GalleyCrush: Dear Memory

Today’s GalleyCrush is Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on October 12, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.”

First lines: “I hear the phone ringing / but I can’t answer it. / It is silence calling.”

Book buzz: “Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory is a tender exploration of grief, an excavation into stories untold, memories unshared, the treasures that await our discovery if we trace the lives that held ours. It is a vulnerable and evocative experience of what it means to miss, to yearn, to return to the pieces of our most beloved.” —Kao Kalia Yang

Book notes: Hardcover, nonfiction, 168 pages.

Cover credit: Art by Victoria Chang, design by Mary Austin Speaker.

Author bio: Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN/Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee, and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle-grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.

GalleyCrush: Villainy

7.23.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy, forthcoming from Nightboat Books on September 14, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Harnessing street protest as a poetic formation, Villainy exhibits the desires that bring queers into public space.”

First lines: “THE END OF FASCISM LOOKS LIKE CENTURIES OF QUEERS DANCING ON THE GRAVE OF // 1. CAPITALISM / 2. THE STATE / 3. COLONIALISM / 4. NAZIS / 5. RACISM / 6. OPPRESSION”

Book buzz: “In an industry that encourages the toothless, Andrea Abi-Karam’s propulsive Villainy calls: ‘give the poem teeth.’ In an industry that incants, this book incites, revealing the revolutionary potential of desire, of determined disfiguration, of poetry itself, which, in Abi-Karam’s hands and ways becomes, as the street, a site of unbounded action. Here is a poetry that demolishes poetry. A fire to our fascist order. A book fully alive.” —Solmaz Sharif

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 136 pages.

Cover credit: Cover photo of author by Lix Z, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Author bio: Andrea Abi-Karam is a trans, arab-american punk poet-performer cyborg and author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), a poetic critique of the U.S. military’s role in the War on Terror. With Kay Gabriel, they coedited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are a Leo obsessed with queer terror and convertibles.

GalleyCrush: Matrix

7.16.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Lauren Groff’s Matrix, forthcoming from Riverhead Books on September 7, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.”

First lines: “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.”

Book buzz: “Transcendent prose and vividly described settings bring to life historic events, from the Crusades to the papal interdict of 1208. Groff has outdone herself with an accomplishment as radiant as Marie’s visions.” —Publishers Weekly

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 272 pages.

Author bio: Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times best-selling author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Award, and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.

GalleyCrush: Everything I Have Is Yours

7.9.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Eleanor Henderson’s Everything I Have Is Yours, forthcoming from Flatiron Books on August 10, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From New York Times best-selling author Eleanor Henderson comes a turbulent love story meets harrowing medical mystery: the true story of the author’s twenty-year marriage defined by her husband’s chronic illness—and a testament to the endurance of love.”

First lines: “I am trying to get Aaron to sleep. It’s close to midnight on a Sunday, the bedroom dark but for one low lamp, the air purifier purring. He is struggling, crying out, his eyes squeezed shut in pain. I rub his back. I kiss his forehead. ‘It’s okay,’ I whisper. ‘You’re okay.’ Across the bridge of his nose are the freshly flecked scars on his swollen sinuses, like the scratches sleeping babies inflict on themselves with their tiny fingernails. How many nights have I spent rocking babies to sleep, how many hours waiting for the weight of their limbs to fall with the gravity of the dead, then laying them in the crib, sliding my hands out from under their diapered bottoms one knuckle at a time, praying please please please? But Aaron is not a baby. He is my husband.”

Book buzz: “Everything I Have Is Yours is a gripping portrait of a marriage so full of love, chaos, and the heart-breaking, head-slapping contradictions and consolations that it will leave you wondering how any of us survives the institution. Eleanor Henderson is a writer of extraordinary talent, depth, and feeling, and this memoir might be the most candid book I’ve ever read.” —Adrienne Brodeur

Book notes: Hardcover, memoir, 400 pages.

Author bio: Eleanor Henderson is the author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and the New York Times best-seller Ten Thousand Saints, which was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers Magazine, and the Best American Short Stories. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons.

GalleyCrush: The Last Thing

7.2.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Patrick Rosal’s The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, forthcoming from Persea Books on September 21, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Bursting with music, infused with love and awe, this is essential reading from a poet of vigor and conscience.”

First lines: “Boys don’t read. / —the experts // These kids run / their sloppy fly routes // right to left / in a crabgrass park.”

Book buzz: “I read these poems aloud to change the air in my room, to alter my mood. What a gift to be reminded of the capacity for song in every breath.” —Jamila Woods

Book notes: Hardcover, poetry, 224 pages.

Cover credit: Mark Rosal with Rita Lascaro.

Author bio: Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author of four previous books, most recently Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has earned fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Senior Research Program. He is a professor of English and the inaugural codirector of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University–Camden.

GalleyCrush: Bewilderment

6.25.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, forthcoming from W. W. Norton on September 21, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and No. 1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory.”

First lines: “But we might never find them? We’d set up the scope on the deck, on a clear autumn night, on the edge of one of the last patches of darkness in the eastern U.S. Darkness this good was hard to come by, and so much darkness in one place lit up the sky. We pointed the tube through a gap in the trees above our rented cabin. Robin pulled his eye from the eyepiece—my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world.”

Book buzz: “Reading a novel by Richard Powers is like taking a tiny spaceship on a voyage into his circulatory system and nervous system and brainpan and gut. He lets you in, is what I’m saying, and you feel it as the gravitational pull moves you from earth to him. This is especially true in Bewilderment, where a brain is a universe and a universe is a brain and both are un-understandable together. This book [will] break your heart; his compassion will flay you. What [Powers] did for trees in The Overstory and for German lieder in The Time of Our Singing, is what he does for parenthood in Bewilderment; he particularizes it and then universalizes it and then you see stardust.” —Erica Eisdorfer of Flyleaf Books

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 288 pages.

Author bio: Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received a National Book Award. His novel The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

GalleyCrush: A Calling for Charlie Barnes

6.11.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Joshua Ferris’s A Calling for Charlie Barnes, forthcoming from Little, Brown on September 28, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From National Book Award finalist Joshua Ferris, a new novel about a modern American family and the larger-than-life father at the heart of it. But with so many competing factions, who gets to tell his story?”

First line: “Steady Boy woke, showered and spritzed, skipped breakfast for the time being, and headed in to work.”

Book buzz: “A deeply funny, very moving book about that most pivotal and permanent of destinations: death. Ferris’s hijinks are serious; his play is profound. There is magic in these pages.” —Ayad Akhtar

Cover credit: Jacket design by Gregg Kulick, image courtesy of Getty Images.

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 352 pages.

Author bio: Joshua Ferris is the author of three previous novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and a collection of stories, The Dinner Party. A National Book Award and Booker Prize finalist, he is the recipient the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

GalleyCrush: Cloud Cuckoo Land

6.4.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, forthcoming from Scribner on September 28, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most best-selling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story.”

First lines: “A fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. A mass of curls haloes her head; her socks are full of holes. This is Konstance.”

Book buzz: “This is a glory of a book. As its cast of characters moves us across continents and ages from ancient Greece to the present and beyond, we fall in love with the best of them—and the worst. Cloud Cuckoo Land is impossible to put down and once finished, life-changing, the kind of book you hope will come your way but almost never does. An absolute masterpiece.” —Betsy Burton of the King’s English Bookshop

Cover credit: Jonathan Bush

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 656 pages.

Author bio: Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times best-seller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

GalleyCrush: Poet Warrior

5.28.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Joy Harjo’s Poet Warrior, forthcoming from W. W. Norton on September 7, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.”

First lines: “To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.”

Book notes: Hardcover, memoir, 240 pages.

Author bio: Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently An American Sunrise (Norton, 2019). Named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2019, she lives in Tulsa.

GalleyCrush: When the Reckoning Comes

5.21.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, forthcoming from Harper Perennial on August 3, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A haunting novel about a Black woman who returns to her hometown for a plantation wedding and the horror that ensues as she reconnects with the blood-soaked history of the land and the best friends she left behind.”

First lines: “They are coming. In life, heavy was the crown of chains meant to keep their bodies down, but their spirits soon will rise.”

Book buzz: “Whether we know it or not, we are all haunted by history. LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes makes that fact both startlingly real and beautiful. And while McQueen serves up stark lucidity and beauty, she doesn’t hide from the darkness of the past, instead she makes meaning of it. This book is a wonder.” —Rion Amilcar Scott

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 256 pages.

Author bio: LaTanya McQueen has an MFA from Emerson College, a PhD from the University of Missouri, and was the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Coe College in Iowa.

GalleyCrush: Agatha of Little Neon

5.14.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 3, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “‘Blazingly original, wry, and perfectly attuned to the oddness—and the profundity—of life’ (Cristina Henríquez), Claire Luchette’s debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self.”

First lines: “Mother Roberta made the rules: no chewing gum, no bicycles, no tree nuts, no pets. Every morning she brewed the coffee and every night she cooked the meal. Twice a year she sewed our made-to-measure habits from yards of a black poly-wool blend. She embroidered pillows, made punch from powder, wrote the homilies for the priest.”

Book buzz: “Agatha of Little Neon is the rare kind of book that reads like a transmission from a person you don’t know, but who is already nestled close to your heart. Full of small devotions, pith and vigor, and a bounty of tender feeling for a world that is not quite as full of grace as it could be, this bold debut shines with a light all its own and announces Claire Luchette as a true original and a voice to follow closely.” —Alexandra Kleeman

Cover credit: June Park

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 288 pages.

Author bio: Claire Luchette’s work has appeared in Granta, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Luchette graduated from the University of Oregon MFA program and has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House. Agatha of Little Neon is her first novel.

GalleyCrush: Radiant Fugitives

5.7.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives, forthcoming from Counterpoint on August 3, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A tour de force debut following three generations of a Muslim Indian American family confronted with a nation—and a world—on the brink of change.”

First lines: “My life outside my mother’s womb has just begun. But what a beginning: I’m bathed in a harsh light, buffeted by jarring noises from all directions, and besieged by cold hands and instruments that prod and squeeze.”

Book buzz: “Radiant Fugitives indeed glows. This is such a beautiful novel, full of light and luminous sentences. Reading it felt like basking in a generous and lucid intelligence. Ahmed writes his characters and their worlds with honesty and compassion. This is a writer to watch, a voice we need.” —Matthew Salesses

Cover credit: Jacket design by Jaya Miceli, images © Shutterstock/Vector Memory and Alamy Stock Photo.

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 384 pages.

Author bio: Nawaaz Ahmed was born in Tamil Nadu, India. Before becoming a novelist, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is the winner of several Hopwood Awards. He has completed residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, Bread Loaf, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has also received fellowships from Kundiman and Lambda Literary. His fiction has appeared in the Sonora Review and been performed at the Sterling Music Room. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of the jacket designer.

GalleyCrush: The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

4.30.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, forthcoming from Harper on July 27, 2021. Editor’s Note: This book’s publication date has been changed to August 24, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “The 2020 National Book Award–nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.”

First lines: “We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell these stories of a woman’s line. Her people and her dirt, her trees, her water.”

Book buzz: “This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. In Jeffers’s deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel.” —Jacqueline Woodson

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 816 pages.

Author bio: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, was longlisted for a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is critic-at-large for the Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.

GalleyCrush: The Woman From Uruguay

4.23.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Pedro Mairal’s The Woman From Uruguay, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft, forthcoming from Bloomsbury on July 6, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From acclaimed Argentine author Pedro Mairal and Man Booker International–winning translator Jennifer Croft, the unforgettable story of two would-be lovers over the course of a single day.”

First lines: “You told me I talked in my sleep. That’s the first thing I remember from that morning. The alarm went off at six. Maiko had gotten into bed with us. You nestled into me and the words were whispered in my ear, so as not to wake him, but also I think to keep us from facing each other, from talking with our morning breath.”

Book buzz: “Beautifully written and translated, The Woman From Uruguay is a work of exquisite style, shrewd philosophical insight, and deftly controlled suspense. A searing tale of seduction and betrayal, both wryly comic and deeply serious.” —Sigrid Nunez

Cover credit: Design by Patti Ratchford, photos courtesy of Getty Images and Plain Picture.

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 160 pages.

Author bio: Pedro Mairal is a professor of English literature in Buenos Aires. In 1998 he was awarded the Premio Clarín de Novela and in 2007 he was included in the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 list, which named the thirty-nine best Latin American authors under thirty-nine. Among his novels are A Night With Sabrina Love, which was made into a film and widely translated, and The Woman From Uruguay, which was a bestseller in Latin America and Spain and has been published in twelve countries.

Translator bio: Jennifer Croft was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2018 and was a National Book Award finalist for her translation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and National Endowment for the Arts grants and fellowships, as well as a Tin House Workshop Scholarship for her memoir, Homesick. She has published her own work and numerous translations in the New York Times, VICE, n+1, the New Republic, the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

GalleyCrush: Nightbitch

4.16.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, forthcoming from Doubleday on July 20, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “In this blazingly smart and voracious debut, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she’s turning into a dog.”

First line: “When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke—because that’s the sort of lady she was, a good sport, able to poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight, not wound really tight, not so freakishly tight that she couldn’t see the humor in a light-hearted not-meant-as-an-insult situation—but in the days following this new naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck, and was, like, What the fuck.”

Book buzz: “I could not love a novel more than Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch. It’s such a uniquely brilliant book, one that looks at the intersection of motherhood and art, the terror of ‘a thousand artless afternoons.’ It is so wonderfully observant, so precise, and yet manages to expand and expand upon those initial concerns, turning magical, dark, and funny.” —Kevin Wilson

Cover credit: Illustration courtesy of North American Meat Institute. Scan provided by Sally Edelstein.

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 256 pages.

Author bio: Rachel Yoder is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub. She lives in Iowa City with her husband and son.

Correction: A previous version of this article misattributed credit for the cover art and design.

GalleyCrush: Ghost Forest

4.9.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest, forthcoming from One World on July 13, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “For fans of The Farewell, this graceful and indelible debut about love, grief, and family welcomes you into its pages and invites you to linger, staying with you long after you’ve closed its covers.”

First lines: “Twenty-one days after my dad died, a bird perched on the railing of my balcony. It was brown. It stayed there for a long time.”

Book buzz: “Ghost Forest is a debut certain to turn your heart. With a dexterity and style all her own, Pik-Shuen Fung renders the many voices that make up a family, as well as the mythologies we create for those we know, and those we wish we knew better. I am madly in love with this book, a kaleidoscopic wonder.” —T Kira Madden

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 272 pages.

Author bio: Pik-Shuen Fung is a Canadian writer and artist living in New York City. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, the Millay Colony, and Storyknife. Ghost Forest is her first book.

Cover Reveal: What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J. A. Chancy

4.2.21

This week in GalleyCrush, we are pleased to share an exclusive first look at Myriam J. A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, which is forthcoming from Tin House on October 5, 2021. Below, lose yourself in the rich purple and green tones of the hummingbirds that grace the cover designed by Diane Chonette, then read the poignant first sentences.

Perfect pitch: “Ambitious, intimate, and haunting, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s novel What Storm, What Thunder tells the epic story of the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti through unforgettable characters bearing witness to the aftermath, both communal and personal.”

First lines: “Port-au-Prince, November 25, 2014: ‘Oh. Oh ye, oh ye. Manman’mwen. Oh ye, oh ye, oye. M’pa gen zo ankò!’ My old mama used to say these words when she grew too old to draw water from her own well. I remember. When I made my way back to see her in her last days—standing in the tap-tap truck for long hours as we traveled the serpentine road leading out of the capital to the villages of the coast, all the way to Saint Marc, where I was born, and my mother was born, and her mother before her—I was troubled to see her diminished frame in her bed. I could see her bones through the frail, wrinkled skin that lay limply across them. I could see the bones, but still she moaned to the goddess plaintively: ‘I have no bones; I have no bones.’”

Book buzz: “What Storm, What Thunder is a striking and formidable novel by one of our most brilliant writers and storytellers. Lending her voice to ten survivors whose lives were indelibly altered by the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Myriam J. A. Chancy’s sublime choral novel not only describes what it was like for her characters before, during, and after that heartrending day, she also powerfully guides us towards further reflection and healing.” —Edwidge Danticat

Cover credit: Design by Diane Chonette.

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 330 pages.

Author bio: Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer, the HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

GalleyCrush: Seek You

3.26.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Kristen Radtke’s Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, forthcoming from Pantheon on July 6, 2021. Editor’s Note: This book’s publication date has been changed to July 13, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From the acclaimed author of Imagine Wanting Only This—a timely and moving meditation on isolation and longing, both as individuals and as a society.”

First line: “When I started writing this book in 2016, rates of loneliness had already been increasing exponentially for decades, yet it wasn’t a subject I heard people talk about very often, at least not in relation to themselves.”

Book buzz: “Seek You stunned me. Kristen Radtke, one of the best of our literary artists, shines her brilliant light into modern America’s experiment in loneliness with this supremely elegant and devastating book. It was my companion during a long, dark night of the soul; I emerged grateful to have had such sleekness and wit, such calm intelligence, to guide me back to daylight.” —Lauren Groff

Book notes: Hardcover, graphic nonfiction, 352 pages.

Cover credit: Kristen Radtke.

Author bio: Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This. The recipient of a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Radtke is the art director and deputy publisher of the Believer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, the Atlantic, the Guardian, GQ, Vogue, and Oxford American, among other publications.

GalleyCrush: Hard Like Water

3.19.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Yan Lianke’s Hard Like Water, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, forthcoming from Grove Press on June 15, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From a visionary, world-class writer, dubbed ‘China’s most controversial novelist’ by the New Yorker, a gripping and biting story of ambition and betrayal, following two young Communist revolutionaries whose forbidden love sets them apart from their traditionally minded village, as the Cultural Revolution sweeps the nation.”

First line: “After I die and things settle down, I’ll reevaluate my life, and specifically the cracks between my speech, behavior, posture, and my chickenshit love.”

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 384 pages.

Author bio: Yan Lianke is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, he was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina Étranger. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.

Translator bio: Carlos Rojas is the translator of several books by Yan Lianke, including Three Brothers, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, Lenin’s Kisses, The Four Books, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and The Years, Months, Days. His other translations include Yu Hua’s Brothers, which he cotranslated with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and which was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. He is the author of The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity, The Great Wall: A Cultural History, and Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Reform in Modern China, as well as many articles. He is a professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University.

Cover Reveal: Pilot Impostor by James Hannaham

3.12.21

This week in GalleyCrush, we are pleased to share an exclusive first look at James Hannaham’s Pilot Impostor, which is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press on November 2, 2021. Below, view the bright and bold cover designed by Michael Salu, read the first sentences from the book, and discover more details.

Perfect pitch: “From visual artist and PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of Delicious Foods, a startling, shape-shifting book of prose and images, which draws on an unexpected pair of inspirations—the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the history of air disasters—to investigate con men, identity politics, failures of leadership, the privilege of ineptitude, the slave trade, and the nature of consciousness.”

First lines: “Sometimes I feel like a commercial jet pilot, sitting here with my eyes focused on my lighted display, the artificial horizon indicating my attitude, fingers at the ready. I have so many systems to monitor as I work; each aspect of the writing might as well be a knob or a dial on the console of an airplane. So many souls depend on my ability, so many people put their trust in me without having met me—or at least I imagine that they do. Like you (though you may have met me). The risk of losing altitude and the difficulty of maintaining attitude remains constantly in mind.”

Book buzz: “Micro-essays, flash fictions, prose poems: However you choose to label James Hannaham’s rebuses of posture and imposture, self and anti-self, they are endlessly inventive, thought-provoking, and delightful. Mixing text and image, playfulness and profundity, Pilot Impostor updates the flight manual of shape-shifting twentieth-century masters—Calvino, Borges, Perec—and most of all Fernando Pessoa, poetic champion of identity theft. ‘So too in my soul do aircraft vanish’—well now, that’s the type of pilot we’ve been looking for!” —Campbell McGrath

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 208 pages.

Cover credit: Michael Salu, House of Thought.

Author bio: James Hannaham is a writer and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. His criticism, essays, and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Spin, Out, 4Columns, Travel + Leisure, and BuzzFeed. He received a 2015 Pushcart Prize for a piece that appeared in Gigantic. He cofounded the performance group Elevator Repair Service and worked with them from 1992 to 2002. He has exhibited text-based visual art at Open Source Gallery, 490 Atlantic, Kimberley-Klark, and The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, and won Best in Show at Main Street Arts’ Biblio Spectaculum. Pilot Impostor will be followed by Re-Entry, or What Happened to Carlotta, a novel, in 2022.

GalleyCrush: Somebody’s Daughter

3.5.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Ashley C. Ford’s Somebody’s Daughter, forthcoming from Flatiron Books on June 1, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins.”

First line: “Just remember, you can always come home.”

Big blurb: “Ashley Ford’s prose is glass—so clear, sharp, and smooth that the reader sees, in vivid focus, her complicated childhood, brilliant mind, and golden heart. The gravity and urgency of Somebody’s Daughter anchored me to my chair and slowed my heartbeat—like no book has since Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Ashley Ford is a writer for the ages, and Somebody’s Daughter will be a book of the year.” —Glennon Doyle

Book notes: Hardcover, memoir, 224 pages.

Cover credit: Rachel Willey.

Author bio: Ashley C. Ford lives in Brooklyn, New York. She hosts The Chronicles of Now podcast, on which she has featured Lisa Taddeo, Carmen Maria Machado, Tommy Orange, Curtis Sittenfeld, and more. She also cohosts the HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio. Ford has written or guest-edited for the Guardian, ELLE, BuzzFeed, Out, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Allure, Marie Claire, and the New York Times, among other publications.

GalleyCrush: Future Feeling

2.26.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Joss Lake’s Future Feeling, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press on June 1, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “An embittered dog walker obsessed with a social media influencer inadvertently puts a curse on a young man—and must adventure into a mysterious dimension in order to save him—in this wildly inventive, delightfully subversive, genre-nonconforming debut novel about illusion, magic, technology, kinship, and the emergent future.”

First lines: “The summons arrived the day after the wedding. Through honeyed dreams, I heard the knock.”

Big blurb: “I devoured this funny, charming book of trans friendships and sly cultural commentary; a story about what truly matters for those of us lost in the maelstrom of identity and media. Here’s how unable I was to put it down: I accidentally dropped it in the toilet, fished it out, and kept right on reading.” —Torrey Peters

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 304 pages.

Cover credit: Michael Salu, House of Thought.

Author bio: Joss Lake is a trans writer and educator based in New York whose work has been supported by Queens Council of the Arts, Women and Performance Studies Collective, the Watermill Center, and Columbia University. He runs a literary sauna series called Trans at Rest. Future Feeling is his debut novel.

GalleyCrush: Stone Fruit

2.19.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit, forthcoming from Fantagraphics on May 11, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “An exhilarating and tender debut graphic novel that is an ode to the love and connection shared among three women and the child they all adore.”

First lines: “Things were best when Nessie was about six. We were at our best, for a while, anyway.”

Big blurb: “In Stone Fruit, relationships are characters unto their own—tangled, evolving, alchemical. Lee Lai is a major new comics talent.” —Jillian Tamaki

Book notes: Hardcover, graphic novel, 236 pages.

Cover credit: Lee Lai.

Author bio: Lee Lai was born in 1993 in Naarm (Melbourne). Currently Lai makes comics and illustrations in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Her short story comics have been featured in the New Yorker, the Lifted Brow, Room, and Everyday Feminism.

GalleyCrush: Great Circle

2.12.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, forthcoming from Knopf on May 4, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Spanning Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles, Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost.”

First line: “If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere.”

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 608 pages.

Cover credit: Art by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson. Photo © Peter Nahum at the Leicester Galleries, London / Bridgeman Images. Jacket design by Kelly Blair.

Author bio: Maggie Shipstead is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

GalleyCrush: The Renunciations

2.5.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations, forthcoming from Graywolf Press on May 4, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma.”

First lines: “I was born into a house of air, / my dad born to bear, to share, his burden.”

Big blurb: “With Donika Kelly’s signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance…. Kelly’s poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine.” —Khadijah Queen

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 104 pages.

Cover credit: Art by Lorna Simpson, design by Jeenee Lee.

Author bio: Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

GalleyCrush: The Souvenir Museum

1.29.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Elizabeth McCracken’s The Souvenir Museum, forthcoming from Ecco on April 13, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken is an undisputed virtuoso of the short story, and this new collection features her most vibrant and heartrending work to date.”

First line: “Because Jack didn’t drive—not stick, not on the left side of the road, not at all ever—Sadie piloted the rental car from the Dublin airport to the wedding, grinding gears and scraping along the greenery and—for a few miles—creeping behind a tractor on a winding road.”

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 256 pages.

Cover credit: Allison Saltzman

Author bio: Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books, including Bowlaway (Ecco, 2019) and The Giant’s House (Dial Press, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James Michener Chair for Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

GalleyCrush: Tributary

1.22.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Carey Salerno’s Tributary, forthcoming from Persea Books on April 20, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From the author of Shelter, ferocious poems that rail against a community’s bigotry and culture of silence.”

First lines: “It’s a drum. It’s a drum. It’s a river. It’s a drum.”

Big blurb: “Tributary by Carey Salerno is a beautiful book of river, within river, against river as metaphor, as life force, as faith. Salerno skillfully oscillates within and without the river—refracting it, lifting it up to the light, and using it as a force to deconstruct family, societal, and racial failings. The speaker in these poems both denies and wants the river. In poem after poem, Salerno layers thought after thought onto the river until it overflows. A radiant dissent rises in the end. Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.” —Victoria Chang

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 96 pages.

Cover credit: Art by Roberto Campos, design by Small Stuff.

Author bio: Carey Salerno is a poet and essayist. She is the executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books. She holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from New England College. Salerno is the author of Shelter and coeditor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books. She teaches for the University of Maine in Farmington and resides in New Jersey.

GalleyCrush: Double Trio

1.15.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Nathaniel Mackey’s three-book box set, Double Trio, forthcoming from New Directions on April 6, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “For thirty-five years the poet Nathaniel Mackey has been writing a long poem of fugitive-making like no other: two elegiac, intertwined serial poems—Song of the Andoumboulou and ‘Mu’—that follow a mysterious, migrant ‘we’ through the rhythms and currents of the world with lyrical virtuosity and impassioned expectancy.”

First lines: “All alone he staggered, newly / back from Málaga. Deep strum, / bowed Maghrebi strings chorused / in back of him, the Full Moon / Double / Octet blared as well…”

Big blurb: “Still sourcing and exploring two massive, braided streams of retrospective invention—‘Mu’ and Song of the Andoumboulou—Mackey’s liturgy falls and sprays and pools in Double Trio. Bottomless, modal, modular as McCoy Tyner’s matched, augmented threes, surfaces bloomed with turbulent, recombinant bottom like Bill Dixon’s double-bassed ensembles, Double Trio doesn’t culminate: It promises.” —Fred Moten

Cover credit: Rodrigo Corral

Book notes: Poetry, paperback box set, 1,080 pages.

Author bio: Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947. He is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in Poetry for Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006), the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University.

GalleyCrush: White Magic

1.8.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Elissa Washuta’s White Magic, forthcoming from Tin House on April 27, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “In this collection of intertwined essays, [Elissa Washuta] writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch.”

First lines: “Some girl at school once had a mood ring. We girls were quiet about it the way we were quiet about the rolled waistbands of our uniform skirts, which we concealed with the loose overhangs of tucked-in polos. Both were kinds of witchcraft the nuns forbade: spells done with sacred tools, the conjuring power of our hips.”

Big blurb: “Elissa Washuta is exactly the writer we need right now: as funny as she is formidable a thinker, as thoughtful as she is inventive—her scrutiny is a fearless tool, every subject whittled to its truest form. White Magic is a bracingly original work that enthralled me in a hypnosis on the other side of which I was changed for the better, more likely to trust my own strange intelligence.” —Melissa Febos

Book notes: Hardcover, essays, 432 pages.

Author bio: Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of My Body Is a Book of Rules and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Washuta is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

GalleyCrush: Water I Won’t Touch

1.1.21

Today’s GalleyCrush is Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on April 20, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won’t Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape.”

First lines: “In the beginning, there was a boy / who touched me as he shouldn’t have.”

Big blurb: “When I read Water I Won’t Touch, I dog-eared many pages, underlined many lines. Candrilli’s poems are intimate, nimble, glinting with tenderness and an astonishing lyricism. The physicality of violence electrifies memory, a refusal to conform and the euphoria of love sweetens the future. Language this good, this deftly composed fills me with gratitude. Candrilli is a fearless and brilliant poet.” —Eduardo C. Corral

Book notes: Poetry, paperback, 96 pages.

Author bio: Kayleb Rae Candrilli is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the author of All the Gay Saints (Saturnalia Books, 2020) and What Runs Over (YesYes Books, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry and the American Book Fest Best Book Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. Their work has also appeared in Poetry, the American Poetry Review, American Poets, TriQuarterly, and Boston Review, among other publications. They live in Philadelphia.

GalleyCrush: Index of Women

12.18.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Amy Gerstler’s Index of Women, forthcoming from Penguin Books on April 6, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “From a ‘maestra of invention’ (New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood.”

First lines: “So, given the document’s age and ravaged state, / it’s far from the epic we thought we’d be left / by our ancestors. Where, for example, / are the gods, floods, beasts, and prophesies? // of these women tell me.”

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 112 pages.

Author bio: Amy Gerstler is a writer of fiction, poetry, and journalism whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including the Paris Review and Best American Poetry. Her 1990 book, Bitter Angel, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

GalleyCrush: Girlhood

12.11.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing on March 30, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.”

First lines: “The story went like this: I was a happy child, if also a strange one. There were griefs, but I was safe and well-loved. The age of ten or eleven—the time when my childhood became more distinctly a girlhood—marked a violent turn from this.”

Big blurb: “In this book, Febos proves herself to be one of the great documenters of the terrible and exquisite depths of girlhood. Here, that terrible and beautiful aeon is dissected, sung over, explored like ancient ruins. These essays are moss and iron—hard and beautiful—and struck through with Febos’s signature brilliance and power and grace. An essential, heartbreaking project.” —Carmen Maria Machado

Book notes: Hardcover, essays, 336 pages.

Author bio: Melissa Febos is the author of the memoirs Whip Smart and Abandon Me. Her essays have appeared in Tin House, the Believer, the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, Lenny Letter, and elsewhere. Portions from Abandon Me have won prizes from Prairie Schooner and StoryQuarterly, and have twice earned notice in the 2015 Best American Essays anthology. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Ragdale, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Febos serves on the directorial board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

GalleyCrush: Libertie

12.4.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie, forthcoming from Algonquin Books on March 30, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “The critically acclaimed and Whiting Award–winning author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman returns with an unforgettable story about the meaning of freedom.”

First lines: “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. ‘It still didn’t help him much, my love,’ she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic.”

Big blurb: “Pure brilliance. So much will be written about Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie—how it blends history and magic into a new kind of telling, how it spins the past to draw deft circles around our present—but none of it will measure up to the singular joy of reading this book.” —Mira Jacob

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 336 pages.

Author bio: Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Greenidge lives in Brooklyn, New York.

GalleyCrush: Festival Days

11.27.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days, forthcoming from Little, Brown on March 16, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A searing and exhilarating new collection from the acclaimed author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville.”

First lines: “Something happened to her while she was eating, or right afterward. She began turning in circles and couldn’t stop. In my kitchen, in my car, and then in an examining room at the vet’s office. I sat on the floor with her while the vet stood leaning against the wall, watching us. I was crying, but he ignored that.”

Book notes: Hardcover, nonfiction, 272 pages.

Author bio: Jo Ann Beard is the author of the essay collection The Boys of My Youth and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other magazines and anthologies. She has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

GalleyCrush: Tethered to Stars

11.20.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Fady Joudah’s Tethered to Stars, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on March 9, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A collection born of polyphony and the rhythms of our cosmos—intimate in its stakes, celestial in its dreams.”

First lines: “Be an owl, / not even a sunflower // turns its head / 270 degrees, // but may the need to ask me / about my darkness // never command you.”

Praise: “In his brilliant forthcoming book, Tethered to Stars, Fady Joudah writes about the mysterious cosmos swirling with intricate linkages—as his phone is pinging. Ah, yes, Jerusalem, the Holy City! Right now, let’s call all our cities holy. Let’s hope our trees continue to communicate, whatever humans can or can’t accomplish.” —Naomi Shihab Nye in the New York Times Magazine

Book notes: Poetry, paperback, 96 pages.

Author bio: Fady Joudah is the author of four previous collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, and Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the coeditor and cofounder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He lives in Houston and practices internal medicine.

GalleyCrush: The Committed

11.13.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, forthcoming from Grove Press on March 2, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “The long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.”

First line: “We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves.”

Big blurb: “This follow-up to his seminal The Sympathizer is Nguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched, The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel, like all daring novels, is a Trojan Horse, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere—and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And, perhaps even more critically, How do we laugh?” —Ocean Vuong

Book notes: Fiction, hardcover, 368 pages.

Author bio: Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Sympathizer, which was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction alongside seven other prizes. He is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced, and also the author of the short story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.

GalleyCrush: The Rain Heron

11.6.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron, forthcoming from FSG Originals on February 9, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A gripping novel of myth, environment, adventure, and an unlikely friendship, from an award-winning Australian author.”

First lines: “A farmer lived, but not well. If she planted grain, it would not sprout. If she grew rice, it would rot. If she tried to raise livestock, they would gasp and choke and die before they’d seen a second dawn (or they were stillborn, often taking their mothers, which the farmer had usually bought with the last of her coins and hope, with them).”

Big blurb: “The Rain Heron is a patient and rooted fable told as naturally as a tree grows. With timeless and captivating prose, Robbie Arnott has a talent for making it look easy. I was transfixed.” —Catherine Lacey

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 288 pages.

Author bio: Robbie Arnott is the author of the novel Flames, which won the Margaret Scott Prize, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 2019 he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. He lives in Tasmania.

GalleyCrush: Fake Accounts

10.30.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, forthcoming from Catapult on February 2, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A woman in a post-election tailspin discovers that her boyfriend is an anonymous online conspiracy theorist in this provocative and subversive debut novel that examines social media, sex, feminism, and fiction, the connection they’ve all promised, and the lies they help us tell.”

First line: “Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon, if not by exponential environmental catastrophe then by some combination of nuclear war, the American two-party system, patriarchy, white supremacy, gentrification, globalization, data breaches, and social media.”

Big blurb: “This novel made me want to retire from contemporary reality. I loved it.” —Zadie Smith

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 272 pages.

Author bio: Lauren Oyler’s essays on books and culture have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Cut, the New Republic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Born and raised in West Virginia, she now divides her time between New York City and Berlin.

GalleyCrush: Popular Longing

10.23.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Natalie Shapero’s Popular Longing, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press on February 16, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “With deadpan humor, quick turns, and blunt logic, Natalie Shapero’s third collection moves nimbly between the lines of power structures—linguistic, personal, political—to expose the loneliness of our contemporary realities.”

First lines: “Six years ago, the big museum sold eight famous paintings / to purchase, for unspecified millions, / Gustave Caillebotte’s MAN AT HIS BATH.”

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 80 pages.

Author bio: Natalie Shapero is a professor of the practice of poetry at Tufts University. Her most recent poetry collection is Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), received the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Her writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Fellowship.

GalleyCrush: The Removed

10.16.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Brandon Hobson’s The Removed, forthcoming from Ecco on February 16, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson.”

First lines: “The day before he died, in the remote town of Quah, Oklahoma, Ray-Ray Echota rode his motorcycle down the empty stretch of highway, blowing past rain puddles and trees, a strong wind pressing against his body. He was fifteen years old.”

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 288 pages.

Author bio: Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and winner of the Reading the West Book Award. His other books include Desolation of Avenues Untold and the novella Deep Ellum. His work has appeared in the Believer, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, NOON, and the Paris Review Daily, among other publications. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Hobson is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

GalleyCrush: Land of Big Numbers

10.9.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Te-Ping Chen’s Land of Big Numbers, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on February 2, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent that vividly gives voice to the men and women of modern China and its diaspora.”

First lines: “The hour of our birth had been carefully forecast, a winter’s day cesarean timed to coincide with Dr. Feng’s lunch break. The doctor pulled me out first, indignant, squalling, like a hotel guest inexpertly roused and tossed before checkout. She came next, and was so perfectly quiet that at first they worried she wasn’t breathing at all.”

Big blurb: “A spectacular work, comic, timely, profound. Te-Ping Chen has a superb eye for detail in a China where transformation occurs simultaneously too fast and too slow for lives in pursuit of meaning in a brave new world. Her characters are achingly alive. It’s rare to read a collection so satisfying, where every story adds to a gripping and intricate world.” —Madeleine Thien

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 256 pages.

Author bio: Te-Ping Chen’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and BOMB. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.

GalleyCrush: 100 Boyfriends

10.2.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, forthcoming from MCD x FSG Originals on February 2, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “An irreverent, sensitive, and inimitable look at gay dysfunction through the eyes of a cult hero.”

First lines: “I woke up alarmed. I didn’t know where I was at first. It was that feeling of waking up someplace foreign and being like, ‘What the fuck?!’ But then you look to the left and you’re like, ‘Oh, wait, that handsome guy.’”

Big blurb: “Each story in 100 Boyfriends is a minor eclipse: stunning in scope, technically blinding, and entirely miraculous. I laughed and I cried and I laughed until I cried—Brontez Purnell is a marvel.” —Bryan Washington

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 192 pages.

Author bio: Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down (Amethyst Editions, 2017). The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award for Fiction, he was one of thirty-two authors featured in “Black Male Writers for Our Time” in T: The New York Time Style Magazine. Purnell is also the front man for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock. He lives in Oakland.

GalleyCrush: The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void

9.25.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void, illustrated by Kalan Sherrard and forthcoming from Nightboat Books on January 26, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A magnetic and spellbinding debut poetry collection that speaks in the language of dreams.”

First lines: “All I remember is the coppiced terrain I crossed to find a house to rest in. Who is the woman lurking in the woods? A fellow traveler. I’m not used to seeing others. She is lost and I am lost but the difference is she is a novice at being lost, whereas I have always been without country.”

Big blurb: “Jackie Wang’s new book asks questions that rotate/fluoresce against a backdrop or foreground of ceremonial apprenticeship, like sunflowers or the memories of sunflowers. In this other world, ‘survivor trauma’ is experienced by creatures and non-creatures alike. I was so moved by the mixtures of writing I encountered here: the ‘map’ of a dream, but also the notebooks that ‘fill up,’ not always in the English of waking time. ‘I want to write you without writing over you. I have something to tell you,’ the speaker says, with the delicacy and directness of a sentence written directly on the skin. Kalan Sherrard’s illustrations echo this way of marking the page: a mode of companionship and witness in a book that did not end because it did not begin. Is this what it feels like to be a person?” —Bhanu Kapil

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 120 pages.

Author bio: Jackie Wang is a PhD candidate in the department of African and African American studies at Harvard University, specializing in race and the political economy of prisons and police in the United States. She is the author of a number of punk zines including On Being Hard Femme, as well as a collection of dream poems titled Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb. In 2018 she published Carceral Capitalism—a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state—with Semiotext(e). She is currently an Arleen Carlson and Edna Nelson Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

GalleyCrush: Reel Bay

9.18.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Jana Larson’s Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay, forthcoming from Coffee House Press on January 19, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “Equal parts memoir, mystery, reclaimed screenplay, and travelogue, Reel Bay charts Jana Larson’s unusual journey toward understanding another woman’s life.”

First lines: “If this book were a film, it would open on the black-and-white image of a woman walking alone on a snow-covered road. She is seen from a distance, a dark impression against a frozen backdrop of wheat fields covered in white.”

Big blurb: “I have no idea what the hell this book is—in the best way—except that it’s obsessive and dazzling as it spawns and splits fictions and nonfictions. Expect to be dizzied. Reel Bay vibrates with strangeness.” —Ander Monson

Book notes: Paperback, nonfiction, 296 pages.

Author bio: Jana Larson holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Hamline University, an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California in San Diego, and a BA in anthropology from the University of California in Santa Cruz. As a filmmaker, she has received awards from the Princess Grace Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board and shown her work at festivals and the Walker Art Center. She lives in Minneapolis.

GalleyCrush: Craft in the Real World

9.11.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, forthcoming from Catapult on January 19, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A groundbreaking resource for fiction writers, teachers, and students, this manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.”

First lines: “This book is a challenge to accepted models of craft and workshop, to everything from a character-driven plot to the ‘cone of silence,’ or ‘gag rule,’ that in a creative writing workshop silences the manuscript’s author. The challenge is this: to take craft out of some imaginary vacuum (as if meaning in fiction is separate from meaning in life) and return it to its cultural and historical context.”

Big blurb: “This book is a gift to those writers who’ve felt the tilt of imbalanced power in a workshop, who’ve wondered whose rules they’re following when they write and why, who’ve struggled to tell their stories within a narrow and restrictive tradition. With empathy and keen insight, Matthew Salesses delivers an unflinching critique of the pedagogy of creative writing’s old guard—and models a way of studying and communicating craft that is self-aware, socially engaged, and thrillingly alive.” —Alexandra Kleeman

Book notes: Paperback, nonfiction, 256 pages.

Author bio: Matthew Salesses is the author of three novels, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, The Hundred-Year Flood, and I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, and a forthcoming essay collection. He was adopted from Korea and currently lives in Iowa.

GalleyCrush: Detransition, Baby

9.4.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, forthcoming from One World on January 12, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “A whipsmart debut about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.”

First lines: “The question, for Reese: Were married men just desperately attractive to her? Or was the pool of men who were available to her as a trans woman only those who had already locked down a cis wife and could now ‘explore’ with her?”

Big blurb: “Detransition, Baby is emotionally generous, richly textured, and deeply intelligent—a vibrant and kaleidoscopic portrait of complicated women and their colliding lives.” —Claire Lombardo

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 352 pages.

Author bio: Torrey Peters is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of two novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She also holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a master’s in comparative literature from Dartmouth.

GalleyCrush: Stay Safe

8.28.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Emma Hine’s Stay Safe, forthcoming from Sarabande Books on January 5, 2021.

Perfect pitch: “At the center of this stellar collection are three imaginative sisters who have grown up in a world colored by loss and anticipatory grief, painting their lives with great swathes of anxiety and sadness.”

First lines: “Sometimes when I tell it they fall / and their parents find them twitching / like wrens on the flagstones, grieving / over wings that didn’t work. Oh well.”

Big blurb: “Simply said: this is the renewable energy we’ve been waiting for. So attuned are these poems to their introspective nature and terrors of the self, their wild narratives, and linguistic spells, this book begins to feel like its own solar farm: each page, a panel of skyshine and wonderments.” —Major Jackson

Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 72 pages.

Author bio: Emma Hine is a poet, writer, and freelance editor. Her debut poetry collection, Stay Safe, received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in January 2021. Poems from this collection have recently appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, the Missouri Review, the Offing, the Paris Review, and the Southern Review, among others. Her essays have also been published in Guernica and Poets & Writers Magazine.

GalleyCrush: Crosshairs

8.21.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Catherine Hernandez’s Crosshairs, forthcoming from Atria Books on December 8, 2020.

Perfect pitch: “The author of the acclaimed novel Scarborough weaves an unforgettable and timely dystopian tale about a near-future, where a queer Black performer and his allies join forces to rise up when an oppressive regime gathers those deemed ‘Other’ into concentration camps.”

First lines: “Evan. My beautiful Evan. Here in the darkness of this hiding place, I write you these words. Without paper, without pen, I trace these words in my head, along the perimeter of your outline.”

Big blurb: “Catherine Hernandez is groundbreaking. Her talent is remarkable. I dare you not to cry or scream or marvel or, like me, do all at once while reading this book. This story is a masterpiece of voice and metaphor, image and embodiment. But it is also a perfectly crafted portrait of us now, of us then, of the us we hope to be. I love this book, this big, bright missive that not only breaks the ground, but that gifts us with the steps to take in order to get to the other side, together.” —Cherie Dimaline

Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 272 pages.

Author bio: Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of color, radical mother, theater practitioner, award-winning author, and the artistic director of b current Performing Arts and the Sulong Theatre. She is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian heritage, and she is married into the Navajo Nation. She is the author of the plays Singkil and Kilt Pins, the children’s book M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book, and the novel Scarborough.

GalleyCrush: The Freezer Door

8.14.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, forthcoming from Semiotext(e) on December 8, 2020. Editor’s Note: This book’s publication date has been changed to November 24, 2020.

Perfect pitch: A meditation on the trauma and possibility of searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexual, and social conformity.

First line: “One problem with gentrification is that it always gets worse.”

Big blurb: “Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore puts sex and gender, suffering and gentrification, encounter and solitude, at the center of a book that defies borders and uses language to dive directly into mystery. I admire Sycamore’s gossamer refusal ever to land anywhere definitive; the sentences travel further and further into trauma’s backyard, where complex ideas find a habitat among the simplest formulations. Sycamore, by breathing into the prose, treats the act of book-building as a practice strange and organic as sleeping, walking, bathing, eating. The Freezer Door delves into the philosophy of the sexual meeting place with a virtually unprecedented aplomb.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

Book notes: Paperback, nonfiction, 264 pages.

Author bio: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of three novels and a memoir, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her anthology, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book. Her novel Sketchtasy was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2018. She lives in Seattle.

GalleyCrush: Harmada

7.17.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is João Gilberto Noll’s Harmada, translated from the Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, forthcoming from Two Lines Press on November 10, 2020.

Perfect pitch: A mythic tale of art and displacement nimbly translated from Portuguese by Edgar Garbelotto, Harmada serves as yet another reminder of João Gilberto Noll’s sublime literary power: generous in its mystery; earthbound in its essential urges; and entirely unpredictable.

First lines: “Nobody sees me here. I can lie down on the ground at last, and delight in the earth that has turned to mud after the storm.”

Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 168 pages.

Author bio: João Gilberto Noll (1946–2017) was the author of nearly twenty books. His work appeared in Brazil’s leading periodicals, and he was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation, King’s College London, and the University of California in Berkeley, as well as a Guggenheim fellow. A five-time recipient of the Prêmio Jabuti, and the recipient of more than ten awards in all, he died in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the age of seventy.

Translator bio: Edgar Garbelotto is a writer and translator born in Brazil and based in the United States for the past twenty years. His translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Lord was published by Two Lines Press in 2019. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Asymptote, Ninth Letter, Little Patuxent Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Terra Incognita, written in both Portuguese and English, is his debut novel.

GalleyCrush: Fugitive Atlas

7.10.20

Today’s GalleyCrush is Khaled Mattawa’s

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Author: squong

Date:

August 1, 2021

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