Bøker utgitt av Graywolf Press

"A self-effacing, humane and unparanoid call to change our wealthy yet often barbaric world for the better." * In this provocative cri de coeur, the philosopher John Armstrong rescues the idea of civilization from irrelevance and connects it to our search for individual happiness. "Civilization" once referred to a society's technological prowess, its political development, or its cultural achievement. In the modern era, however, the word became burdened by the legacy of colonialism and connotations of elitism. For it to have value once again, according to Armstrong, we must understand that a society balances material prosperity with spiritual prosperity if it is to merit the term "civilized"-and currently we are impoverished. In Search of Civilization is his corrective. As he roams from anecdote to aesthetic appreciation-from the banality of an early job at an insurance company to the redemptive wonders of a seventeenth-century church spire visible out an office window, from Adam Smith's philosophy to the Japanese tea ceremony-Armstrong reminds us that culture lies within us and that its nourishment is essential to a flourishing society.

A collection of fanciful, philosophical science fictions by "one of Mexico's finest novelists" (Vulture).The characters that populate Yuri Herrera's surprising new story collection inhabit imagined futures that reveal the strangeness and instability of the present. Drawing on science fiction, noir, and the philosophical parables of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions and Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, these very short stories are an inspired extension of this significant writer's work.In Ten Planets, objects can be sentient and might rebel against the unhappy human family to which they are attached. A detective of sorts finds clues to buried secrets by studying the noses of his clients, which he insists are covert maps. A meager bacterium in a human intestine gains consciousness when a psychotropic drug is ingested. Monsters and aliens abound, but in the fiction of Yuri Herrera, knowing who is the monster and who the alien is a tricky proposition.In Ten Planets, Herrera's consistent themes-the mutability of borders, the wounds and legacy of colonial violence, and a deep love of storytelling in all its forms-are explored with evident brilliance and delight.

Like Franz Kafka's The Trial for the post-truth era, at once "surreal, polemical, and fun" (The Telegraph).Sterling Beckenbauer is plunged into a terrifying and nonsensical world one morning when they are attacked, then unfairly arrested, in their neighborhood in London. With the help of their friends, Sterling hosts a trial of their own in order to exonerate themselves and to hold the powers that be to account.Sterling Karat Gold, in the words of Kamila Shamsie, is "a madly brilliant and deeply sane novel that reveals surrealism as possibly the most effective way of talking about the political moment we find ourselves in." In it, Isabel Waidner concocts a world replete with bullfighters, high fashion, DIY theater, the Beach Boys, and time-traveling spaceships. The acclaimed winner of the 2021 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that breaks the mold and extends the possibilities of the form, this novel explores the phantasmagoric nature of contemporary life, especially for nonbinary migrants, and daringly revises how solidarity and justice might be sought and won. Sterling Karat Gold couldn't be a better North American introduction to a writer with an irresistible style and unforgettable vision.

A startling book-length essay, at once grand and intimate, from National Book Award finalist Nona Fernández.Voyager begins with Nona Fernández accompanying her elderly mother to the doctor to seek an explanation for her frequent falls and inability to remember what preceded them. As the author stares at the image of her mother's brain scan, it occurs to her that the electrical signals shown on the screen resemble the night sky.Inspired by the mission of the Voyager spacecrafts, Fernández begins a process of observation and documentation. She describes a recent trip to the remote Atacama desert-one of the world's best spots for astronomical observation-to join people who, like her, hope to dispel the mythologized history of Chile's new democracy. Weaving together the story of her mother's illness with story of her country and of the cosmos itself, Fernández braids astronomy and astrology, neuroscience and memory, family history and national history into this brief but intensely imagined autobiographical essay. Scrutinizing the mechanisms of personal, civic, and stellar memory, she insists on preserving the truth of what we've seen and experienced, and finding ways to recover what people and countries often prefer to forget.In Voyager, Fernández finds a new container for her profound and surreal reckonings with the past. One of the great chroniclers of our day, she has written a rich and resonant book.

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for PoetryFinalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardFinalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for PoetryLonglisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardIn Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself-its foreclosures, affects, successes-she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom.Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

Winner of the 2021 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins-a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins's murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor's poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against-and between-women of color.Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood's relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor's inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. "Concentrate," she writes. "We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make."

"Coomer is clearly an author of serious talent." -The Washington Post Book WorldInhabiting an island off the coast of Maine left to her by her great-uncle Arno, Hannah finds her life as a dedicated and solitary artist rudely interrupted one summer when a dog, matted with feathers and seaweed, arrives with the tide. He is only the first of a series of unexpected visitors and is soon followed by a teenager running from an abusive father, a half sister in trouble, a mainland family, and a forlorn trapped whale. In the engrossing drama that unfolds, Hannah's love of her island solitude competes with her instinctive compassion for others.In this booksellers' favorite and two-time Book Sense pick, now available in paperback, Joe Coomer offers the rugged yet stunning beauty of Maine and the lobstermen and their families who are dependent on the sea for survival. Pocketful of Names is a deeply human tale about the unpredictability of nature, art, family, and the flotsam and jetsam that comprise our lives.

"A pitch-perfect depiction of the reality of the artistic life." -The Observer"Excuse me?" She glanced back over her shoulder. He was looking at her with an expression of utter desolation, such as one rarely saw, an expression that literally stopped her in her tracks. When painter Roderic Kennedy meets Julia Fitzpatrick, twenty years younger and also an artist, it seems as though a long spell of turbulance and misfortune in his life-including alcoholism and a broken marriage-has finally come to an end. But when Julia has a chance meeting with a desperately unhappy stranger, this brief yet powerful encounter sets in motion a chain of events that has dramatic consequences for all three. Set in Ireland, Authenticity is a mesmerizing exploration of living the creative life as well as the cost of neglecting it. With a seamless tapestry of voices in various forms-self-reflection, memory, conversations-Madden offers a remarkable and moving novel that reaches from the bottom of the soul to the moment of inspiration.