Bøker utgitt av Dzanc Books

At once an ode to birds, an elegy to space, and a journey into the most haunted and uncanny corners of the human mind, The Avian Hourglass showcases Lindsey Drager’s signature brilliance in a stunning, surrealist novel for fans of Jesse Ball, Helen Oyeyemi, Yoko Ogawa, and Shirley JacksonThe birds have disappeared. The stars are no longer visible. The Crisis is growing worse. In a town as isolated as a snowglobe, a woman who dreams of becoming a radio astronomer struggles to raise the triplets she gave birth to as a gestational surrogate, whose parents were killed in a car accident. Surrounded by characters who wear wings, memorize etymologies, and build gigantic bird nests, and bound to this town in which young adults must decide between two binary worldviews—either YES or NO—the woman is haunted by the old fable of the Girl in Glass Vessel, a cautionary tale about prying back the façade of one’s world.When events begin to unfold that suggest a local legend about the town being the whole of the universe might be true, the woman finds her understanding of her own life–and her reality–slipping through her fingers.A reflection on the intersecting crises of mental health, the climate emergency, political polarization, and the exponentially growing reliance on technology, The Avian Hourglass culminates in a figurative and literal twist that asks readers to reframe how they conceive of a series of concentric understandings of home: the globe, one’s country, one’s town, one’s family, and one’s own body.

“The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us.” –Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed and Sex & LoveA sixteen-year-old transplanted Pennsylvanian navigates sunburn and heartbreak in equal measure while falling in love with a very tan ghost. A girl with drunk scribbles on her shoes searches for fragments of an old flame inside the boy at the mall food court. And a female circus contortionist, daughter of a failed clown, comes to terms with the first law of romantic relationships: Once in a hole, stop digging.In First Law of Holes, award-winning author Meg Pokrass delivers a stunning selection of stories from the past fourteen years of her flash fiction career, tackling themes of belonging, obsession, messy love and loneliness with her trademark, unconventional storytelling.

A hybrid collection of braided and narrative essay, litany, prayer, ekphrasis, etymology, and reimagining of myth, Yoke & Feather explores the complex relationship between freedom and obligation. Anchored in a rural mountain childhood, this collection ranges from blessings for the demolition derby and the public-school lice check to Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande, to the kitchen of the biblical sisters, Mary and Martha, as they welcome their improbable foster daughter.Inspired by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s interdisciplinary study of midrash, these essays delight in the possibilities concealed beneath the apparent text of the biblical narrative: what might have happened before and after, above and below the porous ancient myth. Reimaginings of Moses, Lazarus, Mary Magdalene, and others stream alongside the narrator’s twenty-first century experiences: post-divorce online dating, a new partnership with a single father, the struggle with midlife childlessness, and the conundrums of teaching creative writing in a world of unending crisis.With Jessie van Eerden’s keen ear for prose and a spirituality informed by rural Appalachia, these lyric essays seek to explore the ways our deepest obligations may lead us to our most authentic forms of freedom.

Winner of the 2019 Dzanc Prize for FictionSet in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women-niece, aunt, and stowaway-and an improbable road trip. Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan-with a hound in tow-set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiqui and the desert of Georgia O'Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they've known. Frankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave's dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived. With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth-and herself-the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.

With Lance Olsen's signature flair, Absolute Away is an innovative narrative triptych, a story of one life reimagined. The first movement tells the story of Edie Metzger, a little Jewish girl who bit Hermann Göring's lip so hard it bled at a Nazi book-burning rally in 1933. In the second, in 1956, grown Edie is the passenger clinging to the backseat of the Oldsmobile 88 convertible driven by Jackson Pollock, moments before it plunges off the road. In the third, the narrative embarks into an ever-unspooling universe of Edies that might have lived-Edie's gender, past, and consciousness flying forever farther apart. Absolute Away is a novel about travel in its largest sense-about the self, the past, the future, aging, ideas, relationships, our own mortal being(s) as transitive verbs, and how what and who we are connects to everything else.

In prose that is both unflinching and lyrical, Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh presents Zan, a collection of stories that provide a deep and nuanced view of contemporary Iranian women as they navigate a crucial moment in their nation's history. A university student strips off her hijab in the streets of Tehran and films herself as part of a daring protest movement. A wealthy Iranian woman living in Atlanta maintains a secret life as a burlesque dancer. A teenager slips out of a hotel room at night to skinny dip in the toxic Caspian Sea. An Iranian lesbian agonizes over her coming out and her father's subsequent attempts to re-educate her. These are some of the many windows Zan opens into the complex lives of Iranian women today-those who continue to suffer oppression under the Islamic Republic, those who are crafting new identities in America, and those who hover somewhere in between.  Against the backdrops of the Islamic Republic and the American empire, these women grapple with the rigid standards foisted upon them and struggle to forge meaningful relationships with people who misunderstand and otherize them. Winner of the 2022 Dzanc Short Collection Prize, Zan explores feelings familiar to anyone who has ever felt marginalized or who has sought a home in a world where cultures collide and conflict.

With the lyrical joy and lighthearted wordplay that have won him critical acclaim, celebrated Jewish author Curt Leviant delivers a charming literary love story against the backdrop of the lush Italian countryside. In this enticing email romanza, Leviant delivers a breathless confessional with two beginnings and two endings, leaving it up to the reader to decipher what s real.

"With the signature charm and insight that have made him a beloved poet for nearly fifty years, Taylor dives into the wilderness of his life, in canoe and on foot. Across the decades, he reflects on what it means to be a painter, a writer, an observer of life's ordinary beauties; on encountering a bear in the Michigan woods; on the evolution of hitchhiking and the lives of saints; on his transfixion with Doreen dancing at his grade school's show-and-tell; and on the deep and abiding love of a long marriage. A triumphant celebration of growing up and the life that comes after, this is a collection not to be missed by fans of American poetry and all who wander in the wilderness"--Amazon.com.

"e;Olsen's fascinating experiment achieves heft by the accumulation of personal and collective loss, which makes the nightmarish coda feel eerily plausible. Together, the elegant and heartbreaking set pieces prompt deep reflection on the connections between minds and bodies, and on where both are ultimately headed."e; -Publishers Weekly (starred)Skin Elegies uses the metaphor of mind-upload technologies to explore questions about the relationship of the cellular brain to the bytes-entity to which it gives rise; memory and our connection to the idea of pastness; refugeeism (geographical, somatic, temporal, aesthetic); and where the human might end and something else begin.At the center stands an American couple who have fled their increasingly repressive country, now under the authoritarian rule of the Reformation Government, by transferring to a quantum computer housed in North Africa. The novel's structure mimics a constellation of firing neurons-a sparking collage of many tiny narraticules flickering through the brain of one of the refugees as it is digitized. Those narraticules comprise nine larger stories over the course of the novel: the Fukushima disaster; the day the Internet was turned on; the final hours of the Battle of Berlin; John Lennon's murder; an assisted suicide in Switzerland; the Columbine massacre; a woman killed by a domestic abuser; a Syrian boy making his way to Berlin; and the Challenger disaster.With his characteristic brilliance and unrivaled uniqueness, Lance Olsen delivers an innovative, speculative, literary novel in the key of Margaret Atwood, Stanislaw Lem, and J.G. Ballard.

"e;Ebullient ... Daitch finds stimulating connections and writes with sharp irony and joy. This offers delights on every page."e; -Publishers WeeklyAward-winning author Susan Daitch returns with Siege of Comedians, a novel in triptych told through interconnected narrative threads pulled taut by linked crimes.In the first piece, an American forensic sculptor, reconstructing the faces of three victims receives a midnight, visit from a man who threatens her life unless she alters the faces she's almost completed. The twists and turns of the mystery lead her to a new life, working with forensic archeologists at a site near the Prater amusement park in Vienna. In the second section, an accent coach discovers that the man implicated in the death of his girlfriend in 1970s Buenos Aires was once a censor and Assistant Minister of Propaganda in Vienna during World War II. When bodies start turning up under the former Propaganda offices, some date from the war period-but others are much older, their origins going back to the Ottoman siege of Vienna. In the final arc, in the aftermath of the last battle between the Austrians and the Turks, a local businesswoman finds three displaced women from Istanbul-former wives of the sultan-wandering in Vienna and gives them shelter in her brothel, located on the site of the future Ministry of Propaganda.Connected across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts, Siege of Comedians, part political thriller, part comic noir, reflects on aspects of the current refugee crisis, human trafficking, and identity.

"The poignant and powerful first novel following the breakup of a Pakistani family in the face of climate disaster, and their indefatigable search for stability, love, and belongings"--

Celebrated Southern author George Singleton delivers a new collection of short fiction, brilliant and absurd, for fans of George Saunders and Tom FranklinA restaurant owner runs into trouble when his wife starts a well-intentioned, poorly named rooster rescue. A boy navigates his parents’ split between a stretched phone cord and a flooded septic tank. A drunk sequestered in the middle of nowhere wakes up to find a tractor parked in his driveway. And in a big Cadillac, a grandfather and a grandson and a wayward dog hit the road, searching for a life not downloadable, nor measured in bandwidth.Loosely linked by characters and themes, The Curious Lives of Nonprofit Martyrs follows shysters and schemers, film buffs and future ornithologists, unlikely do-gooders, and the men who make up Veterans Against Guns in North America, all doing the best they can with what they possess in smarts and cunning. With Singleton’s signature comic flair, these stories peer through the peepholes of small-town South Carolina into the lives of everyday martyrs—prodigal sons, wayward fathers, and all those who are a little of each.

"A middle-aged Black woman exacts revenge on the aggressively average men she meets on dating sites. A girl buries pieces of herself in a hole beneath an apple tree, hoping to escape her mother's life of struggle and servitude. A group of teenage girls compete for the title of "Worst Girl in America." A young woman in Taiwan becomes infatuated with a female scam caller, a fleeting ghost of a love that blossoms from strangeness. And a wealthy woman goes to unconventional, and perhaps not entirely ethical, lengths to find her dream man. In these sixteen stories, we see women at their most monstrous--as con artists and murderers, cutthroats and scalpers, ruled by ambition and grief and spite. Characters for those tired of being told to play nice. Dressed to the nines in morally gray, the stories in this anthology comprise an envelope full of teeth: each one distinct, unsettling, and sharp enough to rip out a throat. List of contributors: Alice Ash, Alicia Elliott, Alison Rumfitt, Aliya Whiteley, Amanda Leduc, Chana Porter, Chantal V. Johnson, Chaya Bhuvaneswar, Deesha Philyaw, K-Ming Chang, Lauren Groff, Maisy Card, Megan Giddings, Sarah Rose Etter, Vanessa Chan, Yah Yah Scholfield" --

The Sentence is wholly unique: a graphic novel told in the form of a sentence diagram. A single 6732-word sentence, diagrammed in full.Set in a parallel-universe United States in which the government has recently been overthrown by a military coup, the story is narrated by a lonely young grammar professor, Riley, who is suddenly branded a traitor by the new regime. Bewildered by the charges, and fearing a death sentence, Riley manages to flee to an anarchist commune in the wilderness. After a lifetime of feeling alienated, of desperately longing for friendship, Riley is astonished to be accepted and loved by the anarchists—to come to love the anarchists in return. But when the anarchists reveal a plot to assassinate the authoritarian dictator of the country, Riley is forced to choose whether to support the plot—to return to the capital and help the anarchists bomb the headquarters—or to lose their newfound family forever.

"Tulsi Gurung arrives in Pennsylvania on a day so impossibly damp and gray he wonders if he's landed on the underside of the world. He is sixteen and brimming with wonder and fear. Born and raised in Refugee Camp Goldhap, Tulsi is technically a refugee from Bhutan, a land he's never set eyes on. Reunited with his grandfather, Tulsi struggles to navigate his new life, his new country, and a raw separation from his beloved sister, Susmita, the one person who truly tethers him to the world. Haunted by the uncertainty of her fate, Tulsi attempts to move on, forging relationships with the unfamiliar characters he encounters: a youth pastor's wife suffering a crisis of faith, a guarded transfer student with a mysterious past, a single mother with whom Tulsi glimpses a future brighter than he'd ever imagined. But the past will not rest, and Tulsi finds he must heal the wound of Susmita's loss and track down the sister he left behind"--

"There are so many ways to bury the dead. In an autobiographical series of essays, The Loved Ones explores the deaths of four family members across three generations: an inexplicable double murder, a fatal car accident, a long illness, and a conscripted solider killed in action. Piece by piece, each essay explores the death a loved one in a collage of vignettes: the loss, the aftermath, the funerals, and the rituals used to say goodbye to the body. As the investigation deepens, Davis lines up other forms of death--capital punishment and murder; medically-assisted suicide and "natural" death from disease; military conscription and "freak accident"--to see what comes to the surface. The Loved Ones is about the intricate reality of grief, the instability of time and memory in the face of loss, and the feeling of being left behind still living. It asks, what does it mean to bury our loved ones when our only desire is to never let them go?"--

Winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection PrizeA near-future farmer battling environmental crises takes ina mysterious girl he finds on the roadside. A bus driver navigates throughtreacherous weather and memories of her tragic past as she races to savechildren from the end of the world. A woman keeps giving birth to children fromdifferent time periods. And a woman struggles with her young daughter mysteriouslytransforming into something wild and unruly, confronting themes of motherhoodand family.  In Girl Country, stories range frommedieval Belgium to the near-future of the American Midwest, populated bymothers and monsters, mermaids and milkmaids, nuns and bus drivers‿women inevery walk of life, but particularly working-class women, navigating theintersection of the mundane and the magical. Perfect for fans of Orange Worldand Animal Wife, these are stories about women with teeth‿wild andalive.

"In a city far in the future, retired lecturer Wiggins moves from window to window in a museum, intricately describing each scene. Whales gliding above a shipwreck and a lost cup and saucer. An animatronic forest twenty stories tall. A line of mosquitos in uniforms and reglia, honored as heroes of the last great war. Bit by bit, Wiggins unspools the secrets of his world - the conflict that brought it to the brink, and the great thinker, Michaux, who led the diorama revolution, himself now preserved under glass. After a phone call in the middle of the night, Wiggins ets out to visit the Diorama of the Town: an entire, dioramic world, hundreds of miles across, where people are objects of curiosity, taxidermied and posed. In this hybrid novel - part essay, part prose poem, part travel narrative - Blair Austin brings us nose to the glass with our own vanishing world, what we preserve and at what cost." --

An intense, surreal story of family and growing up, perfect for fans of Matt Bell and The Immortalists. A mother clings to twin sons, desperate to keep them from becoming their father, a pirate forever sailing away. In this rain-soaked township, she will attempt to mummify them, piece by piece, to stop them from growing up, a hope founded in magic and immortality. Meanwhile, their father obsesses the seas with his own belief in ever-lasting life, learning too late that his heart belongs on shore. In Only and Ever This, a family must endure father loss, a mother‿s grief, and roiling adolescence, slipping as it does into arcades, caves, and the young love for a ghostly girl up the street.

From Man Booker International Prize finalist Josip Novakovich comes a satiric novel with teeth‿a tale of Russia in the early aughts, perfect for fans of Dostoevsky and Gary Shteyngart. In this picaresque novel set in the early 2000s, David, an investment banker with Eastern European roots, goes bankrupt from the Enron fiasco, and moves to Russia to do some soul-searching. In the shadow of the Khazan cathedral, he‿s arrested for the murder of two Georgian wine-importers.  David is imprisoned at Kresty, bewildered and alone. One day, Putin himself visits, with a modest proposal for David: to travel to Georgia and slip plutonium into the president‿s wine. This is the price of freedom: to assassinate a president.  Told with Josip Novakovich's signature skill and satiric wit, Rubble of Rubles delves into the absurdity and menace of totalitarianism. At the crossroads of literary fiction, satire, and crime, this is a novel for modern fans of Notes from Underground and Absurdistan.

A posthumous collection of short stories and fragments from novels unfinished at the time of his death. This collection shows, once again, that Gay was a master of Southern Gothic, with tales that are dark and atmospheric and written with finely crafted prose.

In the Event of Contact chronicles characters profoundly affected by physical connection, or its lack. Among them, a scrappy teen vies to be the next Sherlock Holmes; an immigrant daughter must defend her decision to remain childless; a guilt-ridden woman is haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend; a cantankerous crossing guard celebrates getting run over by a truck; an embattled priest with dementia determines to perform a heroic, redemptive act, if he can only remember how; and a young girl navigates crippling aversion to touch, even from her sisters. Amidst backgrounds of trespass and absence, the indelible characters of In the Event of Contact seek renewed belief in themselves, recovery, and humanity.

With Death and So Forth, esteemed writer and editor Gordon Lish returns with a new book of scintillating short fiction. With his trademark precision, wit, and wiliness, Lish writes outside the margins and around the edges of the death, loss, and the fractiousness and fragmentation of language. Death and So Forth collects a number of Lish's acclaimed stories and introduces eight new fictions, including a tribute to Denis Johnson and so many others lost in the course of a long life. Brilliant and sharp-eyed, this is a treasure for fans of Gordon Lish, new and lifelong.

A hypnotic, brutal, and unstoppable coming-of-age story echoing from within the aftershocks set off by the American Indian boarding schools of generations past, fanned by the flames of nearly fifteen years of service in the Armed Forces, exposing a series of inescapable prisons and the invisible scars of attempted erasure. When he learns his father is dying, David Tromblay ponders what will become of the monster's legacy and picks up a pen to set the story straight. In sharp and unflinching prose, he recounts his childhood bouncing between his father, who wrestles with anger, alcoholism, and a traumatic brain injury; his grandmother, who survived Indian boarding schools but mistook the corporal punishment she endured for proper child-rearing; and his mother, a part-time waitress, dancer, and locksmith, who hides from David's father in church basements and the folded-down back seat of her car until winter forces her to abandon her son on his grandmother's doorstep. For twelve years, he is beaten, burned, humiliated, locked in closets, lied to, molested, seen and not heard, until his talent for brutal violence meets and exceeds his father's, granting him an escape. Years later, David confronts the compounded traumas of his childhood, searching for the domino that fell and forced his family into the cycle of brutality and denial of their own identity.