Spring 2025 Catalog
Charlottesville
by Deborah Baker
Publication date June 3, 2025 nonfiction
The story of the torch march and rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, and shocked the nation
In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city.
To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.
Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand and The Last Englishmen. Her biography In Extremis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her book The Convert was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in New York and Charlottesville.
Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker
Trying
by Chloé Caldwell
Publication date August 5, 2025 nonfiction
From the author of the best-selling Women, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening
If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked?
Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected her experience; for one thing, most stories ended with in vitro fertilization, a baby, or both. She wanted to offer something different.
Caldwell began a book. She imagined a selective journal about her experience coping with stasis and uncertainty. Is it time to quit coffee, find a new acupuncturist, get another blood test? Her questions extended to her job at a clothing boutique and to her teaching and writing practice. Why do people love equating publishing books with giving birth? What is the right amount of money to spend on pants or fertility treatments? How much trying is enough? She ignored the sense that something else in her life was wrong that was not on the page . . . until she extracted a confession from her husband.
Broken by betrayal but freed from domesticity, Caldwell felt reawakened, to long-buried desires, to her queer identity, to pleasure and possibility. She kept writing, making sense of her new reality as it took shape. With the candor, irreverence, and heart that have made Caldwell’s work beloved, Trying intimately captures a self in a continuous process of becoming—and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process.
Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women, the memoir The Red Zone, and the essay collections I’ll Tell You in Person and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Bon Appétit, the Cut, Autostraddle, Longreads, and Nylon.
Trying: A Memoir by Chloé Caldwell
August 5, 2025
Trans., 1st ser., dram: United Talent Agency
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
by Irene Solà; Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Publication date June 17, 2025 fiction
An earthy, bewitching, and ferocious new novel by the author of When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.
As day turns to night, four hundred years’ worth of stories unspool, and the house reverberates with raucous laughter, pungent feasts, and piercing cries of pleasure and pain. It all begins with Joana, Mas Clavell’s matriarch, who once longed for a husband—“a full man,” perhaps even “an heir with a patch of land and a roof over his head.” She summoned the devil to fulfill her wish and struck a deal: a man in exchange for her soul. But when, on her wedding day, Joana discovered that her husband was missing a toe (eaten by wolves), she exploited a loophole in her agreement, heedless of what consequences might follow.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is an audacious and entrancing novel in which the lines between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history are blurred. In it, Irene Solà draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairy tales to tell a completely new kind of story.
Irene Solà is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of the novels The Dams, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, and Beast, a poetry collection.
Mara Faye Lethem is a writer, researcher, and translator. Her translation of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance was recognized with a wide range of awards and nominations, including the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, the Warwick Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Barrios Award, the Nota Bene Prize, a Firecracker Award, the Prix Jan Michalski, and the Lewis Galantière Award. Her recent translations include books by Alana S. Portero, Jaume Cabré, and Pol Guasch.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness: A Novel by Irene Solà; Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
June 17, 2025
Regaining Unconsciousness
by Harryette Mullen
Publication date August 5, 2025 poetry
Only legendary poet Harryette Mullen could make a book of our time’s dire crises this much fun to read
As you plan your last meal, chunks of ancient glaciers are ice cubes melting in a bowl of steaming broth. If, in a season of superlatives, you survive the hottest month on record in the hottest summer of the hottest year in the hottest decade ever, you’ll want a cold shower and a sip of chilled champagne.
—from “Hotter Than July”
Harryette Mullen is one of contemporary poetry’s most influential voices, for her inventive language play, keen wit, formal experimentation, and pointed critique of American culture. In Regaining Unconsciousness, her first new collection in twelve years, Mullen confronts the imminent dangers of our present to sound an alarm for our future, to wake us out of our complicity and despondency: Can we, even still, find our way to our unconscious selves, beyond our capacity to harm, subdue, and consume?
Regaining Unconsciousness: Poems by Harryette Mullen
August 5, 2025
That's All I Know
by Elisa Levi; Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Publication date May 20, 2025 fiction
A “radically countercultural” (El País Semanal) breakout novel about the restlessness of youth in rural Spain
Nineteen-year-old Little Lea lives in a rural town where life ends at the edge of the forest.
When a stranger loses his dog on the first day after the end of the world, Little Lea warns him not to follow it into the forest, that people who enter never come out. Over a shared joint, she tells him about the burning in her gut, winding a tale of loss, desire, and conspiracies.
Little Lea sees the world through backcountry eyes that distrust the outsiders who come but who also get to leave. When she isn’t working at her mother’s grocery store, she cares for her empty-headed younger sister, Nora, who only cries when she’s in pain. Meanwhile, her friend Catalina does nothing but cry. Little Lea wants Javier to love her, and she doesn’t want Marco, who leaves weed and his best potatoes on her doorstep. As the town prepares for their end-of-the-world festival, she faces her intensifying desire to leave, that burning that unsettles her life—she wants to be useful somewhere else, even if it means being unloved, unwanted, unable to return. That’s all she knows.
That's All I Know: A Novel by Elisa Levi; Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Whites
by Mark Doten
Publication date August 19, 2025 fiction
Corrosive stories about the insatiable logic of whiteness, by one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
The excoriating stories in Mark Doten’s brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten's stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time. They run the political spectrum from “well-intentioned” liberals and newly woke CEOs to Trump appointees, QAnon adherents, and believers in replacement theory. There is an anti-vax nursing home employee, an anti-woke billionaire, a nonbinary sneaker podcaster turned January 6 insurrectionist, a nonprofit LA housing president dubbed “WORST KAREN EVER,” an elderly Republican in denial of his COVID-19 diagnosis, teenage YouTubers responding to a shooting at their suburban Minnesota school, a demonically possessed cookie manufacturer drafting a BLM statement with his new Black employee, and a gay White supremacist figure who may be a joke on 4chan, but will have his revenge.
Whites: Stories by Mark Doten
Paradiso
by Dante Alighieri; Translation by Mary Jo Bang
Publication date July 8, 2025 poetry
The epic conclusion of Mary Jo Bang’s celebrated translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy
Then, the way an arrow strikes a target
Even before the bowstring stops quivering,
We raced that fast into the second realm.
My Lady’s joy was such that, as she passed
Into the light of that heaven, I saw the planet
Itself become that much brighter.
And if the star changed and sparkled,
What did I become—I who by my very nature
Am mercurial in every way?
—from "Canto V"
Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso completes her groundbreaking new version of Dante’s masterpiece, begun with Inferno and continued with Purgatorio. In Paradiso, Dante has been purified by his climb up the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, and now, led by the luminous Beatrice, he begins his ascent through the nine celestial spheres of heaven toward the Empyrean, the mind of God. Along the way, we meet the souls of the blessed—those at various proximities to God, but all existing within the bliss of heaven’s perfect order. Philosophically rich, spiritually resonant, Paradiso is a reckoning with justice and morality from a time of ethical questioning and political division much like our own.
Bang’s translation is a revelation in its artistry, readability, and faithfulness to Dante’s ambition for an epic poem that dares to employ language and references recognizable to its readers. In her lyric style and her illuminating and generous notes, Bang has made The Divine Comedy for the twenty-first century.
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri; Translation by Mary Jo Bang
Enter
by Jim Moore
Publication date May 6, 2025 poetry
Lyrical and frank meditations on mortality from a four-time Minnesota Book Award winner
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do, please show me how to be you.
—from “How to Come out of Lockdown”
In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood—parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages—and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry’s tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. “Please show me how to be you,” he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poettapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.
Enter: Poems by Jim Moore
My Heavenly Favorite
by Lucas Rijneveld; Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
Publication date May 6, 2025 fiction
“A tour de force of transgressive imagination” (The Guardian UK) by the winner of the International Booker Prize
A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.