Archives de catégorie : Literary

BLACK WINE de Candas Jane Dorsey

Winner of the IAFA Crawford, the James Tiptree, Jr., and the Aurora awards, BLACK WINE beckons readers into a stark and richly realized world similar to yet very different from our own, to explore the many ways a woman can be cut off from her own history.

BLACK WINE
by Candas Jane Dorsey
Open Road Media, June 2023
(via The Rights Factory)

An amnesiac slave girl struggles to learn about her past—and secure a future outside the oppressive society that binds her. A female adventurer confronts danger as she searches for her lost mother. A wife struggles within a marriage to a man she does not want. How does a woman survive, maintain her sense of self in such a place? A world of female characters whose emotional journeys are intimately intertwined, where identity and history, language and perception, sexuality and oppression, unite them in their search for meaning, human connection, and ultimately, freedom.

Winner of James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Crawford Award, Prix Aurora Award. Originally published by Tor Books.

“As brilliant as William Gibson, as complex as Gene Wolfe, with a humanity and passion all her own. Candas Jane Dorsey isn’t just a comer, she’s a winner. ” —Ursula K. Le Guin

“A tantalizing, distinctive, sexy, and beautifully rendered first novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

Candas Jane Dorsey is an award-winning speculative and crime fiction novelist. The author of four novels (soon to be five), two short story collections and four books of poetry, her work has won the Otherwise Award (formerly the James Tiptree Jr. Award), the William L. Crawford Award, the Aurora Prize and the Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery from the Crime Writers of Canada.

RED SMOKING MIRROR de Nick Hunt

A bravura re-imagining of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, from a prize-winning writer.

RED SMOKING MIRROR
by Nick Hunt
Swift Press, July 2023
(via Randle Editorial and Literary)

The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb.
For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma’s breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea…
A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, RED SMOKING MIRROR is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

Nick Hunt has walked and written across much of Europe. He has written a loose trilogy of books about walking in Europe, the first two of which were shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His articles have appeared in The Economist, the Guardian and elsewhere, and he works as an editor for the Dark Mountain Project. RED SMOKING MIRROR is his first novel.

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS de Leyna Krow

A darkly fabulist story collection about women’s choices, complicity, and power and the lack thereof (with screen rights to the title story « Sinkhole » sold to Jordan Peele and Universal).

SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS
by Leyna Krow
Viking, Summer 2024
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan)

Credit: Young Kwak photo

From a genie, a devil, time travelers, a thief in peril, an oversized baby, an exploding woman, a woman with an impossible sinkhole in her yard, a woman who gives birth to a wild child, and more, this collection explores women in power – or in a deficit of power — to confront questions of complicity and intent, hysteria, paranoia, and what makes us whole in a world with relative values. With unsettling insight and echoes of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link and Laura van den Berg, SINKHOLE, AND OTHER INEXPLICABLE VOIDS traces peripheral, upside down spaces in which sometimes there is a choice to be made, rules to be broken, risks to be tried, even crimes to be had, for the sake of a woman’s unconditional freedom.

Leyna Krow’s first collection I’M FINE, BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE SINKING (Featherproof Books, 2017) was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. Krow lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband and two children. She is at work on her second novel

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES d’Andrew Krivak

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming from Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak.

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Press, May 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.
After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.
In spare, breathtaking prose, LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES  is the freestanding, culminating novel in Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which began with The Sojourn and The Signal Flame. It is a story about borders drawn within families as well as around nations, and redrawn by ethnicity, prejudice, and war. It is also a tender story of love and how it is tested by duty, loyalty, and honor.

“Subtle and nuanced.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Krivak’s resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Krivak impresses with this layered story of deferred homecomings and the elusive nature of peace.” —Publishers Weekly

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Bear, a Mountain Book Competition winner and NEA Big Read selection, and the novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

AMERICA FANTASTICA de Tim O’Brien

An American Master returns: The author of The Things They Carried delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery by a disgraced journalist sparks a cross-country chase through a nation corroded by shameless delusion and deceit.

AMERICA FANTASTICA
by Tim O’Brien
Mariner Books/HarperCollins, October 2023

At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in northern California.
“How much is on hand, would you say?” he asked the teller. “I’ll want it all.”
“You’re robbing me?”
“Not you,” Boyd replied, revealing a Temptation .38 Special.
Angie Bing, the teller, scraped together $81,000.
Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag. “I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to take a ride with me. …”
So begins the adventure of Boyd Halverson—star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JC Penny manager—and his irrepressible hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday Boyd and Angie reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police. 
AMERICA FANTASTICA marks the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. Just as O’Brien’s modern classic, The Things They Carried, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, AMERICA FANTASTICA  puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.

Tim O’Brien received the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. Among his other books are The Things They Carried, Pulitzer finalist and a New York Times Book of the Century and In the Lake of the Woods, winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. He was awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing in 2013.