Spring 2022 Catalog
VOICE OF THE FISH: A LYRIC ESSAY
by Lars Horn
Publication Date June 07, 2022 Nonfiction
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyric essay on transmasculinity and the oceanic world
Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.
Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn’s upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art installations—memorably in a photography session in an ice bath with dead squid—to Horn’s travels before they were out as trans, these essays are linked by a desire to interrogate liminal physicalities. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of “the body” as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.
Lars Horn holds MAs from the University of Edinburgh; the École normale supérieure, Paris; and Concordia University, Montreal. Horn’s work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Write Across Canada, and New Writing Scotland. They live in Miami.
Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay by Lars Horn
June 7, 2022
978-1-64445-089-5
Paperback $16
240 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., dram.: Janklow and Nesbit
MOTHER COUNTRY
by Jacinda Townsend
Publication Date May 03, 2022 Fiction
A transnational feminist novel about human trafficking and motherhood from an award-winning author
Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.
In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning. Mother Country is a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival, in the name of love.
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Mother Country: A Novel by Jacinda Townsend
May, 03, 2022
978-1-64445-087-1
Paperback $17
312 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press
ANIMAL JOY: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
by Nuar Alsadir
Publication Date August 02, 2022 Nonfiction
An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter
Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of being present and embodied.
Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Karenina’s morphine addiction, Freud’s un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Fanon’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the author’s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions—frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking—are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from one’s true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst and the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.
Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir
August 2, 2022
978-1-64445-093-2
Paperback $17
320 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., dram: Fitzcarraldo Editions 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
TURN UP THE OCEAN
by Tony Hoagland
Publication Date July 12, 2022 Poetry
The final book of poems by Tony Hoagland, “one of the most distinctive voices of our time” (Carl Dennis)
Over the course of his celebrated career, Tony Hoagland ventured fearlessly into the unlit alleys of emotion and experience. The poems in Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humor the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland’s signature wit and unparalleled observations take in longstanding injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our ongoing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of skepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland’s devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry.
It presents its thousand ugly heads.
Death or madness to look at it too long
but your job
is not to conquer it;
not to provide entertaining repartee,
nor to revile yourself in shame.
Your job is to stay calm.
Your job is to watch and take notes,
to go on looking.
Your job is to not be turned into stone.
—from “Gorgon”
Tony Hoagland was the author of seven collections of poetry, including Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. He was also the author of two collections of essays, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essaysand Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He taught for many years at the University of Houston. Hoagland died in October 2018.
Turn Up the Ocean: Poems by Tony Hoagland
July 12, 2022
978-1-64445-092-5
Paperback $16
80 pages 6" x 9"
Brit. trans. audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Propietor c/o Graywolf Press
SLEEPING ALONE
by Ru Freeman
Publication Date June 07, 2022 Fiction
Wide-ranging, vibrant stories from the acclaimed author of On Sal Mal Lane
Sleeping Alone is a collection of rich and evocative stories about what it means to cross borders, both real and imagined. These stories look closely at the experiences of people as they try to make sense of new places ranging from Maine to Sri Lanka, and from Dublin to Philadelphia. The families who inhabit these stories—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters—must find their way among the unfamiliar; forced to reconcile the homes and identities that they left with the lives they live now. At once sprawling and intimate, Sleeping Alone asks: What is the toll of feeling foreign in one’s land, foreign to others, or foreign to oneself?
Whether Ru Freeman, author of the novel On Sal Mal Lane, is capturing an intimate account of a child’s life in Sri Lanka, or the life of an immigrant staying in Dublin, she renders the complex circumstances of her characters’ lives with dignity and grace. With a light touch and a real sensitivity to the nuances of human interaction, Freeman offers a fresh look at the ways people are ever more globally intertwined, and the ways we all look for home no matter where we are.
Ru Freeman is the author of On Sal Mal Lane and A Disobedient Girl. An activist and journalist whose work appears internationally, she calls both Sri Lanka and America home.
Sleeping Alone: Stories by Ru Freeman
June 7, 2022
978-1-64445-088-8
Paperback $16
240 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., dram.: The Book Group Audio: Graywolf Press
THE TRIBE: PORTRAITS OF CUBA
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez
Publication Date June 21, 2022 Nonfiction
A dizzying portrait of contemporary Cuba as it has rarely been seen, by an up-and-coming Cuban novelist
Teeming with life and compulsively readable, the pieces gathered together in The Tribe aggregate into an extraordinary mosaic of Cuba today. Carlos Manuel Álvarez, one of the most exciting young writers in Latin America, employs the crónica form—a genre unique to Latin American writing that blends reportage, narrative nonfiction, and novelistic techniques—to illuminate a particularly turbulent period in Cuban history, from the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States, to the death of Fidel Castro, to the convulsions of the San Isidro Movement.
Unique, edgy, and stylishly written, The Tribe shows a society in flux, featuring athletes in exile, artists, nurses, underground musicians and household names, dissident poets, the hidden underclass at a landfill, migrants attempting to make their way across Central America, fugitives escaping the FBI, and dealers in the black market, as well as revelers and policemen in the noisy Havana night. It is a major work of reportage by one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language novelists.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez is the author of The Fallen. He has been included in Granta’s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” as well as Bogotá39’s best Latin American writers under 40. He divides his time between Havana and Mexico City.
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba by Carlos Manuel Álvarez
June 21, 2022
978-1-64445-090-1
Paperback $17
336 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., dram: Fitzcarraldo Editions 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
WONDERLANDS: ESSAYS ON THE LIFE OF LITERATURE
by Charles Baxter
Publication Date July 12, 2022 Nonfiction
Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House
Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.
Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays—the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”—add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside Baxter’s prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.
Charles Baxter is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel The Sun Collective. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Minneapolis.
Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature by Charles Baxter
July 12, 2022
978-1-64445-091-8
Paperback $17
304 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio.: Graywolf Press Dram.: Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents
CIVIL SERVICE
by Claire Schwartz
Publication Date August 02, 2022 Poetry
A study in complicity with crushing state violence, an invitation to an otherwise—a chilling, remarkable debut
While the spectacle of state violence fleetingly commands a collective gaze, Civil Service turns to the quotidian where political regimes are diffusely maintained—where empire is not the province of a few bad actors, but of all who occupy and operate the state. In these poems populated by characters named for their occupations and mutable positions of power—the Accountant, the Intern, the Board Chair—catastrophic events recede as the demands and rewards of daily life take precedence. As a result, banal authorizations and personal compromises are exposed as the ordinary mechanisms inherent to extraordinary atrocity. Interwoven with bureaucratic encounters are rigorous studies of how knowledge is produced and contested. One sequence imagines an interrogation room in which a captive, Amira, refuses the terms of the state’s questioning. The dominant meanings of that space preclude Amira’s full presence, but those conditions are not fixed. In a series of lectures, traces of that fugitive voice emerge as fragmentary declarations, charging the reader to dwell beside it and transform meaning such that Amira might be addressed.
In this astonishing debut, Claire Schwartz stages the impossibility of articulating freedom in a nation of prisons. Civil Service probes the razor-thin borders between ally and accomplice, surveillance and witness, carcerality and care—the lines we draw to believe ourselves good.
guardians-to-be. If you are good, one day
an embossed invitation will arrive at the door of the house
you own. You will sit next to the Curator, light
chattering along the chandeliers, your napkin shaped like a swan.
To protect your silk, you snap its neck with flourish. The blood, beautiful,
reddening your cheeks as you slip into the chair drawn just for you. Sit, the chair says
to the patron. Stand, to the guard. The guard shifts on blistered feet. She loves you,
she loves you not. The children pluck the daisy bald,
discard their little sun in the gutter.
—from “Object Lesson”
Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service and the poetry editor of Jewish Currents. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, Poetry Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received her PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University.
Civil Service: Poems by Claire Schwartz
August 2, 2022
978-1-64445-094-9
Paperback $16
72 pages 6.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
LINE AND LIGHT
by Jeffrey Yang
Publication Date May 03, 2022 Poetry
A multifaceted collection by Jeffrey Yang, whose poetry is “flexible, expansive, sonorously clever” (The Millions)
In Jeffrey Yang’s vision for this brilliant new collection, the essence of poetry can be broken down into line and light. Dispersed across these poems are luminous centers, points of a constellation tracing lines of energy through art, myth, and history. These interconnections create vast and dynamic reverberations. As Yang asks in one poem, “What vitality binds a universe?”
One long series explores through shadow and play the ancient Malay kingdom of Langkasuka, a legendary nexus of creativity, commerce, and spiritual life, threatened over time by violence, climate, and environmental degradation. The title poem is a study of time, night turning to dawn revealing the lines and lights of an art installation on an island in the Hudson River, flowing into another poem about Grand Central Terminal’s atrium of stars, flowing upriver into a poem that describes a cemetery for a state prison. Another extended sequence is a collaboration investigating memory and loss composed of Yang’s poems, Japanese translations by Hiroaki Sato, and drawings made with ink derived from tea leaves by artist Kazumi Tanaka. The collection ends with moving elegies for poets, translators, and artists whose works have informed this one. Altogether, Line and Light illuminates the ways that ancestry holds and makes possible the act of making art.
the generations
return
through the estuary world
rest in the wind
stone, wordless way
sleep, waves
rest in the wind
shadows
play
—from “Langkasuka”
Jeffrey Yang is the author of Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies. Yang lives in Beacon, New York.
Line and Light: Poems by Jeffrey Yang
May 3, 2022
978-1-64445-086-4
Paperback $16
144 pages 7.5" x 9"
Brit., trans., audio, dram.: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
WATER OVER STONES
by Bernardo Atxaga
Publication Date August 16, 2022 Fiction
A perceptive, moving novel about life and death in the Basque Country, from the author of Nevada Days
Bernardo Atxaga’s Water over Stones follows a group of interconnected people in a small village in the Basque Country. It opens with the story of a young boy who has returned from his French boarding school to his uncle’s bakery, where his family hopes he will speak again. He’s been silent since an incident in which he threw a stone at a teacher for reasons unknown. With the assistance of twin brothers who take him to a river in the forest, he’ll recover his speech. As the years pass, those twins, now adults, will be part of a mining strike in the Ugarte region, and so take up the mantle of the narrative, just as others will after them.
Water over Stones is similar in nature to Atxaga’s earlier books Obabakoak and The Accordionist’s Son, as it weaves in themes of friendship, nature, and death. Yet in capturing a span of time from the early 1970s, when the shadow of the Franco dictatorship still loomed, to 2017, when these boys must learn to leave their old beliefs behind and move on, Atxaga finds new richness and depth in familiar subjects. As threads of water run over stones in the river, so these lives run together and, over time, technology and industry bring new changes as the wheel of life turns.
Bernardo Atxaga is a prizewinning author whose books, including Seven Houses in France and The Accordionist’s Son, have won international critical acclaim. His works have been translated into thirty-two languages. He lives in the Basque Country.
Water over Stones: A Novel by Bernardo Atxaga
978-1-64445-095-6
Paperback $18
400 pages 5.5" x 8.25"
Brit.: MacLehose Press 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press Trans., dram.: Ute Körner Literary Agent
SUCH COLOR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
by Tracy K. Smith
Publication Date August 16, 2022 Poetry
Now in paperback from Tracy K. Smith, former Poet Laureate of the United States
Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the immense mysteries and conundrums of human existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits of desire and the body, the next investigates the very sweep of history; when one encounters death and the outer reaches of space, the next bears witness to violence against language and people from across time, delving into the rescuing possibilities of the everlasting.
Such Color collects the best poems from Smith’s award-winning books and culminates in brilliant and excoriating new poems. These new works confront America’s historical and contemporary racism and injustices, while they also rise toward the registers of the ecstatic, the rapturous, and the sacred—urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it. Now in paperback, this magnificent retrospective affirms Smith’s place as one of the twenty-first century’s most treasured poets.
The we that fills me? Our shadows reel and dart.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The world has never had—will never have—our backs?
The world has never had—will never have—our backs.
Our blood simmers, stirred back. What if
The we that fills me, our shadows real and dark,
Is the world intended for me?
—from “I Sit Outside in Low Late-Afternoon Light to Feel Earth Call to Me”
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.
Such Color: New and Selected Poems by Tracy K. Smith
August 16, 2022
978-1-64445-096-3
Paperback $18
240 pages 6" x 9"
Brit., trans., dram., audio: Graywolf Press 1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press