Winter 2025 Catalog | Graywolf Press

by Paul B. Preciado

Publication date April 15, 2025 essays

A revolutionary book tracing the collapse of the paradigms that have organized the world for centuries

In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.

The central thesis of this monumental work is that dysphoria, to be understood properly, should not be seen as a mental illness but rather as the condition that defines our times. Dysphoria is an abyss that separates a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist order hurtling toward its end from a new way of being that, until now, has been seen as unproductive and abnormal but is in fact the way out of our current predicament.

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With echoes of visionaries such as William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker, Preciado’s theoretical writing is propelled by lyric power while providing us with a critical toolbox full of new concepts that can guide our thinking and our actions: transition, cognitive emancipation, denormalization, disidentification, “electronic heroin,” digital coups, necro-kitsch. Dysphoria Mundi is Preciado’s most accessible and significant work to date, in which he makes sense of a world in ruins around us and maps a joyous, radical way forward.

Paul B. Preciado is the author of Can the Monster Speak?, Countersexual Manifesto, and Testo Junkie, among other books, and wrote and directed the film Orlando, My Political Biography. He directs the Institute for Planetary Transition and lives in Paris.

Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition by Paul B. Preciado

April 15, 2025

978-1-64445-332-2

Paperback $22.00

448 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit.: Fitzcarraldo Editions

Trans., dram.: Casanovas & Lynch Literary Agency

1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press

By Shubha Sunder

Publication date March 4, 2025 fiction

An elegantly inventive debut novel that offers a sharp new take on the immigrant story in post-9/11 America

Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.

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Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.

Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.

Optional Practical Training: A Novel by Shubha Sunder

March 4, 2025

978-1-64445-324-7

Paperback $17.00

256 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: The Gernert Company

Audio: Graywolf Press

By Youssef Rakha

Publication date February 4, 2025 fiction

A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

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Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, The Crocodiles, and Paulo, which was long-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

The Dissenters: A Novel by Youssef Rakha

February 4, 2025

978-1-64445-319-3

Paperback $17.00

272 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit., audio, 1st ser.: Graywolf Press

Trans., dram.: Ayesha Pande Literary Agency

By Ben Ratliff

Publication date March 18, 2025 essays

A revelatory exploration of the relationship between music and running by one of our foremost music writers

Out the front door, across the street, down the hill, and into Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. This is how Ben Ratliff’s runs started most days of the week for about a decade. Sometimes listening to music, not always. Then, at the beginning of the pandemic, he began taking notes about what he listened to. He wondered if a body in motion, his body, was helping him to listen better to the motion in music.

He runs through the woods, along the Hudson River, and into the lowlands of the Bronx. He encounters newly erected fences for an intended FEMA field hospital, and demonstrations against racial violence. His runs, and the notes that result from them, vary in length just as the songs he listens to do: seventies soul, jazz, hardcore punk, string quartets, Eliane Radigue’s slow-change electronics, Carnatic singing, DJ sets, piano music of all kinds, Sade, Fred Astaire, and Ice Spice.

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Run the Song is also the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he’s listening to—let’s run it, he’ll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.

Ben Ratliff is the author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A former music critic for the New York Times, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening by Ben Ratliff

March 18, 2025

978-1-64445-328-5

Paperback $18.00

272 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: Zoë Pagnamenta Agency

Audio: Graywolf Press

By Corinna Vallianatos

Publication date February 4, 2025 fiction

“Corinna Vallianatos can make an entire soul come shining out of the smallest phrase.”―Kevin Brockmeier

The stories in Origin Stories take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame. Their narrators perceive more than is explicable, want more than they have, and contend with the bounty and frugality of their relationships. In “This Isn’t the Actual Sea,” a woman considers that her friend’s failure and sudden success have given her the material she needs to write something of her own, if she’s willing to risk the friendship to do so. “The Artist’s Wife” describes, in a painting stowed in a bowling alley broom closet, the chasm between seeing and being seen. “Dogwood” is a piece of lyric reportage on beauty, family, and survival whose sections range from the narrator’s childhood to her son’s new adulthood. And “Origin Story” acts as an accounting of the many different states where a woman and her husband have lived, and what it is they’ve been searching for.

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In this keen, meditative collection set in Southern California and Virginia, Corinna Vallianatos dramatizes the bonds of mother and child, the self-destruction of young womanhood, the thrill and bewilderment of friendship, and the power of place.

Origin Stories is filled with humor, longing, beauty, and belief.

Origin Stories: Stories by Corinna Vallianatos

February 4, 2025

978-1-64445-321-6

Paperback $17.00

192 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit., audio: Graywolf Press

1st ser., trans., dram.: William Morris Endeavor

By Mai Der Vang

Publication date March 4, 2025 poems

Pulitzer Prize finalist Mai Der Vang’s “lyrical interventions strike powerful notes of lamentation and rage” (The New Yorker)

Mai Der Vang’s poetry—lyrically insistent and visually compelling—constitutes a groundbreaking investigation into the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants. Primordial is a crucial turn to the ecological and generational impact of violence, a powerful and rousing meditation on climate, origin, and fate.

With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.

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Primordial examines the saola’s relationship to Hmong refugee identity and cosmology and a shared sense of exile, precarity, privacy, and survival. Can a war-torn landscape and memory provide sanctuary, and what are the consequences for our climate, our origins, our ability to belong to a homeland? Written during a difficult pregnancy and postpartum period, Vang’s poems are urgent stays against extinction.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Afterland, winner of the First Book Award of the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, her poetry has appeared in Tin House, the American Poetry Review, and Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Primordial: Poems by Mai Der Vang

March 4, 2025

978-1-64445-326-1

Paperback $17.00

144 pages 7" x 9"

Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press

1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press

By Ariana Reines

Publication date April 15, 2025 poems

An intimate chronicle of grief and sex from a “go-for-broke artist . . . like no one else” (Ben Lerner)

In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines explores the intersection of rage and surrender.

Drawing on the lineage of medieval troubadours’ erotic poetry, Reines employs the feminine, sexual symbology of the titular flower to also explore masculine pain: “I loved to hurt, be hurt by him. / There was a locked & secret mansion in him that I loved.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of femininity and masculinity are replaced with bold vulnerability, and the overturning of gender dynamics transforms the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and transmutation.

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The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, dealing honestly with the connection between erotic love and spirituality. Reines approaches these themes with humor that acknowledges and despairs of their melodrama: “I want to vomit, die, and change my life in that exact order.” Investigating war, maternity, violence and sensuality, and the role of writing in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to write “the horrible / And Freudian thing” that “might ruin this poem,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.

The Rose: Poems by Ariana Reines

April 15, 2025

978-1-64445-334-6

Paperback $17.00

96 pages 6" x 9"

Brit., trans., audio: Graywolf Press

1st ser., dram.: Janklow & Nesbit

By Robin Walter

Publication date April 1, 2025 poems

Winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award, selected by Victoria Chang

In award-winning poet Robin Walter’s debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking—seeing feelingly—become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist.

Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter’s poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather—all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive.

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Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.

Little Mercy: Poems by Robin Walter

April 1, 2025

978-1-64445-330-8

Paperback $17.00

96 pages 6" x 9"

Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press

1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press

By Maggie Nelson

Publication date April 1, 2025 essays

A career-spanning collection of inspiring, revelrous essays about art and artists

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson’s passion for dialogue and dissent. The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

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Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson’s own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations by Maggie Nelson

April 1, 2025

978-1-64445-336-0

Paperback $20.00

352 pages 5.5" x 8.25"

Brit.: Jonathan Cape

Trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Janklow & Nesbit Associates