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.
Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the humans around her, and compelled to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire now imprisoned in the shape of a man, perpetually restless and free-spirited. Having met as two unlikely immigrants in 1899 Manhattan, their lives have become deeply intertwined, but they must decide what, exactly, they mean to each other—all while living disguised as humans, constantly fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters. Meanwhile, Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad has left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe for her own untreatable condition. And in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem that she names Yossele. When she is sent to an uptown orphanage, the hulking golem will become her only friend and companion. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the 20th century to the beginning of World War I, THE HIDDEN PALACE follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their own natures and desires conspire to tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other creatures of their own kinds?
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the bonds that held all the various nations of Eastern Europe together as Soviet satellites have dissolved, calling into question what exactly connects them, and whether there was ever any such place to begin with. But, Mikanowski argues, there really was something more to Eastern Europe than shared political subjection. Eastern Europe had a particular character, and this book will name and describe the peculiar flavor of the place, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev. Part history, part travelogue, part reading of the disparate canon of Eastern European literature, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE will be a work in the tradition of Ian Frazier’s