Astra House Spring 2023 Catalog

MISSION

Astra House is dedicated to publishing authors across genres and from around the world.

Founded in 2020, Astra House’s mission is to advocate for authors who experience their subject deeply and personally, and who have a strong point of view; writers who represent multifaceted expressions of intellectual thought and personal experience, and who can introduce readers to new perspectives about their everyday lives as well as the lives of others.

Astra House is the adult trade imprint of Astra Publishing House.

SPRING 2023

Tyriek White

Are a Haunting

TYRIEK WHITE is a writer, teacher, and musician born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He has received fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the New York State Writers Institute. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi.

A poignant debut for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Jamel Brinkley, We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation.

In 1980’s Brooklyn, Key is enchanted with her world, glowing with her dreams. A charming and tender doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood, she lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared. Colly, Key’s grieving son, soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization.

In the present, an expulsion from school forces Colly across town where, feeling increasingly detached and disenchanted with the condition of his community, he begins to realize that he must, ultimately, be accountable to the place he is from. After college, having forged an understanding of friendship, kinship, community, and how to foster love in places where it seems impossible, Colly returns to East New York to work toward addressing structural neglect and the crumbling blocks of New York City public housing he was born to; discovering a collective path forward from the wreckages of the past.

A supernatural family saga, a searing social critique, and a lyrical and potent account of displaced lives, We Are a Haunting unravels the threads connecting the past, present, and future, and depicts the palpable, breathing essence of the neglected corridors of a pulsing city with pathos and poise.

QUOTES

“Tyriek White did not come to play. He is doing something for New York narratives I’ve never seen, and really never imagined. This novel is so New York—so, so New York—yet so deeply southern on lower frequencies. It’s astonishing.”

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and Long Division

Alejandra Oliva

Rivermouth

A CHRONICLE OF LANGUAGE, FAITH, AND MIGRATION

NONFICTION | SOCIAL SCIENCE | IMMIGRATION

ALEJANDRA OLIVA is an essayist, trans lator, immigrant justice advocate, and em broiderer. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, was nominated for a Pushcart prize, and was honored with an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She was the Frankie Fellow at the Yale Whitney Hum manities Center in 2022. Read more at olivalejandra.com

The Undocumented Americans meets Tell Me How It Ends in this chronicle about translation, storytelling, and borders as understood through the United States’ “immigration crisis.”

Alejandra Oliva is Mexican American, her family lineage defined by a long and fluid relationship with the border between Texas and Mexico, each generation born on opposite sides of the Rio Grande. Now a translator advocating for Latin American migrants seeking asylum and citizenship, Oliva knows all too well the gravity of taking someone’s trauma and delivering it in the warped form the immigration system demands.

In Rivermouth, Oliva focuses on the physical spaces that make up different phases of immigration and looks at how language and opportunity move through each of them; from the river as the waterway that separates the United States and Mexico, to the table as the place over which Oliva prepares asylum seekers for their Credible Fear Interviews, and finally, to the wall as the behemoth imposition that runs along America’s southernmost border.

With lush prose and perceptive insight, Oliva encourages readers to approach the painful questions that this crisis poses with equal parts critique and compassion. By which metrics are we measuring who “deserves” American citizenship? What is the point of humanitarian systems that dole out aid distributed conditionally? What do we owe to our most disenfranchised?

Rivermouth is an argument for porosity. Not just for porous borders and a decriminalization of immigration, but for a more open sense of what we owe one another and a willingness to extend radical empathy. As concrete as she is meditative, sharp as she is lyrical, and incisive as she is literary, Oliva argues for a better world while telling us why it’s worth fighting to get there.

Esther Yi Y/N

Surreal, hilarious, and shrewdly poignant—a novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction.

It’s as if her life only began once Moon appeared in it. The desultory copywriting work, the boyfriend, and the want of anything not-Moon quickly fall away when she beholds the idol in concert, where Moon dances as if his movements are creating their own gravitational field; on live streams, as fans from around the world comment in dozens of languages; even on skincare products endorsed by the wildly popular Korean boy band, of which Moon is the youngest, most luminous member. Seized by ineffable desire, our unnamed narrator begins writing Y/N fanfic—in which you, the reader, insert [Your/Name] and play out an intimate relationship with the unattainable star.

Then Moon suddenly retires, vanishing from the public eye. She stumbles into total disorientation. As Y/N flies from Berlin to Seoul to be with Moon, our narrator, too, journeys in search of the object of her love. In Korea, an escalating series of mistranslations and misidentifications land her at the headquarters of the Kafkaesque entertainment company that manages the boyband until, at a secret location, together with Moon at last, art and real life approach their final convergence.

From a conspicuous new talent comes Y/N, a provocative literary debut about the universal longing for transcendence and the tragic struggle to assert one’s singular story amidst the amnesiac effects of globalization. Crackling with the intellectual sensitivity of Elif Batuman and the sinewy absurdism of Thomas Pynchon, Esther Yi’s prose unsettles the boundary between high and mass art, exploding our expectations of a novel about “identity” and offering in its place a sui generis picture of the loneliness that afflicts modern life.

QUOTES

“Sumptuous, precise, and full of pulsing, startling life, Yi captures with finesse the rhythms of internet voyeurism, the corporeality of parasocial desire, and the very heartbeat of contemporary longing.”

—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

“Crisp zeitgeist setups within a transnational now—Esther Yi’s sharp, sculpted paragraphs beat with a hilarious demonheart that’ll make you cry. I loved it.”

—Eugene Lim, author of Search History

William Lee Adams Wild Dances

MY QUEER AND CURIOUS JOURNEY TO EUROVISION

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. A former staff writer at TIME, he’s written about Euro vision for Billboard, the Financial Times, Newsweek, and the New York Times, among others. He lives in south London with his husband and two cats.

For fans of Crying in H Mart and Priestdaddy, William Lee Adams’s memoir Wild Dances tells the story of how a misunderstood queer biracial kid in small-town Georgia became a Eurovision Song Contest commentator.

As a boy, William Lee Adams spent his days taking care of his quadriplegic brother, worrying about his undiagnosed bipolar Vietnamese mother, and steering clear of his openly racist, war veteran father. Too shy and anxious to even speak until he was six years old, it seemed unlikely William would ever leave Georgia. He passed the time alone in his room, studying maps and reading encyclopedias, dreaming of the day he’d leave it all behind.

Decades later, as a journalist in London, William discovers the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual singing competition known for its extravagant performers and cutthroat politics. William is instantly hooked. Initially just a fan, he starts blogging about the contest, ultimately becoming the most sought-after expert. From Albania, Finland, and Ukraine, to Israel, Sweden, and Russia, William is soon jetting across the continent to meet divas, drag queens, and aspiring singers, who welcome him to their beautiful, if dysfunctional, family of choice.

An uplifting memoir about glitz, glamour, geopolitics and finding your people, no matter how far you have to travel,  Wild Dances celebrates the power of pop music to help us heal and forgive.

Yuri Felsen Deceit

TRANSLATED BY BRYAN KARETNYK

FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

HARDCOVER

ISBN:

YURI FELSEN was the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein. Born in St. Petersburg in 1894, he emigrated in the wake of the Russian Revo lution, first to Riga and then to Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1923. In France, he became one of the leading writers ofhis gener ation, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov.

Following the German occupation of France at the height of his career, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland; however, he was caught, arrest ed and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. After his death he fell into obscurity and his work is only now being translated into English.

“This is . . . real literature, pure and honest.”

—Vladimir Nabokov

Once considered the “Russian Proust,” Yuri Felsen tells of an obsessive love affair set in interwar Paris in Deceit, an experimental novel in the form of a diary.

Following the arrival of Bolshevism in his home country, our narrator finds himself living in exile in Paris. When a Berlin-based friend and fellow Russian expat asks him to look out for her niece, the beautiful and clever socialite Lyolya Heard, he is initially hesitant, but intrigued by Lyolya and her well-established reputation. Over the course of the novel, this curiosity devolves into a lustful obsession, as the hot-and-cold Lyolya sends mixed signals while pursuing the many objects of her own affection, none of which seem to be our narrator. In rich and introspective prose, this novel in diary form speaks as truthfully about the timeless problem of unrequited love as it does about the fragile reality of daily life in interwar Europe.

Subtle and profound in its exploration of love, deceit, and betrayal, Felsen’s novel is a daring and highly original work of psychological fiction. Originally published in 1930, Deceit was recently rediscovered in Russia after much of Yuri Felsen’s archive was destroyed by the Nazis.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

BRYAN KARETNYK is a British writer and translator. His recent translations include major works by Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoevtse va and Boris Poplavsky. He is also the editor of the landmark Penguin Classics anthology Russian Émi gré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky.

QUOTES

“Yuri Felsen’s Deceit offers the reader that rarest of gifts: a glimpse into consciousness as it was constructed nearly a hundred years ago; a portrait not only of how one Russian émigré lived in Paris in the first half of the Twentieth Century but of what and how he thought. This is an improbably modern novel in which, to my own surprise, I seemed, again and again, to encounter and recognize myself. —Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation

“As astute as it is disturbed, as callow as it is wise, and as brilliant as it is idiosyncratic, Deceit reads like the twisted love child of Proust and Dostoevsky, but with a genius all its own.” —Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth

Alejandro Varela The People Who Report More Stress

STORIES

ALEJANDRO VARELA (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in The Point magazine Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, Blunderbuss Magazine, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), the Southampton Review and The New Republic. He is a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature and his graduate studies were in public health. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon is a finalist for the National Book Award.

The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of interconnected stories whose characters who are all acutely aware of the stresses that modern life take on the body and the body politic. These stories brim with the anxieties of people who retreat into themselves while living in the margins.

In “Midtown-West Side Story,” Álvaro, a restaurant worker struggling to support his family, begins selling high-end designer clothes to his co-workers, friends, neighbors, and the restaurant’s regulars in preparation for a move to the suburbs as the all-consuming labor ropes his wife and children into the traveling bazaar.

“The Man in 512” tracks Manny, the childcare worker for a Swedish family, as he observes the comings and goings of an affluent co-op building, and the tender, cross-generational friendship between Antonio and Artie, all the while teaching the children Spanish through Selena’s music catalog.

“Comrades” follows a queer man with radical politics who just ended a longterm relationship and is now on the hunt for a life partner. With little patience and tolerance for liberalism, his series of speed dates devolve into awkward confrontations that leave him wondering if his approach is the correct one.

And in “Carlitos in Charge,” a public health researcher finds a job at the United Nations, where, not unlike most of his colleagues, he spends most of his time and sexual prowess trying to get the United States to cooperate with the rest of the international community. In the process, he becomes entangled with Brad, who asks him to betray the country of his forebears, in a convoluted scheme that leaves Carlitos questioning his place at the UN and in the US.

In this collection, Alejandro Varela deftly and poignantly expresses the frustration of knowing the problems and solutions to our society’s inequities, but not being able to respond to them.

QUOTES

“This book is brilliant, layered, funny, and so insightful about the way communities, like hearts, are made and unmade. I loved it.

Alejandro Varela is a marvel.”

—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

“In linked stories driven by frenzied interior monologue and roving analytical glee . . . The People Who Report More Stress dissects the minutiae of relationships to self, city, space, and sensibility so we don’t numbly succumb to the ‘structured order of things.’”

—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door

Kyung-Sook Shin

Went To See My Father

TRANSLATED BY ANTON HUR

KYUNG-SOOK SHIN is one of South Korea’s most widely read and acclaimed novelists. She has been awarded the Manhae Grand Prize for Literature, the Dong-in Literature Prize, the Yi Sang Literary Prize, and many others, including France’s Prix de l’Inaperçu and Man Asian Literary Prize. Shin is the author of eight novels, eight short story collections, and three essay collections, including the New York Times-bestselling Please Look After Mom, which has been published in over forty coun tries. She currently lives in Seoul.

An instant bestseller in Korea and the follow up to the international bestseller, Please Look After Mom; centering on a woman’s efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets.

Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father only appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter. Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father’s past and reconstructs her own family history.

Consumed with her own grief, Hon had been blind to her father’s vulnerability and her family’s fragility. Unraveling secret after secret and thanks to conversations with loving family and friends, Hon grows closer to her father, who proves to be more complex than she ever gave him credit for. After living through one of the most tumultuous times in Korean history, her father’s life was once vibrant and ambitious, but spiraled during the postwar years. Now, after years of emotional isolation, Hon learns the whole truth, from her father’s affair and involvement in a cult, to the dynamic lives of her own siblings, to her family’s financial hardships.

What Hon uncovers about her father builds towards her understanding of the great scope of his sacrifice and heroism, and of her country as a whole. More than just the portrait of a single man, I Went to See My Father opens a window onto humankind, family, loss, and war. With this longawaited follow-up to Please Look After Mom—flawlessly rendered by award-winning translator Anton Hur—Kyung-Sook Shin has crafted an ambitious, global, epic, and lasting novel.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

ANTON HUR was dou ble-longlisted and shortlist ed for the 2022 International Booker Prize for his translation of Cursed Bunny (2017) by Bora Chung and Love in the Big City (2019) by Sang Young Park. He lives in Seoul.

QUOTES

“An insightful contemplation of memory and connectedness between family members. Shin threads together a lyrical family drama and the multilayered spectrum of Korean history in a compelling epic. It is not only a story of love and pain between father and daughter, but of how memories can heal tragic wounds and restore damaged relationships. A powerful, elegant, pageturner.”

—J.M. Lee, author of Broken Summer

“I Went to See My Father shows us an entire generation that suffered through war, in the single character of a father, a modest cattle farmer. Just as Shin’s Please Look After Mom gives a voice to the forgotten mother, this novel vividly shows the father as a figure whom we often overlook.

Through a narrative so true as to be almost autobiographical, Shin guides us on a journey of heartache to literary catharsis.” —Sang Young Park, author of Love in the Big City

Brad Fox The Bathysphere Book

EFFECTS OF THE LUMINOUS OCEAN DEPTHS

BRAD FOX is a writer, journalist, translator, and former relief contrac tor living in New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, and other venues. His novel To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press, 2020) was a finalist for the Big Other Fiction award and a staff pick at the Paris

A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives, The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new.

In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.

From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths, The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America, as the first great skyscrapers rose above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical, atmospheric, and entirely engrossing, Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home, delighting in tales of the colorful characters who surrounded, supported, and participated in the dives—from groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.

The Bathysphere Book is a hypnotic assemblage of brief chapters along with over fifty full-color images, records from the original bathysphere logbooks, and the moving story of surreptitious romance between Beebe and Hollister that anchors their exploration. Brad Fox blurs the line between poetry and research, unearthing and rendering a visionary meeting with the unknown.

Theodore McCombs

Uranians

THEODORE McCOMBS’s stories have appeared in Guernica, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the anthology Best American Science Fic tion and Fantasy Born in Thousand Oaks, California, he is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, U.C. Berkeley School of Law, and the Clarion Writers Workshop. He lives in San Diego with his partner and their surly old cat.

At the end of the Victorian era, a handful of public intellectuals advocated for tolerance of the “Uranian”—a man who loved other men. Some went so far as to propose that these “intermediate sexes” might, in fact, constitute a totally different species, even serve as intrepid guides in our march toward an uncertain future.

The five speculative stories in Theodore McCombs’s kaleidoscopic collection span several possible worlds, teasing the boundaries between coexisting realities and taking up the question of queer difference from one surprising vantage after another. In “Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” a heartbroken gay man waits in line at an exclusive Berlin rave promising visions of parallel lives across the multiverse. In “Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women,” at the turn of an alternate 20th century, a policeman’s wife feels that if you want an execution done right, you just have to do it yourself. And in the operatic novella “Uranians,” an expedition of queer artists, scientists, and one trans priest embark on a lifelong interplanetary voyage that requires them to renegotiate their connections to a remote and hostile Earth, while keeping their ship’s biome—and each other— alive.

Each story unfolds with the depth and complexity of an entire universe; each is inhabited by characters learning to divest from a society that has marked and rejected them. Discerning which dreams of Western civilization to hold fast to and which to leave behind, these outsiders set their gazes on new horizons and prepare for the changes to come. Arch but tender, clear-eyed and compassionate, Uranians brilliantly illustrates the vital role that queerness plays in every possible version of our world.

QUOTES

“I have been waiting for this sumptuous, prismatic collection for literal years.

Theodore McCombs is a poet of queer pasts, presents, and futures, and Uranians is a formidable debut.”

—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“The whole collection hangs together as form and content, mind and heart.

Beautiful work.”

—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry For the Future

Victoria Kielland My Men

BY DAMION SEARLS

VICTORIA KIELLAND’s first book, the 2013 short prose collection I lyngen (In the Heath er) was shortlisted for the Tarjei Vesaas debutant prize. In 2016, Kielland’s first novel Dammyr (Marsh Pond) was shortlisted for the Youth Critics’ Prize and the literary committee of the Norwegian Authors’ Union awarded her the Norwegian Booksellers’ primary writer’s scholarship. My Men is her breakthrough novel, published to rave reviews in Norway in 2021, as well as a huge international success with more foreign sales.

“This fascinating, off-kilter novel about a female serial killer is an unexpectedly thrilling read.” —Karl Ove Knausgård, author of My Struggle and The Morning Star

“Based on the true story of Norwegian maid Belle Gunness, 19th-century America’s most notorious serial killer with a body count of at least fourteen men, My Men is a fictional account of one broken woman’s descent into inescapable madness.

Among thousands of other Norwegian immigrants seeking freedom, Brynhild emigrated to the American Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century, changing her name and her life. As Bella, later Belle Gunness, she came in search of not only fortune and true faith but, most of all, love.

From Victoria Kielland, a rising star of Norwegian literature and already the winner of several major prizes there, comes My Men, a literary reimagining of the harrowing true story of Belle Gunness, who slowly but irreversibly turned to senseless murder for release from her pain, becoming America’s first known female serial killer. In pursuit of her American Dream, Kielland’s Belle grows increasingly alienated, ruthless, and perversely compelling. Raw, visceral, and altogether hypnotic, My Men is a brutal yet radically empathetic glimpse into the world of a woman consumed by desire.”

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

DAMION SEARLS

a trans

from German, French,

a writer

Dutch

Erika Kobayashi

STORIES

TRANSLATED BY BRIAN BERGSTROM

ERIKA KOBAYASHI is a novelist and visual artist based in Tokyo. Her novel Breakfast with Ma dame Curie published in 2014 by Shueisha, was shortlisted for both the Mishima and the Akutagawa Prize. The English translation of her novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity was published by Astra House in 2022.

A collection of nuclear and contemplative short stories examining the visible and invisible consequences of atomic power on Japanese society.

Sunrise is a collection of interconnected stories continuing Erika Kobayashi’s examination of the effects of nuclear power on generations of women. Connecting changes to everyday life to the development of the atomic bomb, Sunrise shows us how the discovery of radioactive power has shaped our history and continues to shape our future.

In the opening, eponymous story “Sunrise,” Yoko, born just days after Nagasaki was decimated, mirrors her life to the development of nuclear power in Japan. In “Precious Stones,” four daughters take their elderly mother to the restorative waters of a radium spring, exchanging tales of immortality. In “Hello My Baby, Hello My Honey,” a woman goes into labor during the final days of WWII. And finally, “The Forest of Wild Birds” shows Erika visiting the site of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, touring grounds that were once covered in green.

In this collection, Brian Bergstrom’s nimble translations bring Kobayashi’s speculative, striking, and unsettling prose to life in English. Here, we’re forced to reckon with the lasting effects of our known and unknown history and left to question how much of our everyday life is influenced by forces out of our control.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

BRIAN BERGSTROM is a lecturer and translator currently based in Montréal after living in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. His writings and translations have appeared in publications including Granta Asymptote Aperture Lit Hub Mechademia, Japan Forum positions: asia critique, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories He is the editor and principal translator of We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM Press), which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.

Wang Xiaobo Pleasure of Thinking

TRANSLATED BY YAN YAN

WANG XIAOBO was born in Beijing in 1952 and died of a heart attack on April 11, 1997. Xiaobo taught at Beijing University and Renmin University of China and became a freelance writer in 1992. His novels Golden Age and The Future World won the United Daily News (Taiwan) Award for Novel twice. He is also the author of the essay collections A Maverick Pig and The Silent Majority and the novels Golden Age Silver Age, and Running Away at Night.

A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the post-Tiananmen generation.

This newly translated English collection of Wang Xiaobo’s most influential nonfiction pieces also includes rare diary entries offering insight into the author’s time studying in the United States. From his personal take on the intellectual failures of China’s Cultural Revolution era to musings about the future of the internet and science fiction cinema, Wang Xiaobo prods his readers, in a gentle, humorous way, to think about what it means to think.

In between, he questions the social sciences and offers his own understanding of how they should be practiced. Several pieces focus on literature, with notable essays devoted to Italo Calvino, Bertrand Russell, and Ernest Hemingway, whom Wang admired greatly. Other pieces are more personal in nature, ranging from vignettes on life in the United States, to a meditation on getting mugged, to the consideration of the question: why do I write? Like his fiction, Wang’s nonfiction is never about one thing in particular, often juxtaposing and drawing parallels among disparate discourses. But taken together, his essays and fiction all coalesce toward a sort of intellectual optimism that brilliantly anticipates Chinese thought in the 21st century.

A companion to Golden Age, Pleasure of Thinking by Wang Xiaobo contains essays, travelogs, book reviews, and more. As well known in China for his essays as for his novellas, Wang’s nonfiction pieces offer a key to understanding his at times enigmatic fiction. His central thesis—the importance of independent and critical thinking—is accessible and thought-provoking to readers of all backgrounds.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

YAN YAN graduated from Columbia Uni versity in 2008 with degrees in English and religious studies. His translations in clude works by Hans Christian Andersen Award–winner Cao Wenxuan, including the Dingding and Dangdang series, XiMi, and Mountain Goats Don’t Eat Heav en’s Grass, as well as updated editions of Grass House and Bronze Sunflower, for China Children’s Press & Publication Group.

QUOTES

Wang Xiaobo steeped himself in the literatures of East and West, and the blending of influences— including Proust and Twain—makes for a searingly funny and fearless narration full of brilliant headlong riffs on sex, time, history and the terrifying absurdities of the Cultural Revolution. Bawdy, earthy, cerebral, outrageous, bleakly hilarious and off-handedly brave, this novel is like nothing else.”

—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Subject Steve

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

The Sex Lives of African Women

SELF-DISCOVERY, FREEDOM, AND HEALING

NANA DARKOA SEKYIAMAH is a feminist activist, writer, and blogger. She is also co-founder of Adven tures from the Bedrooms of African Women, a website, podcast and festival that publishes and creates content that tells stories of African women’s experiences around sex, sexualities, and pleasure. She lives in Accra, Ghana.

“The Sex Lives of African Women explores the ways African women have sought freedom, pleasure and healing through their sexual experiences . . . has sparked a debate across the region and the African diaspora.”

New York Times

“Touching, joyful, defiant—and honest.”

The Economist, a best book of the year

Celebrate African women’s unique journeys toward sexual pleasure and liberation in this empowering, subversive collection of intimate stories.

In these confessional pages, women control their own bodies and desires, work toward healing their painful pasts, and learn to assert their sexual power. Weaving a rich tapestry of experiences with a sex positive outlook, The Sex Lives of African Women is an empowering, subversive book that celebrates the liberation, individuality, and joy of African women’s multifaceted sexuality.

From a queer community in Egypt, to polyamorous life in Senegal, and a reflection on the intersection of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, feminist author Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah explores the many layers of love and desire, its expression, and how it defines who we are.

Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex for her blog, “Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women.” For this book she spoke to over 30 African women across the globe while chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom.

QUOTES

“Dazzling . . . the tone is hopeful, resilient and accepting. Marked by the diversity of experiences shared, the wealth of intimate details, and the total lack of sensationalism, this is an astonishing report on the quest for sexual liberation.”

Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is changing the way African women talk about sex.” —Harper’s BAZAAR

Alejandro Varela

The Town of Babylon

ALEJANDRO VARELA (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in The Point magazine, Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Rumpus, Joyland Magazine, The Brook lyn Rail, The Offing, Blunderbuss Magazine, Pariahs (an anthology, SFA Press, 2016), the Southampton Review, and The New Republic He is a 2019 Jerome Fellow in Literature and his graduate studies were in public health. His debut novel, The Town of Babylon is a finalist for the National Book Award.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FICTION

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022

by The New York Times

In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity—Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people from his past, some of whom he once called friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

QUOTES

“A gay Latinx man reckons with his past when he returns home for his 20th high school class reunion in Varela’s dazzling debut . . . an incandescent bildungsroman.”

—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review,

“Unsparing yet big-hearted, The Town of Babylon will delight anyone who’s ever dreaded a school reunion—or believed they’d outgrown a community. Varela throws open the closet of queer suburban adolescence with verve, empathy, and insight. A deeply moving debut.”

—Julian Lucas, staff writer, The New Yorker

Erika Kobayashi

Trinity, Trinity, Trinity

TRANSLATED BY BRIAN BERGSTROM

ERIKA KOBAYASHI is a novelist and visual artist based in Tokyo. Her novel Breakfast with Ma dame Curie published in 2014 by Shueisha, was shortlisted for both the Mishima and the Akutagawa Prize. Trinity, Trinity, Trinity is her latest novel.

A literary thriller about the effects of nuclear power on the mind, body, and recorded history of three generations of Japanese women.

Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, Japan is preparing for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a cold, sterile room, unable to recall her past. Across the country, the elderly begin to hear voices emanating from black stones, compelling them to behave in strange and unpredictable ways. The voices are a symptom of a disease called “Trinity.”

As details about the disease come to light, we encounter a thread of linked histories—Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, the discovery of radiation, the nuclear arms race, the subsequent birth of nuclear energy, and the disaster in Fukushima. The thread linking these events begins to unravel in the lead-up to a terrorist attack at the Japan National Olympic Stadium.

A work of speculative fiction reckoning with the consequences of the past and continued effects of nuclear power, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity follows the lives of three generations of women as they grapple with the legacy of mankind’s quest for light and power.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

BRIAN BERGSTROM is a lecturer and translator currently based in Montréal after living in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. His writings and translations have appeared in publica tions including Granta, Asymptote Aper ture, Lit Hub, Mechademia, Japan Forum positions: asia critique, and The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. He is the editor and principal translator of We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM Press), which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award.

QUOTES

“Delicately weaves generations of women to the lasting wounds of nuclear destruction and the hubris of war. A unique and unforgettable novel.”

—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Woman of Light

“This compelling novel weaves together the past, the present, and a possible future in a panoply of memory, experience, and social unrest . . . examines the shifting sands of memory and interconnected identity in a fluid landscape shaped by nuclear radiation, social media, and social connection. Highly recommended.”

—Henry Bankhead, Library Journal, starred review