When translator Sarah Booker came to Coffee House with pitches for the translation of both novels of Ojeda’s, the press thought it best to have JAWBONE precede NEFANDO, allowing the former to serve as amuse bouche to the latter’s more toothsome topics.
[TW: sexual abuse, child abuse]
An Antisemitism Studies Primer
Often, the kind of research getting funded, printed, and promoted has more to do with the agenda of those writing the checks, the institutions that support them, and the schools who are stacking their faculty rolls, than the provable consequence of the research.
If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display – Nick Thran
If It Gets Quiet Later On is its own tabletop display, a grouping of poems, short stories, and essays connected (mostly) by Thran’s life as a writer, reader, and bookseller.
The caretaker tries to keep the objects in his collection from speaking about the lives they have lived . . . reducing them to mere list of objects. The more he fights the resonance of their voices, the more they resist becoming metaphors of the past.
Cross-Stitch – Jazmina Barrera
Fragments scattered throughout the novel tell of women who used embroidery to share messages, whether to reassure loved ones of their well-being, call for help after being silenced, or protest political injustice.
God Went Like That – Yxta Maya Murray
In this polyvocal portrait of how race, ethnicity, class, and gender stratify environmental threat, Murray, a Latina novelist and professor of law at Loyola Marymount University, peers into the wide gap between US legal protections and environmental justice.
You, Bleeding Childhood – Michele Mari
Celebrating the enchantment of those first toys and books, the collection is imbued with a sense of wonder and adventure, threatened at every corner by the harshness of adulthood and the looming fear that soon it will all be lost.
The possibility of Tatars, or in fact anyone, attacking the Fortezza, are not the real danger. Instead, time, rumor, and misplaced trust are the ultimate foe.
The Beast You Are – Paul Tremblay
Short fiction is its own country in the horror world. . . . You have less time to pull off a grand narrative feat, so you have to keep it simple. This is a tall order for Tremblay, who must try to stamp his brand of ambiguity onto a format that demands precision.
Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex – Juana María Rodríguez
How does our obsession with narratives of despair obscure moments of pleasure that also shape sex workers’ lives?