A Line in the World – Dorthe Nors
Whether visiting a lighthouse with the author, or a seaside museum, one always senses the nearness, vigor, and life-endangering threat of the churning waters.
Each character’s Roman sea is quite different, but the similarity remains: Each has been tossed up on its shore.
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.