Verdigris
Michele Mari (Author) Brian Robert Moore (Translator)
At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends
his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore,
losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his
grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however,
doesn't come from a book--it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes
frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks
an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino
volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to
keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing
together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography . . . a quest that leads to
the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's
admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on
Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means
merely a horticultural threat.
And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino
than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or
the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very
thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
Hard by a Great Forest
Leo Vardiashvili (Author)
NAMED ONE OF THE OBSERVER'S 10 BEST NEW NOVELISTS FOR 2024
"The stakes could barely be higher in Leo Vardiashvili's propulsive page-turner...It's a spellbinding achievement."--The Financial Times
"Has a commercial-fiction spring in its step.... Vardiashvili also has captured the winking, world-weary humor and magic-realist touches that mark a lot of literature from Europe's war-torn corners." --Los Angeles Times
"This novel annihilated me.... Left my heart bruised and battered and aching for more." --Khaled Hosseini, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner
"Tender and raw and funny." --Colum McCann, National Book Award winning author of Let the Great World Spin
"Propulsive, funny, and profound."--Elif Batuman, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of The Idiot
"A book like no other, from an imagination like no other." --Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less Is Lost
Amid rubble and rebuilding in a former Soviet land, one family must rescue one another and put the past to rest: a stirring novel about what happens after the fighting is over
Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past, haunted by the places and people they left behind.
When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final message they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: "I left a trail I can't erase. Do not follow it."
In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father's footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people. By turns savage and tender, compassionate and harrowing, Hard by a Great Forest is a powerful and ultimately hopeful novel about the individual and collective trauma of war, and the indomitable spirit of a people determined not only to survive, but to remember those who did not.
Love Novel
Ivana Sajko (Author) Mima Simic (Translator)
Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis - Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award - One of The Millions Most Anticipated Titles of 2024 - One of Kirkus Reviews' Twenty Books You Can Read in a Weekend - One of the Boston Globe's Anticipated Forthcoming Titles
Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom.
He, an unemployed Dante scholar, trying to change the world and write a novel. She, once a passable actress with a vaguely rewarding theater job, now a stay-at-home mom. He is delirious with dreams of grandeur; she is on edge, a detonator bomb with a dirty laundry trigger. The rent is late, the neighbor caviling, the government astoundingly callous: with violence looming on all sides, husband and wife circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss.
Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana Sajko's Love Novel takes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.
Tali Girls: A Novel of Afghanistan
Siamak Herawi (Author) Sara Khalili (Translator)
An intimate look at the lives, loves, horrors, and dreams of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule
A heartbreaking tragedy in the vein of The Kite Runner from a major English-speaking Afghan figure famous for his books and long career in politics
Siamak Herawi brings Afghan women centerstage and takes us deep into the heart of his motherland to witness the reality of their lives under the Taliban's most extreme interpretation of Islam. Based on true stories, the result is a sobering and harrowing tale that relates the current ethos of a country under occupation by one power or another for more than half a century.
Told in a direct, conversational prose, this chorus of voices offers us a vivid picture of the endless cycle of the suffering of girls and women in the grip of the Taliban authorities, of the imbalance of power and opportunity.
The central figures illuminate the power of love, friendship, and generosity in the face of poverty and oppression. Their experiences and dilemmas have a visceral power and we become deeply attached to Kowsar, Geesu, and Simin. These are testaments of resilience, hope, courage, and visceral fear, of doors of opportunity opening just a crack that offer a way out.
In Sara Khalili's vibrant and nuanced translation from the Persian, Tali Girls tears down the curtain and exposes the treacherous realities of what women are up against in modern-day, war-torn Afghanistan.
Head Above Water: Reflections on Illness
Shahd Alshammari (Author)
This lyrical hybrid memoir revisits a lifetime's worth of personal journals to slowly piece together a narrative of chronic illness--a moving account of survival, memory, loss, and hope.
Shahd Alshammari is just eighteen when she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and told by her neurologist that she would not make it past age thirty. Despite what she is told, by thirty, she has become a professor of literature, and has managed to navigate education systems in both Kuwait and the United Kingdom and inspire generations of students.
Head above Water is the intimate, philosophical memoir of Shahd Alshammari's life of triumph and resistance, as a woman marked "ill" by society and as a lifelong reader, student, and teacher. Charting her journey with raw honesty, Alshammari explores disability, displacement, and belonging--not only of the body, but of culture, gender, and race, and imparts wisdom of profound philosophical value throughout. It is people, human connections, that keep us afloat, she argues--"and in storytelling we have the power to gain a sense of agency over our lives."
Last to Eat, Last to Learn: My Life in Afghanistan Fighting to Educate Women
Pashtana Durrani (Author) Tamara Bralo (Author)
From young Afghani activist and Amnesty International Global Youth Ambassador Pashtana Durrani, a deeply inspiring memoir about the power of learning and the value of educators in their many forms - from teachers, mentors, and role models, to fathers, mothers, and any one of us with the drive to stand against ignorance...
A Ms. Magazine Pick for Most Anticipated Feminist Books
"Pashtana's story highlights the resourcefulness and bravery of young women in Afghanistan. I hope readers will be inspired by her mission to give every girl the education she deserves and the opportunity to pursue her dreams."--Malala Yousafzai
Inspired by generations of her family's unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan's girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden. In a country devastated by war and violence, where girls are often married off before reaching their teenage years and prohibited from leaving their homes, heeding that call seemed both impossible and dangerous.
Pashtana was raised in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school for girls within their home. Fueled by his insistence that despite being a girl, she mattered and deserved an education, Pashtana was sixteen when, against impossible odds, she was granted a path out of the refugee camp: admittance to a preparatory program at Oxford. Unthinkably and to her parents' horror, she chose a different path. She chose Afghanistan.
Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls in remote areas of the country, training teachers in digital literacy. Her commitment to education has made her a target of the Taliban. Still, she continues to fight for women's education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.
Courageous and inspiring, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is the story of how just one person can transform a family, a tribe, a country. It reminds us of the emancipatory power of learning and the transformational potential that lies within each of us.
A portion of proceeds from Last to Eat, Last to Learn will be donated to LEARN (LearnAfghan.org), the NGO dedicated to providing quality education and healthcare to communities in conflict zones.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide
Tahir Hamut Izgil (Author) Joshua L. Freeman (Translator)
A National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize finalist
Named one of the best books of the year by: THE NEW YORK TIMES - THE WASHINGTON POST - THE ECONOMIST - TIME
A poet's account of one of the world's most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family's escape from genocide
One by one, Tahir Hamut Izgil's friends disappeared. The Chinese government's brutal persecution of the Uyghur people had continued for years, but in 2017 it assumed a terrifying new scale. The Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in western China, were experiencing an echo of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, amplified by China's establishment of an all-seeing high-tech surveillance state. Over a million people have vanished into China's internment camps for Muslim minorities.
Tahir, a prominent poet and intellectual, had been no stranger to persecution. After he attempted to travel abroad in 1996, police tortured him until he confessed to fabricated charges and sent him to a re-education through labor camp. But even having endured three years in the camp, he could never have predicted the Chinese government's radical solution to the Uyghur question two decades later. Was the first sign when Tahir was interrogated for hours after a phone call with a fellow poet in the Netherlands? Or when his old friend was sentenced to life in prison simply for calling for Uyghurs' legal rights to be enforced? Perhaps it was when the police seized Uyghurs' radios and installed jamming equipment to cut them off from the outside world.
Once Tahir noticed that the park near his home was nearly empty because so many neighbors had been arrested, he knew the police would be coming for him any day. One night, after Tahir's daughters were asleep, he placed by his door a sturdy pair of shoes, a sweater, and a coat so that he could stay warm if the police came for him in the middle of the night. It was clear to Tahir and his wife that fleeing the country was the family's only hope.
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is the story of the political, social, and cultural destruction of Tahir Hamut Izgil's homeland. Among leading Uyghur intellectuals and writers, he is the only one known to have escaped China since the mass internments began. His book is a call for the world to awaken to the unfolding catastrophe, and a tribute to his friends and fellow Uyghurs whose voices have been silenced.
What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork
Witold Szablowski (Author) Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator)
A New York Times Editors' Choice
"Entertaining . . . A heady mix of propaganda and paranoia . . . [Szablowski writes] sensitively . . . not just about food but also its terrible absence." --The New York Times Book Review
"Riveting--a delicious odyssey full of history, humor, and jaw-dropping stories. If you want to understand the making of modern Russia, read this book." --Daniel Stone, bestselling author of The Food Explorer
A high-spirited, eye-opening, appetite-whetting culinary travel adventure that tells the story of the last hundred years of Russian power through food, by an award-winning Polish journalist who's been praised by both Timothy Snyder and Bill Buford
In the gonzo spirit of Anthony Bourdain and Hunter S. Thompson, Witold Szablowski has tracked down--and broken bread with--people whose stories of working in Kremlin kitchens impart a surprising flavor to our understanding of one of the world's superpowers.
In revealing what Tsar Nicholas II's and Lenin's favorite meals were, why Stalin's cook taught Gorbachev's cook to sing to his dough, how Stalin had a food tester while he was starving the Ukrainians during the Great Famine, what the recipe was for the first soup flown into outer space, why Brezhnev hated caviar, what was served to the Soviet Union's leaders at the very moment they decided the USSR should cease to exist, and whether Putin's grandfather really did cook for Lenin and Stalin, Szablowski has written a fascinating oral history--complete with recipes and photos--of Russia's evolution from culinary indifference to decadence, famine to feasts, and of the Kremlin's Olympics-style preoccupation with food as an expression of the country's global standing.
Traveling across Stalin's Georgia, the war fronts of Afghanistan, the nuclear wastelands of Chornobyl, and even to a besieged steelworks plant in Mariupol--often with one-of-a-kind access to locales forbidden to foreign eyes, and with a rousing sense of adventure and an inimitable ability to get people to spill the tea--he shows that a century after the revolution, Russia still uses food as an instrument of war and feeds its people on propaganda.
Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women
Sandra Guzman (Author)
Spanning time, styles, and traditions, a dazzling collection of essential works from 140 Latine writers, scholars, and activists from across the world--from warrior poet Audre Lorde to novelist Edwidge Danticat and performer and author Elizabeth Acevedo and artist/poet Cecilia Vicuña--gathered in one magnificent volume.
Daughters of Latin America collects the intergenerational voices of Latine women across time and space, capturing the power, strength, and creativity of these visionary writers, leaders, scholars, and activists--including 24 Indigenous voices. Several authors featured are translated into English for the first time. Grammy, National Book Award, Cervantes, and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as a Nobel Laureate and the next generation of literary voices are among the stars of this essential collection, women whose work inspires and transforms us.
An eclectic and inclusive time capsule spanning centuries, genres, and geographical and linguistic diversity, Daughters of Latin America is divided into 13 parts representing the 13 Mayan Moons, each cycle honoring a different theme. Within its pages are poems from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón and celebrated Cervantes Prize-winner Dulce María Loynaz; lyric essays from New York Times bestselling author Naima Coster, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Guggenheim Fellow Maryse Condé; rousing speeches from U.S. Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Lencan Indigenous land and water protector Berta Caceres; and a transcendent Mazatec chant from shaman and poet María Sabina testifying to the power of language as a cure, which opens the book.
More than a collection of writings, Daughters of Latin America is a resurrection of ancestral literary inheritance as well as a celebration of the rising voices encouraged and nurtured by those who came before them.
In addition to those mentioned above, contributors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Julia Alvarez, Albalucia Angel, Marie Arana, Ruth Behar, Gioconda Belli, Miluska Benavides, Carmen Bouollosa, Giannina Braschi, Norma Cantú, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Angie Cruz, Edwidge Danticat, Julia de Burgos, Lila Downs, Laura Esquivel, Conceição Evaristo, Mayra Santos Febres, Sara Gallardo, Cristina Rivera Garza, Reyna Grande, Sonia Guiñasaca, Georgina Herrera, María Hinojosa, Claudia Salazar Jimenez, Jamaica Kincaid, María Clara Sharupi Jua, Amada Libertad, Josefina López, Gabriela Mistral, Celeste Mohammed, Cherrié Moraga, Angela Morales, Nancy Morejón, Anaïs Nin, Achy Obejas, Alejandra Pizarnik, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Elena Poniatowska, Laura Restrepo, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Mikeas Sánchez, Esmeralda Santiago, Rita Laura Segato, Ana María Shua, Natalia Toledo, Julia Wong, Elisabet Velasquez, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Helena María Viramontes, and many more.
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