Hot News This Week
November 17, 2022
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We’re taking a holiday break next Thursday, so look for the Communiqué back in your inbox on December 1!
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Legendary Norwegian author Jon Fosse spoke with critic Merve Emre in a rare interview for the New Yorker on November 13. “I think literature is also a way of learning to die,” says Fosse, whose Septology trilogy is collected in a limited hardcover edition published by Transit Books next week. Read the full conversation here on writing, religion, near-death experiences, and much more.
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| | Your Hearts, Your Scars
by Adina Talve-Goodman, ed. Sarika Talve-Goodman and Hannah Tinti
Bellevue Literary Press • January 2023 • 9781954276055
“This posthumous collection of essays on coming of age as a heart transplant recipient exposes so much of the human condition from the perspective of a young woman wrestling with her mortality. Full of hope, this book is a lighthouse for those always seeking the best in people.”—Arvin Ramgoolam, Townie Books (Crested Butte, CO)
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Our Most-Anticipated Thanksgiving Float
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Gift Guide Recs and Editors’ Choice Picks in the New York Times Book Review
The New York Times’s 2022 Holiday Gift Guide recommends two titles from Consortium publishers. Notes on Shapeshifting is an Entertainment pick—“Gabi Abrão’s slim, precious chapbook contains a fail-safe guide to breakups, raw poems and memories of personal metamorphosis,” says Times music critic Jon Caramanica. Among the Kids picks is Katerina Karolik’s My Cup of Art: “This playful pop-up book imagines how various artists might create a tea or coffee cup,” writes Book Review children’s editor Jennifer Krauss.
My Cup of Art
by Katerina Karolik
Albatros Media • December 2022 • 9788000065946
Late Summer Ode
by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Copper Canyon Press • October 2022 • 9781556596476
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Read This Next: a Family Saga Featuring Triplets and Bombshell Secrets
A lengthy review of Amanda Svensson’s novel A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding, translated by Nichola Smalley, will run in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The epic saga centers on a family with triplets when, as writer Michael Callahan notes in the piece, “the sudden disappearance of their feckless father and an accompanying bombshell announcement by their fretful mother bring them into contact to confess old secrets, heal old wounds and, perhaps, glue the fractured brood back together.” For more on the novel, read reviews from The Guardian, BookPage, and Publishers Weekly.
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A Most-Anticipated Debut Novel Coming This Winter
Aurora Mattia’s debut novel, The Fifth Wound, is among Vulture’s most-anticipated books for winter. It’s “a strange book in all the best ways,” says writer Isle McElroy in the piece. “Baroque and mythical . . . this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound.”
The Fifth Wound
by Aurora Mattia
Nightboat Books • March 2023 • 9781643621487
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Best Books of the Year
With year-end lists rolling in, we’re keeping tabs on all the books featured from Consortium publishers. Browse more 2022 coverage highlights, and check out what’s new this week:
- Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey (And Other Stories)
- Canción by Eduardo Halfon, translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn (Bellevue Literary Press)
- Pretend It’s My Body by Luke Dani Blue (Feminist Press / Amethyst Editions)
- Pollak’s Arm by Hans von Trotha, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer (New Vessel Press)
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 Click here for more top titles publishing next Tuesday, Nov. 22.
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★ “Danielsson’s clarity of thought and expression and his use of illuminating literary and historical references are equal to the quality of his writing. Science ‘popularizing’ doesn’t get much more comprehensible, or provocative, than this.”—Kirkus Reviews
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| | Case Study
by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Biblioasis • November 2022 • 9781771965200
“[Case Study] is an elaborate, mind-bending guessing game; it is a blackly comic and quietly moving study of a nervous breakdown; and it is a captivating portrait of an egomaniac. . . . Macrae has reliably delivered another work of fiendish fun.”—Star Tribune
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“Although the poems are haunted by historical and contemporary violence, they are also often rapturous, revelling in the pleasures of nature and of the body.”—New Yorker
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| | On Browsing
by Jason Guriel
Biblioasis • November 2022 • 9781771965101
“Guriel’s nostalgic essays are odes to physical media and brick-and-mortar stores where they resided, spaces—from bookshelves to CD bins—that were once essential to our culture and that offered a lifestyle now eroded by the internet.”—New York Times Book Review
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“The contributions to Bigger Than Bravery . . . encourage readers to consider how to make good use of the moments we have—to persist past hardship, find joy in adversity, be resilient, survive, live on (or be remembered).”—Star Tribune
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New Digital Review Copies
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Solenoid
by Mircea Cartarescu, trans. Sean Cotter
Deep Vellum Publishing • October 2022 • 9781646052028
“As in the work of Kafka, whose diaries the narrator adores, the book’s horror and humor are born from examining ‘the tragic anomaly of the spirit dressed in flesh.’”—New Yorker
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Lynn York of Blair and Kristen Renee Miller of Sarabande Books recently spoke with Publishers Weekly for a piece about women-led book publishers.
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On November 11, Publishers Weekly highlighted Nervosa by Hayley Gold (Street Noise Books) in a piece on comics and graphic novels about health and medical topics.
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Case Study
by Graeme Macrae Burnet
Biblioasis • November 2022 • 9781771965200
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