Fall 2017 - Counterpoint Press

COUNTERPOINT PRESS O R B O O K S New Titles & Selected Backlist

w w w. c o u nt e r p o i nt p r e s s . c o m D i s t r i b ut e d b y P u b l i s h e r s G r o u p We s t , a d iv ision of I ng ra m P ubl isher S er v ices Cover image by Zoe Norvell

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DEAR FRIENDS, It is a pleasure to recall the first American Booksellers Convention’s annual meeting I attended as a publisher, in Chicago, well before it acquired the grandly suggestive appellation “Expo” to this otherwise modest occasion. As I stood behind a small table stacked with freshly printed catalogs and, I think, two sample books of our first season’s offering, the director of Yale University Press came to visit the booth and after a few moments said, “Thank God you don’t know you can’t do this any longer.” I was a bit startled by this greeting, and finally understood that she meant one cannot become an independent publisher devoted exclusively to serious literary work, good bookmaking, and careful dedicated publishing in a marketplace that seems to alternate between hostility and indifference. And over the years we’ve seen things deteriorate further, as the broad community of independent booksellers shrank to a fraction of their original base, as book review outlets disappeared on an almost weekly basis, and the number of titles published in our industry each year became a desperate flood of the good, the bad, and the worse than terrible. But as this catalog and our website attest, Counterpoint has not only survived, it has thrived, and we have published a few hundred books that will deserve the attention of our grandchildren. We’ve moved from Washington, D.C., to New York, then to California, and after we created our Berkeley office, Dan Smetanka joined as executive editor in 2006 and established our Los Angeles presence. His books and authors have brought extraordinary new attention to our lists. And late last fall, as a thrilling act of renewal, Counterpoint merged with Catapult Press. It now sees itself in an organization that includes Catapult, Soft Skull, OR Books, the select Sierra Club backlist, and a handful of other titles, a catalog as formidable as that of any independent press in the land. We are under the leadership of Andy Hunter, our new publisher, and my colleagues have gathered together to join colleagues from our other imprints to become a team of skilled professionals working each day against difficult odds to make a difference in our American literary culture. You can imagine my satisfaction coming to work every morning.

Jack Shoemaker Co-Founder and Editorial Director

A KIND OF FREEDOM A Novel Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

AUGUST

FICTION

$26.00

9781619029224

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256 pages

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6” x 9”



“Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom is an elegant, captivating, and generous debut novel. I’m still thinking about how our choices are indelibly influenced by our familial histories, whether we’re aware or not, and how the present connects to the past, especially regarding the societal weight of race and class . . . With seemingly effortless subtlety and command, Wilkerson Sexton delivers. A Kind of Freedom is multifaceted and beautiful.” —Victoria Patterson, author of This Vacant Paradise and The Little Brother

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© Ben Krantz

“[Sexton] interweaves generations of parent-child relations to reveal, with sharp insight, how promise and possibility can sometimes yield to circumstances shaped by the limits to freedom.” —Lauret Savoy, author of Trace

“Margaret Wilkerson’s A Kind of Freedom is a brilliant mosaic of an African American family and a love song to New Orleans. Her characters are all of us, America’s family, written with deep insight and devastating honesty but also with grace and beauty. Wilkerson’s stunning debut illuminates the journey of sisters and the generations they bear, the hope they have for the future, and the future still strived for, still deferred, giving us all of this in razor-edged prose that is cuts to the quick.”

Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society and when she falls for Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves. In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty he’ll leave again. Jackie’s son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He finds something hypnotic about training the seedlings, testing the levels, trimming the leaves, —Dana Johnson, author of drying the buds. He was a In the Not Quite Dark and square before Hurricane KaElsewhere, California trina, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm. Fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over—until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal. For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.

Born and raised in New Orleans, MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON studied creative writing at Dartmouth and law at UC Berkeley. A recipient of the Lombard fellowship, she spent a year in the Dominican Republic working for a civil rights organization and writing A Kind of Freedom, her debut novel. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Grey Sparrow Journal, Limestone Journal, and Broad! Magazine. She lives in the Bay Area, California.

AND YOUR DAUGHTERS SHALL PROPHESY Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion Adrian Shirk As one woman grapples with her messy spiritual heritage, she unravels the complex tales of America’s female prophets.

RELIGION

$26.00

9781619029538

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272 pages

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© Cait Oppermann

AUGUST

And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is a powerful, personal exploration of American women and their religions, weaving connections between Adrian Shirk’s own varied spiritual experiences and the prophetesses, feminists, and spiritual icons who have shaped this country. Laced throughout this hybrid memoir are stories of American religious traditions shaped by women. Shirk collects the histories of astrologers, faith healers, preachers, priestesses, mambos, and mediums who’ve had to find their own ways toward divinity outside prescribed patriarchal orders. Each woman represents a pathway for Shirk’s own spiritual inquiries. She introduces us to the New Orleans high priestess Marie Laveau, the pop New Age pioneer Linda Goodman, the prophetic vision of intersectionality as preached by Sojourner Truth, “saint” Flannery O’Connor, and so many more. Through her journey, Shirk discovers that, as the culture wars flatten religious discourse and shred institutional trust, more and more Americans are yearning for alternative, individualized, feminist routes through religion. And women, having spent so much time at the margins of religious discourse, illuminate its darkened corners. And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is a beacon to those who are searching for a spirituality of resistance, for an unsteady truth. It draws a line from our own era of unrest to the women who came before us, those fascinating innovators, boundary crossers, paradoxes, and radical justice seekers.

ADRIAN SHIRK was raised in Portland, Oregon, and has since lived in New York and Wyoming. She’s a columnist at Catapult, and her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, and others. She has produced radio stories for Wyoming Public Media and Pop Up Archive. She teaches women’s studies, English, and creative writing at Pratt Institute, and lives on the border of the Bronx and Yonkers with her husband, Sweeney, and Quentin the cat. adrianshirk.com

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DON’T SAVE ANYTHING The Uncollected Writings of James Salter James Salter “Sentence for sentence Salter is the master.”

AUGUST

ANTHOLOGY

$26.00

9781619029361

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320 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • Cassada 9781619020559 | $15.95

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• Memorable Days 9781582437262 | $15.95

• A Sport and a Pastime 9780374530501 | $14.00

James Salter was a master. One of the greatest writers of American sentences in our literary history, his acute and glimmering portrayals of characters are —Richard Ford, built with a restrained and poetic style. author of Let Me Be The author of many memorable works of fiction—including Dusk and Other Stories, Frank with You which won the PEN/Faulkner Award—he is also celebrated for his memoirs and many nonfiction essays. In her preface, Kay Salter writes, “Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s nonfiction—articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it . . . One of the greatest pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer’s feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That’s what you’ll find here.” This collection gathers his thoughts on writing and profiles of famous writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe and Asia which first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People Magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, and many other publications.



“There is scarcely a writer alive who could not learn from his passion and precision of language.” —Peter Matthiessen, cofounder of The Paris Review



“Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure.” —Susan Sontag



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Courtesy of the author’s estate

“Salter inhabits the same rarefied heights as Flannery O’Connor, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever.” —Ned Rorem, The Washington Post Book World

JAMES SALTER was a novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, essayist, and journalist. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose earned him the praise of readers, writers, and critics. The New York Times called his novel A Sport and a Pastime “as nearly perfect as any American fiction,” and it became part of the prestigious Modern Library Collection. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection Dusk and Other Stories and was also the winner of the Windham Campbell Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award, The Paris Review’s Hadada, and others. He died on June 19, 2015, at age ninety.

GANGSTER NATION A Novel

Tod Goldberg Gangster Nation is the much­ anticipated sequel to the wickedly dark, Hammett Prize Finalist Gangsterland, an unexpected, page-turning examination of the seedy foundations of American life. SEPTEMBER

THRILLER

$26.00

9781619027237

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352 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • Gangsterland: A Novel 9781619023444 | $16.95

It’s been two years since the events of Gangsterland, when legendary Chicago hitman Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Las Vegas Rabbi David Cohen. Now, in September of 2001, everything’s coming up gold for David—but Sal wants out. He only needs to make it through the High Holidays, and he’ll have enough money to slip away, grab his wife and kid, and start fresh. Across the country, former FBI agent Matthew Drew is now running security for an Indian Casino outside of Milwaukee, spending his off-time stalking members of The Family, looking for vengeance for the murder of his former partner. So when Sal’s cousin stumbles into the casino one night, Matthew takes the law into his own hands—again—touching off a series of events that will have Rabbi Cohen running for his life, trapped in Las Vegas, with the law, society, and the post-9/11 world closing in around him. With the wit and gritty glamour that defines his writing, Goldberg traces how the things we most value in our lives— home, health, even our spiritual lives—have been built on the enterprises of criminals.

PRAISE FOR GANGSTERLAND “Tod Goldberg’s Gansterland will arrive as a gloriously original Mafia novel: 100 percent unhinged about the professionall unhinged . . . Torridly funny . . . The novel swells with a spiritual but jazzy tone.” —The New York Times Book Review “Complex characters with understandable motivations distinguish this highly unusual crime novel . . . Goldberg injects Talmudic wisdom and a hint of Springsteen into the workings of organized crime and FBI investigative techniques and makes it all work splendidly.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “One of the year’s best hard-boiled crime novels.” —Booklist (starred review)

New York Times bestselling writer TOD GOLDBERG is the author of Gangsterland, the crime-tinged novels Living Dead Girl, Fake Liar Cheat, and the popular Burn Notice series. His essays and short stories have been published in Best American Essays, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Wall Street Journal, E!, and Jewcy among many others. He runs the popular podcast Literary Disco and directs the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside. todgoldberg.com

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Author photograph by Linda Woods

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THE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO RISE LIKE THE WATERS UPON YOUR SHORE A Story of American Rage Jared Yates Sexton On June 14, 2016, Jared Yates Sexton reported from a Donald Trump rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first journalists to attend these rallies and give mainstream readers an idea of the raw anger that occurred there, Sexton found himself in the center of a maelstrom. Following a series of tweets that saw his observations viewed well over a million times, his reporting was soon featured in The Washington Post, NPR, Bloomberg, and Mother Jones, and he would go on to write two pieces for The New York Times. Sexton gained over eighteen thousand followers on Twitter in a matter of days, and received online harassment, campaigns to get him fired from his university professorship, and death threats that changed his life forever. The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is a firsthand account of the events that shaped the 2016 presidential election and the cultural forces that powered Donald Trump into White House. Featuring in-the-field reports as well as deep analysis, Sexton’s book is not just the story of the most unexpected and divisive election in modern political history. It is also a sobering chronicle of our democracy’s political polarization—a result of our self-constructed, technologically assisted echo chambers. Like the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer— books that have paved the way for important narratives that shape how we perceive not only the politics of our time but also our way of life—The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore is an instant, essential classic, an authoritative depiction of a country struggling to make sense of itself.

An outlaw expedition into America through the guise of the savage and unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign.

SEPTEMBER

POLITICS

$26.00

9781619029569

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320 pages

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“Jared Yates Sexton is a raw talent, the kind of writer that you need to tell your friends about, the kind of writer you envy and will follow to the ends of the earth.” —Robert James Russell, author of Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out



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“He is a writer most excellent at details, both huge and tiny—the monstrous wildfires and infinitesimal sparks that warm a life, a relationship, a heart.” —Leesa Cross-­Smith, author of Every Kiss a War

JARED YATES SEXTON was one of the first journalists to attend and report from the 2016 Donald Trump rallies. He is a writer whose political writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, and elsewhere. He is the author of three collections of fiction and a crime n ­ ovel. Currently he serves as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. JYSexton

SURVIVOR CAFÉ The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory Elizabeth Rosner As firsthand survivors of many of the twentieth century’s most monumental events—the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War—begin to pass away, Survivor Café addresses urgent questions: How do we carry those stories forward? How do we collectively ensure that the horrors of the past are not forgotten? In this wide-­ ranging book, Elizabeth Rosner discusses the intergenerational inheritance of trauma, as well as the intricacies of memory and remembrance in the aftermath of genocide and atrocity. Through a series of interconnected pieces, Survivor Café becomes a lens for numerous constructs of memorialization—from Holocaust museums and commemorative sites to educational methodology, from national reconciliation projects to individual cross-­cultural encounters. With her own personal experience as a daughter of two Holocaust survivors, Rosner describes a series of trips to Germany with her father, re­v isiting the site of his imprisonment in Buchenwald concentration camp. She extends this exploration to consider echoes of similar legacies among descendants of African American slaves, descendants of Cambodian survivors of the Killing Fields, descendants of survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the effects of 9/11 on the general population, and others. In a thoughtful examination of language (and its limits), as well as current brain research involving the mechanisms of memory, Rosner depicts a variety of efforts to create a map of human tragedy and transcendence. Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must also continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our twenty-first-century human inheritance—not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy, and to keep the ever-­changing conversations alive between the past and the present.

A bold work of nonfiction that examines the ways that survivors, witnesses, and post­war generations talk about and shape traumatic experiences.

SEPTEMBER

SOCIOLOGY

$26.00

9781619029545

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304 pages

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PRAISE FOR ELECTRIC CITY



“R ich and poignant.”

—San Francisco Chronicle



© Judy Dater

“Rosner beautifully bridges past and present in the dynamism of her historical depictions, capturing the dangers and excitement of invention, the complex play between generations of America’s immigrant populations and its native peoples, the wonder of young love, and the insatiable spark of curiosity that is a calling card of scientific inquiry, and a hallmark of the human heart.” —Elle

ELIZABETH ROSNER is the author of three novels and a poetry collection. The Speed of Light was translated into nine languages and won several awards in the United States and in Europe, including being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Femina. Blue Nude was named among the best books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Electric City was named among the best books of 2014 by NPR. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle, the San Francisco Chronicle, and others. She lives in Berkeley. elizabethrosner.com

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HERE IN BERLIN A Novel Cristina García Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city A provocative new novel by the through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemauthor of the porary Berlin—its complex, trouclassic Dreaming bled past still pulsing in the air as it in Cuban, finalist was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García for the National brings the people of this famed city to Book Award.

FICTION

$26.00

9781619029590

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© Isabelle Selby

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OCTOBER

life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing. An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character—vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people’s history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine, only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace. A meditation on war and mystery, this is an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future.

CRISTINA GARCÍA is the author of seven novels, including Dreaming in Cuban, a finalist for the National Book Award that just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary; The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, and King of Cuba. Her work has been translated into fourteen languages. García has edited anthologies, written children’s books, published poetry, and taught at universities nationwide. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area. cristinagarcianovelist.com

THE ART OF LOADING BRUSH New Agrarian Writings Wendell Berry These essays and stories present Berry’s New Agrarian vision in one of its most complete and troubling manifestations since The Unsettling of America.

OCTOBER

ESSAYS

$26.00

9781619020382

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240 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • Jayber Crow: A Novel 9781582431604 | $15.95 • Hannah Coulter: A Novel 9781593760786 | $14.95 • The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture 9781619025998 | $16.95



• A Small Porch: Sabbath Poems 2014 and 2015 9781619029422 | $16.95 • A Place in Time Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership 9781619021884 | $15.95 • Our Only World: Ten Essays 9781619027008 | $16.95

“Berry’s craftsmanship remains impeccable. Few other poets have such chaste and precise diction or manage line and stanza with such unaffected serenity.” —Booklist

Wendell Berry’s profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this new gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of Agrarian philosophy. Berry believes that American cultural problems are nearly always aligned with their agricultural problems, and recent events have shone a terrible spotlight on the divides between our urban and rural citizens. Our communities are as endangered as our landscapes. There is, as Berry outlines, still much work to do, and our daily lives—in hope and affection—must triumph over despair. Berry moves deftly between the real and the imagined. The Art of Loading Brush is an unusual mix of essays and stories, including “The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age,” which explores Agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. “The Presence of Nature in the Natural World” is added here as the bookend of this developing New Agrarianism. Four stories from an as-yet-unfinished novel, better described as “an essay in imagination,” extend the Port William story as it follows Andy Catlett throughout his life to this present moment. Andy works alongside his grandson in “The Art of Loading Brush,” one of the most moving and tender stories of the entire Port William cycle. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.



“[Berry’s] essays, poetry and fiction have fertilized a crop of great solace in my life, and helped to breed a healthy flock of good manners, to boot. As I travel this unlikely road of opportunity, as a woodworker and writer, sure, but most often as a jackass, I have his writings upon which to fix my mind and my heart, to keep my life’s errant wagon between the ditches, as it were. Mr. Berry’s sentences and stories deliver a great payload of edifying entertainment, which I hungrily consume, but it is the bass note of morality thumping through his musical phrases that guides me with the most constant of hands upon my plow.” —Nick Offerman

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Award, the Aiken Taylor Award for poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He is also a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wendell lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky. wendellberrybooks.com

Author photograph by Guy Mendes

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THE ROMANCE OF ELSEWHERE Essays Lynn Freed “A beautiful writer, dead-­on brilliant, rich in humor, possessing a dark and comforting wisdom.”

OCTOBER

ESSAYS

$26.00

9781619029279

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Lynn Freed’s deeply personal essays explore our most quintessential question: What makes a home? From very early on she had imagined for herself an ideal life: a stranger in a strange place. Either as a teenager visiting the UN or as a young bride in New York seeking to escape South Africa, Freed found, in the end, a true —Anne Lamott marriage between writing and travel, travel and identity. Traversing decades and continents and back again, The Romance of Elsewhere captures the dilemma of the expat and does so with Freed’s signature honesty and humor. She takes on subjects as disparate as Disneyland, lovers, ecotourism, shopping, serious illness, and the anomaly of writers who blossom into full power only in old age. Freed’s new collection further establishes her as a renowned voice in memoir and the exploration of identity.



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© Mary S. Pitts

“No one writes funnier, more acutely observant, frank, and intelligent personal essays than Lynn Freed. If her skeptical, sardonic voice amuses us with every line, it is largely because she is a grown­-up in a culture of adolescence, who has done her psychological homework and taken the full measure of her experience, mistakes included. In this, her best nonfiction collection, you will come to know her narrator as one of the most nuanced and sophisticated characters in contemporary literature, and in the process make a new friend.” —Phillip Lopate

LYNN FREED grew up in South Africa, before moving to New York and receiving her MA and PhD in English Literature from Columbia. She has published nine books, and her short stories and essays have been published widely in such places as Harper’s Magazine, O, The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Atlantic. She is the recipient of two PEN/O. Henry Awards and was awarded the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is currently the Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis. lynnfreed.com

JUSTICE FAILED How “Legal Ethics” Kept Me in Prison for 26 Years Alton Logan with Berl Falbaum “The story of the wrongful conviction of Alton Logan in Chicago stands out as perhaps one of the most unusual and cruel stories in the history of American jurisprudence.” OCTOBER

LAW/SOCIOLOGY

$26.00

9781619029927

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160 pages

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“This remarkable first-person story told by an innocent man who lost 26 years of his life for a crime he did not commit, not only presents the dilemma that criminal defense attorneys face when their client confesses to them, but also recounts how a serial police torturer named Jon Burge framed him, and a racist ‘justice’ system sealed his fate.” —G. Flint Taylor, People’s Law Office Chicago

Justice Failed is the story of Alton Logan, an African A ­merican man who served twenty­-six years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Shamefully, such false imprisonment isn’t uncommon in America, but what makes this case extraordinary is that his innocence was made known to the attorneys of the true murderer within one month of Logan’s imprisonment. Written in collaboration with veteran journalist Berl Falbaum, Justice Failed explores the sharp —Maurice Possley, Pulitzer divide that exists between common Prize–winning journalist sense morality—an innocent man should be free—and the rigid ethics of the law which superseded that morality. The actual murderer admitted his guilt to his lawyers, but they, bound by the absolutism of clientattorney privilege, did not take action to free an innocent man. According to ethic codes, they could not. Instead, they signed an affidavit proclaiming Alton Logan’s innocence, and in a move that belongs in a thriller, one of them locked the document in a strong box and kept it beneath his bed, in case they were someday able to assist Logan. It wasn’t until after the true murderer’s death in 2007 that the lawyers came forward with the information that eventually set Logan free. Throughout, interviews and probing legal exploration give way to Alton Logan himself as he tells his own story; from his childhood in Chicago to the strength required to maintain his innocence while incarcerated, to the devastating impact that the loss of a quarter century has had on his life—he entered prison at twenty-eight years of age, and was released at fiftyfive. His story is painful and infuriating, but Justice Failed is not meant to shock, nor is it a plea for pity. Logan and Falbaum lay out the facts, and answer the question “How could this happen?” Very easily, it seems. Through telling his story, Alton Logan and Berl Falbaum seek to change that.

©Berl Falbaum

ALTON LOGAN served twenty-six years of a life sentence in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was formally declared innocent on April 17, 2009. Alton currently lives with his wife, Terry, in Chicago. BERL FALBAUM’s career includes ten years as a political reporter for The Detroit News, four years in state politics as administrative aide to Michigan’s lieutenant governor, and fifteen years in corporate public relations. He is the author of eight books, including Shanghai Remembered, the story of how 20,000 Jews escaped to Shanghai from Nazi Europe during World War II, which received an award from the Independent Publishers Association.

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THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG POET David Biespiel A beautifully rendered memoir about creative beginnings in the vein of Umberto Eco’s classic Confessions of a Young Novelist.

OCTOBER

MEMOIR

$26.00

9781619029934

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208 pages

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The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Impelled by the wonder and delight of creativity, and how the presence of books assists emotional development, Biespiel writes for every creative person who longs to shape the actions of their world into art and literature. Exploring the original sources of his creative impulse—a great-grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the “pattern and random bursts that make up a life.” His book as well offers an intimate and intensely personal recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, including treks through Iowa, Brooklyn, Nashville, and road trips across the United States; from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming-of-age tale that does for Allston in Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s. Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates “in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same.”

DAVID BIESPIEL is the author of A Long, High Whistle, a collection of pieces drawn from his long-standing column in the Oregonian about writing and poetry that won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction. He has also written five books of poetry, most recently Charming Gardeners and The Book of Men and Women, which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. He is the editor of Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, which received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He writes the Poetry Wire column for The Rumpus. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.

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davidbiespiel.wixsite.com

DavidBiespiel

Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger

IMPROVEMENT A Novel Joan Silber “No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power.”

NOVEMBER

FICTION

$26.00

9781619029606

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256 pages

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© Shari Diamond

“Silber allows readers to see life as intimately knowable yet essentially mysterious.” —The Washington Post

One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in Harlem, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them. Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet she sees him through a three-month stint at —The Boston Globe Riker’s Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other faroff places—and loves—around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme, across state lines, violating his probation. When Reyna takes a step back, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them. A novel that examines conviction, connection, repayment, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe said “No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power,” and Improvement is Silber’s most shining achievement.



“I n Silber’s magnificent fiction . . . the characters’ lifetimes pass with a page-turning effortlessness that belies their intense, moving depths.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

JOAN SILBER is the author of the story collection Fools, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and nominated for the PEN/Faulker Award. Her first novel, Household Words, won the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has published five other books of fiction, including Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Agni, Ploughshares, Boulevard, and Epoch, among others. Joan teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. joansilber.net

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THE LAST SHERIFF IN TEXAS James McCollom A timely and sharply observed examination of a changing America through one small-town election.

NOVEMBER

AMERICAN HISTORY

$26.00

9781619029965

Trade Cloth

272 pages

Rights: NA

6” x 9”

A violent man in power. A divided populace who sees him as savior or sinner. Streets filled with guns. Anger toward those who can’t speak English. The presence of the Klan. A media in its infancy, awakening to its ability to sway public discourse. This is not modern day America, but postwar Texas. Beeville was the most American of small towns—the place that GIs had fantasized about while fighting through the ruins of Europe, a place of good schools, clean streets, and churches. Old West justice ruled, as evidenced by a 1947 shootout when outlaws surprised popular sheriff Vail Ennis at a gas station and shot him five times, point blank, in the belly. Ellis managed to draw his gun and put three bullets in each assailant; he reloaded and put in each three more. Then he drove himself sixteen miles to a hospital. Time Magazine’s full-page article on the shooting was seen by some as a referendum on law enforcement owing to the sheriff’s extreme violence, but telegrams, cards, and flowers from all across America poured into the Beeville’s tiny post office. Most of Beeville took comfort in knowing that Ennis kept them safe, that Texas was still Texas. Yet when a second violent incident threw Ennis into the crosshairs of public opinion once again, his downfall was orchestrated by an unlikely figure: his close friend and Beeville’s favorite son, Johnny Barnhart. Feeling the town had to take responsibility for the violence, Barnhart confronted and overthrew Ennis in the election of 1952: a landmark standoff between old Texas, with its culture of cowboy bravery and violence, and urban Texas, with its lawyers, oil institutions, and a growing Mexican population. The town would never be the same again. The Last Sheriff in Texas is a riveting narrative about the postwar American landscape, an era grappling with the same issues we continue to face today. Debate over excessive force in law enforcement, Anglo-Mexican relations, racism, gun control, the influence of the media, urban-rural conflict, the power of the oil industry, mistrust of politicians and the political process—all have surprising historical precedence in the story of Vail Ennis and Johnny Barnhart.

JAMES McCOLLOM is the author of The Continental Affair: The Rise and Fall of the Continental Illinois Bank. A native son of Beeville, Texas, he worked as a banker and business executive in the Northeast before settling back in his hometown.

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Author photograph by Jimmie Jackson

THE BOOK OF RESTING PLACES Thomas Mira y Lopez A debut collection of essays that explores where the living settles the dead by a stunning new literary voice.

NOVEMBER

ESSAYS

$26.00

9781619021235

Trade Cloth

224 pages

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“A n excellent meditation on his father’s death and his mother’s preparations for her own, this book’s loneliness is matched by both its beauty and its curiosity. Unlike the bodies of those cryogenically frozen or their names scratched into trees, this book will be here for a very long time.” —Ander Monson, author of Letter to a Future Lover

In the aftermath of his father’s untimely death and his family’s indecision over what to do with the remains, Thomas Mira y Lopez became obsessed with the type and variety of places where we lay the dead to rest. The result is The Book of Resting Places, a singular collection of essays that weaves history, mythology, journalism, and personal narrative into the author’s search for a place to process grief. Across three continents and ten different resting places, Mira y Lopez explores unusual hallowed grounds. From the world’s largest cryonics institute in southern Arizona, to a set of Roman catacombs being digested by modern bacteria, to his family’s burial plots in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, to an eighteenth-century desert cemetery that was relocated for the building of a modern courthouse, Mira y Lopez examines these overlooked spaces and what they tell us about ourselves and the passing of those we love—how we grieve them, and how we attempt to forget them. The Book of Resting Places’s invigorating blend of ideas creates a relief map of our memorials while opening up the liminal spaces created not only when someone dies, but when our memories of them also begin to pass. The Book of Resting Places is a roving elegy, a highly personal and startling dive into our personal and public underworlds—a meditation on the active and passive nature of memory, our variable states of grief, and our culture’s inclination to turn a blind eye to what it cannot process.

THOMAS MIR A Y LOPEZ earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and is the 2017–2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill. Previously he was an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Nonfiction at Colgate University. He has published in numerous journals such as The Georgia Review and The Kenyon Review online (including a “Notable” Best American Essay selection) and has received a scholarship and fellowship from Bread Loaf and MacDowell respectively. This is his first book. thomasmiraylopez.com

Author photograph by Ellee Achten

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N E W LY REISSUED

WHERE BIGFOOT WALKS Crossing the Dark Divide Updated with Fresh Experiences and Finds

Robert Michael Pyle “[An] absorbing, classily written field report. Pyle makes all the right connections. Best of all, he loves a good mystery and is smart enough, open and radical enough, to never say never.” AUGUST $16.95 Trade Paper Reissue Rights: World

SCIENCE/ ANTHROPOLOGY 9781619029378 336 pages 5.5” x 8.25”



“[A] leisurely, gracefully written meditation.” —Publishers Weekly



“Where Bigfoot Walks is a pleasure, whether he is helping a slug across the road, hugging a tree, crawling through a lava tube or discussing the colour of bear excrement, Pyle rejoices in the beauty of the world, and communicates his enthusiasm and expert knowledge with a rare modesty. His book should appeal to anyone with an interest in why people want to believe in the supernatural, when they already live in a world bursting with natural wonders.” —New Scientist



© Florence Sage

“Celebrated author Pyle, whose Wintergreen won a John Burroughs medal, is fascinated not so much by Bigfoot as he is by the people who believe that Bigfoot exists— and are trying to prove it.” —Library Journal

Where Bigfoot Walks is a spectacular, moving, and witty narrative exploration of not only the phenomenon of Bigfoot, but also the human need to believe that something is out there beyond the campfire, and that wildness remains as well. Awarded a Guggenheim to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Robert Pyle trekked into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovered both a giant —Kirkus Reviews fossil footprint and recent tracks. He searched out Indians who told him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully evolved into humans. He attended Sasquatch Daze, where he met scientists, hunters, and others who have devoted their lives to the search, and realized that “these guys don’t want to find Bigfoot—they want to be Bigfoot!” A handful of openminded biologists and anthropologists countered the tabloids he studied, while rogue Forest Service employees and loggers swore of an industry conspiracy to deep-six accounts of unknown, upright hominoid apes among us. In the end, Pyle concludes that if we can hang on to a sizeable hunk of Bigfoot habitat, we will at least have a fragment of the greatest green treasure the temperate world has ever known. If we do not, Bigfoot, real or imagined, will vanish; and with it will flee the others who dwell in that world. “Looking at that tangled land,” he writes, “one can just about accept that Sasquatch could coexist with towns and loggers and hunters and hikers, all in proportion. But when the topography is finally tamed outright, no one will anymore imagine that giants are abroad on the land.” In the years since publication, the author’s fresh experiences and finds—detailed in an all-new chapter which includes an evaluation of recent DNA evidence from Bigfoot hair and scat, the study of speech phonemes in the “Sierra Sounds” purported Bigfoot recordings, Pyle’s examination of the impact of the wildly popular Animal Planet series Bigfoot Hunters, the reemergence of the famous Bob Gimlin into the Bigfoot community, and more—have kept his own mind wide open to one of the biggest questions in the land.

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE is the author of eighteen books, including Wintergreen, Rambles in a Ravaged Land, Chasing Monarchs, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Sky Time in Gray’s River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place, and the recent poetry collection Evolution of the Genus Iris. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim fellow, he is a full-time writer living in southwestern Washington.

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THIS IS WHAT WE DO A Novel Tom Hansen with a new foreword by Lenore Zion

“A nonstop, genreblending noir-crimevigilante-politicalsexy-nihilisticalmost surreal thrill ride, infused in equal measures with brutality and beauty.”

SEPTEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781619029415

Trade Paper Reissue

320 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • American Junkie 9781593766641 | $16.95

James Nethery is at the end of his rope. Unable to find meaning in his comfortable life, he has cut himself off from everyone and fled to Paris. His mission; to rid himself of a lifetime of baggage, erase the past, and start over. He wanders Paris aimlessly until he meets Lily, a Ukrainian model and hooker. They form a unique bond, and together take the first steps toward —Gina Frangello writing new stories of their lives. Soon, Lily’s past catches up with her and they are forced to go on the lam in a strange country. Together they must decide between justice and vengeance, and, when forced to take action, between what is too much— and not enough. This Is What We Do is part neo-noir thriller, part love story, and part cautionary tale of the perils of trying to write a new life from nothing—and the stories that will be written for you by others if you find yourself in the public eye.



“A compelling, existential thrill ride.”

—Booklist



“This Is What We Do is a love story. Or, to be more accurate, it’s a story that’s in love with its own existential indifference. But it’s also Atlas Shrugged jammed in reverse and with the tires smoked. It’s Ayn Rand for people with a brain. And a gun. It’s a kick. Read it.” —Sean Beaudoin



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© Robert Nethery

“There’s what people say, and then there’s what they do. The phrase will infect your consciousness, contorting and twisting itself around to take on more and more dimensions. What does it mean to act on our desires when one person’s wish fulfillment means another’s nightmare? What does it mean to be free, or to escape? At its core, This is What We Do gives us two people left with nothing, cutting close to the uncoolness of loving without fear.” —Grace Krilanovich, author of The Orange Eats Creeps

TOM HANSEN was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. As a musician in the late 1970s and early ’80s, he was a pioneer in the punk rock scene in Seattle. Eventually, music gave way to heroin and he turned to dealing to support his habit. He got clean in 1999, returned to school, and received an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2008. He published his first book, the memoir American Junkie, in 2010.

WOMEN IN THEIR BEDS Collected Stories Gina Berriault

with a new introduction by Peter Orner

“In these 35 stories, one struggles to find a sentence that is anything less than jewelbox perfect.” NBCC Award Winner

OCTOBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781619029613

Trade Paper Reissue

352 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • The Son: A Novel 9781887178754 | $12.95

Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. In this reissue of her collected stories— twenty years after its first publication—with a new introduction by renowned author and devoted —The New York Times Berriault advocate Peter Orner—we Book Review see the deft hand of this well-loved master of the short story at its best. Berriault employs her vital sensibility—sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw—to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? Her writing is spare, evanescent, pulsing with life and shimmering with life’s strange hope. Her stories illustrate the depth of her emotional understanding. “Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else’s, whether it’s night or day, whether they want to be or not . . .” With Women in Their Beds, Berriault’s prose—moving, honest, and wise—achieves a mastery of the short story form that was in evidence every step of her long career. She was a completely modern writer, blessed with an exquisite sense of the potency of words and the ability to create moments of empathy that are both disturbing and mysteriously amusing.

• Stolen Pleasures: The Selected Stories of Gina Berriault 9781582437408 | $15.95 • The Tea Ceremony: The Uncollected Writings of Gina Berriault 9781593760465 | $15.00 • Three Short Novels: The Son, The Lights of Earth, and The Conference of Victims 9781619022478 | $19.95



“ While it may seem a lot to ask of some short stories, Women in Their Beds could conceivably vindicate the art . . . Berriault writes real fiction . . . She deepens reality, complements it and affords us the bliss of knowing, for a moment, what we cannot know.” —The Nation



© Julie Berriault

“Each story is constructed so gracefully that it’s easy to overlook how carefully crafted Berriault’s writing is. Her lilting, musical prose adds a sophisticated sheen to the truths she mines.” —Publishers Weekly

GINA BERRIAULT was the author of four novels, three short story collections, and several screenplays. One of the most celebrated short story writers in her lifetime, she was the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including the PEN/ Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature. She died in 1999.

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MANAZURU A Novel Hiromi Kawakami Translated by Michael Emmerich Both startlingly restless and immaculately compact, Manazuru paints the portrait of a woman on the cusp of her own memories and at the brink of her future. Twelve years have passed since Kei’s husband, Rei, disappeared and she was left alone with her threeyear-old daughter. Her new relationship with a married man—the antithesis of Rei—has brought her life to a numbing stasis, and her relation—Publishers Weekly ships with her mother and daughter have spilled into routine, day after day. Kei begins making repeated trips to the seaside town of Manazuru, a place that jogs her memory to a moment in time she can never quite locate. Her time there by the water encompasses years of unsteady footing and a developing urgency to find something. Through a poetic style embracing the surreal and grotesque, a quiet tenderness emerges from these dark moments. Manazuru is a meditation on memory—a profound, precisely delineated exploration of the relationships between lovers and family members.

“Kawakami has a remarkable ability to obscure reality, fantasy, and memory, making the desire for love feel hauntingly real.” NOVEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090187

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224 pages

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“It’s one of those unexpected titles that wear better with time; it needs to sort of ‘sit’ after reading to fully appreciate.” —Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center



Bestselling author HIROMI K AWAK AMI’s acclaim for her essays, stories, and novels include the Pascal Short Story Prize for New Writers and the Akutagawa Prize. Her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo was short-listed for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 International Foreign Fiction Prize. Manazuru won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission prize. She lives in Japan, where she taught biology and is a member of the Science Fiction Research Association.

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© Tomohiro Muta

“The action convincingly moves in waves between Kei’s past and present, the surreal and the everyday. Part ghost story, part meditation on life and death, family and self, this slim novel is captivating and suspenseful, and sure to satisfy not only fans of ghost fiction but all readers.” —Booklist

STRANGE WEATHER IN TOKYO

(Previously published as The Briefcase)

A Novel Hiromi Kawakami Translated by Allison Markin Powell

Short-listed for Man Asian Literary Prize

NOVEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090163

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192 pages

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“In quiet, natureinfused prose that stresses both characters’ solitude, Kawakami subtly captures the cyclic patterns of loneliness while weighing the definition of love.”

Short-listed for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a story of loneliness and love that defies age. Tsukiko, thirty-eight, works in an office and lives alone. One night, she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers in a local bar. Tsukiko had only ever called him “Sensei” (“Teacher”). He is thirty years her senior, retired, and presumably a widower. Their relationship develops from a —Booklist perfunctory acknowledgment of each other as they eat and drink alone at the bar, to a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love.



“Each chapter of the book is like a haiku, incorporating seasonal references to the moon, mushroom picking and cherry blossoms. The chapters are whimsical and often melancholy, but humor is never far away. It is a celebration of friendship, the ordinary and individuality and a rumination on intimacy, love and loneliness. I cannot recommend Strange Weather in Tokyo enough, which is also a testament to the translator who has skillfully retained the poetry and beauty of the original.” —The Japan Society

MICHAEL EMMERICH is the translator of several books, including Kawakami’s Manazuru. He holds a PhD in Japanese literature from Columbia university and was a Costen Postoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. ALLISON MARKIN POWELL is a literary translator and editor in New York City, and translated Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo. She has translated works by Osamu Dazai, Kaho Akayama, and Motoyuki Shibata, and she was the guest editor for the Words Without Borders Japan issue.

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NEW IN PAPERBACK

EVERY KIND OF WANTING A Novel Gina Frangello “Frangello takes on an enthralling range of issues, from sexuality to assimilation, and keeping secrets is her greatest talent. Every page brings a new revelation, making the bitter end even sweeter.” AUGUST

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090040

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352 pages

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“A darkly funny tale.”

—Marie Claire



© Blair Holmes

“I n this bravura performance, a quantum creative leap . . . Frangello astutely dissects the quandaries of female sexuality, adoption, terminal illness, and compound heartbreak in a torrent of tough-minded observations, audacious candor, and storytelling moxie.” —Booklist

Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a “Community Baby.” Miguel could not be more different from his partner Chad, a happygo-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago’s wealthy North Shore. When Chad’s sister, Gretchen, offers the couple an egg, their search for a surrogate leads them to Miguel’s old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright, Nick, —The Globe and Mail with whom she is raising two boys. Into this web falls Miguel’s sister Lina, a former addict and stripper, who begins a passionate affair with Nick while deciphering the mysteries of her past. But every action these couples make has unforeseen consequences. As Lina faces her long-hidden demons, and the fragile friendships between Miguel and Chad and Nick and Emily begin to fray as the baby’s birth draws near, a shocking turn of events—and the secret Lina’s been hiding—threaten to break them apart forever. By turns funny, dark and sexy, Every Kind of Wanting strips bare the layers of the American family today. Tackling issues such as assimilation, the legacy of secrets, the morality of desire, and ultimately who “owns” love, the characters—across all ethnicities, nationalities, and sexualities—are blisteringly alive.



“F rangello’s story is also an act of weaving, the warp and weft of lives turned toward the arrival of an infant . . . It’s the balance between interior and exterior, tidiness and chaos, that makes Every Kind of Wanting so winsome. The reader sees the imperfections of these collective lives like a great tableau, as rich and human as a handhewn tapestry.” —Shelf Awareness



“[A] charming novel . . . Frangello threads conflicts over ethnicity, class and sexuality into the novel, and injects a smart topicality that gives it special resonance.” —Los Angeles Times

GINA FR ANGELLO is the author of A Life in Men, which was a book club selection for NYLON Magazine. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies, a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent. She is the founder of Other Voices Books and has served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, executive editor for Other Voices Magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in Ploughshares, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, The Huffington Post, and many others.

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TROTSKY IN NEW YORK, 1917 Portrait of a Radical on the Eve of Revolution Kenneth D. Ackerman “His brief stay in N.Y.C. may remain a historical footnote, but Ackerman clearly demonstrates the forcefulness of Trotsky’s revolutionary spirit.” AUGUST

HISTORY

$16.95

9781640090033

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400 pages

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© J. Larry Golfer

“[Ackerman] is a gifted storyteller. He has unearthed a wealth of previously little known material and produced from it a book that is appealing and thoughtprovoking. . . . It deserves a wide audience. The author’s empathy for ‘old’ New York is vivid and deep, as is his fascination with Leon Trotsky.” —World Socialist Website

Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as co-leader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the twentieth century, a global icon of radical change. Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small cir—Publishers Weekly cle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York City. Between January and March 1917, Trotsky found refuge in the United States. America had kept itself out of the European Great War, leaving New York the freest city on earth. During his time there—just over ten weeks—Trotsky immersed himself in the local scene. He settled his family in the Bronx, edited a radical left wing tabloid in Greenwich Village, sampled the lifestyle, and plunged headlong into local politics. His clashes with leading New York socialists over the question of U.S. entry into World War I would reshape the American left for the next fifty years.



“Ackerman creates a lively portrait of this tireless agitator adjusting his personal life and his politics to a strange country a few months before the Bolsheviks seized power at home. In boisterous prose wellmatched to his topic, the author also convincingly evokes the social ferment of New York’s huge immigrant community . . . Ackerman succeeds in presenting Trotsky’s little-known weeks in New York as an absorbing adventure, though much greater adventures lay ahead. An entertaining and informative account of a footnote to the life of one of the 20th century’s most charismatic leaders.” —Kirkus Reviews

KENNETH D. ACKERMAN has made old New York a favorite subject in his writing, including his critically acclaimed biography BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York. He now returns to New York in a different era, the exciting eve of American entry into World War I, for his first major new book in nine years. Beyond his writing, Ackerman has served a long legal career in Washington, D.C., both inside and out of government. He continues to practice private law in Washington. kennethackerman.com

ANOTHER PLACE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN A Novel Rebecca Kauffman “In clear and vivid prose, Kauffman potently depicts lonely and isolated lives, marked by rash decisions made in the hope of finding connection.”

SEPTEMBER

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9781640090071

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304 pages

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“ While a series of stories don’t always add up to a novel, this is an accomplished debut—at times emotionally gritty but always emotionally true. For all fiction collections.” —Library Journal (starred review)



“K auffman’s compassion for her lonely characters is evident.” —Kirkus Reviews



© Jimmie Jackson

“Through the eyes of the characters in these stories— many tragic but making the best of what they have— we glimpse Kauffman’s deep and abiding empathy.” —Read It Forward, Favorite Read for October

Most of us have experienced what it’s like to know what someone is going to say right before they say it. Or perhaps you have been shocked by the irrefutable phenomena of coincidence, when your life intersects with another’s in the most unlikely way. In gripping prose marked by stark simplicity, Another Place You’ve Never Been by debut novelist Rebecca Kauffman explores the intersection —Publishers Weekly of human experience amidst the minutiae of everyday life. (starred review) In her mid-thirties and living in Buffalo, New York (where she is originally from), Tracy spends most days at the restaurant where she works as a hostess, despite her aspirations of a career that would make use of her creative talents. Tracy’s life is explored not only though her own personal point of view, but also through the viewpoints of other characters, wherein Tracy may only make a peripheral appearance or even emerge at different periods in her life. Kauffman subtly exposes the lives of these characters— alongside the presences of spiritually mysterious Native American figures that appear throughout—and gradually reveals the true purposes of both as their paths intersect. This wonderful novel hails the emotional complexity and narrative scope of A Visit from the Goon Squad, and resonates with the strong mystical content found in Swamplandia. At its core, this book is a broad investigation of bold ideas, such as the possibility that any person, at any time, in any place could find themselves shivering in the presence of great and ancient forces; and the notion that love is perhaps “far less voluntary” than we might believe it to be. Long-listed for the Center for Fiction Award for a debut novel.

REBECCA K AUFFMAN is originally from rural northeastern Ohio. She eventually moved to New York City, where she received her BA in Classical Violin Performance from the Manhattan School of Music. Several years later, Kauffman attended NYU where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. In the years since, she has worked primarily in restaurants and intermittently as a teacher. She currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

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SPIES IN PALESTINE

Love, Betrayal, and the Heroic Life of Sarah Aaronsohn James Srodes

SEPTEMBER

BIOGRAPHY

$16.95

9781640090057

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224 pages

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© Franko Khoury

“I n this engaging story of the woman called the Flame of Israel, a woman greatly admired by the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, Srodes also details the lost opportunity for a peaceful alliance between the new Israel and the indigenous people of the region.” —Booklist

“Aaronsohn’s story is grippingly told by James Srodes in an account that also explores, in brisk and incisive language, a phase of World War I that historians tend to skim past. [H]is book is an engaging five cloak / five dagger read.”

Sarah Aaronsohn was a twentyfirst-century woman in a nineteenth-century world. She and her siblings were born as part of the first wave of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe in the 1880s, settling in the province of Syria-Palestine. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the settlers had come a dramatic distance in creating the Eretz Israel of their Biblical prophecies. Sarah’s home village of Zichron Ya’akov brought pros—The Washington Times perity to their lands between the Mediterranean coast and the Mount Carmel range. But when the Ottoman Turkish Empire sided with Kaiser Wilhelm II and the other Central Powers in World War I, the Jewish settlements faced cruel oppressions. This book describes how the Aaronsohns, one of the most prominent families in the province, came to commit themselves and their comrades to the Allied side and how they formed the NILI espionage organization to spy against the Turkish Army. Late in the war, in 1917, Sarah assumed command of the spy network as the group’s penetration of the Turkish army reached a critical juncture. Sarah was idolized by T. E. Lawrence, the fabled Lawrence of Arabia who dedicated his flowery biography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to her.



“ What the CIA would give for its own Sarah Aaronsohn gathering secrets in today’s Syria—or anywhere else! Spies in Palestine offers not just a relevant, fascinating window into the history of that troubled region, but a riveting spy story told by a master journalist.” —Jeff Stein, intelligence correspondent for Newsweek

JAMES SRODES is the author of Dream Maker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. DeLorean, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, Franklin: The Essential Founding Father, and On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World. He lives in Washington, D.C.

THE HOT CLIMATE OF PROMISES AND GRACE 64 Stories Steven Nightingale “A brilliant and cunning collection of found and fashioned stories, marvelously told/written.”

SEPTEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090064

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208 pages

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ALSO AVAILABLE • Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God 9781619027015 | $17.95

With these short stories, deeply indebted to Sufi tales and Jataka stories (as well as to the Brothers Grimm and American folktales), Steven Nightingale offers testimonies of revelation, mischief, miracles, and grace given him by sixty-four remarkable women who’ve appeared —Robert Twigger in his life over time. These delightful pieces combine humor and sensuality with surrealism and an oblique spirituality, and each becomes an opportunity of gentle instruction, invention, and entertainment. The book describes a spiritual pilgrimage, beautifully written, a unique offering from this wonderful writer.



“Nightingale’s transcendent collection offers 64 vignettes, with a nod to folktales, which explore the wonder, grace, and humor of life and the many paths within and around it . . . Inquisitive and surreal, Nightingale’s imaginative tales extend into the recesses of mind and spirit as his characters grapple with life’s moral and metaphysical questions.” —Booklist



© Lucy Blake

“These gem-like tales form a kind of love song to the feminine principle, that aspect of each of us that is irrational, untamed, and intuitive. Although this principle is always under threat from logic and order, Steven Nightingale illustrates some of the ways in which it can flare up and illuminate the darkness. The Hot Climate is an amazing collection of intriguing vignettes full of humor, wisdom, and sensuality. Anyone who loves a good laugh—or the flashes of penetrating insight offered by the unexpected behavior of wild, tender, and cunning women—will want to read them.” —Lisa Alther, author of Kinflicks and About Women

STEVEN NIGHTINGALE is the author of two novels and six books of sonnets, as well as numerous essays. Most recently, his book Granada: Pomegranate in the Hand of God, a book about the city of Granada, Spain, was published by Counterpoint Press. Nightingale’s poetry has been widely anthologized, and he has taught poetry in more than fifty schools and universities. His interests include the medieval art of Spain and Italy, the wild country of the American West and the Caribbean, cooking for his treasured wife and daughter, astronomy, venture capital, the quantitative arts, and Emily Dickinson, whom he loves. He lives in Woodside, California, with his family. stevennightingale.net

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ISLAND OF THE MAD A Novel Laurie Sheck “Compelling, mysterious and hard to shake . . . Utterly one of a kind.”

SEPTEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090088

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400 pages

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“Sheck returns with a gorgeously written work that layers together strands of history in one bravura act . . . A dizzyingly inventive work that reveals a strong sense of human connectedness; highly recommended for anyone who doesn’t want just plot.” —Library Journal



Following on the heels of her exciting and widely acclaimed A Monster’s Notes, and with Sheck’s characteristic brilliance of language, Island of the Mad follows the solitary, hunchbacked Ambrose A, as he sets out on a mysterious —Junot Díaz journey to Venice in search of a lost notebook he knows almost nothing about. Eventually he arrives in San Servolo, the Island of the Mad, in the Venetian Lagoon, only a few minutes’ boat ride from Venice. At the island’s old, abandoned hospital that has been turned into a conference center, he discovers a mess of papers in a drawer, and among them the correspondence and notes of two of the island’s former inhabitants—a woman with a rare genetic illness that causes the afflicted to gradually become unable to sleep until, increasingly hallucinatory and feverish, they essentially die of sleeplessness; and her friend, a man who experiences epileptic seizures. As the sleepless woman’s eyesight fails, she wants only one thing—that her friend read to her from Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, a book she loves but can no longer read herself. As Ambrose follows their strange tale, everything he has ever known or thought is called into question.



“[P]oet and poetic novelist Sheck draws on classic works . . . to create an exquisitely intricate and moving literary pastiche . . . In concise, haunting, inquisitive, and incantatory passages, Sheck imaginatively and compassionately explores the mysteries of the body and mind, of brokenness and aloneness, while celebrating language as a lifeline across pain, time, and space.” —Booklist

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© Nina Subin

“[ Island of the Mad] reads like a lucid dream . . . Sheck pulls readers through the time-worn canals of Venice on a literary romp that will please fans of the historical and the fantastic alike.” —Publishers Weekly

L AURIE SHECK is the author of A Monster’s Notes, a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was selected by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 10 Best Fictions of the year (2009), and long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC International Fiction Prize. Her five books of poems include Captivity and The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is a member of the graduate faculty at the New School and lives in New York City.

EAT, LIVE, LOVE, DIE Selected Essays Betty Fussell

OCTOBER

FOOD/ESSAYS

$16.95

9781640090118

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304 pages

Rights: World

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“ Whatever the subject at hand, Fussell meets the chief requirement of the essayist: She’s good company. Opinionated and sometimes caustic, she moves easily from high to low, from the scholarly to the deeply personal.” —The Washington Post



“Award-winning writer Betty Fussell’s essay collection Eat, Live, Love, Die reveals a splendid mind, a masterful touch, and the high points of an honorable career. She is one of the culinary world’s treasures.” —The Wall Street Journal



© Amy Dickerson

“The idiosyncratic food writer harvests some of her best work in a savory collection that doubles as a memoir and declaration of faith . . . A dazzling showcase for Fussell’s delicious ability to ‘taste . . . words with the kind of pleasure that turns cooking fires into the fires of love.’” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Let me quickly add that Fussell is also very funny and inspiring. Some of the best essays here are the most recent, written in Fussell’s dotage. Aging is a hot literary topic these days, but no one else I’ve read has captured the bizarre acceleration of time as we age quite the way Fussell does.”

Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She’s not just the awardwinning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s Journalism Award who was inducted into their “Who’s Who of American Food and Beverage” in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years’ worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue. —Maureen Corrigan for This is a woman who at NPR’s “Fresh Air” eighty-two years old (and despite being half-blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for The New York Times Magazine). She got her deer. This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty-oneyear-old bride, because “housewifery wasn’t enough.” Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.



“F ussell’s writing is so deeply felt and beautifully rendered that she makes every topic she chooses feel vital to the reader . . . Fussell is a gifted essayist and a meditative thinker, as enriching and relevant as she makes her subjects.” —The New York Times Book Review

Born in Southern California in 1927, BETTY FUSSELL received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and taught there before moving to New York City, where she taught literature and film at the New School for Social Research and writing at Columbia University. In the 1980s she left teaching to write full-time. In 2007 she won a James Beard Foundation Award for Journalism for “American Prime” in Saveur’s Steak Issue of July. She was recently celebrated, along with other winners of the Silver Spoon Award, by Food Arts Magazine, for which she has long been a contributing authority. bettyfussell.com

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FRENCH GIRL WITH MOTHER A Novel Norman Ollestad A tale of intrigue set against the backdrop of the French countryside.

OCTOBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090125

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320 pages

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© Jenny Ollestad

“A unique, atmospheric literary thriller with a strong sense of place that will have appeal for fans of both Scandinavian crime fiction and psychological thrillers.” —Booklist

French Girl with Mother is a provocative, propulsive thriller that marries the spirit of James Salter with a hint of Patricia Highsmith and the velocity of The Art Forger. Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work. He’s been deemed by his mentors and critics as technically skillful but uninspired—criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with the woman and it very quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty just may conjure the electricity he has been seeking for his work. So when the woman invites him to her parents’ crumbling, centuries-old chateau in the country to allow him to sketch her, he accepts, knowing that this proposition is both ill advised and thrilling. Once enveloped by this isolated estate, a door opens to a world Nathan is not prepared for. The arrival of the young woman’s family—her mother, a volatile, voracious former ballerina, her father, a mysterious businessman with secrets of his own, and her uncle, who might be trafficking in art forgeries. French Girl with Mother is a sexy, page turning novel that also examines provocative questions about art and its inspirations. Who is the muse? Who is the artist? And, most important, whose power will win out?



“F inely wrought; Ollestad builds a delicate tension between the characters, exposing their raw desire and exploring the concept of artistic inspiration . . . A quietly tense and absorbing read.” —Kirkus Reviews

NORMAN OLLESTAD is the author of Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival, which was a New York Times bestseller, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and was published in fifteen countries around the world. His work has appeared in Time, Outside Magazine, and Men’s Journal. He lives in California with his family.

MOSHI MOSHI A Novel Banana Yoshimoto

NOVEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090156

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208 pages

Rights: World English

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“Banana Yoshimoto’s novels are like jewel boxes, and Moshi Moshi is no exception.” —Vanity Fair



© Fumiya Sawa

“ Yoshimoto’s beguiling evocations of life’s small details . . . make Moshi Moshi a joy to read.” —The National

“A beautiful translation . . . Yoshimoto deploys a magically Japanese light touch to emotionally and existentially tough subject matter: domestic disarray, loneliness, identity issues, lovesick-ness . . . [A] nimble narrative.”

In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie’s muchloved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful past behind them. However, despite their attempts to move forward, Yoshie is haunted by nightmares in which her father is looking for the phone he left behind on the day he died, or on which she is —Elle trying—unsuccessfully—to call him. Is her dead father trying to communicate a message to her through these dreams? With the lightness of touch and surreal detachment that are the hallmarks of her writing, Banana Yoshimoto turns a potential tragedy into a poignant coming-of-age ghost story and a life-affirming homage to the healing powers of community, food, and family. Recently long-listed for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award, Moshi Moshi was published in 2010 in Japanese in Tokyo, where it has sold more than 30,000 copies.



“A n intimate portrayal of grief and recovery . . . Yoshimoto’s beautiful imagery—the cherry tree in front of the Les Liens bistro where Yochan works, restaurants glowing late at night, the coziness among the restaurant staff members, all captures the spirit of Shimokitazawa and marks Yochan’s slow return to an anchored life . . . The translator, Yoneda, enables English readers to fully appreciate Yoshimoto’s subdued, yet sharp, rendering of a young woman emerging from grief and moving forward with her dreams.” —Booklist

BANANA YOSHIMOTO was born in Tokyo in 1964 and graduated from Nihon University, College of Art, where she majored in literature. Her works have been translated and published in more than 30 countries. Recent works include Tori Tachi, Circus Night, Funa-Funa Funabashi, and Iyashi no Uta. ASA YONEDA was born in Osaka and translates from Japanese. She currently lives in Bristol.

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COAST RANGE A Collection from the Pacific Edge Nick Neely “Finely tuned essays that vary intriguingly in form and tone . . . Neely capably explores the complexity of his subjects with polish and finesse, looking carefully and thinking deeply.” NOVEMBER

ESSAYS/NATURE

$16.95

9781640090132

Trade Paper

208 pages

Rights: World

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© Holly Myers

“Fans of Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir will enjoy these essays even if they are not familiar with the specific geographic area.” —Library Journal

Coast: the edge of land, or conversely the edge of sea. Range: a measure between limits, or the scope or territory of a thing. Coast Range, the debut collection of essays from writer Nick Neely, meticulously and thoughtfully dwells on these intersections and much more. The book’s title refers to the region in which these essays are set: the California and Oregon coastal ranges. In deeply moving prose equal parts exhilarating and —Kirkus Reviews pensive, each essay explores an (starred review) iconic organism (a few geologic), so that, on the whole, the collection becomes a curiosity cabinet that freshly embodies this Pacific Northwest landscape. But the book also employs a playful range of forms. Just as forest gives way to bluff and ocean, here narrative journalism adjoins memoir and lyric essay. These associative, sensuous, and sometimes saturnine pieces are further entwined by the theme of “collecting” itself—beginning with a meditation on the impulse to gather beach agates, a semiprecious stone. Another essay follows the journey of salmon from their “collection” at a hatchery through a casino kitchen to a tribal coming-of-age ceremony; a third is a flitting exploration of hummingbirds.



“Neely’s fascination with a huge swath of the Pacific Northwest coastal range is evident in this quiet essay collection that focuses on small details described in carefully studied prose . . . This is the sort of introspective writing that will appeal strongly to readers seeking to gain a deeper appreciation of their environment, and those with curiosity about or longing for the region he knows so well. Neely clearly spent a lot of time watching and listening, both to the people and animals that call the area home, and his observations have real staying power.” —Booklist

NICK NEELY grew up south of San Francisco, in the oak and chaparral on the bay side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. He holds an MA in Literature and the Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno, and MFAs in nonfiction and poetry from Hunter College and Columbia University. His nonfiction has appeared in magazines such as Orion, Audubon, Mother Jones, High Country News, Kenyon Review, the Threepenny Review, the Georgia Review, and Ecotone. He is a recipient of PEN/Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a UC Berkeley–11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, and the 2015 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. He lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird. nickneely.com

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WEDDING BUSH ROAD A Novel David Francis “In prose as severely beautiful as the land depicted, Francis takes us into the bleeding heart of family. Well recommended for many readers.”

NOVEMBER

FICTION

$16.95

9781640090149

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304 pages

Rights: NA

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© Jimmie Jackson

“F rancis’s prose is urgent and at times breathless, packed with sense-rich descriptions. Poetic images swirl off the page . . . Wedding Bush Road envelopes us in a strange world where nothing can be taken for granted. This is a rich, beautifully textured novel, unforgettable in its setting and the people who live there.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

A young lawyer in Los Angeles is called back to his family’s farm in rural Australia and plunged into a complex struggle between past and present, town and country, and the secrets that haunt them all. When he learns of his mother’s ailing health, Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel —Library Journal half a world away to the family’s horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their history: long divorced, his mother still maintains the farm having put out her cheating, rakish husband, and even in these later years her anger burns brightly. Daniel arrives at the farm in the heat of his parents’ conflict with Sharen, an alluring tenant and ex-lover of his father now perched on family land. Sharen and her unstable son Reggie complicate an already difficult family dynamic while Daniel has to tend to his mother’s condition, his father’s contentious behavior, and the swell of memory that strikes whenever he visits the farm. As Daniel is increasingly drawn to Sharen, the various tensions across the farm will spark events that cannot help but change them all.



“David Francis writes with precision and sensitivity about that most complicated of subjects: Home. Amid unforgettable landscapes and characters that are both beautiful and violent, Wedding Bush Road grapples with discontent and restlessness. Francis turns a sharp but generous eye on those who won’t leave and those who can’t stay, reminding us that family can be the most dangerous place of all.” —Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised

DAVID FR ANCIS, based in Los Angeles where he works for the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, spends part of each year back on his family’s farm in Australia. He is the author of The Great Inland Sea, published to acclaim in seven countries, and Stray Dog Winter, Book of the Year in The Advocate, winner of the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Prize for Literature, and a LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist. He has taught creative writing at UCLA, Occidental College, and in the Masters of Professional Writing program at USC. He is Vice President of PEN Center USA.

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RECENTLY PUBLISHED

THE LIGHTKEEPERS A novel by Abby Geni

GRACE A novel by Natashia Deón

Fiction | Trade Paper | 9781619029026 $16.95 | 368 pages | Ebook Available

Fiction | Trade Paper | 9781619029439 $16.95 | 400 pages | Ebook Available

Winner of the 2016 B&N Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by Jennifer Senior of the New York Times, and by Kirkus Reviews

“[A] dazzlingly unsettling first novel . . . The language is as startlingly rich as the terrain, making you look at everything as if you had never seen it before.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“[An] immersive tale . . . You’ll believe every word.” —People

LUCKY YOU A novel by Erika Carter

THE BLUE HOUR A novel by Laura Pritchett

“Gripping and deeply affecting.” —Buzzfeed

Fiction | Trade Cloth | 9781619028999 $26.00 | 288 pages | Ebook Available

Fiction | Cloth | 9781619028487 $25.00 | 256 pages | Ebook Available

An Official Book of the Month Club Selection

“A seamless tale of uneasy lives poised for change in one Colorado mountain community. A pitch-perfect story from a superb writer.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A marvel of a book, partly because Carter does a perfect job balancing humor and tragedy. The funny moments bring to mind the fiction of Mary Robison and Ann Beattie; the darker ones are reminiscent of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.” —NPR

IF YOU ARE THERE A novel by Susan Sherman

Fiction | Cloth | 9781619028456 $26.00 | 368 pages | Ebook Available “The bold, incandescent descriptions of séances are where Sherman’s art truly shines.” —Booklist “A feast of detail and description.” —Kirkus Reviews

A TRAIN THROUGH TIME: A LIFE, REAL AND IMAGINED by Elizabeth Farnsworth Memoir | Cloth | 9781619028432 $25.00 | 160 pages | Ebook Available

“A moving and vivid account into what drove this accomplished journalist into the darkest corners of humanity . . . offers us an insider’s view of some of the most morally challenging moments in our country’s history.” —San Francisco Chronicle

I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES by Noy Holland Fiction | Cloth | 9781619028463 $28.00 | 400 pages | Ebook Available

“These new and selected stories testify to the fact that there are still fine short story writers out there, doing the hard job of serious literary production in our age of tweets and memes.” —The New York Times

DEMOCRACY BETRAYED: THE RISE OF THE SURVEILLANCE SECURITY STATE by William W. Keller Political Science | Cloth | 9781619029125 $28.00 | 304 pages | Ebook Available

“Keller makes a spirited case for preferring untrammeled freedom to managed and monitored safety.” —Kirkus Reviews

OR BOOKS

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POCKET PIKETTY A Handy Guide to Capital in the Twenty-First Century Jesper Roine “An ideal companion to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”

AUGUST

ECONOMICS

$14.95

9781944869359

Trade Paper Original

256 pages

Rights: US

4.25” x 6.75”



“For students and those in need of easier access to Piketty’s work, Roine lays out the story in clear terms while providing very useful historical and economic background.” —David Stasavage, chair and professor of politics, New York University, and author of Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the Unied States and Europe

We all know the book: it’s been hailed as one of the most important documents on how the world economy works, or doesn’t work, and it’s been a colossal bestseller —David Stasavage, Chair since it first appeared in 2014, and Professor of Politics, with more than 1.5 million copies New York University sold. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes a powerful case that wealth, and accumulated wealth, tends to stay where it lands: and with the passage of time, just gets bigger . . . and bigger. But how many of us who bought or borrowed the book—or even, perhaps, reviewed it—have read more than a fraction of its 696 pages? How many more shuddered at the thought of committing $40 to such a venture? And how many of Piketty’s groundshaking concepts have gone unappreciated, all for want of intellectual stamina? Deliverance is at hand in the form of Pocket Piketty, written in clear and accessible prose by an experienced economist and teacher—and one whose work was relied on by Piketty for his masterpiece. In this handy and slim volume, Jesper Roine explains all things Piketty.



“Jesper Roine has written a superb summary of the most talkedabout economics book of the twenty-first century. Jesper’s sharp analytical mind, deep social interest and his own respected research in the field make him the ideal author of a book like this.” —Magnus Henrekson, professor and managing director of The Research Institute of Industrial Economics



© Paul Hansen

“A very readable summary of Piketty’s important book, written by a leading expert on inequality data.” —Per Krusell, professor of Economics, Stockholm University, and chair, Nobel Prize committee, Prize for Economic Sciences

JESPER ROINE is an expert on wealth and income inequality, as well as one of the researchers who has contributed to the World Top Incomes Database upon which Piketty’s research is based. He is an associate professor of Economics at SITE at the Stockholm School of Economics and has been published, extensively, on the topic of income and wealth inequality. Together with his colleague Daniel Waldenström at Uppsala University, he is responsible for the Swedish data on long-run income and wealth inequality used in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. jesperroine.se

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OURS TO HACK AND TO OWN

The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider “If you’ve ever wondered about how a new, collaborative, sustainable, democratic economy might work, [this book] is for you.”

TECHNOLOGY

$16.95

9781944869335

Trade Paper Original

256 pages

Rights: US

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© Michael Nagel

“E xtremely timely . . . Key reading for anyone with an interest in creating a more collaborative, equitable and sustainable world.” —Cooperative News

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TREBOR SCHOLZ, scholar-activist, is Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in NYC, where he convenes the Digital Labor conference series. Among other books, he is the author of the forthcoming Uber-Worked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Taking Back the Digital Economy. TreborS



“ What if Uber drivers set up their own platform, or if a city’s residents controlled their own version of Airbnb? How about if enough Twitter users got together to buy the company in order to share its ownership? The latter idea comes from Nathan Schneider, co-editor of one of the best guides to this emerging area Ours to Hack and To Own. It’s a fascinating collection of not-all-that-techy articles on cooperative initiatives to resist the cooptation of the Internet.” —The American Conservative

NATHAN SCHNEIDER is a Scholar-in-Residence of media studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has written for Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, The Catholic Worker, and other publications.

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© Elizabeth Leitzell

AUGUST

Real democracy and the Internet are not mutually exclusive. Here, for the first time in one volume, are some of the most cogent thinkers and doers on the subject of the cooptation of the Internet, and how we can resist and reverse the process. The activists who have put to—OpenDemocracy.net gether Ours to Hack and to Own argue for a new kind of online economy: platform cooperativism, which combines the rich heritage of cooperatives with the promise of twenty-first-century technologies, free from monopoly, exploitation, and surveillance. The on-demand economy is reversing the rights and protections workers fought for centuries to win. Ordinary Internet users, meanwhile, retain little control over their personal data. While promising to be the great equalizers, online platforms have often exacerbated social inequalities. Can the Internet be owned and governed differently? What if Uber drivers set up their own platform, or if a city’s residents controlled their own version of Airbnb? This book shows that another kind of Internet is possible—and that, in a new generation of online platforms, it is already taking shape.

DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT A Year Inside the Optimization Movement Carl Cederström and André Spicer A highly entertaining account of two young professors’ attempt to improve themselves through the techniques of the burgeoning self-optimization movement.

OCTOBER

HUMOR/SCIENCE

$18.95

9781944869397

Trade Paper Original

320 pages

Rights: US

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In these pages, the authors of the widely acclaimed Wellness Syndrome throw themselves headlong into the techniques of self-optimization, a burgeoning movement that seeks to transcend the limits placed on us as mere humans, whether the feebleness of our bodies or our mental incapacities. Cederström and Spicer, devoted each month of a roller coaster year to a different way of improving themselves: January was Productivity, February their bodies, March their brains. June was for sex and September for money. Perhaps the trickiest was April, a month devoted to relationships, when their feelings for each other came under the microscope, with results that were both hilarious and painful. Carl thought André was only “dialing it in,” André felt Carl was too controlling. In fact, both proved themselves willing guinea pigs in an extraordinary (and sometimes downright dangerous) range of techniques and technologies, had hitherto undertaken little by way of self-improvement. They had rarely seen the inside of a gym, let alone utilized apps that deliver electric shocks in pursuit of improved concentration. They wore head-bands designed to optimize sleep, and attempted to boost their memory through learning associative techniques (failing to be admitted to MENSA bit learning pi to 1,000 digits), trained for weightlifting competitions, wrote what they (still) hope might become a bestselling Scandinavian detective story, attended motivational seminars and tantra workshops, went on new-age retreats and man-camps, and experimented with sex toys and productivity drugs. André even addressed a London subway car whilst (nearly) naked in an attempt to overcome a negative body image. Somewhat surprisingly, the two young professors survived this year of rigorous research. Further, they produced a hilarious and eye-opening book based upon it. Written in the form of two parallel diaries, Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement provides a biting analysis of the narcissism and individual competitiveness that increasingly pervades a culture in which social solutions are receding and individual self-improvement is the only option left.

ANDRÉ SPICER is Professor at Cass Business School at City University London and the coauthor or coeditor of five books. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Times, Independent, and CNN. andre_spicer CARL CEDERSTRÖM is Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University and the coauthor or coeditor of five books. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, New Scientist, Harvard Business Review, and 3:AM Magazine. cederstromcarl

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ASSUMING BOYCOTT

Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production Edited by Carin Kuoni, Kareem Estefan, and Laura Raicovich “The ultimate resource to help decide where to draw the ethical line.”

OCTOBER

ESSAYS

$16.95

9781944869434

Trade Paper Original

304 pages

Rights: US

5.5” x 8.25”



“The brilliant writers and debaters assembled here come at the issue from different angles, all from the central belief that art is never not political.” —Holland Cotter, co-chief art critic, The New York Times

Street protests are one side of a worldwide citizens’ movement. Another side is the increasing use of boycotts, one of the most powerful weapons in the organizer’s arsenal: it is an effective and moral lever for civil rights, most notably today in its —Gregory Sholette, adoption by the BDS movement. artist and author Since the days of the nineteenthcentury Irish land wars, when Irish tenant farmers defied the actions of Captain Charles Boycott and English landlords, “boycott” has been a method that’s had an impact time and again. In the twentieth century, it notably played central roles in the liberation of India and South Africa and the struggle for civil rights in the United States: the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott is generally seen as a turning point in the movement against segregation. Assuming Boycott is the essential reader for today’s creative leaders and cultural practitioners, including original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators, and writers who examine the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. It is about consequences and causes of cultural boycott. Far from withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a productive tool of creative and productive engagement.



“A n essential guide to the terrain of cultural politics today. With colleagues and comrades like these, one feels not only bolstered but downright emboldened.” —Hal Foster, professor of art and archeology, Princeton University

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© Josh Cender

CARIN KUONI is director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School. She has edited and coedited several books, among them Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America. K AREEM ESTEFAN is an art critic, writer, editor, and doctoral candidate in Brown University’s Modern Culture and Media department. L AUR A R AICOVICH is president and executive director of The Queens Museum of the City of New York. She is the author of At the Lightning Field.

WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES Yazidi Women and the Islamic State Cathy Otten With extraordinarily vivid first-hand reporting from on the ground in northern Iraq, a young journalist chronicles the persecution and resistance of Yazidi women caught up in the war with Islamic State.

OCTOBER

CURRENT EVENTS

$25.00

9781944869458

Trade Cloth

208 pages

Rights: US

5” x 7”

ISIS’s attack on the Yazidi population of northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world’s attention to a hitherto small and secretive faith, worshippers of the sun, fire and a peacock deity, numbering half a million people. The world’s media focused especially on the treatment of Yazidi women and girls who were kidnapped by the jihadists, sold in slave markets, forced into marriage, and extensively assaulted and raped. The headlines have moved on to other stories now. But the events surrounding the mass abductions of Yazidi women, here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the firsthand reporting of a young journalist who has traveled extensively in the homelands of the Yazidis, provide an eye-opening perspective on life inside the Islamic state. Today, over 3,000 Yazidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, passed between fighters as chattel. But many others have escaped or been released. Otten bases much of her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their stories of life inside the Caliphate as spoils of war. The results are deeply moving personal narratives that bring alive a human tragedy. Describing the slave markets in riveting detail, Otten shows how the revival of female enslavement is central to ISIS ideology and has become a part of their recruitment strategy. She also relates inspiring stories of the determined resistance of many of the women, accounts that capture fully the severe dangers facing those attempting flight.

CATHY OTTEN is a freelance British journalist based in Iraqi Kurdistan covering Kurds, Iraq, and the war with ISIS for the Independent. Based in Iraq since 2013, she has written for Al Jazeera English, CS monitor, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, USA Today, Huffington Post and Newsweek Japan among others. Cathy is a regular guest on the BBC World Service and Sky News World discussing Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Kurds, and Isis.

cathyotten.co.uk

cathyotten

Author photograph by Alice Martins

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WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE

Against the Sharing Economy Tom Slee “What’s Yours Is Mine is required reading for anyone interested in technology and economic justice.”

NOVEMBER

ECONOMICS

$16.95

9781944869373

Trade Paper Original

208 pages

Rights: US

5.5” x 8.25”

“I n What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, Tom Slee . . . delivers a smart and searing critique of a business that people are only just beginning to think about in a serious way. While some bloggers still treat the sharing economy as some kind of cause, Slee rightly analyses it as a business model masquerading as a movement.” —The Spectator (UK)

The news is full of their names, supposedly the vanguard of a rethinking of capitalism. Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Uber, and many more companies have a mandate of disruption and upending the “old order”—and they’ve succeeded in effecting the “biggest —Astra Taylor change in the American workforce in over a century,” according to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. But this new wave of technology companies is funded and steered by very old-school venture capitalists. And in What’s Yours Is Mine, technologist Tom Slee argues the so-called sharing economy damages development, extends harsh free-market practices into previously protected areas of our lives, and presents the opportunity for a few people to make fortunes by damaging communities and pushing vulnerable individuals to take on unsustainable risk. Drawing on original empirical research, Slee shows that the friendly language of sharing, trust, and community masks a darker reality.

“Tom Slee’s essential new book shows that the sharing economy has very little to do with sharing. Slee uses wit, clarity, and facts to demolish the self-serving mythologies of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and figure out what Uber, Amazon and their kind are really up to.” —Henry Farrell, co-chair, Social Science Research Council’s Digital Culture Initiative; George Washington University

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© Lynne Supeene

“Slee is an extremely well-informed skeptic who presents a satisfyingly blistering critique of high tech’s disingenuous equating of sharing with profiteering.” —Counterpunch

TOM SLEE writes about technology, politics, and economics and in the last three years has become a leading critic of the sharing economy. He has a PhD in theoretical chemistry, a long career in the software industry, and his book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart is a game-theoretical investigation of individual choice that has been used in university economics, philosophy, and sociology courses. He blogs at www.tomslee.net. whimsley

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