Hot News This Week October 17, 2024
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| “I will turn to Wilkerson’s book again and again to be reminded of my three dear friends who comprised the band Thunderclap Newman.”
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| More Fosse on the Way from Transit
Transit Books publisher Adam Levy spoke with Marketplace Morning Report last week about acquiring new works from Jon Fosse after he won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. “I think it’s fairly common when a small house has a lot of success with an author, for them to move to a larger house to receive significantly more money,” says Levy. “We really did try to make the case why we would be the right house to continue with him.” As noted in the piece, Transit has sold over 50,000 copies of Fosse’s books in the past year.
Publishers Lunch reports that Transit’s Fosse acquisitions include the Vaim trilogy—his first new works since winning the Nobel—which is a sequence of three novels set in a fictional fishing village in Norway, as well as Dog Stories, a collection of three novellas with canine protagonists, previously unpublished in English.
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| Read This Next: Eva Baltasar’s Mammoth, translated by Julia Sanches
“A quiet but hard-staring fighter of a book, Mammoth is, in a world doomed to end, one woman’s strange and powerful cry against her own extinction.” Eva Baltasar’s novel Mammoth, translated by Julia Sanches, received a glowing review in the New York Times Book Review on October 12. A “surprising slim novel that trembles with the force of an approaching stampede,” it’s the story of a woman who “negotiates a new life in a crumbling farmhouse in a rural mountain hamlet” after being “frustrated by her initial failure to conceive, and by the many small assaults on her dignity in a world of low-paid but all-consuming work, of disappointing crushes and high rent and little joy.”
Mammoth is part of a loosely connected trilogy with Baltasar’s previous novels, Permafrost and Boulder. Boulder was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, and critic Parul Sehgal praised it in the New Yorker as a “ragged, sensuous story” about a “gorgeously untethered woman wondering just what to do with her freedom.”
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, trans. Julia Sanches And Other Stories • August 2024 • 9781916751002
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| | The First Snow by Marie Stumpfova and Radek Maly, illus. Marie Stumpfova Albatros Media • August 2024 • 9788000070759
“What a beautiful, imaginative, fun book! The soft illustrations and text hold a sense of wonder.” — Tegan Tigani, Queen Anne Book Company (Seattle, WA)
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“Delightful! Joyful! Original! Love it.” — Naomi Chamblin, Napa Bookmine (Napa, CA)
“Captures the childhood wish for the wonder of a white Christmas! Lovely illustrations and sweet sibling story.” — Jessica Nock, Main Street Books (Davidson, NC)
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★ “A standout graphic adaptation of Antarctic explorer Cherry-Garrard’s account of his 1910–1913 expedition to the South Pole. . . . A sweeping, majestic saga that achieves the rare feat of being both educational and entertaining. Readers will eagerly await the rest of the adventure.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Trigger by C.G. Moore Little Island Books • September 2024 • 9781915071538
★ “A raw and fiercely gripping portrayal with paramount representation. . . . This intense account of surviving sexual violence raises awareness and helps destigmatize male/male assault.” — School Library Journal
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| | Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, trans. Alex Zucker Bellevue Literary Press • August 2024 • 9781954276291
“If Felice Bauer is seen at all by literary historians, it’s simply as the recipient of more than 500 letters from her former fiancé, Franz Kafka. . . . ‘Who,’ Platzová asks, ‘was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture and precisely set watches?’” — New York Times Book Review
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“The profound cultural and intellectual impact of the notebook is the subject of this wide-ranging history, which traces the unassuming object’s development from ancient wax tablets to modern-day Moleskines.” — New Yorker
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“Brian Evenson, in his masterful stories, whatever combination of weird fiction, horror, and science fiction they might be; in his suspension of epistemology in the moment of seeing both a bird and a leaf; in his endless, unwavering doubt, leaves his readers tottering exactly there.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
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“A passionate and urgent case for open borders. . . . For in the end its power lies less in prompting change (at least in the imminent future) than in advancing a compassionate and almost irrefutable ethical case.” — New York Review of Books
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| | The Propagandist by Cécile Desprairies, trans. Natasha Lehrer New Vessel Press • October 2024 • 9781954404267
“At once a ghost story, a tale of amour fou, a settling of accounts, and, one senses, a deeply personal act of expiation. . . . Deftly translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, this début novel offers a thoroughgoing inventory of French complicity with the crimes of Nazi occupiers during the Second World War.” — New Yorker
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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ABA and NCIBA Bestseller Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown AK Press • August 2024 • 9781849355544
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The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy Feminist Press • September 2024 • 9781558613317
“An absolute blast of magic and mystery, The Sapling Cage had me enraptured from page 1. Lorel, a trans girl determined to be a witch, must hide her identity from her coven as she learns the ways of magic.” — Melanie Moran-Resendiz, Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ)
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