Race, obsession, and the blues are the themes of this wildly original novel by African American poet, novelist, and activist J. J. Phillips. Eunice Prideaux, a young, light-skinned black woman from a well-to-do San Francisco family, is sick of her conventional home. One evening when guests are over, she puts “Bakershop Blues,” by the legendary blues singer Blacksnake Brown, on the record player, and soon the whole well-mannered company is groaning and moaning along with the music. Soon, too, Eunice has packed up and set off for Raleigh, North Carolina, where Blacksnake lives, knowing that she has “to go find the source of herself, this music that moved her and the others, however much they tried to deny it.” Disembarking from a train into a hot Southern night, Eunice finds herself in an unfamiliar world. Arrested on suspicion of soliciting, she spends a night in prison. After her release, she tracks Blacksnake down and soon she has moved in with him. There is nothing nice about Blacksnake or his way of life. The power of his music is real; so is the ugliness with which he treats Eunice, who finds herself in a dark place, almost deprived of the will to live. Mojo Hand, however, is an Orphic tale, a story of initiation into art and individuality no matter the cost, and Eunice will emerge from the darkness transformed. Long out of print, J.J. Phillips’s novel is a powerfully original work of fiction that sings the blues.

A Carnegie Medal Honor Book Twelve-year-old Smith is a denizen of the mean streets of eighteenth-century London, living hand to mouth by virtue of wit and pluck. One day he trails an old gentleman with a bulging pocket, deftly picks it, and as footsteps ring out from the alley by which he had planned to make his escape, finds himself in a tough spot. Taking refuge in a doorway, he sees two men emerge to murder the man who was his mark. They rifle the dead man’s pockets and finding them empty, depart in a rage. Smith, terrified, flees the scene of the crime. What has he stolen that is worth the life of a man? Smith is a gripping, engrossing, and utterly diverting tale of high adventure related by a writer whose scintillating style is matched only by the dazzle of his plotting. In the words of Lloyd Alexander, “Garfield is unmatched for sheer exciting storytelling. The reader simply can’t stop reading him.”

The Robber Hotzenplotz is a merry tale of two scoundrels, two friends, a toad-fairy, and an unforgettable escapade. The Robber Hotzenplotz works hard at his job, waking early to hide in the woods and waylay new victims. One morning Kasperl’s grandmother is sitting in the sun outside her house, grinding coffee in her new musical coffee mill—a birthday gift from Kasperl and his best friend Seppel—when suddenly Hotzenplotz, attracted by the music, leaps out to steal the mill. Sergeant Dimplemoser hears Grandmother’s cries and comes to her aid, but Hotzenplotz has evaded the useless police for years. So Kasperl and Seppel vow to catch the robber themselves. But catching robbers is not as easy as all that ... Kasperl and Seppel soon discover that even the best-laid plans can be foiled, especially when Hotzenplotz enlists the help of his wicked magician friend Petrosilius Zackleman, a gluttonous villain with a weakness for fried potatoes.

The mystical laundress at the center of this novel is obsessed with purity. Her task is formidable as she stands guard over a sealed shaft at a Ukrainian coal mine that hides terrible truths. The bodies of dead Jews lying in its depths seem to attract still more present-day crimes. Acclaimed Russian author Sergei Lebedev portrays a ghostly realm riven by lust and fear just as the Kremlin invades the same part of Ukraine occupied by the Wehrmacht in World War Two. Then corpses rain from the sky when a jetliner is shot down overhead, scattering luxury goods along with the mortal remains. Eerie coincidences and gruesome discoveries fill this riveting exploration of an uncanny place where the geography exudes violence, and where the sins of the past are never all that in the past. Lebedev, who has won international praise for his soul-searching prose and unflinching examination of history's evils, shines light on the fault line where Nazism met Soviet communism, evolving into the new fascism of today's Russia.

The first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most important voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, a collection of poems about the region's history of violence as seen through geography, myth, and city life. Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the most significant voices in contemporary Ukrainian literature, began his career as a poet, producing three collections and two separately published poem cycles in the 1980s and 1990s, the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a time of great political change and artistic revolution. Set Change: Selected Poems presents for the first time in English comprehensive selections from all three collections and both cycles. In modern Ukrainian letters, Andrukhovych occupies a position similar to the literary giant Nikolai Gogol. While his influence is broad and significant, he is constantly reinventing himself as a writer: his work represents everything playful, free-spirited, and new, and epitomizes all the most original aspects of Ukrainian literature. The poems collected here showcase the poet’s prolonged quest for a representation of—and response to—the region’s history of violence. In this quest Andrukhovych explores various settings and themes of geography, investigates the shifting borders of Eastern Europe, and invokes a gamut of myths and fantastical elements set in the territory of present-day Ukraine. The cornerstone of his poems is a deep fascination with the idea of the city. Andrukhovych’s vivid descriptions lend themselves to his investigations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, two of the city’s most significant aspects. The poet’s deep interest in the baroque, his obsession with verbal play and irony, the elegiac mode, the many hidden as well as overt allusions to other literary works and writers, and the poet’s need for textual experimentation are those elements that make his poems arresting, timely, and perpetually fascinating. (Translated by the award-winning duo of John Hennessy and Ostap Kin, whose work on this project has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.)

A new edition of Saul Steinberg’s memoir-in-drawing of his escape from fascist Europe, staying briefly in the Dominican Republic and then travelling up into America, capturing absurdities, delights, and the grim realities of war along the way. To escape fascist Europe, the artist Saul Steinberg drew his way to America. He made it to New York in 1942 already in contract with The New Yorker, but was soon called up to serve in World War II. This book, All In Line, is a memoir-via-drawing of this key time in Steinberg’s life, when he began to find his line and his way in America. In his cartoons and illustrations for The New Yorker and others, Steinberg depicted delightful absurdities and quiet moments: a painter saws a long canvas into smaller, sellable portions; a child draws a gigantic face on the sidewalk to the confusion of passersby; a woman alone in her room bends metal hangers into the shapes of faces. But Steinberg didn’t shy away from facing the grim realities of his era. There are withering anti-fascist cartoons, as well as glimpses of war: skies crowded with bombers, families on the run, army convoys, broken-down jeeps, and smoldering battlefields. This new edition of All In Line includes an introduction by the cartoonist Liana Finck and an afterword by the writer Iain Topliss on Steinberg’s creation of the book. This new edition of All In Line will resonate with lifelong fans of Steinberg, as well as artists just beginning to find their own way.

A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the 20th Century. Cesare Pavese’s 1936 collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, is increasingly regarded as one of the most astonishing and powerful books of twentieth-century poetry. William Arrowsmith’s translations, accompanied here by the original Italian lyrics, capture the spirit and complex vitality of Pavese’s voice. This edition also contains a thorough introduction to Pavese’s work, notes to individual poems, and two critical essays that Pavese wrote about Lavorare stanca, the book by which he hoped to be remembered. “Lavorare stanca,” Pavese once declared, “is a book that might have saved a generation.”

A collection of over thirty short stories by one of the greatest fiction writers in American history, now available in a single volume for the first time ever. The immensity of Gallant's achievement still seems insufficiently recognized. Alice Munro's Nobel notwithstanding, Gallant may in fact have been the best pure story writer since the early-1950s prime of Cheever, Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, Gallant's stories are sui generis. They do something different than perfecting the tradition or stretching the boundaries of what the form can do. For all their expansiveness, Gallant's stories constitute a striking and almost avant-garde reduction: in reading her, one feels like they discover something about what a short story really is and isn't—about what is necessary, and what is sufficient. The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes over thirty stories never before collected in one volume, including "The Accident" and "His Mother" and "An Autobiography" and "Dedé." With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master's fiction will be in print.

Goblins, wizards, superheroes, talking animals, and an assortment of fantastical shapeshifting characters populate this book of never-before-collected comics and illustrations, many of them drawn on incidental materials such as scrap paper and notepads. Pulling from pulp, sci-fi, gag cartoons, fantasy, and thrillers, and populated by goblins, astronauts, magical thieves, and talking owls, CF’s comics break apart genres and forms, reassembling them into one-of-a-kind stories that reveal an immense imagination and boundary-pushing talent. Christopher Forgues (better known as CF) roared into the indie comics scene in the early 2000s, producing some of the most exciting and influential work of the decade. His output was startlingly original and impressively prolific: Paper Radio, his collaboration with Ben Jones; his multi-part epic Powr Mastrs; and the shorter comics and zines now collected for the first time in Distant Ruptures. These comics, created using scratchy pencil and brilliant color, smudged Xeroxes and scraps of notepaper, capture the extraordinary range of CF's work. Fellow cartoonist Sammy Harkham has gathered the best of them into this new collection, which also includes an introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost as well as a new interview with CF. Distant Ruptures offers readers their first chance to see the full scope of this remarkable era of CF's comics.

Short stories about people on the margins, from story peddlers to beggars, by one of Turkey's most innovative fiction writers, now in a new English translation. Adored in Turkey for his post-modern fiction and regarded internationally as one of Turkey’s greatest writers, Oğuz Atay remains largely untranslated into English. First published in 1975, Waiting for the Fear is Atay's only collection of short stories, a book that is routinely praised in Turkey, by, among others, the Nobel Prizewinner Orhan Pamuk, for having transformed the art of short fiction. The eight stories that the book contains, all of them focused on characters living on the margins of society, are dramatic and even tragic, while also being shot through with irony and a humor. In the title story, a nameless young man, of a thoughtful and misanthropic turn of mind, returns to his home on the outskirts of an enormous nameless city to find waiting for him a letter in a foreign language of which he has no knowledge at all, and from this anomalous, if seemingly trivial, turn of events, one thing after another unfolds with stark inevitablity. Another story nods to Gogol's "The Overcoat": its hero is a speechless beggar wandering around the back streets of Istanbul dressed in a woman’s fur coat who will end up stuck in a shop window like a manikin. Elsewhere, a professional story peddler lives in a hut beside a train station in a country that is at war—unless it isn't. He can't remember. What do such life and death realities matter, however, so long as there are stories to tell? Atay's stories are full of a vivid sense of life's absurdities while also being psychologically true to life; his characters, oddballs and losers all, are also utterly individual with distinctive voices of their own, now plainspoken, wistful, womanly, now sophisticated and acerbic, with a dangerous swagger. And if Atay is a brilliant examiner of the inner life, he is no less aware of the flawed social world in which his people struggle to make their way Waiting for the Fear is a book that, page by beguiling page, holds the reader's attention from beginning to end, the rare collection of short stories that not only reflects a unique authorial vision but reads like a pageturner. Ralph Hubbell's new translation will introduce readers of English to a still insufficiently known giant of modern Turkish and world literature.