Serpent's Tail catalogue spring 2017

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Contents 2–3 The Essex Serpent Sarah Perry 4–5 I Hate the Internet Jarett Kobek 6–7 The Accusation Bandi 8 The Moth: All These Wonders The Moth 9 All Grown Up Jami Attenberg 10–11 Broken River J. Robert Lennon 12 African Psycho Alain Mabanckou 13 Black Moses Alain Mabanckou 14–15 Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy Thrillers 16 Chelsea Girls Eileen Myles 17 Euphoria Heinz Helle 18 All The Rivers Dorit Rabinyan 19 A Separation Katie Kitamura 20 The Last Wolf László Krasznahorkai 21 The Visiting Privilege Joy Williams 22–23 Serpent’s Tail Classics 24–25 New in paperback 26–27 Recently published 28–31 Backlist 32–33 Contact information

Introduction

Serpent’s Tail an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

In March 2017 we will publish The Accusation, a collection of stories by a North Korean writer known as Bandi. Bandi, who still lives in North Korea, has risked everything to produce a work that takes us under the skin of life in one of the world’s most repressive countries. Begun in 1989 and recently smuggled out into South Korea, these beautifully written stories paint a shattering picture of the degradations of daily existence under Kim Il-sung’s totalitarian regime and will unquestionably stand as one of the most important works of dissident literature of our times. We are immensely proud to be publishing this important book alongside fifteen publishers worldwide.

3 Holford Yard, Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD For more information about Serpent’s Tail, visit us at www.serpentstail.com Get in touch via email at info@serpentstail.com or on social media at

/serpentstail

@serpentstail

/serpentstailbooks

This season we also have outstanding and provocative new novels by J. Robert Lennon, Jami Attenberg, Alain Mabanckou and Katie Kitamura, a new book of extraordinary true stories from The Moth, and I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek, the angriest, funniest piece of fiction you’ll read this or any year.

Hannah Westland Publisher, Serpent’s Tail

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S E S X SER E E H T he book that has gotten und PEN T er ev T ery

one ’ s skin ‌

day Times bestseller fo n u r fv S e we A mer read by the Sun m u s day T a eks, s a imes, ller ked e a Gua c n s i t s Evenin P rdian , Ev g Standard London be raph . ening Sta eleg ndard, aily T Stella ma gazine, Mumsnet, Observer, D

en Macdonald and more l e H aters, Pr W h ais Sara ef , e d rom urnsi B Jessie n h o Burton, Marian Keyes, J Unmissable paperback marketing campaign to come

The Essex Serpent Sarah Perry

New in paperback

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER London, 1893. Cora Seaborne, newly widowed, is leaving town for Essex. As she arrives in Colchester, she hears rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist, is immediately enthralled, convinced that the beast may be a previously undiscovered species.

In Aldwinter, Cora meets William Ransome, the local vicar. Like Cora, Will is deeply suspicious of the rumours. As he tries to calm his parishioners, he and Cora strike up an intense relationship, eventually changing each other’s lives in ways entirely unexpected.

Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, The Essex Serpent is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take.

‘You feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel channelled by Perry in some sort of Victorian seance. This is the best new novel I’ve read in years’ Daily Telegraph ‘One of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade’ Sunday Times

Sarah Perry was born in Essex in 1979. Her first novel After Me Comes the Flood was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize. She lives in Norwich. @SarahGPerry

Fiction £7.99 B-format paperback 432pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 545 2 eISBN: 978 1 78283 204 1 January 2017 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe

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I Hate the Internet

New title

A novel

Jarett Kobek ‘The Internet was a wonderful invention. It was a computer network which people used to remind other people that they were awful pieces of shit.’

In the 1990s, Adeline drew a comic book that ended up making her kind-of famous. In 2013, Adeline aired some unfashionable opinions that made their way onto the Internet.

The reaction of the Internet, being a tool for extracting advertising revenue from online abuse, was predictable. The reaction of the Internet, being part of a culture that hates women, was to send Adeline messages like ‘Drp slut ... hope u get gang rape.’

Set in a San Francisco hollowed out by tech money, I Hate the Internet is a savage indictment of the intolerable bullshit of unregulated capitalism and an uproarious, hilarious but above all furious satire of our Internet Age.

‘Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervour of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era … he’s as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don’t need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages’ Jonathan Lethem ‘This book has soul as well as nerve ... log off Twitter for a day. Pick this up’ The New York Times

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called ‘highly interesting’ by the Times Literary Supplement, has been the subject of much academic writing and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. I Hate the Internet is his first full-length novel and is being published in six languages.

Fiction £12.99 B-format hardback 276pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 761 6 eISBN: 978 1 78283 314 7 November 2016 UK Com ex Can

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The Accusation

New title

Forbidden stories from inside North Korea

Bandi

Translated by Deborah Smith

The ‘Solzhenitsyn of Pyongyang’ speaks In 1989, a North Korean dissident writer began to write a series of stories about life under the country’s totalitarian regime. Smuggled out for global publication in 2017, they provide a unique window on this most secretive of countries.

Bandi’s stories tell of ordinary men and women facing the terrible absurdity of daily life in North Korea: the factory supervisor caught between loyalty to an old friend and loyalty to the Party; the staunch Party man whose actor son reveals to him the absurd theatre of their reality; the mother raising her child in a world where the all-pervasive propaganda is the very stuff of childhood nightmare.

The Accusation is a reminder that humanity can sustain hope even in the most desperate of circumstances – and that the courage of free thought has a power far beyond those who seek to suppress it.

The Accusation is the first dissident fiction ever to cross the borders of this secretive and repressive state, and its subversively profound satire recalls Bulgakov and Gogol ‘The Solzhenitsyn of Pyongyang ... a luscious testimony, crammed with irony, on the insane regime of Kim Il-sung and the hopelessness of the citizens of North Korea’ L’Éxpress

반디

Bandi is the Korean word for firefly. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea.

Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback 288pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 754 8 eISBN: 978 1 78283 312 3 March 2017 UK Com ex Can Exclusive Europe

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The Moth

New title

All These Wonders

True accounts of fearlessness from the live storytelling phenomenon All These Wonders is a collection of brand-new stories about risk, courage and facing the unknown. Storytellers include the writers Marlon James, Jung Chang and Christina Lamb, as well as a hip hop ‘one-hit wonder’, an astronomer gazing at the surface of Pluto for the first time and a young female spy risking everything as part of Churchill’s secret army during World War II. They share their ventures into uncharted territory – and how their lives were changed forever by what they found there.

These true stories have been carefully selected and adapted for the page by the creative minds at The Moth, and will encompass the very best of the more than 17,000 stories performed in live Moth shows around the world. Filled with a variety of humorous, moving and gripping tales from all walks of life, it is timed to celebrate The Moth’s 20th anniversary year.

True stories £12.99 Demy paperback original with flaps 416pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 663 3 eISBN: 978 1 78125 665 7 April 2017 UK Com ex Can

The Moth is dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling.

Since 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories, told live and without notes, to standing-roomonly crowds worldwide. The Moth’s first collection was an international bestseller. http://themoth.org

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The follow-up volume to the beloved international bestseller ‘Beautifully simple, authentic, a little bit therapeutic and utterly addictive. It is a joyful reminder of the power of the story and the need for story-telling’ Sunday Times ‘Brilliant and quietly addictive’ Guardian

All Grown Up Jami Attenberg

New title

An unflinching confession of a woman contending with the outside world’s expectations of who she should be Andrea is single, childless and thirty-nine. She’s trying to navigate family, sexuality, friendships and work, but battles with thoughts and desires that few people would want to face up to. Told in gut-wrenchingly honest language that shimmers with rage and intimacy, All Grown Up poses such questions as: What if I don’t want to hold your baby? Can I date you without having to hear about your divorce? At what point does drinking a lot become a drinking problem?

Why does everyone keep asking me why I am not married?

Powerfully intelligent and wickedly funny, All Grown Up delves into the psyche of a flawed but mesmerising character. Readers will recognise themselves in Jami Attenberg’s truthful account of what it means to be a 21st-century woman, though they might not always want to admit it.

‘Hilarious, courageous and mesmerising from page one, All Grown Up is a little gem that packs a devastating wallop. It’s that rare book I’m dying to give all my friends so we can discuss it deep into the night’ Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette ‘Beautiful and brutal, intelligent and funny, frank and sexy’ Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

Jami Attenberg is the author of Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was published in nine countries.

Both are published by Serpent’s Tail and both are being adapted for television. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback 224pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 704 3 eISBN: 978 1 78283 284 3 May 2017 UK Com ex Can

@jamiattenberg 9

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Broken River J. Robert Lennon

New title

A stunning psychological literary thriller from ‘a master of the dark arts’ The old house in Broken River had stood empty for over a decade. Twelve years ago, a brutal double murder took place there, a young couple killed in front of their toddler daughter. Now Karl and Eleanor are giving their marriage one last shot by moving there from Brooklyn with their twelve-year-old daughter Irina.

As Karl reverts to his old cheating habits, Eleanor and Irina hide their fascination with the house’s past from one another. But their actions have consequences, and unleash forces none of them could have anticipated.

This new novel by America’s master of literary rule-breaking is part thriller, part family drama, part gothic horror – and, like all Lennon’s novels, defies genre to stand as a work of unflinching moral purpose, showing the consequences of human deceitfulness and the dreadful force the past can exert on the present.

Broken River is a literary crossover hit in waiting that will appeal to readers of Stephen King and Anne Tyler alike ‘J. Robert Lennon is a dazzling stylist – gifted with a manic turn-of-phrase, a splendidly aberrant sense of humour’ Douglas Kennedy, The Times

J. Robert Lennon is the author of eight novels, including Familiar, also published by Serpent’s Tail.

His fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. He lives in upstate New York.

Fiction 272pp £12.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78125 797 5 £11.99 Export paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 800 2 eISBN: 978 1 78283 335 2 June 2017 UK Com ex Can

@jrobertlennon 11

African Psycho Alain Mabanckou

Serpent’s Tail Classic

Translated by Christine Schwartz Hartley

Alain Mabanckou’s uproarious, fleet-footed English-language debut, reissued as a Serpent’s Tail Classic to coincide with the publication of Black Moses Grégoire Nakobomayo, a petty criminal, has decided to kill his girlfriend Germaine. He’s planned the crime for some time, but still, the act of murder requires a bit of psychological and logistical preparation. Luckily, he has a mentor to call on, the far more accomplished serial killer Angoualima. The fact that Angoualima is dead doesn’t prevent Grégoire from holding lengthy conversations with him. Little by little, Grégoire interweaves Angoualima’s life and criminal exploits with his own.

Continuing with the plan despite a string of botched attempts, Grégoire’s final shot at offing Germaine leads to an abrupt unravelling. Lauded for its fresh and witty style, African Psycho is an inventive satire of blank-eyed consumerism.

Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback 176pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 787 6 eISBN: 978 1 84765 473 1 April 2017 UK Com ex Can

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‘Taxi Driver for Africa’s blank generation … a pulp fiction vision of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth that somehow manages to be both frightening and self-mocking at the same time’ Time Out ‘Disturbingly funny … although the title invokes American Psycho, the book owes more to Dostoyevsky and Camus’ New Yorker

Black Moses Alain Mabanckou

New title

Translated by Helen Stevenson

The new novel from the Man Booker International Prize nominee It’s 1970, and in the People’s Republic of Congo a Marxist-Leninist revolution is ushering in a new age. But at the orphanage where young Moses has grown up, the revolution has only strengthened the institution’s corrupt director.

So Moses escapes to Pointe-Noire, where he finds a home with a band of Congolese Merry Men and the Zairian prostitutes of the Trois-Cents quarter.

But the authorities won’t leave Moses in peace, and chase the Merry Men and the Trois-Cents girls out of town. All this injustice pushes poor Moses over the edge. Could he really be the Robin Hood of the Congo? Or is he just losing it?

Black Moses is a larger-than-life comic tale of a young man obsessed with helping the helpless in the unjust world. It is also a vital new extension of Mabanckou’s extraordinary, interlinked body of work dedicated to his native Congo, and confirms his status as one of our great storytellers.

‘Mabanckou’s voice is vividly colloquial, mischievous and often outrageous as he explores, from multiple angles, the country where he grew up, drawing on its political conflicts and compromises, disappointments and hopes. He acts the jester, but with serious intent and lacerating effect’ Man Booker International Prize 2015 judges’ citation ‘One of the continent’s greatest living writers’ Guardian

Alain Mabanckou was born in 1966 in Congo. His four previous novels are published by Serpent’s Tail, as is the memoir The Lights of Pointe-Noire. He has been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, won the prestigious Prix Renaudot and was a finalist for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.

Fiction £14.99 Demy hardback 240pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 673 2 eISBN: 978 1 78283 267 6 April 2017 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

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Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly

New title

A Sean Duffy Thriller

Adrian McKinty

This time, help isn’t coming. This time, Duffy has to save himself.

Belfast 1988: a man has been shot in the back with an arrow. It ain’t Injuns and it isn’t Robin Hood. But uncovering exactly who has done it will take Detective Inspector Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on the high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave.

Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs and with his relationship on the rocks, Duffy will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece.

Crime fiction £12.99 Royal paperback original 336pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 692 3 eISBN: 978 1 78283 279 9 January 2017 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe Tr

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Adrian McKinty was born in Northern Ireland and grew up at the height of the Troubles.

In the early 1990s he moved to New York City where he worked in bars, bookstores and building sites. He now lives in Melbourne, Australia. www.adrianmckinty.com @adrianmckinty

SPINETINGLER AWARD WINNER NED KELLY AWARD WINNER BARRY AWARD WINNER STEEL DAGGER AWARD SHORTLISTED EDGAR AWARD SHORTLISTED THEAKSTON AWARD SHORTLISTED ANTHONY AWARD NOMINEE

The Sean Duffy Thrillers

‘McKinty’s Troubles-set tales are becoming one of the great crime series … brilliant’ Sun

The Cold Cold Ground

I Hear the Sirens in the Street

In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

Gun Street Girl

Rain Dogs

‘If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written’ The Times

‘It blew my doors off’ Ian Rankin

‘Smart and irreverent’ Sunday Times

‘McKinty is firmly in the front rank of modern crime writers’ Daily Mail

‘One of crime fiction’s most reliable attractions’ Mail on Sunday

£7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 84668 823 2 eISBN: 978 1 84765 795 4 June 2012 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

£7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 84668 819 5 eISBN: 978 1 84765 929 3 January 2013 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

£7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 84668 821 8 eISBN: 978 1 84765 931 6 June 2014 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

£7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 84668 982 6 eISBN: 978 1 78283 051 1 July 2015 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

£7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 457 8 eISBN: 978 1 78283 162 4 March 2016 World ex USA, Can Exclusive Europe

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Chelsea Girls Eileen Myles

Serpent’s Tail Classic

with a new introduction by the author

A groundbreaking and candid novel-in-real-time, Chelsea Girls is the cult classic by the ‘rockstar of modern poetry’ (BUST Magazine) In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist’s life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool and intimate account of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity.

Told in an audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in lyrical language, Chelsea Girls weaves together memories of Myles’ 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, a volatile adolescence, unabashed ‘lesbianity’ and riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s and 80s New York.

Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback 288pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 780 7 eISBN: 978 1 78283 326 0 August 2016 UK Com ex Can

Eileen Myles has been described as ‘one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature’. Myles is the winner of four Lambda Book Awards, has published twenty books of poetry, criticism and fiction, and recently appeared in the hit US TV series Transparent. @EileenMyles

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‘For those of us who became who we are in large part via Chelsea Girls when it came out in 1994, it comes as no surprise that Eileen Myles’ landmark book feels just as kinetic, ecstatic, muscular, hilarious, sorrowful, valiant, original, necessary and timeless today. For those of you encountering it for the first time, I envy your ride. Chelsea Girls is an unmatched classic and an act of social justice’ Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Euphoria Heinz Helle

New title

Translated by Kári Driscoll

What becomes of man when all he has left is survival?

Somewhere in the Austrian Alps, a group of men in their thirties have gathered for a weekend away. When they come down from the hills, the world has ended.

As the men wander through the destroyed landscape, Euphoria’s narrator reveals only small, shocking details – a boy sitting impassively beside his murdered parents, a provincial nightclub full of charred bodies. Seeking food and fuel for the fire, but finding only the pointless remnants of their vanished world, the men realise that all they have left is their lives. And what are those worth in a world where their future has crumbled away, their past is an empty taunt and their present is reduced to the animal trudge of survival?

An austere, troubling tale of how quickly we become beasts, Euphoria explores the savagery of man in a world run free from society’s restraints.

A post-apocalyptic literary fable about human nature to compare with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or José Saramago’s Blindness ‘Leaves you shivering. In a crystal clear, poetic language Helle speaks of the beauty and indifference of nature, the survival instincts of man, our cruelty but also our capacity for friendship’ FOCUS

Heinz Helle was born in 1978.

He studied philosophy in Munich and New York. He has worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies, and is a graduate of the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel.

Euphoria is his second novel; his first novel Superabundance was also published by Serpent’s Tail.

Fiction £11.99 Demy paperback original with flaps 192pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 688 6 eISBN: 978 1 78283 277 5 February 2017 World English language US

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All The Rivers Dorit Rabinyan

New title

Translated by Jessica Cohen

Romeo & Juliet for our divided modern world A chance encounter in New York brings two strangers together: Liat is an idealistic translator, Hilmi a talented young painter. Together they explore the city, share jokes and homemade meals, and fall in love. There is only one problem: Liat is from Israel, Hilmi from Palestine, and outside reality can only be kept at bay for so long. After a tempestuous visit from Hilmi’s brother, cracks begin to form in the relationship, and their points of difference – Liat’s military service, Hilmi’s hopes for Palestine’s future – threaten to overwhelm them.

When they return separately to their divided countries, Liat and Hilmi must decide whether to keep going, or let go.

A prizewinning bestseller, banned in Israeli schools for its depiction of a taboo relationship, this is the deeply affecting story of two people trying to bridge one of the most deeply riven borders in the world.

Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback original 288pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 764 7 eISBN: 978 1 78283 316 1 February 2017 UK Com ex Can

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Dorit Rabinyan is the bestselling author of the acclaimed Persian Brides and Strand of a Thousand Pearls. She is the recipient of the Itzhak Vinner Prize, the Prime Minister’s Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Award. All The Rivers was named as a book of the year by Ha’aretz.

A tragic love story and a profound portrait of the human reality behind the Israel–Palestine conflict ‘A precise and elegant love story, drawn with the finest of lines.

There are many astonishing things about this book’ Amos Oz

A Separation Katie Kitamura

THE CLERKENWELL PRESS

A transfixing story of absence and presence in the aftermath of a marriage A young woman, beginning a new life after a failed marriage, gets word that her ex-husband has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged southern Peloponnese. Reluctantly she agrees to go and search for him. In her heart, she’s not even sure if she wants to find him. Adrift in the wild and barren landscape, she traces the failure of their relationship, and finds that she understands less than she thought about the man she used to love.

A story of intimacy, infidelity and compassion, A Separation is about the gulf that divides us from the lives of others and the narratives we create to mask our true emotions. As the narrator reflects upon her love for a man who may never have been what he appeared, Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on the brink of catastrophe.

‘Kitamura is one of the best living writers I’ve read, and she gives the dead ones a run for their money’ Evie Wyld ‘Profound and gripping. Kitamura combines the calm complexity of Joseph Conrad with the pacing and reveal of Patricia Highsmith. This novel is a wonder and a pleasure’ Rivka Galchen

Katie Kitamura is based in New York and London. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Wired and the Guardian. Her previous novel Gone to the Forest, also published by Clerkenwell Press, was a book of the year in both the Financial Times and the New Yorker.

Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback 240pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 658 9 eISBN: 978 1 78125 662 6 March 2017 UK Com ex Can

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The Last Wolf

László Krasznahorkai Translated by George Szirtes and John Batki

Two masterly novellas by Europe’s pre-eminent literary genius In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar.

In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear a forest’s last ‘noxious beasts’.

Herman begins with great zeal, although in time he switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game ... In Herman II, the same events are related from the perspective of strange visitors to the region, a group of hyper-sexualised aristocrats who interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman ...

These intense novellas, full of Krasznahorkai’s signature sense of foreboding and dark irony, are perfect examples of his craft.

Fiction £12.99 Demy hardback 128pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 813 2 eISBN: 978 1 78283 342 0 January 2017 UK Com ex Can

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László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the International Man Booker Prize 2015, 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango, and 1993 Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance.

‘A visionary writer of extraordinary intensity … terrifying, strange, appallingly comic and often shatteringly beautiful … magnificent works of deep imagination’ Man Booker International Prize citation ‘Far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing’ W. G. Sebald

The Visiting Privilege New and collected stories

Joy Williams

‘The modern heir to Anton Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor’ Washington Post Joy Williams’ peerless short stories are unlike anything else. Her uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers for three decades. Here, for the first time, Williams’ best stories are available in a single volume, together with thirteen new stories that show a writer continuing to mould the form into something strange and new.

Real but surreal, bleak but funny, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, her stories fray away the fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human life. In ‘The Lover’, a girl suffers a spiritual and physical wasting away; in ‘The Visiting Privilege’, a visitor finds refuge in her friend’s psychiatric ward; in ‘Charity’, a woman gives a poor family gas money and finds herself marooned in their peculiar world. The forty-six flawless stories collected in The Visiting Privilege cement Williams’ status as the most devastating artist of short fiction writing today.

‘The Visiting Privilege cements Williams’ position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance’ The New York Times ‘Joy Williams is simply a wonder’ Raymond Carver ‘One of the great American short story writers’ Jay McInerney

Joy Williams is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of four novels and three collections of stories, as well as the essays Ill Nature, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

Fiction £16.99 Demy hardback 512pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 746 3 eISBN: 978 1 78283 307 9 November 2016 UK Com ex Can

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Serpent’s Tail Classics Masterpieces from the Serpent’s Tail vault Pete Ayrton founded Serpent’s Tail in 1986 to introduce British readers to risk-taking books from around the world. Serpent’s Tail quickly established a reputation for fearlessness, and for discovering an eclectic range of ground-breaking fiction and non-fiction.

We’re still publishing dangerous books that we think matter, from literary novels, crime fiction and works in translation to non-fiction books on contemporary culture and politics.

Whether it’s Albertine Sarrazin’s 60s tale of youthful rebellion Astragal, Lester Bangs’ missives from the punk-rock frontline in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Jean Patrick-Manchette’s razorsharp Marxist satire Fatale or David Gates’s bravura story of a man drinking himself into oblivion in Jernigan, our classics still burn as fiercely as they did on first publication.

For more information, visit: www.serpentstail.com/serpents-tail-classics 22

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Devil in a Blue Dress Walter Mosley

The Piano Teacher Elfriede Jelinek

‘A first novel of astonishing virtuosity, upending Chandler’s LA to show a dark side of a different kind’ Sunday Times

‘In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure and spite and selfcontempt seep from every pore’ Guardian

Fiction £8.99 B format paperback 224pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 519 3 eISBN: 978 1 84765 236 2 January 2017 World ex USA, Can

Fiction £8.99 B format paperback 304pp ISBN: 978 1 78125 568 1 eISBN: 978 1 84765 306 2 November 2016 World ex USA, Can

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Serpent’s Tail Classics – now available

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Iron Towns

Anthony Cartwright

New in paperback

‘The best football novel since The Damned United’ Daily Mail Liam Corwen is playing out the end of a modest career at Irontown FC. As the club limps towards relegation, Liam’s mind turns to history – and the past weighs heavily in the Iron Towns. The old steelworks rust, apple trees grow up through the abandoned factory floors and the land is haunted again by old myths creeping back to the edge of consciousness.

But it is more recent legends that fill Liam’s mind: the great footballers tattooed across his body, images of famous cup finals, moments etched in the collective memory ... could redemption, greatness even, still wait for Liam and his friends, here among the crumbling estates and old dockyards?

Shifting between past and present, evoking the landscape and myth of a forgotten corner of England, Iron Towns is a tale of dreams of youth, football and industry – and what happens when those dreams recede into the past.

Fiction £8.99 B-format paperback 288pp ISBN: 9781781255391 eISBN: 9781782832010 March 2017 World all languages US

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Anthony Cartwright was born in Dudley in 1973. The author of three previous novels, he is a Betty Trask Award winner and his work has been shortlisted for several literary prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize.

He lives in London with his wife and son.

‘This is not a book that yearns for relentless tension, but the subtler pleasures of texture and flow … visionary’ Guardian ‘Kaleidoscopic … a patchwork quilt of a novel, depicting a decimated industrial landscape’ Review 31 ‘An elegiac tale that mixes myth and melodrama to dazzling effect’ Metro

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Superabundance Heinz Helle

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‘A daring portrait of an overwhelmed mind’ Financial Times

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‘Dark, dreamlike … beautiful in its evocation of flawed love’ Financial Times

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‘Enthralling … a thought-provoking, surprisingly touching story’ Big Issue

Fiction £8.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 396 0 eISBN: 978 1 78283 129 7 February 2017 World English language

Crime fiction £7.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 485 1 eISBN: 978 1 78283 177 8 March 2017 World all languages

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Fiction £8.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 515 5 eISBN: 978 1 78283 190 7 May 2017 UK Com ex Can

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Non-fiction £9.99 B format paperback ISBN: 978 1 78125 461 5 eISBN: 9781 7 8283 165 5 July 2016 World all languages

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Poetry £14.99 Demy hardback ISBN: 978 1 78125 736 4 eISBN: 978 1 78283 300 0 August 2016 UK Com ex Can

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978 1 78125 511 7 e 978 1 78283 188 4 £8.99

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