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Dismantled and scattered just before his death, Jaime de Angulo’s poetic masterpiece Old Time Stories is now reconstituted for the first time in this edition.

Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories, a visual prose-poem drawing on his anthropological research among Indigenous communities in California, is a forgotten modernist treasure. Completed shortly before de Angulo’s death, the work has survived only in fragments, divided between an abridged 1953 publication and a limited edition from the 1970s. This new reconstituted edition gives contemporary readers—whether interested in experimental literature, linguistics, cultural anthropology, or Native American history—their first chance to engage with the complete work.

Structured around children’s stories inspired by the Indigenous tales and legends de Angulo encountered directly during his studies, Old Time Stories uses illustrations, different typefaces, and other experimental formatting techniques to translate rich oral and pictographic traditions into the condensed form of print. Beyond its significance as an innovative work of American literary modernism, it interrogates the colonialist foundations of Western modernity through this very reworking of Western literary conventions.

Robert Finn's translation of Turkish author Nazli Eray's Orphée makes available to the English-language reader a rewriting of the myth from the perspective of Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Eray's surrealistic version takes place in a hot resort town in contemporary Turkey. The setting of an archaeological dig gives a connection to the past and literally to the underworld. Found in the dig is a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who proceeds to offer an unusual perspective on modern life and values through mysterious letters carried by a messenger pigeon. Eray also comments on modernity, as the city of Ankara emerges as a character in the novel's fantasy. Set in junta-ruled Turkey of the 1980s, the novel takes its place as a crucial slice of Turkish literary history.

Resonating with haunting references to the film Last Tango in Paris, the novel evolves as a mystery story with a humorous bent. Thus Eray illuminates her insatiable curiosity about other cultures, particularly those of the West. Finally, the style of the translation is simple and clear, with crisp dialogue. Sibel Erol, professor of Turkish literature at New York University, has written an introduction that places this fantastic plot in a literary context, as well as in understandable terms that relate to the reality of today's Turkey.