Hot News This Week
May 9, 2024
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| | The Default World
by Naomi Kanakia
Feminist / Amethyst Editions • May 2024 • 9781558613164
“An astounding take on performative activism and transactional relationships, The Default World follows a couch surfing trans woman trying to take advantage of her rich friends’ healthcare benefits.” — Mallory Sutton, Bards Alley Bookshop (Vienna, VA)
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“We find Aubrey in Toronto in the early 1990s, where he is swept up in the world of literary strivers. . . . Breezy yet literate, it’s a smart, crisp read about the messiness of love.” — Grace Harper, Mac’s Backs (Cleveland Heights, OH)
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| Out of the Sierra is an Indie Next Pick
The ABA announced last week that Victoria Blanco’s Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance is an Indie Next pick for June. “Poetic yet journalistic, dramatic yet quiet, devastating but hopeful,” says Luis Correa of Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA), one of the nominating booksellers. “A delicately told account of the Rarámuri, a Native people of Mexico, that honors their history, traditions, and culture, and one family’s story as they adapt to modern Mexican life.”
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| Deep Vellum and the Dallas Literary Scene
“Today Dallas is home to one of the most dynamic, international literary scenes in the country, inspired in many ways by the infectious, DIY energy of Deep Vellum.” Publisher Will Evans and our friends at Deep Vellum were recently profiled by the New York Times for their contributions to Dallas’s flourishing literary scene. “A literary city is not just a publishing house or bookstores or writers or readers,” says Will in the piece. “It’s the entire thing.”
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| New Fiction in the New York Times Book Review
In other Deep Vellum news, two of their books recently received in-depth reviews in the New York Times Book Review. On Short War, the NYTBR review says that “translator and critic Lily Meyer’s first novel opens in Santiago, Chile, with a lovely, eerie assuredness, a moment like an incantation: a girl walking toward a boy through a crowded party, illuminated.” In American Abductions, according to the NYTBR review, “Cárdenas’s narrative engines include oneiric séances, unheralded victims rebaptized as 20th-century Surrealists, a plausible robot named Roberto Bolaño, and lives fractured by trauma, death or computer algorithms.”
Also garnering a recent full NYTBR review is Lublin by Manya Wilkinson: “With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages.”
Short War
by Lily Meyer
Deep Vellum / A Strange Object • April 2024 • 9781646053155
American Abductions
by Mauro Javier Cardenas
Deep Vellum / Dalkey Archive Press • May 2024 • 9781628975185
Lublin
by Manya Wilkinson
And Other Stories • April 2024 • 9781913505943
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| | The Caricaturist
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press • July 2024 • 9781954276277
★ “An illustrator seeks his fortune on the eve of the Spanish-American War. Though it opens in 1897, Lock’s new novel feels very relevant in 2024. . . . A resonant story of art, rebellion, and politics.” — Kirkus Reviews
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★ “Convincing scientific lore reveals fascinating what-ifs about space travel and colonization. Pursuing humanity’s redemption to its final interstellar frontier, Flynn delivers an impressive and original epic.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Divided Island
by Daniela Tarazona, trans. Lizzie Davis and Kevin Gerry Dunn
Deep Vellum Publishing • April 2024 • 9781646053148
★ “Mexican writer Tarazona’s inventive English-language debut follows an author whose consciousness splits into two separate realities. . . . It’s a triumph of experimentation.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Brittle Joints
by Maria Sweeney
Street Noise Books • June 2024 • 9781951491260
★ “Cartoonist Sweeney debuts with a candid portrait of life with a disability, drawn in delicate brushstrokes and natural colors. . . . Sweeney’s subtle and elegant art reflects the nuance of her moment-to-moment struggle to ground her self apart from chronic pain.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | The Robbery
by Joaquín Camp
Berbay Publishing • May 2024 • 9781922610706
“Three identical robbers named Thief 1, Thief 2 and Thief 3 resolve to dig a hole to rob a bank. They burrow their way into the middle of an orchestra concert, inside the ring of a Lucha libre match and onto the deck of the Titanic.” — New York Times Book Review
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“Genuinely thrilling: the pacing is perfect, and the stakes ratchet up in a horrifying, relentless, and seemingly inevitable progression. Simultaneously, this is a novel that meditates on power and authority, and the ethics thereof.” — Locus Magazine
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“An amazing woman, Myra Sack, has written a gorgeous, heartbreaking and uplifting book called Fifty-seven Fridays.” — Anne Lamott, via X/Twitter
“Heartbreakingly fearless, Sack demonstrates that grief is boundless, and you can love, cherish and mourn all at once.” — PEOPLE
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| New Digital Review Copies
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“This is one of those monumental events in American poetry: the life’s work of a major poet gathered in one big book, an opportunity to revel in all that Jean Valentine accomplished in her long and prolific career.” — NPR.org
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