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Be Faithful unto Death is the moving story of a bright and sensitive schoolboy growing up in an old-established boarding school in the city of Debrecen in eastern Hungary. Misi, a dreamer and would-be writer, is falsely accused of stealing a winning lottery ticket. The torments through which he goes – and grows – are superbly described.

The novel is brimming with vivid detail from the provincial life that Móricz knew so well and shot through with a sense of the tragic fate of a newly truncated Hungary.

Following desperate characters in desperate circumstances in the rural Midwest

In these colorful, darkly comic stories, veteran journalist and crime reporter John Counts takes readers to an often-ignored part of the country: a fictional Great Lakes coastal town in northern Michigan defined by beauty and bleakness. The cast of characters in these connected stories ranges from addicts to backwoods misfits to ruined lumber families, all bound together by their desire to obtain something just out of reach. Big Frank breaks out of a rehab facility trying to outrun grief. The women in the village of Brotherhood grapple with sterility resulting from an environmental calamity. A local politician must convince her mother to leave a nudist colony. And in the final, sweeping story, a splinter group from the local tribe attempts to reclaim its ancestral land by force. The people of Bear County and their predicaments encompass the wildly original and yet totally ordinary truths about American life off the beaten track.

WINNER OF FC2's CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A universal story of exile, of the refugee and emigrant, and of all those displaced who can reconstruct a sense of home only by weaving a new fabric of the imagination

For nearly two decades, Şiva has met after work on Tuesdays with four friends at a teahouse called the Kafiye. In interrupted conversations, the women explore what it is to live engaged lives inside and outside the home. Amidst joking and complaints, while drinking too much tea and eating too many sweets, they tell of their days: a son’s ninth birthday, the bruise on the arm of an aging parent, soldiers stationed outside the school, the funeral of an opposition political leader killed in a mysterious car accident.

Set in an unnamed provincial capital of an unnamed country, Benefit Street tells of a wide circle of friends—teachers, lawyers, missionaries, doctors, artisans—in a time of gathering and dispersal. It tells the story of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, colleagues, and neighbors, as war to the East threatens and constitutional rights are daily eroded by an increasingly authoritarian regime.

The ideals of youth, freedom, and coexistence are severely tested with the shocking revelation that the charismatic leader of their group has sexually abused the women under his care. The limits of reconciliation are tested as Şiva makes an arduous journey into the mountains to meet an estranged mother with a genius for weaving complex rugs.
 

An illustrated edition of Billy Budd featuring woodcuts by celebrated artist Barry Moser.
 
This edition of Billy Budd, Sailor presents Herman Melville’s iconic tale of the high seas alongside illustrations by renowned artist, publisher, and printmaker Barry Moser.
 
Throughout his fifty-year career, Moser has illustrated more than three hundred books ranging from novels to children’s stories to the Bible. Through his Pennyroyal Press, Moser designs and prints fine-press, illustrated, and occasionally oversized books in very limited editions, which are beloved by collectors and bibliophiles. To coincide with the centenary of the novella’s posthumous publication, Moser created sixteen original woodcuts illustrating the scenes and characters of Billy Budd, Sailor, and this trade edition now makes these exquisite illustrations accessible to a wide audience.

This illustrated edition adapts the text of the critical edition of the novella prepared for the Melville Electronic Library by John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Ohge.

A story of first love across cities spanning the decade that transformed the internet

In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.

A fierce, unapologetic eye captures the universal quest for connection in post-communist Eastern Europe.

Emotionally neglected by her immature, promiscuous mother and forced to care for her cantankerous dying grandmother, twelve-year-old Jarka is left to fend for herself in the social vacuum of a post-communist concrete jungle in Bratislava. She spends her days roaming the streets and daydreaming in the only place she feels truly safe: a small garden inherited from her grandfather. One day, stopping at a suburban railway station, she impulsively abducts twin babies.

Teetering on the edge of disaster, Jarka struggles to care for the children, and in the process, begins to discover herself. Boat Number Five—which was adapted into an award-winning Slovak film—brilliantly captures the ache and emptiness of a fractured society.

The best-known work by acclaimed Cuban poet Ángel Escobar

Ángel Escobar’s Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza is known by many as the most devastating book of his poetic generation. It is his first to be offered to an English-speaking audience. Merging personal and collective meditations, these twenty-three poems perform an indictment of violence. Escobar’s poetry delineates lacerations etched on bodies and minds by the sanguinary twentieth century, which unfolded out of a longer modernity spanning the Americas.

Breach of Trust / Abuso de confianza outlived its author, who took his own life in 1997. Brief and implicit appeals for justice and love offset the book’s abject theatricality. Escobar’s tragic masterpiece deftly interweaves themes into a striking synthesis offered in the spirit of survival.

Award-winning translator Kristin Dykstra introduces this collection with a comprehensive examination of Escobar’s life, work, and the times within which he wrote. Dykstra situates Escobar’s poetic abjection as his drive to confront thingification face to (non)face.

Three Sams, one impossible building, and a mystery echoing across worlds, lifetimes, and dreams.

Brezhat is a thrilling, puzzle-like novella that unfolds across three overlapping worlds, all occurring within the same haunted building. In one timeline, the building is a school where children's dreams are recorded. In another, an orphanage tied to a glass factory. In the third, a postapocalyptic ruin inhabited by a community of eccentric survivors.

Within its shifting halls live three versions of the same person, all named Sam. Though separated by time and circumstance, the Sams share dreams, sensations, and fleeting encounters that bind their lives together in unsettling ways. As they wander through forgotten corridors and forbidden rooms, the Sams undertake tasks both ordinary and uncanny. They deliver life-saving serum, reassemble the body of a broken friend, talk with the dead, and bury dead mice. Along the way, they are guided, taught, and sometimes misled by an unforgettable cast of adults: teachers, nuns, scientists, artists, a librarian, and the inscrutable Mr. Jones, a janitor who seems to exist outside of time altogether. Threaded through each timeline is the shadow of a former friend whose acts of violence echo across worlds, causing old wounds to recur in new forms. Blending speculative fiction, psychological insight, and gothic atmosphere, Brezhat is a mesmerizing novella steeped in mystery, unraveling the stories we inherit, the selves we might have been, and the strange ways pain reverberates across a lifetime.
 

A classic work of twentieth-century Slovak literature that blends naturalism and depictions of rural life with the supernatural.

After many years, Libor returns to his native village, where he has been appointed gamekeeper. His childhood sweetheart, Zuna, is waiting for him there. But his homecoming is far from idyllic. He has “tasted city life” and soon becomes an outsider to the villagers. According to them, Zuna has become a local prostitute who sleeps with anyone who pays her. Zuna’s father, an old miller, has gone blind because he made a pact with the devil. The mill where Libor and Zuna used to play as children has fallen into disrepair and ruin. The more Libor gets to know the world that he has returned to, the more confused he becomes. The village is full of superstitions, secrets, and hostility. He meets the charcoal burner Tavo, who lives high in the mountains, and learns from him the mysterious and bloody story of Zuna’s birth. He also learns what matters most to him: Zuna is pure and innocent. Libor starts a relationship with her from scratch. But just when their forgotten love might finally come to fruition, He appears—a vagabond who can transform into a wolf—and Libor discovers that Zuna is meeting with him. Is it a monster that gouges people’s eyes out? The devil, or our immaterial, dark alter ego? Reality, dreams, and fantasy blend in Libor’s mind as his hopes seem crushed beyond redemption.

A searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence.

In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an “English” outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population. 

At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they’ve accumulated caring for Emma’s disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara’s husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars—a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own. 

Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can’t control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one’s heart.

WINNER OF FC2’s CATHERINE DOCTOROW INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A gathering of luminescent stories that illustrates how fraught and contingent the simplest of lives can be, and the often unexpected means available to each of us for our own salvation

The truths revealed and the lives upended in the 13 stories that make up Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This are at once singularly foreign and uncannily familiar. A wife pens a series of suicide notes to her family that verge on the comic, hovering between the tyrannical and the absurd. A mother obsesses over what her child eats. A young girl left with caretakers in New York draws on her potent imagination with consequences in real life that are both liberating and disastrous. In a college application essay a young woman finally begins to make sense of the troubling vicissitudes of her existence. A young French girl departs for America with her reprehensible beau to find she’s as much a stranger to herself abroad as she was at home. As with her previous novels and story collections, Murphy’s keen rendering of these disparate, complex lives illuminate in ways both quiet and startling our capacity for deliverance and devastation through daring acts of self-invention.