Fall 2022 Catalog
Life Is Everywhere
by Lucy Ives
Publication Date October 4 Fiction
A virtuosic, radical reimagining of the systems novel by a “rampaging, mirthful genius” (Elizabeth McKenzie)
Everything that happened was repetition. But it was repetition with a difference. So she dragged along in a spiral, trusting to this form.
Manhattan, 2014. It’s an unseasonably warm Thursday in November and Erin Adamo is locked out of her apartment. Her husband has just left her and meanwhile her keys are in her coat, which she abandoned at her parents’ apartment when she exited mid-dinner after her father—once again—lost control.
Erin takes refuge in the library of the university where she is a grad student. Her bag contains two manuscripts she’s written, along with a monograph by a faculty member who’s recently become embroiled in a bizarre scandal. Erin isn’t sure what she’s doing, but a small, mostly unconscious part of her knows: within these documents is a key she’s needed all along.
With unflinching precision, Life Is Everywhere captures emotional events that hover fitfully at the borders of visibility and intelligibility, showing how the past lives on, often secretly and at the expense of the present. It’s about one person on one evening, reckoning with heartbreak—a story that, to be fully told, unexpectedly requires many others, from the history of botulism to an enigmatic surrealist prank. Multifarious, mischievous, and deeply humane, Lucy Ives’s latest masterpiece rejoices in what a novel, and a self, can carry.
Lucy Ives is the author of the novels Impossible Views of the World and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World and the story collection Cosmogony. Her writing has appeared in Aperture, Artforum, frieze, Granta, n+1, and Vogue.
Life Is Everywhere by Lucy Ives
October 4, 2022
978-1-64445-204-2
Paperback $18
400 pages 5.5 " x 8.25"
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st ser., dram: Janklow & Nesbit
Dr. No
by Percival Everett
Publication Date November 1 Fiction
A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising
The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.
With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”
Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn’t to say that it’s not about anything. In fact, it’s about villains. Bond villains. And that’s not nothing.
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books, most recently The Trees and Telephone, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. No by Percival Everett
November 1, 2022
978-1-64445-208-0
Paperback $16
232 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Melanie Jackson Agency
Rupture Tense
by Jenny Xie
Publication Date September 6 Poetry
The astounding second collection by Jenny Xie, “a magician of perspective and scale” (The New Yorker)
Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.
The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.
some damp spots, coins from another life, left on the pillow.
Off camera, someone from long ago stages a return.
Cue expectation, a kind of frugality of the scene.
There is movement and a spool of time
and, therefore, we begin a narration.
From the rupture, what is it that you see?
—from “The Rupture Tense”
Jenny Xie is the author of Nowhere to Arrive, recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize, and her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and teaches at New York University. Eye Level is her most recent collection.
Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie
September 6, 2022
978-1-64445-201-1
Paperback $17
120 pages 6.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
by Dorthe Nors, Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight
Publication Date November 1 Nonfiction
A celebrated Danish writer explores the unsung histories and geographies of her beloved slice of the world
Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.
Dorthe Nors’s first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast—from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Wadden Sea Islands in the southwest. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors’ ties to region as well as her decision to move back there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer’s Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother’s unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it.
Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person’s life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.
Dorthe Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop; four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize; and two novellas, collected in So Much for That Winter. She lives in Denmark.
A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight
November 1, 2022
978-1-64445-209-7
Paperback $17
168 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Pushkin Press Trans., dram.: Ahlander Agency 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Sinking Bell
by Bojan Louis
Publication Date September 27 Fiction
Potent stories that offer a forceful vision of contemporary Navajo life, by an American Book Award winner
An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a White woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions.
An ex-con hired to fix up a school bus for a couple living off the grid in the desert finds himself in the middle of their tattered relationship. An electrician’s plan to take his young nephew on a hike in the mountains, as a break from the motel room where they live, goes awry thanks to an untrustworthy new coworker. A night custodian makes the mistake of revealing too much about his work at a medical research facility to a girl who shares his passion for death metal. A relapsing addict struggles to square his desire for a White woman he meets in a writing class with family expectations and traditions.
Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai Dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He is the author of a book of poetry, Currents, which received an American Book Award. He has been a resident at MacDowell. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.
Sinking Bell by Bojan Louis
September 27, 2022
978-1-64445-203-5
Paperback $16
192 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession
by Ander Monson
Publication Date September 20 Nonfiction
A searching memoir of a life lived in the flicker of an action film, by the author of I Will Take the Answer
In his first memoir, Ander Monson guides readers through a scene-by-scene exploration of the 1987 film Predator, which he has watched 146 times. Some fighters might not have time to bleed, but Monson has the patience to consider their adventure, one frame at a time. He turns his obsession into a lens through which he poignantly examines his own life, formed by mainstream, White, male American culture. Between scenes, Monson delves deeply into his adolescence in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Riyadh, his role as a father and the loss of his own mother, and his friendships with men bound by the troubled camaraderie depicted in action and sci-fi blockbusters. Along with excursions into the conflicted pleasures of cosplay and first-person shooters, he imagines himself beside the poet and memoirist Paul Monette, who wrote the novelization of the movie while his partner was dying of AIDS.
A sincere and playful book that lovingly dissects the film, Predator also offers questions and critiques of masculinity, fandom, and their interrelation with acts of mass violence. In a stirring reversal, one chapter exposes Monson through the Predator’s heat-seeking vision, asking him, “What do you know about the workings of the hidden world?” As Monson brings us into the brilliant depths of the film and its universe, the hunt begins.
Ander Monson is the author of Letter to a Future Lover; Vanishing Point, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Neck Deep and Other Predicaments. He edits DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. He lives in Tucson, where he teaches at the University of Arizona.
Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession by Ander Monson
September 20, 2022
978-1-64445-200-4
Paperback $16
264 pages
5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: The Wylie Agency Audio: Graywolf Press
The Consequences
by Manuel Muñoz
Publication Date October 18 Fiction
Shimmering stories set in California’s Central Valley, the first book in a decade from a virtuoso story writer
“Her immediate concern was money.” So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz’s dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California’s Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal.
These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who put food on our tables but are regularly and ruthlessly rounded up by the migra, as well as the quotidian struggles and immense challenges faced by their families. The messy and sometimes violent realities navigated by his characters—straight and gay, immigrant and American-born, young and old—are tempered by moments of surprising, tender care: Two young women meet on a bus to Los Angeles to retrieve husbands who must find their way back from the border after being deported; a gay couple plans a housewarming party that reveals buried class tensions; a teenage mother slips out to a carnival where she encounters the father of her child; the foreman of a crew of fruit pickers finds a dead body and is subsequently—perhaps literally—haunted.
In The Consequences, obligation can shape, support, and sometimes derail us. It’s a magnificent new book from a gifted writer at the height of his powers.
Manuel Muñoz is the author of two previous collections and a novel. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, three O. Henry Awards, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories. A native of Dinuba, California, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.
The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz
October 18, 2022
978-1-64445-206-6
Paperback books $16
224 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists Audio: Graywolf Press
Little
by David Treuer
Publication Date November 1 Fiction
Back in print, with a new introduction, the memorable debut by the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
The grave we dug for my brother Little remained empty even after we filled it back in. And nobody was going to admit it.
So begins Little, first published by Graywolf Press in 1995 when David Treuer was just twenty-four. The narrative unfolds to reveal the deeply entwined stories of the three generations of Little’s family, including Stan, a veteran of the Vietnam War who believes Little is his son; Duke and Ellis, the twins who built the first house in Poverty after losing their community to smallpox and influenza; Jeannette, the matriarch who loved both Duke and Ellis and who walked hundreds of miles to reunite with them. Each of these characters carries a piece of the mystery of Little’s short life.
With rhythmic and unadorned prose, Treuer uncovers in even the most frost-hardened ground the resilience and humor of life in Poverty. From the unbearable cruelty of the institutions that systematically unraveled Native communities at the turn of the century, to the hard and hollow emptiness of a child’s grave, Treuer has orchestrated a moving account of kinship and survival.
In his new introduction, Treuer, now among the foremost writers of his generation, reflects on the germ of this novel and how it fits into his lasting body of work centered on Native life. More than a quarter of a century later, Little proves as vital and moving as ever.
David Treuer is the award-winning author of seven books and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. He is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and teaches at the University of Southern California.
Little by David Treuer
November 1, 2022
978-1-64445-207-3
Paperback $17
320 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., dram.: Elyse Cheney Literary Associates Audio: Graywolf Press
We Are Mermaids
by Stephanie Burt
Publication Date October 4 Poetry
Effusive new poems by Stephanie Burt, “perhaps our greatest poet of having yet more to say” (Boston Review)
Stephanie Burt’s poems in We Are Mermaids are never just one thing. Instead, they revel in their multiplicity, their interconnectedness, their secret powers to become much more than they at first seem. In these poems, punctuation marks make arguments for their utility and their rights to exist. Frozen isn’t simply another Disney animated musical but “the Most Trans Movie Ever.” Mermaids, werewolves, and superheroes don’t just fret over divided natures and secret identities, but celebrate their wholeness, their unique abilities, and their erotic potential. Flowers in this collection bloom into exactly what they are meant to be—revealing themselves, like bleeding hearts, beyond their given names.
ful. You are not required
to come up with something to say.
You can spend your life benthic, or brackish,
subsisting and even thriving where a fingertip
comes away saline and still refreshing,
exploring the estuary, the submerged lip
and congeries of overlapping shores
on the green-black water, the harbor, the bay.
You can live with your doubt,
that’s why it’s yours.
With humor and insight, Burt’s poems have always cherished and examined the things of this world, both real and imagined objects of fascination and desire. In this resplendent new collection, her observation and care flourish into her most fulfilled book yet. These poems shake off indecisiveness and doubt to reach joys through romance and family, through nature (urban and otherwise), and through imaginative community. We Are Mermaids is a trans book, a fangirl book, a book about coming together. It’s also Burt’s best book.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University and the author of several previous books of poetry and literary criticism, among them Advice from the Lights, Belmont and Close Calls with Nonsense, as well as The Poem Is You.
We Are Mermaids by Stephanie Burt
October 4, 2022
978-1-64445-205-9
Paperback $17
120 pages 6.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
Concentrate
by Courtney Faye Taylor
Publication Date November 1 Poetry
Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins’s murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor’s poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against—and between—women of color.
rip a switch from its yard. Fear had me
creased over a knee to be depleted.
I was mad.
Mad felt out of place like God in a sitcom
or hair in a wound. But in the country of my
hurt, “mad” can mean “very much.”
mad affected mad offended mad afflicted.
I was mad in awe of all them eyes
on this Black girl’s broke down life.
—from "Arizona?"
Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood’s relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor’s inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. “Concentrate,” she writes. “We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make.”
Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer and visual artist. She is a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work can be found in Poetry, the Nation, Best New Poets 2020, and elsewhere.
Concentrate: Poems by Courtney Faye Taylor
November 1, 2022
978-1-64445-210-3
Paperback $16
96 pages 7" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
by Maggie Nelson
Publication Date September 6 Nonfiction
Now in paperback, an enduring work of criticism from one of the most important writers of our time
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with it enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
As with all of Nelson’s work, how she thinks—and how that thinking expresses itself in style—is crucial to the book’s achievement. Through her generosity, rigor, and willingness to critically engage reigning pieties, Nelson shows that new forms of thinking and talking are available to us, ones that welcome a chorus of voices, and recommit us to our entanglement, even at its most difficult. On Freedom is an ambitious, essential book that reinvigorates the art of criticism.
Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner The Argonauts. She teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson
September 6, 2022
978-1-64445-202-8
Paperback $17
312 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Jonathan Cape Trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates