Hot News This Week February 20, 2025
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Congratulations to El-Kurd and our friends at Haymarket Books, and many thanks to the booksellers and readers who have supported El-Kurd’s vital work.
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| Tilted Axis Publishes “Groundbreaking, Genre-defying Literature in Translation”
“With its emphasis on overlooked languages and narratives that often have a queer or feminist bent, Tilted Axis has helped to transform the landscape for translated fiction.”
This week, reporter Alexandra Alter profiled Tilted Axis Press in the New York Times, delving into how they’ve “carved out a unique literary niche” and “gained a reputation for bringing out a wide range of groundbreaking, genre-defying literature in translation.” We’re thrilled to be working with the press as their new distributor.
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| Read This Next: Ugliness
Moshtari Hilal’s Ugliness, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, is making headlines recently. A profile of Hilal ran in the Style section of today’s print New York Times: “Ms. Hilal takes on our beauty-worshipping celebrity culture and the beauty industry for their roles in encouraging all this effort, shame and secrecy, keeping women in an expensive prison of self doubt and fueling the consumption of products,” writes columnist Rhonda Garelick in the piece, which also features selections of Hilal’s artwork included in the book.
Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal, trans. Elisabeth Lauffer New Vessel Press • February 2025 • 9781954404281
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“A thrilling, engrossing read. . . . Lucio is a lively companion and offers a perspective into worlds that many of us will never see, from the highest ranking politician’s dinner table to the foulest prison cell.” — Douglas Riggs, Bank Square Books (Mystic, CT)
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“These poems of yearning place trans and queer awakening at their center. . . . A coalescence of girlhood and godhood, a body more tolerable revels in the euphoric mess of identity.” — Wroxanna Work, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)
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| | The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia Coffee House Press • April 2025 • 9781566897211
★ “Addonia’s mesmerizing prose drives the narrative from one carnal thought to the next as Hannah endures racist taunts and the stress of living in limbo. It’s a passionate and seductive tale of resilience.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Blue Sky Morning by Jihyun Kim, trans. Polly Lawson Floris Books • May 2025 • 9781782509080
★ “The feeling of a lovely morning, captured perfectly. . . . Every illustration in this South Korean import is filled with detail, from the children’s expressions to the individual leaves on the trees.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | The Gone Book by Helena Close Little Island Books • April 2025 • 9781912417445
★ “Close’s YA debut is excellent in every regard. The fully realized characters are highly sympathetic and come alive on the page. The plot is compelling, the setting beautifully realized.” — Booklist
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| | Attila by Aliocha Coll, trans. Katie Whittemore Open Letter • April 2025 • 9781960385376
★ “Coll (1948–1990) offers a literary riddle for the ages in this gorgeous 1991 novel, his English-language debut. . . . The novel is propelled by its unique prose, thrillingly translated by Whittemore.” — Publishers Weekly
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★ “Missed connections and the passage of time feature in this captivating collection by Akutagawa Prize winner Shibasaki. . . . Readers of Aimee Bender or Haruki Murakami will love this.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist, trans. Saskia Vogel Coach House Books • February 2025 • 9781552454893
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“A sweet story that explores the deeper theme of wanting to be seen versus truly seeing. Del Mazo grasps the importance of rhythm for the page turn, and her pacing is spot-on. . . . Guridi’s tender and funny artwork adeptly captures the heart of the tale.” — New York Times Book Review
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“The pared-down prose and folk-tale imagery . . . gives Satan’s Claw a Brothers Grimm feel. Richard Wells’s illustrations of horned, fanged fiends and bat-winged gargoyles, done in the style of antique engravings, thicken the period atmosphere.” — Washington Post
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| | Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi Wave Books • April 2024 • 9781950268931
“Mirror Nation brings all of us—the poet and the subject and the reader—closer to some pinnacle of truth that we would otherwise be far from without the text.” — International Examiner
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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ABA and Bookshop.org Bestseller I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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