Spring 2021 Catalog
NAMES FOR LIGHT: A Family History
by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Publication Date August 17, 2021 Nonfiction
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance
Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family’s history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family’s stories move into the present, her own story—that of a writer seeking to understand who she is—moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.
Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family’s legacy.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven. She has a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She teaches at Amherst College.
Names for Light: A Family History by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
August 17, 2021
978-1-64445-061-1
Paperback Original $16
176 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., 1st. ser., dram.: The Wylie Agency
Walking on Cowrie Shells
by Nana Nkweti
Publication Date June 1, 2021 Fiction
A virtuosic debut collection that roves across genres and styles, by a finalist for the Caine Prize
In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” she skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of Western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.
In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there’s everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con, to a murder investigation driven by statistics, to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character.
Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.
Praise for Walking on Cowrie Shells
“Let us thank whoever granted Nana Nkweti her all-access-pass to the human soul. . . . Walking on Cowrie Shells is a collection of verve, audacity, and consummate control.”—Kevin Brockmeier
“What an intoxicating book! Magical, funny, inventive and joyous, Nkweti’s tales remind us what storytelling can be.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
Nana Nkweti is a Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.
Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti
June 1, 2021
978-1-64445-054-3
Paperback $16
176 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., audio: Graywolf Press 1st ser., dram.: 3 Arts Entertainment
Pilgrim Bell
by Kaveh Akbar
Publication Date August 3, 2021 Poetry
Kaveh Akbar’s exquisite, highly anticipated follow-up to Calling a Wolf a Wolf
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.
Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.
America, I warn you, if you invite me into your home
I will linger,
kissing my beloveds frankly,
pulling up radishes
and capping all your pens.
There are no good kings,
only burning palaces.
Lose me today, so much.
—from “The Palace”
Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and has received honors such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.
Pilgrim Bell: Poems by Kaveh Akbar
August 3, 2021
978-1-64445-059-8
Paperback Original $16
80 pages 6.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: The Wylie Agency
The Renunciations
by Donika Kelly
Publication Date May 4, 2021 Poetry
An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary
The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of “the oracle”—an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends—the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.
In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma—a home whose construction starts “with a razing.”
Then I rested, a cycle fallow. Said winter. Said the ground
is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire
to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.
Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new groundwater, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth
and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears:
whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time
to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.
—from “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.”
Praise for The Renunciations
“The journey we take in The Renunciations is nothing short of rescue mission. And who else but Donika Kelly could offer such a lucid guide to the central figure of this book, as she navigates her most difficult years. . . . The poems are startling, disturbing, and relentlessly bold. I can’t imagine a time before having The Renunciations as a part of my emotional ecosystem and poetic landscape. Thank you, Donika, is what I really want to say.”—francine j. harris
“With Donika Kelly’s signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance. . . . Kelly’s poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine.”—Khadijah Queen
“In The Renunciations, her vital new poetry collection, Donika Kelly harnesses ‘the air, the earth, and flame’ to renounce the old gods: child abuse, violence, racial injustice, generational trauma. . . . The Renunciations is a work of stunning power, alive with haunting images, complex metaphor. And while Kelly looks unsparingly at pain and suffering—her own and others’—with transformation comes joy.”—Ellen Bass
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa.
The Renunciations: Poems by Donika Kelly
May 4, 2021
978-1-64445-053-6
Paperback $16
72 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal
by Rachel Greenwald Smith
Publication Date August 3, 2021 Nonfiction
A strident argument about the dangers of compromise in art, politics, and everyday life
On Compromise is an argument against contemporary liberal society’s tendency to view compromise as an unalloyed good—politically, ethically, and artistically. In a series of clear, convincing essays, Rachel Greenwald Smith discusses the dangers of thinking about compromise as an end, rather than as a means. To illustrate her points, she recounts her stint in a band as a bass player, fighting with her bandmates about “what the song wants,” and then moves outward to Bikini Kill and the Riot Grrrl movement, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Poetry magazine, the resurgence of fascism, and other wide-ranging topics.
Smith’s arguments are complex and yet have a simplicity to them, as she writes in a concise, cogent style that is eminently readable. By weaving examples drawn from literature, music, and other art forms with political theory and first-person anecdotes, she shows the problems of compromise in action. And even as Smith demonstrates the many ways that late capitalism demands individual compromise, she also holds out hope for the possibility of lasting change through collective action. Closing with a piercing discussion of the uncompromising nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and how global protests against racism and police brutality after the murder of George Floyd point to a new future, On Compromise is a necessary and vital book for our time.
Rachel Greenwald Smith is the author of On Compromise and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, the Account, Mediations, and elsewhere. She teaches at Saint Louis University.
On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal by Rachel Greenwald Smith
August 3, 2021
978-1-64445-060-4
Paperback $16
208 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
See/Saw: Looking at Photographs
by Geoff Dyer
Publication Date May 4, 2021 Nonfiction
A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
See/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day—including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb—the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of moving, witty, prescient, surprising, and intimate encounters with images.
Dyer has been writing about photography for thirty years, and this tour de force of visual scrutiny and stylistic flair gathers his lively, engaged criticism over the course of a decade. A rich addition to Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and heir to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and John Berger’s Understanding a Photograph, See/Saw shows shows how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, revealing a brilliant seer at work. It is a paean to art and art writing by one of the liveliest critics of our day.
Geoff Dyer is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California.
See/Saw: Looking at Photographs by Geoff Dyer
May 4, 2021
978-1-64445-044-4
Paperback Original, w/ color illustrations $24
336 pages 7" x 9.25"
Brit.: Canongate Books
Trans., 1st ser., dram.: The Wylie Agency
Audio: Graywolf Press
Nervous System
by Lina Meruane, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Publication Date May 18, 2021 Fiction
An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing Red
Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctoral thesis in the “country of the present” but she is from the “country of the past,” a place burdened in her memory by both personal and political tragedies. Her partner, El, is a forensic scientist who analyzes the bones of victims of state violence and is recovering from an explosion at a work site that almost killed him. Consumed by writer’s block, Ella finds herself wishing that she would become ill, which would provide time for writing and perhaps an excuse for her lack of progress. Then she begins to experience mysterious symptoms that doctors find undiagnosable.
As Ella’s anxiety grows, the past begins to exert a strong gravitational pull, and other members of her family come into focus: the widowed Father, the Stepmother, the Twins, and the Firstborn. Each of them has their own experience of illness and violence, and eventually the systems that both hold them together and atomize them are exposed.
In this extraordinary clinical biography of a family, full of affection and resentment, dark humor and buried secrets, illness describes the traumas that can be visited not just upon the body, but on families and on the history of the countries—present and past—that we live in.
Lina Meruane is the award-winning Chilean author of Nervous System and Seeing Red. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and was a DAAD Writer in Residence in Berlin. She teaches at New York University.
Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today, including Samanta Schweblin and Alejandro Zambra. Her translations have won the English PEN award and the Premio Valle-Inclán, and been nominated three times for the International Booker Prize. Her short story translations have been featured in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, and Granta, among others. She is the recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
Nervous System: A Novel by Lina Meruane
May 18, 2021
978-1-64445-055-0
Paperback $16
176 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Atlantic Books
1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., dram.: Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency
Purgatorio
by Dante Alighieri, translated from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang
Publication Date July 13, 2021 Poetry
The second installment in Mary Jo Bang’s exhilarating, innovative translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy
Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Purgatorio is the extraordinary continuation of her journey with Dante, which began with her transformative version of Inferno. In Purgatorio, still guided by the Roman poet Virgil, Dante emerges from the horrors of Hell to begin the climb up Mount Purgatory, a seven-terrace mountain with each level devoted to those atoning for one of the seven deadly sins. At the summit, we find the Terrestrial Heaven and Beatrice—who will take over for Virgil, who, as a pagan, can only take Dante so far. During the climb, we are introduced to the myriad ways in which humans destroy the social fabric through pride, envy, and vindictive anger.
In her signature lyric style, accompanied by her wise and exuberant notes, Bang has produced a stunning translation of this fourteenth-century text, rich with references that span time, languages, and cultures. The contemporary allusions echo the audacious character of the original, and slyly insist that whatever was true in Dante’s era is still true. Usain Bolt, Tootsie Fruit Chews, the MGM logo, Leo the Lion, Amy Winehouse, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and Gertrude Stein are among those who make cameo appearances as Bang, with eloquence and daring, shepherds The Divine Comedy into the twenty-first century.
If I had, Reader, a longer interval in which to write,
I would, at least as a parting shot, sing
Of the sweet drink that never would’ve satisfied me,
But the cards of the second canticle have all been
Spread out, exactly as planned—so there’s no room left
To take the brake off the art and go farther.
I came back from those most holy waters
Recovered, no longer past repair—renewed
Like trees with new limbs turn over new leaves—
Pure and ready to climb the stairway to the stars.
—from “Canto XXXIII”
Praise for Mary Jo Bang's translation of Inferno
“The only good Hell to be in right now is poet Mary Jo Bang’s innovative, new translation of Dante’s Inferno.”—Vanity Fair
“[Bang’s Inferno] is an epic both fresh and historical, scholarly and irreverent. . . . This will be Dante for the next generation.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“[Bang] succeeds in giving the Inferno’s narrative drama an energetic idiom. . . . One of the most readable and enjoyable versions of the Inferno of our time.”—The New York Review of Books
“Bang did something incredibly smart before she coaxed Dante's corpse to sit up and sing for us: She taught him how to talk like us. Hell is more appealing in the form of a mirror.”—The Stranger
Mary Jo Bang has published eight poetry collections, including A Doll for Throwing and Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and new translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri translated by Mary Jo Bang
July 13, 2021
978-1-64445-057-4
Paperback $18
336 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: The Clegg Agency
Encircling 3: Aftermath
by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland
Publication Date July 13, 2021 Fiction
The Encircling Trilogy comes thundering to a close as the man at the center is revealed
The final book in Carl Frode Tiller’s groundbreaking Encircling Trilogy is here. In Barbara Haveland’s powerful translation, two new letters circle closer than ever to David, who allegedly lost his memory. One is from Marius, who has led the life of wealth and privilege that David was meant to live. And yet Marius does not appreciate it—desperate for attention, he lies to his girlfriend, with disastrous consequences. The other comes from Susanne, an ex-lover whose affair with David led to the breakup of her marriage. Humiliated by David’s unflattering portrayal of her in his novel, Susanne is determined to exact revenge on him in the most painful possible way.
Last of all we come face-to-face with David himself: a frustrated writer whose early successes have faded. His therapy sessions seem to reveal a dangerous and violent individual bent on getting what he wants at any cost. With David’s own story told, the last piece falls into place, and his true character is unveiled. But as with books one and two, there are twists and turns that upset expectations and leave the reader wondering whom to believe. Across three books, Tiller’s incisive character portraits lay bare the inequalities of class and excesses of wealth in Norwegian society. With Encircling 3: Aftermath, Tiller sounds the unexplored depths of David’s life, in the culmination of this astonishing feat of psychological realism.
Praise for Encircling and Encircling 2
“A beautiful meditation on the subtler ways we fail each other, our quieter forms of grief. . . . It’s thrilling to know two more books will arrive.”—USA Today
“What makes this novel, the first of a trilogy, extraordinary is the suspense: like the best mystery novels, it transforms the reader into an obsessive gumshoe.”—The New Yorker
“[Encircling 2] pelts across the landscape of memory, around obstacles of lies, secrets, and vanity. . . . An incomparable intellectual escapade. . . . [Tiller’s books] are shards, large slices of story and characterization, each a jagged stepping-stone leading to an inescapable conclusion: identity is not a monolith but a collage — an odd, overlapping, contradictory collage, impossible to reconcile.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
Carl Frode Tiller is the author of six novels and four plays. Books in The Encircling Trilogy have been adapted for the theater and translated into multiple languages. He lives in Trondheim, Norway.
Barbara Haveland is a leading translator of Norwegian and Danish. She is the translator of all three volumes of The Encircling Trilogy by Carl Frode Tiller, and her recent published works include The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann and new translations of Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. She lives in Copenhagen.
Encircling 3: Aftermath by Carl Frode Tiller
July 13, 2021
978-1-64445-058-1
Paperback $18
448 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women
by Wayétu Moore
Publication Date June 15, 2021 Nonfiction
Now in paperback, an engrossing memoir of escaping civil war in Liberia and building a life in the United States
When Wayétu Moore turns five in Monrovia, Liberia, all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised, war breaks out in Liberia, and her family is forced to flee their home, walking and hiding for weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on another journey, this time to the United States.
Spanning this harrowing time in Moore’s early childhood, her years adjusting to life in Texas as a Black woman and an immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a deeply moving story of the search for home in the midst of upheaval. Moore shines a light on the great political and personal forces that continue to affect migrants around the world, and calls on us to acknowledge the tenacious power of love and family.
Praise for The Dragons, The Giant, The Women
“Immersive, exhilarating. . . . This memoir adds an essential voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging false popular narratives that migration is optional, permanent and always results in a better life.”—The New York Times Book Review
“In her bruising new memoir, Moore describes the perilous journey as well as her experience of being a black immigrant living in the American South. Through it all, she threads an urgent narrative about the costs of survival and the strength of familial love.”—TIME
“The Dragons, the Giant, the Women is a beautifully written book about the experience of migrating—a story, particularly in this moment, that can never be told enough.” —Bitch Media
“Building to a thrumming crescendo, the pages almost fly past. Readers will be both enraptured and heartbroken by Moore’s intimate yet epic story of love for family and home.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Wayétu Moore has written an elegant, inspired, page-turning memoir I couldn’t put down. Destined to become a classic!”—Mary Karr
Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King and the founder of One Moore Book. She is a graduate of Howard University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Dragons, The Giant, The Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore
June 15, 2021
978-1-64445-056-7
Paperback $16
272 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: Pushkin Press
Trans., dram.: Writers House
Audio: Brilliance
The Silk Road
by Kathryn Davis
Publication Date August 3, 2021 Fiction
Now available in paperback, the latest mesmerizing novel by “the most original novelist in America” (Slate)
The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling.
The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.
Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles, and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
Praise for The Silk Road
“[Kathryn Davis’s] writing exists outside of genre and trends and time. . . . For those willing to get lost in its spiritual haze, there is a uniquely un-2019 pleasure to be found: a meditative bewilderment that just might cede to enlightenment.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Radiant and endlessly shifting, sensitive to outer form and inner reality, wildly and beautifully impenetrable: that’s as good a paraphrase of this splendid, poetic novel of ideas as you’ll get.”—The Boston Globe
“[Davis is] the most original novelist in America. . . . The Silk Road is . . . a feat of flashing enchantment. I read it in a state I can only describe as baffled wonder.”—Slate
“With nothing less than the human condition on its mind, The Silk Road works in archetype and allegory to produce a slim (not even 150 pages!) but resounding book unlike any you’ve ever read.”—Entertainment Weekly
“The tenacity of Davis’ language, her spellbinding images and spellbound objects, the fragile beauty of the worlds she creates in the moment of their destruction reward an open-minded reader's labors. A book that stuns, almost literally, with its force and its humility. A tender book. A savage book. A once-in-a-lifetime story.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, including The Silk Road and Duplex. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.
The Silk Road: A Novel by Kathryn Davis
August 3, 2021
978-1-64445-028-4
Paperback $16
144 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans.,audio, dram.: The Wylie Agency
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf
by Kathryn Davis
Publication Date August 8, 2021 Fiction
Back in print, an astonishing novel of art, obsession, and the secrets kept by two very different women
In Kathryn Davis’s second novel, Frances Thorn, waitress and single parent of twins, finds herself transformed by the dazzling magnetism of Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer of operas. At the heart of what binds them is “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” the Hans Christian Andersen tale of a prideful girl who, in order to spare her new shoes, uses the loaf of bread intended as a gift for her parents as a stepping-stone, and ends up sinking to the bottom of a bog. Helle’s final opera, based on this tale and unfinished at the time of her death, is willed to Frances—a life-changing legacy that compels Frances to unravel the mysteries of Helle’s story and, in so doing, to enter the endlessly revolving, intricate world of her operas.
The ravishing beauty and matchless wit that have characterized Davis’s work from the beginning are here on full display. The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is a novel as thrilling in its virtuosity as it is moving in its homage to the power of art, a power that changes lives forever.
Praise for The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf
“The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is heated, dramatic, grand in its ambition. . . . Brilliant.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Written in crystalline, sonorous prose, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf is an ambitious book. . . . Davis’s accounts of Helle Ten Brix’s past are . . . splendidly conceived and executed with a confidence that is remarkable.”—Chicago Tribune
“Lyrically intense. . . . Artifice and reality clash, then merge, in this strange and visionary novel.”—Kirkus Reviews
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, including The Silk Road and Duplex. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.
The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf: A Novel by Kathryn Davis
August 8, 2021
978-1-64445-029-1
Paperback $16
416 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
