards 2025, Glenda Adams Award for New Writing**
**Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry**
A moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
'Here is a poetry of passion; a poetry of necessity; a poetry of survival, and a poetry-triumphant.' Maxine Beneba Clarke
'rock flight is a work of timelessness, rigour, precision, relationality and guts just like its poet. A must-read for all of us who yearn and stretch and reach for a world beyond colonies, and an even more urgent read for those who don't.' Alison Whittaker
]]>Moving nimbly between the granular and the broad view, The Oblong Plot, Chris Andrews' third collection, takes in paint splotches on a sawhorse and a star named Fang, life-wasting systems and means of escape. These faceted, echoing poems observe the world's shifting arrangements while rearranging their own letters, sounds, syllables, words and lines. The Oblong Plot invites the reader to join in its serious play.
'I loved this exhilarating, brilliant book. The poems in The Oblong Plot have style and wit to burn, and strike like a tuning fork, reverberating and reshaping the air around us. They are sharply attuned to the ironies and absurdities of contemporary life, finding linguistic torque and wry humour in cityscapes and their inhabitants' waking lives, dreams and aspirations. In seemingly effortless but technically dazzling syllabics, time and again Andrews punctures through the surface of things to find something much stranger and more surreal sitting under the day's skin. He is a relentlessly surprising and inventive poet whose vast linguistic gifts - including an electrifying skill at toggling between the vernacular and the poetically charged, "between / the dreamwarp and the cybercapsule" - remind us that language can both unmake and remake the world around us. The Oblong Plot is a gift to all who turn to poetry seeking to find our language recharged and refreshed.' - Sarah Holland-Batt
]]>A poetry collection which is part criticism, part autobiography, and always acute in its recollection of the emotions inspired by television drama
In her new collection Television, award-winning poet Kate Middleton considers the emotional impact that television programs had on her formative years - from childhood cartoons Astro Boy and Roadrunner to series like Pretty Little Liars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks and Beverly Hills 90210. These were 'the shows I watched to cry, to feel/ the hot gash angst of teenaged-ness'. In poems that expand like mini-essays, the poet explores the feelings evoked by these shows, the shame and longing, the regret and desire, and the different kinds of identification they encouraged, especially in a teenage girl. But the focus is also on the poet as an adult, thinking back over her adolescent responses, about the ways in which television plays with time and reality, and the extent to which its jumble of images reflects her own multi-faceted consciousness, if it hasn't in fact formed it - 'the one whose interests are too voluminous, the one who tries/ to write deeply into one idea and is instead immediately/ tugged sideways...I try to do too much and/ my attention shatters, ricochets among ruins'.
]]>The witch hunt in Europe intensified between 1550 and 1650, decades after the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt. It is right in the middle of these one hundred years of infamy that Anna Thalberg's story takes place.
Anna is a woman of singular beauty who is accused of witchcraft and taken by force to be tried. Klaus, her husband, and Friedrich, the village priest, will also travel to Wrzburg, where Anna has been incarcerated. They will use all available resources, seeking to stop the blind beast of the Inquisition, which is inexorable in trying to drag the woman to the stake.
Witches, werewolves, family spirits and even a demon who theologizes come together in these pages, but their presence is insufficient to hide the true horror: the inhumanity of the institutions, their manipulations and manufacturing of fear, and the arbitrary evil that nests in the heart of human beings.
]]>In these self-mocking poems - populated with youths and elders, cellphones and televisions - Jiang Tao presents and dissects a discontent with the state of the world. The complex use of metaphor highlights his profound wit and poetic mastery, building subtle layers of satire that act as commentary and proposed remedy for society's flaws. But melancholy, nostalgia, dispassion, and the occasional lyricism also come into play as he explores the passage of time, city life, materialism, economic realities, and the difficulties of human communication and connection.Jiang Tao's verse is, as translator Josh Stenberg has written, "a quintessential expression of urban malaise in contemporary China."
]]>Josh Stenbergis a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney.He is the author ofMinority Stages: Sino-Indonesian PerformanceandPublic Display(2019) and an upcoming book on Hokkien theatre, as well as the editor ofIrina's Hat: New Short Stories from China(2013) andKunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance(2022).He translated two volumes of short fiction by Nanjing author Su Tong, short fiction by PRC, Taiwanese, and Southeast Asian Chinese authors, and numerous works of spoken and traditional Chinese theatre. His fiction and poetry have been published inThe Antigonish Review, The New Quarterly, CV2, The Dalhousie Reviewand other literary journals. He has been a fellow of Fulbright Taiwan, the Center for Chinese Studies (National Central Library), the International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden), and the Vermont Studio Centre/Luce Foundation.
An emotionally wrenching novel tackling key themes such as generational trauma and what it means to be Black British, surviving between the gaps of knowledge around familial migrant journeys, set in today's London and Ghana in the mid-90s.
On the cusp of thirty, Ghanaian Londoner Whitney Appiah was born with a special gift. The massage therapist can physically sense where her clients' trauma lies and heal them. But Whitney has no idea that she too is suffering. Tragic events from her youth have left a terrible, unseen mark.
When a dangerous encounter with the man she's dating triggers a wave of fragmented recollections, Whitney embarks on a journey to reclaim her memories and the truth that is buried deep in her early years growing up in Kumasi, Ghana.
Spanning three decades, told through the viewpoints of Whitney, her aunts Gloria and Aretha, and their house help Maame Serwaa, The Rest of You explores what happens when we try to move forward through the lacuna of our past.
'A novel that doesn't shy away from the modern issues of being Black and female. At times heartbreaking, this portrait of a family coming to terms with a tragic past is vivid and tender.' Louise Hare, author of This Lovely City
'Maame Blue's skill at crafting characters that take bits of your heart with them as you read the final pages; is a true gift. Following the characters through the intertwining of multiple timelines brought forth the force that yearning and longing actually possess. A wonderful book!' Kelechi Okafor, author of Edge of Here
'Equal parts romance and coming-of-age story, Blue's emotionally charged debut explores the highs and lows of love...Those looking for heavy emotion in their romance should jump on this one.' Publisher's Weekly on Bad Love
'What is singularly powerful about Bad Love, and commendable for this reason alone, is that the winners and losers in love are all Black. It's so unusual to have a Black woman lead in a romance story, that it is sadly still remarkable.' Words of Colour on Bad Love
]]>In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand 'chinamen' lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were sojourners, who hailed from the Canton region in south China, and found themselves unable to return to their homeland. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and New South Wales, and Aotearoa New Zealand. The poems pay tribute to the author's ancestors, illuminating how they survived and thrived amid longstanding colonialist stories that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.
]]>As its title suggests, ime Kneevi's first book-length poetry collection gestures towards the elusive and often fragmented reality of dreams and recollections. The poems speak of distance, dislocation and longing, evoked by the poet's cultural ties to Croatia, the awkwardness of personal relations and the discomforts of language. They also convey the embarrassment and regret which spring from daily encounters, especially when the point of view is that of an adolescent, a lover, a rival, indeed a poet, endowed with a more than usual amount of self-consciousness. These concerns are echoed, and heightened, by the elliptical form of the poems and their surreal dislocations, which invite the play of implication, giving space and silence their own kind of eloquence. The effect is remarkable, both for the range of emotions expressed, which includes humour and joy alongside unease and uncertainty, and for the intensity of their expression.
]]>That's what these poems offer old lyric technology turning against its partiality to lull, to wrap up, the poems are fast as ice. I go outside and at the top of the street, it is bitterly cold and at the bottom sweltering, humid. Here is the street, here is the weather at every extreme. Transit becomes transit.' John Wilkinson
]]>Sometimes the language is sharp, sometimes lavish, each poem a document of life as a waking dream, a relentless exploration of the everyday. Ali Jane Smith writes, 'It is a relief to turn thoughts and feelings into a poem. Sometimes it is like making a chair, and sometimes it is like smashing concrete with a crowbar.' Here, the chair might wobble, the cracks in the concrete twist like rivers. They take you somewhere, or they tell you something.
]]>This collection of prose poems explores the linked tensions of flight and longing: the immigrant caught on the other side of the world; the transformation of a home; the reckoning of motherhood. Often otherworldly, frequently affirming, and sometimes heartbreaking, these poems offer small meditations - circling overhead, descending into daily life.
]]>Her books include What the Ground Can't Hold (Picador) and She Played Elvis (Allen and Unwin).
Her short works have appeared in Best Australian Stories, Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry, Dreaming Awake, The Writing Mind, Cordite, Overland, Antipodes, Southerly, Island, takahe, Eunoia Review and various Spineless Wonders collections. She has judged the Joanne Burns Award and received an ANU Humanities Research Centre Fellowship, a Bundanon Artists Residency, the Varuna House Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship and a Nan Tien Temple and South Coast Writers Centre residency.
]]>separations. Cutting away
from her past, from varied, acceptable and permissible futures
dreamed into expectations by others on her behalf. From
always being a dangerous difference in a country town, and
rural school. Segue to wide-eyed in the city, to wild eyed, in a
city never imagined.'
In She Goes to Town Sandra Renew writes as a lesbian poet. She shows a gendered world from the point of view of outsider and one who lives on the fringes of heterosexuality, and who fully inhabits a voice of dissent and protest. She deep-dives into gender and comments on living in both urban and rural communities.
She Goes to Town explores the tensions between leaving and staying, crossing lines, endings and beginnings. In poetry, micro-lit, short prose there is a mapping of the path to destruction and the saving graces of hope and trying again.
]]>Sandra's collection, It's the sugar, Sugar (Recent Work Press, 2021) won the ACT Writers Notable Awards for Poetry 2021.
Acting Like a Girl (Recent Work Press, 2019) was the winner of the 2020 ACT Writing and Publishing Award for Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year.
She writes on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (Canberra) and Yuin land (Cobargo).
]]>Alcatraz is a one-of-a-kind illustrated anthology of short prose and prose poetry. It showcases works from many of the most exciting practitioners writing in English across the globe.
This includes work by luminaries such as Will Alexander, Indran Amirthanayagam, Nin Andrews, Maxine Chernoff, Denise Duhamel, Holly Iglesias, Peter Johnson, Luke Kennard, Naveen Kishore, Janice Lee, Jane Monson, Mariko Nagai, Nguyn Phan Qu Mai, Alvin Pang, Lauren Russell, Fiona Sampson, Ian Seed, Sudeep Sen, John Skoyles, Donna Stonecipher, Sam Wagan Watson, Cyril Wong, Nicholas Wong, Jenny Xie and Gary Young.
The volume is edited by the award-winning Australian prose poets Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington who recently published the definitive book about the form, Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2020), and the authoritative Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press, 2020). The book is illustrated by renowned artist and publisher, Phil Day, whose work recently appeared in the New Yorker.
The anthology is titled Alcatraz largely because of the playfulness inherent in the word, which contains the first and last letters of the English alphabet in first and last positions. Contributing writers were asked to respond to the idea of 'Alcatraz' in any way they chose whether directly or more tangentially. This resulted in a wonderful series of responses, taking on and expanding a wide array of the associations connected to this historically loaded word.
The book is highly inventive in its layout, with contributions appearing according to their length. This means that the book moves from the shortest to the longest pieces and the illustrations complement the shape of the written pieces. They are line drawings, playing on the idea of taking a line from the work and representing it obliquely without ever overwhelming it.
Alcatraz is a creative, unusual and distinctive volume celebrating international collaboration and the special magic that happens in the meeting of short prose works and visual art.
Alcatraz includes works by:
Will Alexander
Indran Amirthanayagam
Nin Andrews
Sally Ashton
Cassandra Atherton
Stuart Barnes
Linda Black
Jessica Bundschuh
Anne Caldwell
Anthony Caleshu
Maxine Chernoff
Paul Christiansen
Denise Duhamel
Carrie Etter
Gerald Fleming
Jeff Friedman
Oz Hardwick
Bob Heman
Xavier Hennekinne
Paul Hetherington
Cindy Hochman
MC Hyland
Holly Iglesias
Brenda Iijima
Peter Johnson
S. K. Kelen
Luke Kennard
John Kinsella
Naveen Kishore
Janice Lee
Gian Lombardo
Kathleen McGookey
Alyson Miller
Jane Monson
Margaret Moores
Paul Munden
Mariko Nagai
Sawako Nakayasu
Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Geoff Page
Alvin Pang
Jonathan Penton
Meg Pokrass
Lee Ann Roripaugh
Lauren Russell
Sarah M. Sala
Fiona Sampson
Kristin Sanders
Ian Seed
Sudeep Sen
John Skoyles
Donna Stonecipher
Ruth Stacey
Marc Vincenz
Samuel Wagan Watson
Amelia Walker
Jen Webb
Jessica L. Wilkinson
Cyril Wong
Nicholas Wong
Jenny Xie
Gary Young
Illustrator:
Phil Day
]]>'In this verse-paced novel Kinsella never quite uses Auden's phrase in The Fall of Rome - 'altogether elsewhere' - but we sense the priorities and judgement of the natural environment, and of an older world. Coastal birds and dolphins are among his observers, and we too feel the wind and ocean currents fall and rise so that, despite surveillance and silencing, we may also remember and join in bearing witness.' - Kim Scott
'A book against laughter and forgetting if ever there was one. Moving, incandescent, quietly devastating...Cellnight is contemplative, fiercely elegiac, and a panoramic ode to Whadjuk Noongar country and anti-ode to its settler colonial overlay. As Kendrick Lamar said: the judge make time. So does Kinsella.' - Declan Fry
'To open Cellnight is to encounter John Kinsella's cat's cradle of a verse novel - intersecting threads pulled tight and tense between prison bars, protest signs, booze bottles and warships. Feathered visitors also flit among the narrative fibres, bearing witness to the fists raised over prone and vulnerable bodies in the carceral corners of a swelling port city.' - Cass Lynch
]]>Sometimes has written the celestial subjectively or is it the subjective celestially? and smears the lines between the practices of cosmology, poetry, and astrophysics. After reading this collection, it seems to me like poetry is as valid a method of interrogating the universe as any other.' - Andrea Rassell
]]>This book-length verse narrative is about a so-called 'Dirty T-Shirt Tour', on which a group of Australian poets travel to cities in the United States and Canada in the mid-1980s, to give readings. It is composed as a diary, written from the point of view of one of the poets, who finds himself at odds with the others by virtue of his migrant background, and his commitment to 'performance' poetry. It is his first visit to America, which he views with both wonder and alarm. Isolated in the group by his commitment to a poetics of 'utterance', he finds friendship and acclamation in his audiences and the people he encounters on the street. The tensions portrayed extend beyond the group to encompass issues of racism, sexism and class, as the book offers snapshots of American society, as viewed by the outsider, which are in themselves an expression of his performance poetic. The Tour stands as a chronicle of the difficulties and triumphs of performance poetry, of which Pi.O. was one of the pioneers, long before it became the popular form it is today.
'.. follows no form but his own, a text for spoken performance punctuated by pop-up commas and slashes that pause or jolt...[his] anarchist aesthetic locates the scurrying phrase, the overlooked figures, the extraneous observation in epic scale as Joyce, in modernist commandment, had displayed throughoutUlysses.' - Gig Ryan, Sydney Review of Books
]]>Everett continuously defies convention with every creative expression and brings his literary audacity back to his poetic roots with this, his sixth collection with Red Hen Press.
Sonnets for a Missing Key is a mesmerising feat of language that reinforces Percival Everett as one of the great wordsmiths of the century.
]]>