| Programming note: we’ll be off next Thursday for Thanksgiving, so look for the Communiqué back in your inbox on December 5. Thanks! — Jordan
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Hot News This Week
November 21, 2024
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| With interest in dystopian fiction spiking since the election, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman has seen a major surge in sales, and it recently appeared on ABA and Bookshop.org bestseller lists.
Transit Books reissued Ros Schwartz’s translation of the novel in 2022, and over the past year it’s become a BookTok sensation. More stock will land next week and in December.
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| Read This Next: A Beloved Book Set in a Declining Empire
Them also featured it among works of art to turn to in times of grief and anger, and on November 6, a post about the book went viral on X/Twitter.
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| Best Books of the Year
Kirkus Reviews
- Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (And Other Stories)
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| | Sunday
by Marcelo Tolentino
Blue Dot Kids Press • January 2025 • 9798989858811
“This book has major Good Dog, Carl vibes. . . . Cannot wait to share this one at our store’s storytime.” — Naomi Chamblin, Napa Bookmine (Napa, CA)
“Lush illustrations that invoke In the Night Kitchen. . . . With so many things to find and explore in every picture, this book will have readers returning again and again to make sure they haven’t missed a single detail.” — Katherine Megna-Weber, Books Inc. (San Leandro, CA)
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| | American Abductions
by Mauro Javier Cardenas
Deep Vellum / Dalkey Archive Press • May 2024 • 9781628975185
“The cruel inhumanity of contemporary immigration policy gets a full, fantastical reckoning at the hands of Mauro Javier Cardenas, an Ecuadoran writer who is one of America’s leading experimental stylists.” — James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore (St. Louis, MO)
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★ “Spanish forger and revolutionary Urtubia (1930–2020) recounts his life and crimes in this enthralling autobiography. . . . The author’s unique voice, irascible and wise, adds a great deal of charm to this meandering memoir. It’s a wonder.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Heaven and Hell
by Jón Kalman Stefánsson, trans. Philip Roughton
Biblioasis • February 2025 • 9781771966511
★ “A moving story of loss and courage told in prose as crisp and clear as the Icelandic landscape where it takes place. . . . Stefánsson writes like an epic poet of old about the price the natural world exacts on humans.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | Blade by Blade
by Danusha Laméris
Copper Canyon Press • October 2024 • 9781556597039
★ “This elegiac outing from Laméris is a testament to indelible love, offering a maelstrom of memory that briefly resurrects those she mourns. . . . Laméris’s voice is incomparable.” — Publishers Weekly
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“Blomerth’s work is possibly the next level to the fantastic work that [Victor] Moscoso and his cohort of psychedelic artists invented in the ’60s.” — PRINT
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| | Comrade Papa
by Gauz', trans. Frank Wynne
Biblioasis • October 2024 • 9781771966450
“GauZ’ avoids moralizing and is always alive to the humor and peculiarity of his stories. . . . Frank Wynne’s translation from the French shows a deft touch with Anouman’s malapropisms.” — Wall Street Journal
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| | The Sapling Cage
by Margaret Killjoy
Feminist Press • September 2024 • 9781558613317
“An atmospheric medieval fantasy set in a world gripped by ecological crises. . . . Killjoy’s exploration of the witches’ social dynamics is honest and lovely. A beautiful and moving start to a promising series.” — New York Times Book Review
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“Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die.” — Rain Taxi Review of Books
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“More than an expansive obituary, it is a reminder and celebration of what Israel has not been able to destroy: a Palestinian voice that remains independent, defiant, and human.” — New Arab
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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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