The story of a Chinese father and daughter in the late 19th-century American West: the daughter as she searches for her father, the father as he seeks a new life in a difficult land.
STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE
by Chun Ye
Catapult, Fall 2023
A deeply felt generational story of little-known immigrant history in the vein of Pachinko, STRAW DOGS OF THE UNIVERSE considers what makes or breaks the ties of family, and shows the strength and courage it takes to survive in a new world.
Ye Chun (first name: Chun, surname: Ye) is a former NEA Literature Fellow and a three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize for poetry or fiction. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. Her short stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, and The Georgia Review, among other places. She has published two books of poetry: Travel Over Water and Lantern Puzzle, which won the Berkshire Prize. Her novel in Chinese,《海上的桃树》(Peach Tree in the Sea) was published by People’s Literature Publishing House in 2011. She has published three volumes of translations, including Ripened Wheat: Selected Poems of Hai Zi, shortlisted for the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Award, and Long River: Poems by Yang Jian. Her translation of Li-Young Lee’s Behind My Eyes and Undressing came out in 2019 from People’s Literature Publishing House, and her translation of Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches at Providence College.
The haunting stories in HAO follow Chinese women in both China and America attempting to find language to navigate not only the immigrant experience but the strange continent of motherhood. Confronted with vast silences of gender and identity and trauma, these characters search for words to form fragile intimacies across alien or inhospitable landscapes. In the title story, “Hao,” a persecuted teacher attempts to survive the Cultural Revolution through a word game she plays with her daughter. In “Crazy English,” a woman who comes to America on a fiancée visa struggles with her anxiety around the English language and the looming menace of a stalker. In “A Drawer,” an illiterate teen mother in mid-20th Century wartime China tries to invent a language for herself through drawing.
Sam Easton―a true survivor―is home from Afghanistan, trying to rebuild a life in his hometown of LA. Separated from his wife, bartending and therapy sessions are what occupy his days and nights. When friend and colleague Melody Traeger is beaten by her boyfriend, she turns to Sam for help. When the boyfriend turns up dead the next day, a hard case like Sam is the perfect suspect. But LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan, whose brother recently died serving overseas, is sympathetic to Sam’s troubles, and can’t quite see him as a killer. She’s more interested in the secrets Melody might be keeping and the developments in another murder case on the other side of town. Set in an LA where real people live and work—not the superficial LA of Beverly Hills or the gritty underbelly of the city—DEEP INTO THE DARK features two really engaging, dynamic main characters and explores the nature of obsession, revenge, and grief.
Fourteen years ago, Delphine abandoned her prestigious soloist spot at the Paris Opera Ballet for a new life in St. Petersburg—taking with her a secret that could upend the lives of her best friends, fellow dancers Lindsay and Margaux. Now thirty-six years old, Delphine has returned to her former home and to the legendary Palais Garnier Opera House, to choreograph the ballet that will kickstart the next phase of her career—and, she hopes, finally make things right with her former friends. But Delphine quickly discovers that things have changed while she’s been away…and some secrets can’t stay buried forever. Moving between the trio’s adolescent years and the present day, THE BALLERINAS explores the complexities of female friendship, the dark drive towards physical perfection in the name of artistic expression, the double-edged sword of ambition and passion, and the sublimated rage that so many women hold inside—all culminating in a twist you won’t see coming, with magnetic characters you won’t soon forget.
Beginning in his own hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader through an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned maximum security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, HOW THE WORD IS PASSED illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.