The Unnamed Press Winter/Spring 2014 Catalog

C ATA L O G | W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 014

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If you are a book buyer, please note that we are available via Ingram, or you can order directly through us.

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RETAIL DISCOUNT SCHEDULE 1–4 books 25% 5 or more 45% CONTACT INFORMATION Please contact us at info@unnamedpress.com about receiving ARCs of any of our forthcoming titles.

The Unnamed Press 1551 Colorado Blvd., Ste. 201 Los Angeles, CA 90041 323.333.9460 General and Sales: info@unnamedpress.com Publicity: Olivia@unnamedpress.com

Cover Image © Mashroor Nitol. Mashroor Nitol is a photographer based out of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

u

untroduction Based out of Los Angeles, California, the

Water) or a dystopian SF graphic novel that

Unnamed Press publishes literature and comics

reads like R. Crumb (SPINE), our books feature

from around the world. It also distributes books

surprising protagonists caught up in even

for the nonprofit group Phoneme Media—a

more surprising scenarios. Undiscovered talent

publisher and documentary film producer

breaking into uncharted territory—that’s what

focused on translated literature. If you’re drawn

Unnamed is all about. Phoneme Media follows

to unlikely points of view and world-class

a similar path. It’s first season of books includes

story-telling, then the Unnamed Press is the new

masterful translations of contemporary poetry

independent publisher whose books should

from the vanguard of Spanish, Portuguese,

go face out on your store shelves, or taught in

Uyghur and Arabic languages, as well as the

your classrooms, or posted to whatever internet

experimental novellas of notorious Mexican

pages you like to post things on.

writer Mario Bellatin, for whom Phoneme Media is the exclusive U.S. publisher.

Our first season of books features stories set in South Africa, Bangladesh and Estonia, as

So please enjoy some of the best writing in the

well as a graphic novel from Turkish-born

world. We can’t wait to bring you more.

artist Cihan Sesen. Whether an international crime thriller (Nigerians in Space), short stories about a rising city (Good Night, Mr. Kissinger),

C.P. Heiser

surreal contemporary folk tales (Walker on

Publisher

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Nigerians in Space

Nigerians In Space Deji Bryce Olukotun What if someone asked you to steal a piece of the moon?

And you could? Deji Olukotun’s debut novel about a lunar rock geologist defies categorization—a story of international intrigue that tackles deeper questions of exile and identity.

IT’S HOUSTON IN 1993 and Dr. Wale Olufunmi, lunar rock geologist, has a life most Nigerian immigrants would kill for, but then most Nigerians aren’t Wale—a great scientific mind in exile with galactic ambitions. Soon comes an unbelievable offer: return to Nigeria and help launch the country’s nascent space program. With it comes an even more outlandish challenge: steal a piece of the moon from the lab where he works, and bring it with him to Nigeria as proof of his re-found loyalty. With both personal and national glory at stake, Wale manages to pull off the near impossible, setting out on a journey back to Nigeria that leads anywhere but home.

Available January 2014 Paperback: $16.99 / £12 Literature / International Crime ISBN: 978-1-939419-01-9

Wale’s impulsive act sets into motion a series of arcs in time and space from Houston to Stockholm, from Cape Town to Bulawayo, picking up on the intersecting lives of a South African abalone smuggler, a freedom fighter’s young daughter, and Wale’s own ambitious son, Dayo. Deji Olukotun’s debut novel defies categorization—a story of international intrigue that tackles deeper questions of exile and identity. Nigerians in Space is the first book of international suspense from Unnamed Press.

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The Moon Rock Thief From Nigerians In Space

The highway was still smeared with mud from the flood, from

the hurricane that had pulverized Galveston, from the tussling fronts of the Gulf. The sycamores reflected on the pavement’s sheen with their sharp-fingered leaves…

The guard waved down his car at the second boom gate.

He was a pimply guy fresh out of training college who chatted it up with the enthusiasm of a man who thought that guarding a boom gate at NASA’s Johnson Space Laboratory was the first in a serendipitous series of steps to becoming Congressman.

If he had known that what Wale was about to do would get him fired, he would have wiped the smug expression from his face. They exchanged some words about the baseball game and Wale followed the black mamba of a road to Building 31-A. He went to park in the unnumbered employee lot, and then decided it was his last day, so he parked in his boss’ spot. A final thumb-on-the-nose.

The chickweed and nightshade and dewberries and all the love-making plants had sent out their pollen in droves and he sneezed, cursing the spring. He’d never had allergies in Nigeria, his nose had been stuffed by America and so was his thinking.

Maybe Bello was right that he should return to the clearminded motherland.

He swiped in his security card and made his way through the cubicles to his small, windowless office. His colleague Onur Unkwu wasn’t in yet. But Onur was usually prompt, and would arrive within the next few minutes with a pastry in hand. Wale decided to beat it to the lab to avoid chatting with him. He was beginning to feel nervous, and thought he’d give himself away.

“Remember,” Bello had said on the phone, “Brain gain.”

“Can’t we forget the contingency sample? Isn’t it me you want?”

“Commitment. We believe in commitment. We are offering you a lot of money—more than you’ll ever see in that play pen.

We need a sign that you are on our side, Doctor, and haven’t 06

become one of those baseball-tossing coconuts. Brown on the outside and white on the inside, if you catch my meaning.”

“I hate baseball,” Wale said quickly. “Basketball is my game.”

“That is what I’m afraid of. Our sport is soccer. You’ve been away too long, Doctor. Get me that sample and I’ll see you in Nigeria. It’s high time you came home!”

Wale hated the Contingency Plan and had fought Bello on it since they first started talking. The only plan that would leave him with any chance of backing out involved a hurricane. Then regular procedure demanded that all rocks would have to be moved above the water line and transferred to the double-wall vault. Taking a specimen in those conditions would be difficult, but possible. There was even a chance that he could get away with it and remain on the staff.

But not the Contingency Plan. The Contingency Plan meant the end. He couldn’t say good-bye to his colleagues or his basketball team or anyone. *

*

*

The lunar lab was a sterile jumble of stainless steel, blinking LED lights, hard-backed aluminum chairs, magnetically shielded electronics, analog scopes, and full-spectrum overhead indirect lighting. It was—although few people had ever heard of it—America’s repository for the hundreds of pounds of rocks that had been painstakingly transported back from the moon missions, and the largest and most sophisticated such repository in the world. Every rock that had been collected by the astronauts on the Apollo missions; every speck of dust that had swirled onto their spacesuits; every mite that had gathered in the lunar module; these had been rigorously preserved for decades.

Two doors opened at either end of the lab, one leading to a scanning electron microscope and the other to the double airlock, which in turn led to the Lunar Sample Collection.

There was no lead in the paint or sheetrock and no organic matter. The plastic Christmas tree perched in the corner had never been removed because it was the closest thing to life 07

that snuck in. But Wale was a scientist, hard-trained, and like the rest of the lab geeks all the life he needed was contained in the Lunar Sample Collection. Under the microscopes, the moonrocks teemed with the cosmos.

When he could get to them. Even as a senior staffer he could not access the collection himself. There had to be a Second during the day, and a guard to monitor the gas levels in the chambers. At night one person could access the collection while the other monitored. Usually it was Onur that went into the collection and Wale kept his eye on the dials. If you were alone, you had to occupy yourself with studying a low-priority specimen in the glass glovebox, a sealed aquarium with two rubber gloves welded into the glass. This Wale did, sticking his hands into the glovebox and nervously scratching off a layer of plagioclase feldspar from a fifty gram specimen that had been gathered by Apollo 16. The specimen had already been photodocumented on the moon, with the down-sun ratio, color chart, and stratigraphy inputted into the LSDB long ago.

There were three hours before Wale had to get on the plane. Panic flashed through him as he began to consider that he would never see the lab again. With panic came tachycardia; with palpitations, the memory that his father had died from an unidentified heart condition; with his father, a photo of his sister leaning precariously over the coffin, as if about to dive in; then his sister’s family of step-this and half-that and her current invalid husband. And there was the matter that he hadn’t sent anyone money in six years. And what of his mother? In the face of this Texan largesse, this first-world life?

Patience, Wale, patience. Where you begin your climb, the proverb went, there you will descend. He would deal with those problems when they came. He was returning his mind to Nigeria, he was going home. Wale would have his chance, finally, to go up in space. This was not a sacrifice. This was a dream being realized.

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Praise For Nigerians In Space “Fast-paced, well-written and packed with insight and humor.

Olukotun is a very talented storyteller.”

— Charles Yu, National Book Award 5-Under-35 winner and author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“…a deft mingling of satirical humor, Noirish twists…and a keeneyed yet accessible take on cultural displacement in contemporary times.”

— Olufemi Terry, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing

“You can taste Cape Town, you can hear it in the dialogue, see its beauty in the descriptions. Deji Olukotun has my city’s number: especially its nasty underbelly, the dangerous dealing of abalone poachers.”

— Mike Nicol, author of the Revenge Trilogy

DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN is the inaugural Ford Foundation Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center, a human rights organization that promotes literature and defends free expression. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, and degrees from Yale College and Stanford Law School.

Nigerians in Space is his first novel.

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Good Night, Mr. Kissinger

Good Night, Mr. Kissinger K. Anis Ahmed

From beginning to end, this debut collection of stories traces the modern history of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and its rise from provincial outpost to global megacity.

GOOD NIGHT, MR. KISSINGER opens in the days before war, when an unfinished suburban house is suddenly occupied by the family of an untouchable and disarming girl. Her brief appearance in her young neighbor’s life overshadows (at least for a time) the tanks that soon roll onto their idyllic street. Beginning in the provincial, mostly rural Bangladesh of the 1970s, Kissinger ends in present day Dhaka, with the construction magnate Shabhaz ruminating about his dysfunctional family on the forty-first floor of the highest tower of the city—one which he himself built.

With this debut collection of stories, Ahmed plunges into an anarchic, overwhelming world—the megacity of Dhaka, Bangladesh—plucking individuals from the masses to tell stories of love and ambition, family secrets and exile. There are the brothers Bahram and Jamshed, whose father dresses them in similar clothes to avoid sibling rivalry. And Ramkamal, author of the greatest novel never written, whose disappearance leaves behind a group of disjointed followers trying to make sense of their lives. And there is James D’Costa, the exiled Bangladeshi waiter with an unlikely name, whose encounter with Henry Kissinger force a tense confrontation between past and future.

Available January 2014 Paperback: $16 / £12 Literature / Short Stories ISBN: 978-1-939419-04-0

K. ANIS AHMED is a Bangladeshi writer based in Dhaka. He is also an entrepreneur who has founded a liberal arts university, a daily newspaper, and Bangladesh’s first certified organic tea garden.

He is co-founder of Bengal Lights, Bangladesh’s most prominent English language literary journal.

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Ramkamal’s Gift From Good Night, Mr. Kissinger

What we need to do now, he said—always in medias res—is to bring the city and the novel together in a whole new manner. Dhaka’s a new kind of city, a glimpse into our postapocalyptic future, and it’s time to find a form suitable to its reality. We were sitting in my store, which he had turned into his primary operating base. He stopped by, sometimes several times in a day: to leave his keys or pick up messages; to drop off parcels or laundry; to make phone calls or secure an abbreviated meal; to borrow cab fare or cigarette money, and then to return those puny hand loans and even to conduct complex, confusing arithmetic concerning these small exchanges.

But, most importantly of all, he came by to hold his addas.

Bahar and Joydeep were regulars from the start. Bahar worked as a statistician for a research institute, but his heart, as with the rest of us, was sewn to literature. Joydeep was an anachronistic soul, and resisted any set occupation. Most of the others were students, or recent graduates, and many connected to some facet of the writing world: newspapers, publishing, little magazines, even copywriting in advertising firms. It was the spring after our first meeting, the start of a new millennium, and prophetic goals appeared to be in the realms of the possible again. Ramkamal held his addas, almost nightly, explaining to us the inevitability of this new codex. It will supply this city with a grammar, he said. It can’t, sure 12

as hell, be borrowed from places where the streetlights or plumbing work. What we need to write is nothing short of a manual. The Manual will explore how to be a citizen when the city itself is perpetually in deferral.

More than his ideas, at first, it was the verve with which he pursued them that affected us.

And even more, his innovation lay in his ability to turn his personal mission into a collective enterprise. Everyone who entered his orbit was assigned a role. I was his keeper, in every sense. I kept his clothes and his cash––the erratic quantities that transected his days.

And, increasingly, he started consigning to me his memories, unreliable as they were, and even more unreliably, his secrets. There were references, ever oblique, to his training in a Gandhi Village, before he turned sour on communes. Years spent as a distributor of East European farming machines. Visits as a functionary of a small-time Left party to Havana and Ho Chi Minh City.

It was hard to tell what was true and what he believed to be true. Once I even asked Shamsu, my friend in the Special Branch of police, if he could find out anything. These are not chaps who volunteer information easily.

But we went a long way back, so he subjected me to a litany of standard queries: Has he taken money from you? Has he ever hit anyone? Does he keep the kind of company that worries you?

Has anyone–since you met this guy–asked you for money? Suddenly, I felt bad that I’d asked Shamsu at all, and I prevaricated as much as I could to protect Ramkamal.

“If he’s basically harmless, then why ask me to look into it at all?” Shamsu was a bit annoyed.

“Never mind,” I said. “He just seemed like such an odd fellow, I just thought I’d ask.”

Meantime, Ramkamal was all trust and exuberance. He was busy assigning jobs. Bahar, a brave and tireless sort, was his researcher.

Joydeep, a sallow-faced depressive, was his typist and editor. Certain actors kept the role season after season, others for no longer than a few weeks. But, in any given moment, there was an entire cast to be filled: driver and bodyguard, handlers of bureaucratic affairs, minions to run petty personal errands, reporters to bring back news of events that he could not bear to attend, and sleuths to follow his enemies.

I was also expected to become his publisher. We never really talked about this obligation, let alone draft any contract to that end. To make such an assumption explicit on either side would have dishonored the deeper bonds of recognition that held us together ever since our first vodka-soaked encounter.

It seems odd now that I should have entertained Ramkamal to this extent. Most of his protégés were in their twenties. They were looking for a cause or movement to ennoble their eventless and unpromising lives.

After many delays and futile anticipations, I had recently agreed to an arranged marriage with a seemingly sweet-natured girl, whose handsome forehead was marred by a splotch of discoloration roughly in the shape of England.

I should have been immune to poetry in any form or disguise. Yet I had allowed Ramkamal to enter my life, and even to co-opt me to his purpose.

Not everyone in that bewitched circle knew the full extent of Ramkamal’s dubious

dealings, which started about a year after we met. Or perhaps they existed always, but were exposed to me only from the second year of our acquaintance. If I advised Ramkamal against keeping that kind of company, he’d say with a knowing smile, “You can’t make money, real money, if you are not willing to trade with all kinds.”

“You can also go to jail, if you do. You could even get mugged or killed,” I told him.

“You worry too much, Burgher.” That was the nickname he’d given me. “Worry will turn you into a dutiful citizen, increase your blood pressure. It will make you behave well with women, lose out on lucrative deals.

Ultimately it will turn you into a bald little shopkeeper,” said Ramkamal and guffawed in his booming voice.

Only Ramkamal could mock a person to his face without making them feel actually insulted. We were sitting in my store: me, on a high stool on my side of the counter and Ramkamal on another stool on his side.

My cramped little store could barely hold Ramkamal. Why blame my store; the city could barely contain his personality.

Available February 2014 Paperback: $16 / £10 Literature / Short Stories ISBN: 978-1-939419-04-0 13

Walker on Water

Walker On Water Kristiina Ehin

A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband’s brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the world of Kristiina Ehin.

From the 2007 British Poetry Society Popescu prize winner for European poetry in translation: a series of comic, surreal adventures.

Kristiina Ehin’s quirky voice takes each story directly from the dream state, at times stubborn and resistant, at other times masochistically compliant. Ehin offers up modern folktales in which the very nature of our human identity is at stake—rampant with images and archetypes both new and old, and mediated by the abrupt changes we can only experience in dreams.

KRISTIINA EHIN is a highly acclaimed performer of her poetry, prose and drama in Estonian as well as English. This is her first book of stories to be published in the U.S. In her native Estonia, she has published six volumes of poetry, three books of short stories and a retelling of South-Estonian folk tales. She has written plays, as well as poetic radio broadcasts. She has won Estonia’s most prestigious poetry prize for Kaitseala—a book of poems and journal entries written during a year spent living as a nature reserve warden on an otherwise uninhabited island off Estonia’s north coast. In the UK, she has published six translated books of poetry and three of prose.

Translated by Ilmar Lehtpere Available May 2014 Paperback: $16 / £10 Literature / Short Stories ISBN: 978-1-939419-07-1

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Walker on Water 1.

The man who later became my husband had many female fans. They all wanted him just as much as I did. There’s nothing hotter than desiring a man who doesn’t even notice you.

Jaan is a highly educated man. He works as the director of the Climate Change Monitoring Department at the Academy of Sciences. All of his fans have tried to make an impression on him on an intellectual plane, as Jaan’s brains are so exceptional.

But I won his heart in a very simple and altogether primitive way. One night I ran to his door stark naked. I said someone had made off with my clothes while I’d gone swimming in the night. Everything went as it went.

So now I’d got in through his door. But my competition still hung about in reading rooms, at round tables and all sorts of seminars.

I glowed with happiness. We went to live at Jaan’s ancestral farm. This was Mardi-Jaani farm located at a rather narrow cove between two headlands on the Baltic Sea. But Jaan’s fans didn’t go anywhere. Even so my belief in Jaan and our love was exceptionally tenacious.

At Mardi-Jaani coastal farm I began again to indulge in my favorite pursuit—walking on water. This demanded the same blind faith and supple strength as loving Jaan did. When Jaan went to work early mornings, I started stepping along the still surface of the sea on the shallow water.

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I was already managing this quite well. But further from shore I was gripped by fear.

And then I sank to the bottom like a stone. I understood that the whole art lay in your ability to completely switch off your brain. You can work wonders with the lightness that then comes. I splashed my way to shore and started again with downy-light liftings of my feet. Without thinking about anything I touched the silver reflection of morning light with the ball of my foot. I was calm, light, sure and focused. I reached the middle of the cove. The tips of the headlands stretched out on either side. I’d reached further than ever before.

That’s enough for today. I turn around slowly and walk back to shore. My marriage is like walking on water too. It’s easy if my feet can reach the bottom. It’s a game with little danger when everything is just starting out and the little waves lick your shoreline with pleasure.

2.

Lately I’ve discovered that my husband’s head opens at the back. I hadn’t noticed that before. There’s a hatch there. When Jaan comes home after a tiring day at work, he opens the hatch and takes his brains out.

They steam on the table, but Jaan stretches his legs out on the sofa and looks at me with his happy, drowsy eyes.

3.

I wanted an intelligent and educated man, but what I got was a brainless oaf.

One day a skewed urge awoke in me.

I thought that if I can’t share in Jaan’s brains then they might as well not exist. I suddenly grabbed his brains into my arms and took off running towards the shore in spite of the darkness and the biting wind.

I stepped onto the high crests of the waves.

I put all my willpower to work to silence the thumping of my heart, stop my thought processes and keep my balance on the stormy sea. Further out into the deep, still further!

Don’t lose faith or look at your feet! Over the depths between the two headlands I let go of Jaan’s brains. But they had no intention of sinking to the bottom. They bobbed and danced on the crests of the waves just like me.

Jaan stood watching me silently from the shore. I suddenly began to feel sorry for him and myself. That feeling made me weak and heavy. I became frightened. I tried to understand where that fear was coming from.

I sank in up to my knees. In a panic I strove to stop my thought processes. I was already splashing about up to my hips, then up to my neck in ice-cold water. I would never be able to swim to shore from here.

I stretched my hands out towards the sky, gasped for air. All at once there was something soft and warm in my hand. I pressed it tightly to my breast. It was Jaan’s brains.

Suddenly they were keeping me on the surface like a life jacket. I clung to them until the waves had cast us onto the shore.

I felt utterly done for and stiff with cold.

Jaan tore his brain from between my hands bent with cramp and set it in its place.

“You’re cold, my dear,” he said, and put his warm coat around me.

After that he picked me up in his arms and carried me home.

4.

I’ve been trying to keep my love for Jaan afloat.

At work he is intelligent and closely surrounded by female admirers. At home in Mardi-Jaani he is totally brain-free. Here I’m the only one he has.

But my ability to walk on the surface of the water is beginning to diminish bit by bit. After just barely managing to stay alive thanks to Jaan’s brains while I was trying to drown them, I don’t dare go onto the water anymore as easily as before. My belief in myself took quite a beating and I don’t stay on the surface so well anymore.

It’s the darkest time of the year and everything somehow seems so hopeless. The sea has frozen over and a walker on water has no business there. But as soon as the ice goes, I’m going to try again. In developing my gift I develop my love. Neither can exist without the other.

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SPINE: The Graphic Novel collects in print the first six issues of Cihan Sesen’s comic book, originally released

by Unnamed Press as ebooks.

What is SPINE? Put it this way: imagine R. Crumb illustrating Lara Croft.

In the world of SPINE, nations, cultures, and norms have been destroyed by a cataclysmic volcanic event and replaced by clans who have rewritten religions, reinvented borders, and fashioned new means of warfare from the remnants of the previous world.

Influenced by comic satirists as much as by science fiction, Sesen’s work is both a hilarious commentary on the post-apocalyptic dystopias we find in film and fiction and comics, as much as a rollicking adventure.

Born and raised in Istanbul, CIHAN SESEN barely spoke English when he came to America to study art at Idyllwild Arts Academy. After graduating from high school as a visual arts major, Sesen went on to study filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute. He lives in Los Angeles.

Available June 2014 Graphic Novel / SF ISBN: 978-1-939419-17-0

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See inside front cover for ordering info. www.unnamedpress.com

Nigerians in Space Deji Bryce Olukotun Nigerians in Space Deji Bryce Olukotun

Available February 2014 Paperback: $16.99 / £10 International Crime ISBN: 978-1-939419-01-9

What if someone asked you to steal a piece of the moon? And you actually could? Deji Olukotun’s debut novel about a lunar rock geologist defies categorization—a story of international intrigue that tackles deeper questions of exile and identity.

Walker on Water Kristiina Ehin

Translated by Ilmar Lehtpere Available May 2014 Paperback: $16 / £10 Literature / Short Stories ISBN: 978-1-939419-07-1

A woman cultivates a knack for walking on water, but is undermined by her husband’s brain, which he removes each night when he returns home from work; a couple overcomes the irksome mischief of the gods; a skeptical dragon wonders what sex is all about: this is the world of Kristiina Ehin.

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Good Night, Mr. Kissinger K. Anis Ahmed

Available March 2014 Paperback: $16 / £10 Literature / Short Stories ISBN: 978-1-939419-04-0

From beginning to end, this debut collection of stories traces the modern history of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and its rise from provincial outpost to megacity.

SPINE: The Graphic Novel Cihan Sesen

Available June 2014 Graphic Novel / SF ISBN: 978-1-939419-17-0

What is SPINE? Put it this way: imagine R. Crumb illustrating Lara Croft. A dystopian SF adventure starring a cold-hearted mercenary in search of the ultimate energy source.

Phoneme Media is a nonprofit publisher. www.phonememedia.org

Diorama

Rilke Shake

Translated by Anna Rosenwong Available April 2014 $16 / £12 Poetry Paperback ISBN: 978-1-939419-11-8

Translated by Hilary Kaplan Available May 2014 $16 / £10 Poetry Paperback ISBN: 978-1-939419-09-5

Rocío Cerón

Kaleidoscopic glimpses of a hallucinatory, spiraling journey through image, language, history, and sound.

As unrelentingly tactile as it is unapologetically cerebral, Cerón’s book asks that we relinquish control and submit to the poet’s brutal lyricism and a new kind of order.

Uyghurland, The Farthest Exile: Selected Poems Ahmatjan Osman

Translated by Jeffrey Yang Available June 2014 $16 / £12 Poetry Paperback ISBN: 978-1-939419-11-8

Uyghurland collects over two decades of Ahmatjan Osman’s poetry in Jeffrey Yang’s collaborative translations from the Uyghur and Arabic. Osman, the foremost Uyghur poet of his generation, channels his ancestors alongside Mallarmé and Rimbaud, observing the world from exile.

Angélica Freitas

Rilke Shake’s title, a pun on milkshake, which in Brazil’s vernacular means just what it does in English, indicates the book’s contents: poetry approached as a shake of languages, words, canonical tradition, and a measure of delight, whirred in postmodernity’s ironic blender.

Jacob the Mutant Mario Bellatin

Translated by Jacob Steinberg Available June 2014 $14 / £10 Literature Paperback ISBN: 978-1-939419-10-1

Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation—a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely.

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Winter/Spring 2014