Astra House Fall 2022 Rights Catalog

RIGHTS LIST

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.

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT WWW.ASTRAHOUSE.COM

FOREIGN RIGHTS HANDLED BY 2 SEAS AGENCY: MARLEEN.SEEGERS@2SEASAGENCY.COM

CHRYSOTHEMIS.ARMEFTI@2SEASAGENCY.COM

Esther Yi

Y/N - 6

Alejandra Oliva

Rivermouth - 8

William Lee Adams

Wild Dances - 10

Alejandro Varela

The People Who Report More Stress - 12

Brad Fox

The Bathysphere Book - 14

Theodore McCombs

Uranians - 16

Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Candelaria - 18

Adam Soto

Concerning Those Who Have Fallen

Asleep - 20

Vanessa A. Bee

Home Bound - 23

Recent Acquisitions - 25

Derecka Purnell

Becoming Abolitionists - 30

Li Juan

Winter Pasture - 32

Nasim Marashi

I’ll Be Strong For You - 34

Yu Xiuhua

Moonlight Rests On My Left Palm - 36

Okezie Nwọka

God of Mercy - 38

Shen Fuyu

The Artisans - 40

WORLD RIGHTS

Esther Yi Y/N

A NOVEL

FICTION

ON SALE March 21, 2023

192pp

For readers of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and The Emissary by Yoko Tawada

RIGHTS HELD: World

RIGHTS SOLD: UK (Europa Editions, preempt), Italy (Edizioni E/O, preempt)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ESTHER YI was born in Los Angeles, USA, in 1989. She lives in Leipzig, Germany.

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

“It’s an astonishing debut. Unlike anything I’ve ever read before. I certainly loved the voice right from the off, and laughed out loud with delight at several sentences. I adore both the bonkerness of it and the novel’s deep seriousness, more Kafka than magic realism, but with more humour, perhaps more like Lewis Carroll in that the author conjures up an entirely plausible parallel reality.”

—Christopher Potter, Editorial Director

Europa Editions UK

“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

Alejandra Oliva Rivermouth

A CHRONICLE OF LANGUAGE, FAITH, AND MIGRATION

NONFICTION

ON SALE June 20, 2023

320pp

For readers of The Undocumented Americans and The Distance Between Us and fans of Anne Boyer and Maggie Nelson.

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 are 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.

William Lee Adams Wild Dances

MY QUEER AND CURIOUS JOURNEY TO EUROVISION

NONFICTION/ MEMOIR

ON SALE May 9, 2023

288pp

For readers of Minor Feelings Born a Crime, and Night Sky With Exit Wounds and fans of authors like George M. Johnson and Michael Arcenaux.

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WILLIAM LEE ADAMS is an award-winning journalist and broad caster. A former staff writer at TIME, he’s written about Eurovision for Billboard the Financial Times News week, 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; How a misunderstood queer biracial kid in small-town Georgia became a Eurovision Song Contest commentator; A memoir combining race, glitz, glamour, geopolitics, and the power of pop music.

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’s six years old, it seems unlikely William will ever leave Georgia. He passes the time alone in his room, studying maps and reading encyclopedias, dreaming of the day he’ll leave all of this 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.

Alejandro Varela The People Who Report More Stress

STORIES

FICTION

ON SALE April 4, 2023

256pp

For readers of A Lucky Man and Heads of the Colored People and fans of Bryan Washington and Jenny Zhang.

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

“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

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 intothemselves 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 long-term 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, 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.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

The Town of Babylon

“[An] intimate debut novel.”—The New York Times

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 that they take when they fail us.

QUOTES

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

Alejandro Vaerlo is a marvel.”

—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Brad Fox The Bathysphere

Book

EFFECTS OF THE LUMINOUS OCEAN DEPTHS

NONFICTION/ MEMOIR

ON SALE May 16, 2023

320pp

61 full color images included

For fans of Undrowned The Brilliant Abyss, and The Book of Eels. For fans of visually rich nature documentaries: My Octopus Teacher, Planet Earth.

RIGHTS HELD: World

RIGHTS SOLD: UK (Pushkin Press), Germany (WBG)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

A gorgeous account of William Beebe’s 1930 Bathysphere expedition, the first-ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly environment 3,024 feet below sea level.

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 attached to a steel cable that unrolled off the side of the vessel and plunged into the sea, sinking 3000 feet. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-anda-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, sat Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her excitedly, describing bizarre creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color. Hollister, listening amid rocking waves, tried to get down everything she heard.

The story of The Bathysphere Book springs from the original expedition logbooks—the first eyewitness account of the deep ocean. They possess a strange poetry, scientific vocabulary shot through with the thrill of the new, and an erotic charge due to the illicit affair Hollister and Beebe were carrying on. The expedition launched from an expansive, transforming America, as streetlights came on in New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. Backers ranged from eugenicist conservatives to billionaire socialists, while the expedition staff was a ragtag team of eccentrics who socialized with iconic figures of the period, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The bathysphere was the subject of much media attention and made the team famous. Prefiguring NASA’s blue marble photograph, the first images of the deep ocean offered a new sense of the planetary. The book will include archival images as well as a few reproductions of illustrations by expedition artists.

The Bathysphere Book delights in the human drama that surrounds this groundbreaking move into the deep ocean, a story of one visionary encounter with the unknown.

IMAGES

Theodore McCombs

Uranians

STORIES

FICTION/STORIES

ON SALE May 30, 2023

288pp

Fans of queer fiction with genre elements: Car men Maria Machado, Morgan Thomas, Helen Oyeyemi. Readers of high-concept literary fiction with allegorical criticisms of society: Ted Chiang, Nana Adjei-Brenyah, Karen Russell. Readers of speculative fiction about climate catastrophe like Jeff Vandermeer and Black Mirror–esque para bles about tech like The Circle by Dave Eggers

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THEODORE MCCOMBS’s stories have appeared in Guernica, The Magazine of Fantasy Science Fiction, and the anthol ogy Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Born in Thousand Oaks, Cali fornia, 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.

For readers of Ted Chiang and Karen Russell, a genre-defying debut story collection that explores the essential role of queerness in this and every other possible world.

At the end of the Victorian era, a handful of forward-thinking public intellectuals advocated for societal tolerance of the “Uranian”—a man who loved other men—wondering if these “intermediate sexes” might in fact constitute totally different beings, even hopeful guides toward the future.

The six stories in Theodore McComb’s kaleidoscopic debut 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 “Towards a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles,” a heartbroken young man stands in line at an exclusive underground gay nightclub promising visions of parallel lives across the multiverse. In Boston, at the turn of a very different 20th century, a domineering matron-cum-hangman feels that if you want things done right, you’ll just have to do them yourself. Finally, in the titular novella “Uranians,” an expedition of queer artists, scientists, and one transgender priest are on a lifelong interplanetary voyage that requires them to renegotiate their connections to a remote and hostile Earth, while keeping their ship’s biome alive in the harsh void of space.

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

Melissa LozadaOliva Candelaria

FICTION / HISPANIC & LATINO

ON SALE Fall 2023

223pp

For fans of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, Her Body & Other Parties, Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Sorrow

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MELISSA LOZADA-OLIVA is the child of Guatemalan and Colombian immigrants. She co-hosts the podcast Say More and holds an MFA from NYU in poetry. Her writing has been featured in Remezcla, PAPER, The Guardian, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, Wirecutter, Vulture, Bustle, Glamour, The Huffington Post, Muzzle Magazine The Poetry Project, Audible, and BBC Mundo She is from Massachusetts and lives in New York City.

A deadly earthquake eerily similar to one in 1976 that left Guatemala in ruins leaves all of Massachusetts in shambles and sets off a larger global apocalypse. Strange creatures emerge from the earth’s broken surface and begin to wreak havoc. Meanwhile an elderly Guatemalan grandmother named Candelaria ‘Candy” Garcia is determined to make her way to her estranged daughter Lucia, who is twenty miles out of the city in the suburbs. Taking place over the course of one day, Candy follows the 88-year-old grandmother’s reflections on past mistakes and losses as she treks through charred roads and highways to get to her family. As her journey unfolds, the narrative also includes perspectives from Lucia and Lucia’s own three daughters.

A sweeping, mystical intergenerational novel about mothers and daughters, Candelaria explores the far reaches of historical trauma, how myths of the past can pre-determine one’s present, and how one can strive to break those cycles and define one’s own futures despite the looming end of the world.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Dreaming of You

One of The Millions “Most Anticipated” books and a Harper’s BAZAAR must read of 2021

“The novel is narrated in verse, a device that could feel gimmicky in less capable hands than Lozada-Oliva’s, but instead melds with the macabre-yet-gossipy subject matter to create an unforgettable portrait of a public figure who to many seemed larger than life.”

—Emma Specter, Vogue

A macabre novel in verse of loss, longing, and identity crises following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead.

Playfully morbid and profoundly candid, an interrogation of Latinidad, womanhood, obsession, and disillusionment, Dreaming of You grapples with the cost of being seen for your truest self.

Adam Soto

Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep

GHOST STORIES

FICTION

ON SALE September 27, 2022

272 pp

For readers of literary horror, thriller and science fiction writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Silvia Maria Moreno, Gabino Iglesias, and Sarah Moss.

RIGHTS HELD: World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A collection of short stories moving through time and place, exploring the spaces where we haunt each other and ourselves through our choices, our institutions, and our dreams.

Adam Soto, author of the debut novel This Weightless World, which Robin Sloan called “The social novel for the 21st century,” returns with Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep.

In the title story, a one-armed Harlem Hellfighter goes in search of his specially altered military uniform while Influenza ravages Philadelphia. In “Sleepy Things,” a man is bound to the bedside of his comatose girlfriend who haunts his mother’s dreams. In “Wren & Riley,” a couple travels to Wyoming to visit a childhood friend who killed her abusive husband. And in “The Vegetable Church,” a pair of Syrian sisters, refugees of the civil war, find themselves at a crossroads in the home of their European hosts while their dead father whispers to them words of comfort and guidance.

Sorrowful, funny, and surreal, the stories in Concerning Those Who Have Fallen Asleep unpack and examine, in Soto’s signature style, the devices of genre fiction. The ghosts haunting these pages are sometimes literal—the kind that haunt from beyond the grave— but are just as often metaphorical—ghosts of guilt and longing, suppressed desires, and past lives.

ALSO AVAILABLE:

This Weightless World

A Locus Magazine “2021 Recommended Reading”

A literary debut subverting classic sci-fi tropes set in gentrified Chicago, Silicon Valley, and across the vastness of the cosmos.

From the streets of gentrified Chicago, to the tech boom corridors of Silicon Valley, This Weightless World follows a revolving cast of characters after alien contact upends their lives.

QUOTES

“An imaginative and otherworldly collection. [...] In these well-crafted stories, Soto evocatively shows how the characters are at turns mystified by inexplicable experiences or haunted by burdensome pasts. [...] Readers will be enriched by the way this work thoroughly investigates the human heart.”

Publishers Weekly

“Adam Soto is the metaphysical detective for our dissonant era, and every one of these stories is a new type of ghost he shines a light on, in this portable haunted house of a short story collection. An exhilarating ride, to be read throwback-style: chain-smoking under a pale moon, in black and white.”

—Fernando A. Flores, author of Hog Peninsula and Rio Grande Split

ADAM SOTO Adam Soto is the web editor of American Short Fiction. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former Mi chener-Copernicus Foundation Fellow. His first novel, This Weightless World was published by Astra House in 2021.

WORLD ENGLISH RIGHTS

Home Bound Vanessa A. Bee

AN UPROOTED DAUGHTER’S REFLECTIONS ON BELONGING

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR/ NONFICTION

ON SALE October 11, 2022

256pp

For readers of Yellow House I’m Telling The Truth But I’m Lying, and In The Dream House

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VANESSA A. BEE is a consumer protection lawyer, essayist, and editor of Current Affairs magazine. Born in Cameroon, she grew up in France, England, and the United States. Vanessa holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Nevada and a law degree from Harvard. She lives in Washington, D.C.

“Bee’s lyrical, emotive prose takes readers through her life with an intimacy that draws and keeps them close. . . . [Home Bound] will appeal to a variety of reader, challenging singular beliefs of what it means to be a daughter, sister, lover, wife, lawyer, and mother.”

Library Journal (Starred Review)

“What emerges is a rich and enthralling story of finding oneself outside of the bounds of borders and beliefs. This offers radiant hope in the face of darkness.”

Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

In this singular and intimate memoir of identity and discovery, Vanessa A. Bee explores the way we define “home” and “belonging” — from her birth in Yaoundé, Cameroon, to her adoption by her aunt and her aunt’s white French husband, to experiencing housing insecurity in Europe and her eventual immigration to the US. After her parents’ divorce, Vanessa traveled with her mother to Lyon and later to London, eventually settling in Reno, Nevada, as a teenager, right around the financial crisis and the collapse of the housing market. At twenty, still a practicing evangelical Christian and newly married, Vanessa applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School, where she was one of the youngest members of her class. There, she forged a new belief system, divorced her husband, left the church, and, inspired by her tumultuous childhood, pursued a career in economic justice upon graduation.

Vanessa’s adoptive, multiracial, multilingual, multinational, and transcontinental upbringing has caused her to grapple for years with foundational questions such as: What is home? Is it the country we’re born in, the body we possess, or the name we were given and that identifies us? Is it the house we remember most fondly, the social status assigned to us, or the ideology we forge? What defines us and makes us uniquely who we are?

Organized unconventionally around her own dictionary-style definitions of the word “home,” Vanessa tackles these timeless questions thematically and unpacks the many layers that contribute to and condition our understanding of ourselves and of our place in the world.

QUOTES

“A remarkable portrayal of daughterhood, Home Bound will reshape and expand your definition of belonging. In exquisite, captivating prose, Vanessa A. Bee charts her journey within a sprawling yet tight-knit family across three continents. She is a deeply empathetic writer who weaves intimate details alongside profound insights, and often moved me to tears. Moments after turning the last page, I started reading all over again—a rare impulse reserved only for my favorite books.”

—Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair

“Home Bound is a mesmerizing, globespanning story of forgiveness, resilience, and love. Vanessa A. Bee writes with vulnerability, honesty, and fierce intelligence about the intricacies of home, identity, and belonging. A wise and gripping debut.”

—Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

A Woman is a School by Céline Semaan | World | Spring 2024

Anthony Mattero / Creative Artists Agency

Non-fiction: Narrative

Slow Factory Foundation founder Céline Semaan’s A WOMAN IS A SCHOOL, combines memoir, research, and social theory to advocate for alternate paths to sustainable growth and self realization, based on decolonizing education and shaped in traditions of the Global South.

Get On the Job and Organize by Jaz Brisack | World | Spring 2024

Katie Kotchman / Don Congdon Associates

Non-fiction: Politics/Current Affairs

Barista and leader of the Starbucks union drive Jaz Brisack’s GET ON THE JOB AND ORGANIZE, chronicling unionizing journey of the author and coworkers, with unreported behind-the-scenes details on Starbucks’ efforts to stop them, helping to explain this moment as a new nationwide labor movement is on the rise, including takeaways for readers seeking to organize their workplace, in an effort to forever change the employee mindset.

Death In Ferguson by Derecka Purnell | World | Spring 2024

Alia Hanna Habib / Gernert

Non-fiction: Politics/Current Affairs

Derecka Purnell’s book on activists, which tells the stories of several protestors who have died since the Ferguson Uprising, exposing the toll and exhibiting the power of Black and multiracial protests in America, for publication in time for the 10th anniversary in 2024.

Front Street by Brian Barth | World | Spring 2024

Melissa Falshman/Janklow & Nesbit

Non-fiction: Politics/Current Affairs

Journalist Brian Barth’s FRONT STREET, a narrative investigation into the dramatic effects of the tech economy on the working poor, focusing on three unhoused communities in Cupertino, Mountain View, and Oakland, showing how housing insecurity is spreading to the middle class, and how local governments, developers, and tech companies are complicit.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

The Chronicles of Doom by S.H. Fernando | World | Fall 2024

William LoTurco/LoTurco Literary

Non-fiction: Biography

Veteran music journalist S.H. Fernando Jr.’s THE CHRONICLES OF DOOM: UNRAVELING RAP’S MASKED ICONOCLAST, a biography of Daniel Dumile, aka MF DOOM, recounting the rise, fall, redemption, and untimely demise of one of hip-hop’s most enigmatic and influential figures.

Spring On The Peninsula by Ery Shin | World | Spring 2024

Mark Falkin / Falkin Literary

Fiction: Debut

Scholar of modernism and avant-garde practices at the University of Southern Mississippi Ery Shin’s SPRING ON THE PENINSULA, following a sexually fluid protagonist as he mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters; a poignant exploration of queer life in Seoul in the shadow of tensions with North Korea, pitched in the vein of Constance De Jong’s MODERN LOVE.

Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive by Melissa Lozada-Oliva | World | Fall 2024

Rachel Kim / 3Arts

Fiction: Debut

Author of DREAMING OF YOU Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT, JESUS IS ALIVE, a collection of surreal short stories revealing the complex inner lives of women in search of salvation.

Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler | World | Spring 2024

Samantha Shea

OFFERS RECEIVED: Greek

Fiction: Debut

National Magazine Award for Fiction winner Michael Deagler’s EARLY SOBRIETIES, pitched as a sober version of JESUS’ SON, following one narrator across linked stories as he returns to Philadelphia for his first alcohol-free summer, and exploring the specters of guilt and exile that haunt even a “successful” recovery.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee | World English | Fall 2023

Jessica Friedman / Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

RIGHTS SOLD: 4th Estate (UK)

Fiction: Debut

Columbia MFA graduate Molly McGhee’s JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND, about a man behind on his student loan payments who takes a job auditing the dreams of white collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal; a reckoning with the emotional and psychological toll of late-stage capitalism.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Defeat by Aaron Timms | World English | Spring 2024

Sarah Bolling / The Gernert Company

New Republic, n+1, and Baffler contributor Aaron Timms’s SALT FAT ACID DEFEAT, expanding his n+1 essay of the same name, examining food and restaurant culture under financial capitalism—how egomaniac chefs, rapacious venture capitalists, and feckless politicians became so central to our collective relationship with what we eat—and looking forward to a more humane food future.

Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac | World English | Spring 2024

Charlotte Seymour/ Andrew Nurnberg

Non-fiction: Memoir

Filmmaker Jill Damatac’s DIRTY KITCHEN, blending memoir, food writing, and history as the author cooks her way through recipes from her native-born Philippines and shares family stories as undocumented immigrants in America, forgotten Filipino colonial history, and long- buried indigenous traditions, exploring fractured memories to ask questions of what it means to belong.

Blowfish by Kyung Ran-Jo | World English | Spring 2024

Barbara Zitwer / Barbara J. Zitwer Agency

Fiction: General/Other

Kyung-Ran Jo’s BLOWFISH, about a young sculptor contemplating a woman’s claim to art, love, and death in the footsteps of her grandmother who, having learned of her husband’s infidelity, died by suicide at the age of 30 by artfully preparing and deliberately eating a lethal dish of blowfish in front of her husband and child.

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels | World English (excluding Canada) Fall 2023

Meredith Kaffel

Fiction: General/Other Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels’s DO YOU REMEMBER BEING BORN?, about an aging poet laureate who uncharacteristically “sells out” by agreeing to collaborate on a poem with a Vig Tech company’s highly intelligent poetry AI; a novel about the nature of work, language, motherhood, art-making, and belonging.

Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra | World English | Fall 2023

Fiction: Debut

Celina Baljeet Basra’s HAPPY, following a charming young gourmand and cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab with big dreams, only to toil in restaurant kitchens and farms across Southern Europe, using his verdant fantasy life to survive the reality of ever-worsening conditions faced by all migrant workers.

Galápagos by Fátima Vélez | World English | Fall 2024

Translation from Colombia

Fiction: Debut

Colombian poet Fátima Vélez’s GALÁPAGOS, a gothic novel written in vertiginous, experimental prose following a group of bohemians artists who discover they are dying of AIDS and begin to decompose into ghostly beings; as they embark on a final voyage through the Galapagos islands, cloaked in the skins of their dead, they tell stories, drink, dance, bicker, and go to bed with each other.

NOTABLE BACKLIST

Derecka Purnell Becoming Abolitionists

POLICE, PROTESTS, AND THE PURSUIT OF FREEDOM

SOCIAL SCIENCE / RACE & ETHNIC RELATIONS

ON SALE October 05, 2021

288pp

For readers of Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist So You Want to Talk About Race, The New Jim Crow, Chokehold, Are Prisons Obsolete, and White Fragility, looking for a more radical response to the issue of police violence

RIGHTS HELD: World

RIGHTS SOLD: UK&BC ex Can: Verso Books; France: Éditions Syllepse; Brazil/Portuguese: Novo Século; Italy (Fandango)

Over 12k copies sold

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DERECKA PURNELL, is a human rights law yer, writer, and organizer. She received her JD from Harvard Law School, and works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training to communi ty-based organizations through an abolitionist framework. Her work and writing has been fea tured in the New York Times NPR, The Atlantic the Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar Cosmopoli tan The Appeal Truthout Slate, and many other publications. Derecka is currently a columnist at the Guardian and co-founder of the forthcom ing National Museum of Social Justice and Con temporary Activism.

“With deep insight and moral clarity, Purnell shares her compelling journey of political education and personal transformation, inviting us not only to imagine a world without police, but to muster the courage to fight for the more just world we know is possible. Becoming Abolitionists is essential reading for our times.”

— Michelle Alexander, best-selling author of The New Jim Crow

For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity in departments, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these “solutions” do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.

In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer who was initially skeptical about police abolition because she’d seen too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.

Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risktaking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists towards abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings.

Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence instead. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but an invitation and commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

QUOTES

“At once specific and sweeping, practical and visionary, Becoming Abolitionists is a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation. Do not miss its brilliance!”

— Naomi Klein, best-selling author of The Shock Doctrine

“As a member of the ‘Trayvon Generation,’ Derecka offers us invaluable insights into how young activists are navigating and challenging current injustices. If you’ve curious about the modern abolitionist movement, this book is a must-read!”

— Mariame Kaba, best-selling author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us

Li Juan Winter Pasture

ONE WOMAN’S JOURNEY WITH CHINA’S KAZAKH HERDERS

TRANSLATED BY Jack Hargreaves, Yan Yan

MEMOIR / TRAVEL

ON SALE February 23, 2021

320pp

For readers of voice-driven travel memoirs by women (like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild), as well as memoirs about nature / wildlife (like Heather Macdonald’s H Is For Hawk or James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life), and books that are im mersive experiences in a faraway land - such as classic books by Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer and Jan Morris.

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

JACK HARGREAVES is a Chinese–English trans lator from East Yorkshire, now based in London. Specializing in literary and academic transla tion, his work has appeared in Asymptote Jour nal Paper Republic and Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel and includes writing by Zhu Yiye, Isaac Hsu, Yuan Ling, and Ye Duoduo.

YAN YAN graduated from Columbia University in 2008 with degrees in English and religious studies. After working at the Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China, his hometown, he backpacked around the world and eventually settled down in Brooklyn, then the Hudson Valley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LI JUAN born in Xinjiang in 1979, grew up in Sichuan Province. In her youth, she learned to sew and run a small convenience store with her mother, living in a town where nomads shopped. Later, she worked in a factory in the city of Urumqi. In 2003, she became a public servant until 2008 when she became a full-time author. Her writing career began in 1999, as a colum nist for newspapers like Southern Weekly and Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po Widely regarded as one of the best narrative nonfiction writers of her generation, Li Juan’s writing has won several awards. Winter Pasture is considered to be her most popular and representative work.

Winner of the People’s Literature Award, Winter Pasture has been a bestselling book in China for several years. Li Juan has been widely lauded in the international literary community for her unique contribution to the narrative nonfiction genre. Winter Pasture is her crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries between nature writing and personal memoir.

Kazakh herders take their 30 boisterous camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the winter. The so-called “winter pasture” occurs in a remote region that stretches from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. As Li journeys across the vast, seemingly endless sand dunes, she helps herd sheep, rides horses, chases after camels, builds an underground home using manure, gathers snow for water, and more. With a keen eye for the understated elegance of the natural world, and a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, Li vividly captures both the extraordinary hardships and the ordinary preoccupations of the day-today of the men and women struggling to get by in this desolate landscape. Her companions include Cuma, the often drunk but mostly responsible father; his teenage daughter, Kama, who feels the burden of the world on her shoulders and dreams of going to college; his reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all odds, who is simply known as “Sister-in-law.”

In bringing this faraway world to English language readers here for the first time, Li creates an intimate bond with the rugged people, the remote places, and the nomadic lifestyle. In the signature style that made her an international sensation, Li Juan transcends the travel memoir genre to deliver an indelible and immersive reading experience on every page.

QUOTES

“Li Juan spent minus-20-degree nights with nomadic herders in the Chinese steppes. You’ll want to join her.”

— Laura Miller, Slate

“Deeply moving . . . full of humor, introspection and glimpses into a vanishing lifestyle.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“Chinese journalist Juan makes her stateside debut with a magnificent tale about traveling through the freezing tundra of northern China. . .

A seamless blend of memoir, travelogue, and nature writing, Juan’s skillful prose paints an extraordinarily vivid picture of a remote world. . .This mesmerizing memoir impresses on every page.”

★

— Publishers Weekly, starred review

Nasim Marashi

I’ll Be Strong for You

A NOVEL

TRANSLATED BY Poupeh Missaghi

FRIENDSHIP / WOMEN

ON SALE April 06, 2021

208pp

For readers of upmarket women’s fiction who love stories about female friendship or about women who are trying to reconcile where they come from with where they are going - like books by Elena Ferrante, Terry Mcmillan, Sally Rooney and Julia Alvarez. This will also appeal to readers of memoirs like Without You There Is No Us and Reading Lolita In Tehran who are interested in learning about closed, oppressive societies and what it’s like for women who live there.

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR ABOUT THE AUTHOR

POUPEH MISSAGHI is a writer, a translator both into and out of Persian, Asymptote’s Iran editor at large, and an educator. She holds a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Denver, an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, and an MA in translation studies from Azad University of Tehran, Iran. Her nonfiction, fiction, and translations have ap peared in numerous journals, and she has sev eral books of translation published in Iran.

NASIM MARASHI was born in Tehran, Iran in 1984. She started her career in journalism in 2007 and became a screenwriter in 2013. She won the Premier Prix in Bayhaqi Story Prize (2014) for the short story, “Nakhjir,” and the Premier Prix in Tehran Story Prize (2015) for the short story, “Rood.” Her debut novel, I’ll Be Strong for You (Cheshmeh Publications, 2015) was selected as the Best Novel of the Year in the 8th Jalal-e Al-e-Ahmad Prize and is in its 40th printing. The book was translated into Italian and Kurdish and received great acclaim. Marashi’s second novel, HARAS (Cheshmeh Publications, 2016) is in its 20th printing and has been trans lated into Turkish and Kurdish.

This award-winning debut novel by Iranian journalist Nasim Marashi follows the lives of three young women in Tehran over the course of two seasons as they pursue their wildly different dreams even as they discover that it may mean breaking with the past and endangering their longstanding friendship.

Three recent college graduates in Tehran struggle to find their footing in this award-winning debut by Iranian journalist Nasim Marashi. Roja, the most daring of the three, works in an architecture firm and is determined to leave Tehran for graduate school in Toulouse. Shabaneh, who is devoted to her disabled brother and works with Roja, is uncertain about marrying a colleague as it would mean leaving her family behind. Leyla, who was unable to follow her husband abroad because of her commitment to her career as a journalist, is wracked with regret. Over the course of two seasons, summer and fall, in bustling streets and cramped family apartments, the three women weather setbacks and compromises, finding hope in the most unlikely places. Even as their ambitions cause them to question the very fabric of their personalities and threaten to tear their friendship apart, time and again Roja, Shabaneh, and Leyla return to the comfort of their longtime affection, deep knowledge, and unquestioning support of each other. Vividly capturing three very distinct voices, Marashi’s deeply wrought narrative lovingly brings these young women and their friendship to life in all their complexity.

QUOTES

“Moving . . . Marashi succeeds at depicting her characters’ limited freedom in an otherwise modern society. Readers of women’s fiction will appreciate this.”

— Publishers Weekly

“Nothing short of extraordinary. A born enchanter in her native land — Iran — makes landfall on our shores. I couldn’t stop reading once I began, and remained, forever, as if on the threshold of her dreams.”

– Lila Azam Zanganeh, Booker judge, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness

Yu Xiuhua Moonlight Rests on My Left Palm

POEMS AND ESSAYS

TRANSLATED BY Fiona Sze-Lorrain

POETRY / ASIAN

ON SALE September 07, 2021

156pp

Fans of nature poets like Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Stanley Kunitz, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin

Feminists and readers of Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, Rupi Kaur, Olivia Gatwood, Sapphire, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Gabe Moss, looking for sensual, unapologetic poet ry addressing womanhood

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN, is a poet, literary translator, editor, and zheng harpist who writes and trans lates in English, French, Chinese, and occasional ly Spanish. The author of four poetry collections, most recently Rain in Plural (2020) and The Ru ined Elegance (2016), both from Princeton Uni versity Press, she was a finalist for the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has also translated over a dozen books of of contemporary Chinese, French, and American poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Best Translated Book Award. Named a 2019-20 Abigail R. Cohen Fellow at the Colum bia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, she lives in Paris.

YU XIUHUA is a poet born in 1976 in Hengdian, Hubei Province, China, from an impoverished rural background, who was born with cerebral palsy. Yu began writing poetry in 1998. In 2014, her poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You” became an online sensation, launching her ca reer as a celebrity poet and writer. Her poetry collection Moonlight Rests on My Left Hand (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2015) sold over 300,000 copies, a record for Chinese poetry titles of the past three decades. Yu re ceived the Peasant Literature Award in 2016. Still Tomorrow an award-winning documentary film about her life and poetry, was released to critical acclaim the same year.

Starting with the viral poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You,”

Yu Xiuhua’s raw collection in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation chronicles her life as a disabled, divorced, single mother in rural China.

Yu Xiuhua was born with cerebral palsy in Hengdian village in the Hubei Province, in central China. Unable to attend college, travel, or work the land with her parents, Yu remained home where she could help with housework. Eventually she was forced into an arranged marriage that became abusive. She divorced her husband and moved back in with her parents, taking her son with her.

In defiance of the stigma attached to her disability, her status as a divorced single mother, and as a peasant in rural China, Yu found her voice in poetry. Starting in the late 90s, her writing became a vehicle with which to explore and share her reflections on homesickness, family and ancestry, the reality of disability in the context of a body’s urges and desires.

Then, Yu’s poem “Crossing Half of China to Fuck You” blew open the doors on the patriarchal and traditionalist world of contemporary Chinese poetry. She became an internet sensation, finding a devoted following among young readers who enthusiastically welcomed her fresh, bold, confessional voice into the literary canon.

Thematically organized, Yu’s essays and poems are in conversation with each other around subjects that include love, nostalgia, mortality, the natural world, and writing itself.

“‘Truth once spoken tends to be false,’ writes Yu Xiuhua in her incredible debut of essays and poems. I am smitten with Yu’s powerful writing, erotic poetry, and reflections on disability in daily life. One poem reads, ‘So risky, so heavy / O this love.’ I want nothing but risk in poetry and I feel proud to be a disabled poet in Yu’s company.”

— The Cyborg Jillian Weise, author of Common Cyborg

“Yu Xiuhua’s marvelous collection, a hybrid of poetry and poetical essays, each reflecting back on the other, is a transport into the soul, heart, and sensibility of a unique and exquisite mind. Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s translation, generous with silence, space, and pitch-perfect transparency, is a triumph in its own right.”

— Minna Zallman Proctor, author of Landslide True Stories, editor of The Literary Review, and translator of Natalia Ginzburg and Fleur Jaeggy

Okezie

Nwọka God of Mercy

A NOVEL

FICTION / LITERARY

ON SALE November 2, 2021

304pp

For readers of Homegoing, Things Fall Apart, The Water Dancer, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf, interested in high-literary fiction and magical realism

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OKEZIE NWỌKA (he/they) was born and raised in Washington, DC. They are a graduate of Brown University and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a Dean Graduate Re search Fellow. They are presently teaching and living in their hometown.

“Nwoka’s debut feels like a dream, or a fable, or something in between . . . Recommended for fans of Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control or Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune.”

—Booklist

“[God of Mercy] owes a debt to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, revising that novel’s message for the recent past . . . A well-turned dramatization of spiritual and social culture clashes.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Homegoing meets Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Okezie Nwọka’s debut novel is a powerful reimagining of a history erased.

God of Mercy is set in Ichulu, an Igbo village where the people’s worship of their gods is absolute. Their adherence to tradition has allowed them to evade the influences of colonialism and globalization. But the village is reckoning with changes, including a war between gods signaled by Ijeoma, a girl who can fly.

As tensions grow between Ichulu and its neighboring colonized villages, Ijeoma is forced into exile. Reckoning with her powers and exposed to the world beyond Ichulu, she is imprisoned by a Christian church under the accusation of being a witch. Suffering through isolation, she comes to understand the truth of merciful love.

Reimagining the nature of tradition and cultural heritage and establishing a folklore of the uncolonized, God of Mercy is a novel about wrestling with gods, confronting demons, and understanding one’s true purpose.

QUOTES

“

God of Mercy is a profound exploration of religion, faith, and compassion from a gifted storyteller. Okezie Nwọka creates a richly imagined postcolonial landscape that is at once otherworldly, tragically human, and completely unforgettable.”

— Maisy Card, author of These Ghosts Are Family

“God of Mercy isn’t just a heart-stopping debut—it’s a complete decolonization of the novel, a resounding rejection of the white gaze, a chronicle of a history that has for too long gone untold. This book is at the forefront of a new generation of postcolonial novels, and Nwoka’s talent is unmatched.”

—R.A. Frumkin, author of The Confidence

Shen Fuyu

The Artisans

THE LEGACY OF THE ANCESTORS OF SHEN VILLAGE

TRANSLATED BY Jeremy Tiang

SOCIAL SCIENCE / HISTORY

ON SALE January 4, 2022

256pp

For readers interested in 20th-century Chinese history and culture through who enjoyed the books of Mo Yan, Jung Chang, Leslie T. Chang, Yu Hua, Evan Osnos, and Peter Hessler.

Readers of Studs Terkel, Matthew B. Crawford, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sarah Smarsh, looking for stories about the dignity of work and the working class

RIGHTS HELD: World English

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

JEREMY TIANG is a Singaporean writer, trans lator and playwright based in New York City.

Tiang won the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize for English fiction for his debut novel, State of Emergency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SHEN FUYU was born in Jiangsu, China in 1970. At the age of 18, he left home and drifted around the country, taking up a variety of jobs-porter, clerk, and schoolteacher--and began his writing career. He graduated from the De partment of Chinese Language and Literature of Nanjing University in 1996, and has been working as a journalist for 20 years. Having published more than a dozen books, Shen is a full-time writer now and lives in Paris.

“[Shen Fuyu’s] prose is steeped in contagious nostalgia, and he employs the universal language of emigration and exile, writing, ‘I am now an orphan, lost in the big city.’”

—Farah Abdessamad, The Atlantic

“A Marcel Pagnol of provincial China in a beautifully accessible translation.”

—Kirkus, Starred Review

Evoking Studs Terkel, Shen Fuyu delivers a rollicking deep dive into working life in a small village in rural China, tracing the last 100 years of history.

Born in Shen Village in Southeast China, Shen Fuyu grew up in a family of farmers. Years later, Shen, now a writer, returned to his hometown to capture the village’s rich history in the face of industrialization.

Through his own childhood memories and those of his ancestors, Shen resurrects the working life of Shen Village through interlinked stories of fifteen artisans as their lives intersect over the course of a century. While Shen’s view of his hometown and his heritage is tinged with nostalgia, he does not romanticize it. Nor does he sugarcoat the backbreaking difficulty of life in rural China, but he still captures its small satisfactions and joys of loving one’s work with a great deal of care.

In an acerbic, earthy and unsparing style that swings from poignancy to comedy, sometimes within a single paragraph, Shen evokes the spirits of these workers--a bamboo-weaver and his beloved bull, a carpenter’s magical saw, the deserter who became the village lantern-maker and a rebellious woman who beats up her own kidnapper.

A reflection on the vicissitudes of small-town life during the epic shift from agricultural to industrial civilization, The Artisans vividly details the hardships, friendships and communal mythmaking of a disappearing community.

QUOTES

“The Artisans exists as a record of what once was. Through the stories of the people whose work kept a community alive, it serves as a modern form of ancestral tablet, anchoring the descendants of Shen Village to their own history and to the history of the world.”

Janet Brown, Asia by the Book

Co-agents

Brazil: Villas-Boas & Moss Agency

Baltic States, Central Europe (excl Poland), Balkan & Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe (excl. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine): Livia Stoia Agency

China: CA-Link

Greece: Ersilia Agency

Israel: The Deborah Harris Agency

Japan: Tuttle-Mori Agency

Korea: Non-exclusive

Poland: Graal Agency

Russia, Belarus, Ukraine: Anastasia Lester Agency

Spain & Latin America: SalmaiaLit

Taiwan: The Artemis Agency

Turkey: AnatoliaLitAgency

UK: Abner Stein