front cover of Radiant Daughter
Radiant Daughter
A Novel
Patricia Grossman
Northwestern University Press, 2010

In Radiant Daughter, award-winning novelist Patricia Grossman follows

a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban

Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn, in seaside “Little Odessa,”

in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story—

immigrant parents, “native” children, and the conflicts one might expect—

it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding

the descent of Elise Blazek, the family’s brightest star. Radiant Daughter

is also a story of translation—between generations, from the Czech of

Irena and Stepan, to the “American” of the children, and finally to the

Russian that is Elise’s academic specialty.

Radiant Daughter explores all that is human, from the most self-

destructive behavior to the highest forms of commitment and self-

sacrifice. Even at her lowest moments, Irena never loses her fierce

love for the daughter who has traveled so utterly beyond her reach.

For Elise, the future will always be complicated: a precarious balance

between periods of insight, bursts of accomplishment, and the abyss

of her illness.

Reminiscent, on the one hand, of the meticulously constructed

mother-daughter dynamic in Carol Shields’s Unless and, on the other,

of the anarchic real-life experience of Big and Little Edie Beale in Grey

Gardens, Grossman’s moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring

a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult

child.

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front cover of Rain in the Valley
Rain in the Valley
A Novel
Helen Papanikolas
Utah State University Press, 2005

Three generations of the Demas family face the ups and downs of the twentieth century after their fathers leave the coal mines that drew them from Greece to America, become wool growers and small businessmen, and Americanize their Demopoulos name. As the years pass, the family accumulates untidy lives and tragedies. Parents seek to keep their children tightly bound by old-country customs, to arrange marriages, and to foist their views of women’s inferiority on their daughters. Lia Papastamos in particular, child of a forced marriage between her Greek father and Amerikanidha mother, pulls away from the stifling burden of family tradition and interference, but she and her husband must contend with the decline that time, synthetics, and changing tastes bring to a once-thriving sheep business.

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front cover of Rakes of the Old Court
Rakes of the Old Court
A Novel
Mateiu Caragiale, Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.
 
Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.
 
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front cover of The Red Kimono
The Red Kimono
A Novel
Jan Morrill
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
In 1941, racial tensions are rising in the California community where nineyear-old Sachiko Kimura and her seventeen-year-old brother, Nobu, live. Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor, people are angry, and one night, Sachiko and Nobu witness three teenage boys taunting and beating their father in the park. Sachiko especially remembers Terrence Harris, the boy with dark skin and hazel eyes, and Nobu cannot believe the boys capable of such violence toward his father are actually his friends. What Sachiko and Nobu do not know is that Terrence's family had received a telegram that morning with news that Terrence's father was killed at Pearl Harbor. Desperate to escape his pain, Terrence rushes from his home and runs into two high-school friends who convince him to find a Japanese man and get revenge. They do not know the man they attacked is Sachiko and Nobu's father. In the months that follow, Terrence is convicted of his crime and Sachiko and Nobu are sent to an internment camp in Arkansas, a fictionalized version of the two camps that actually existed in Arkansas during the war. While behind bars and barbed wire, each of the three young people will go through dramatic changes. One will learn acceptance. One will remain imprisoned by resentment, and one will seek a path to forgiveness.
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front cover of The Relic
The Relic
A Novel
José Maria De Eça De Queirós
Tagus Press, 2012
The Relic is an irreverent fictional autobiography narrating the picaresque adventures of Teodorico, a Portuguese playboy determined to be the sole heir of his absurdly pious, sexually repressed, and tyrannical Auntie. Sent to the Holy Land, he returns with what he presumes is the "relic of relics" in hopes of persuading Auntie to bequeath her vast fortune to him. While in Jerusalem, Teodorico has a vision in which he witnesses Christ's trial and crucifixion and the founding of Christianity—with a twist.
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front cover of Remembrance of Things I Forgot
Remembrance of Things I Forgot
A Novel
Bob Smith
University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

“It’s safe to say your relationship is in trouble if the only way you can imagine solving your problems is by borrowing a time machine.”

            In 2006 comic book dealer John Sherkston has decided to break up with his physicist boyfriend, Taylor Esgard, on the very day Taylor announces he’s finally perfected a time machine for the U.S government. John travels back to 1986, where he encounters “Junior,” his younger, more innocent self. When Junior starts to flirt, John wonders how to reveal his identity: “I’m you, only with less hair and problems you can’t imagine.” He also meets up with the younger Taylor, and this unlikely trio teams up to plot a course around their future relationship troubles, prevent John’s sister from making a tragic decision, and stop George W. Bush from becoming president.
            In this wickedly comic, cross-country, time-bending journey, John confronts his own—and the nation’s—blunders, learning that a second chance at changing things for the better also brings new opportunities to screw them up. Through edgy humor, time travel, and droll one-liners, Bob Smith examines family dysfunction, suicide, New York City, and recent American history while effortlessly blending domestic comedy with science fiction. Part acidic political satire, part wild comedy, and part poignant social scrutiny, Remembrance of Things I Forgot is an uproarious adventure filled with sharp observations about our recent past.
 

InSight Out Book Club, featured selection

Bob Smith named one of Instinct magazine’s Leading Men 2011

Winner, Barbara Gittings Literature Award/Stonewall Book Awards, American Library Association

Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association

Finalist, Green Carnation Prize, international prize for LGBT Literature

Amazon Top Ten Gay & Lesbian Books of 2011

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

 
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front cover of The Reprisal
The Reprisal
A Novel
Laudomia Bonanni
University of Chicago Press, 2013
In the bitterly cold winter of 1943, the Italian countryside is torn apart by violence as partisans wage a guerilla war against the occupying German army and their local fascist allies. In the midst of this conflict, a ragtag group of fascist supporters captures a woman in the late stages of pregnancy. Suspecting her of being in league with the partisans, they hastily put her on “trial” by improvising a war tribunal one night in the choir stalls of the abandoned monastery that serves as their hide-out. This sham court convicts the woman and sentences her to die—but not until her child has been born. When a young seminarian visits the monastery and tries to dissuade the fascist band from executing their sentence, the absurd tragedy of the woman’s fate is cast in stark relief. The child’s birth approaches, an unnerving anticipation unfolds, and tension mounts ominously among the characters and within their individual psyches.          

Based on a number of incidents that took place in Abruzzo during the war, Laudomia Bonanni’s compact and tragic novel explores the overwhelming conflicts between ideology and community, justice and vengeance. The story is embedded in the cruel reality of Italian fascism, but its themes of revenge, sacrifice, and violence emerge as universal, delivered in prose that is at once lyrical and brutal.
In her native Italy, Bonanni, a writer of journalism and critical prose as well as fiction, is hailed as one of the strongest proponents of post-war realism, and this is the first of her novels to be made available to Anglophone readers. Translators Susan Stewart and Sara Teardo render Bonanni’s singular style—both sparse and emotive, frank and poetic—into readable, evocative English.

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front cover of Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds
A Novel
Patrick Lawler
University of Alabama Press, 2012
Winner of the 2013 CNY Book Award for Fiction. 

When you step inside Patrick Lawler’s Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fiction’s most inventive writers.
 
Patrick Lawler’s novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.
 
Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a reconfiguring of narrative—how stories exist inside stories, how place exists inside self, how self exists inside others, and how parachutists exist inside clouds.
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front cover of Reuben, Reuben
Reuben, Reuben
A Novel
Peter De Vries
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia—the school of John Updike and Cheever—this work from the great American humorist Peter De Vries looks with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries’s well-read suburbanites. Noted as much for his verbal fluidity and wordplay as for his ability to see humor through pain, De Vries will delight both new readers and old in this uproarious modern masterpiece.
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front cover of Roads, Where There Are No Roads
Roads, Where There Are No Roads
A Novel
Angela Jackson
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Winner, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize

In this highly anticipated sequel to her acclaimed first novel, Where I Must Go, Angela Jackson continues the remarkable story of Magdalena Grace. As a black student at the predominantly white Eden University, Maggie found herself deeply involved in conflict. Now, out in the wider world, she and her beloved Treemont Stone evolve into agents of change as they become immersed in the historical events unfolding around them—the movements advocating for civil rights, black consciousness, black feminism, the rights of the poor, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Rendered in prose so lyrical and luminous as to suggest a dream, Roads, Where There Are No Roads is a love story in the greatest sense, celebrating love between a man and a woman, between family members, and among the members of a community whose pride pushes them to rise up and resist. This gorgeously written novel will resonate with readers today as incredibly relevant, uplifting hearts and causing eyes to water with sorrow and delight. 
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front cover of The Round Dance
The Round Dance
A Novel
Carmine Abate
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The village of Hora is a magical place that blurs the boundaries between a mythical past and the present. It is here that Costantino Avati grows alongside his impetuous and melancholic father, Francesco; his mother, Elena, who hides a secret torment; his two sisters, Orlandina and Lucrezia; and his grandfather Lissandro, the last custodian of an era and a world that are disappearing. As Costantino feels the pangs of first love with the intriguing Roman Isabella, he also discovers the romantic allure of his own village and its rich cultural heritage. In his first novel, acclaimed author Carmine Abate transforms his Italo-Albanian (Arbëresh) hometown of Carfizzi, Calabria, into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. Inspired by the oral traditions of the old Albanian bards and incorporating the poetic local dialect, The Round Dance is a unique piece of multicultural literature that was named by the publishing house Mondadori as one of the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century. 
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front cover of Roxy and Coco
Roxy and Coco
A Novel
Terese Svoboda
West Virginia University Press, 2024
Roxy and Coco, sisters and glamorous harpies (mythical bird women), work to save the world by stopping child abuse, while also trying to evade capture. For readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell.

“[A] wry and rambunctious fable….The book offers brief and staggered visions of family, in all its complex permutations. Here, flocks settle into wonderfully unlikely formations. It’s possible that the most dangerous thing for anyone, harpy or human, is the decision to fly alone.” — Hilary Leichter, New York Times Book Review

 
Sisters Roxy and Coco are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time.
 
When Roxy is suddenly attracted to her human supervisor at a social work agency a hundred years too early, Coco is very suspicious. Luring Roxy with his scent, Tim is also on the payroll of a fake conservationist intent on her less-than-legal collection. Coco swoops in to vet Tim, but Interpol is hot on her trail for a series of curious homicides. (Surveillance has a very hard time convincing his boss of what he’s monitoring.) When the sisters find themselves trapped, Chris, a bipolar skateboarding truant, tries his best to rescue them but it’s Stewie, Coco’s colleague, who turns the story inside out. Roxy and Coco climaxes at a gala of egg fanciers who scramble to escape the harpies’ talons.
 
Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children.
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front cover of Ruta Tannenbaum
Ruta Tannenbaum
A Novel
Miljenko Jergovic
Northwestern University Press, 2011
The novel Ruta Tannenbaum is by prolific, award-winning Croatian author Miljenko Jergović. First published in 2006, the story illuminates life and society in Yugoslavia between the world wars. The title character was inspired by real-life figure Lea Deutsch, the now-forgotten Shirley Temple of Yugoslavia, who was murdered in the Holocaust.

Using their shared Jewish heritage as a starting point, Jergovic constructs a fictional family history populated by historical figures with the precocious Ruta at the center. Stephen Dickey’s translation masterfully captures Jergovic´’s colloquial yet deeply observed style, which animates the tangled and troubled history of persecution and war in Croatia.
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