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Winner of the Humanities in Translation Prize

The Book of Mating is a masterfully translated collection of stories in which Indonesian women explore the full spectrum of mating: marital, sexual, and spiritual; forced and free; transcendent, ruinous, and mundane. Laksmi Pamuntjak portrays both the constraints and opportunities facing women caught between the enduring restrictions of local norms and hierarchies and the tantalizing promises of globalized modern life, between internalized myths and social realities.

An experimental melding of Pamuntjak’s creative, journalistic, and activist work, these stories read as urgent dispatches from the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora—and as universal narratives of women’s lived experiences. Annie Tucker’s nuanced translation takes us from the prison island of Buru and the Bogor Botanical Gardens to Paris’s Left Bank, offering a polyphonic testament to the universal fight for women’s autonomy over their bodies and their lives.

Encompassing a wide range of formal approaches and genres, Samuel Rafael Barber captures the disparate manifestations of power and powerlessness in this era of global neoliberalism. The stories in The Box in Which We Live investigate the existential torment inflicted upon marginalized people by individuals, institutions, and states complicit in oppression. Across these experiments, a comic absurdity emerges and a distance grows between the individual and the collective in a media-oversaturated world.

Leyla is a headstrong Brooklyn-born art historian at a prestigious upstate New York college. When she meets feckless young computer technician Pablo at a party, she quickly becomes pregnant with his child. There’s only one problem: she can’t stand him. And one more problem: her student Michael wants Pablo for himself.

Amid this love triangle, the objects of Leyla and Michael’s study take on a life of their own. Trying to learn more about Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy, they pore over the journal and prison writings of maverick 17th-century utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which, as if by enchantment, transport them back four centuries to Naples. And while the past and present miraculously converge, Leyla, Michael, and Tommaso embark on a voyage of self-discovery in search of a new life.
 
In this fusion of historical, queer, and speculative fiction, Alessandro Giardino combines the intellectual playfulness of Umberto Eco with the psychological finesse of Michael Cunningham.
 

A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel, The Castle.

Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka’s world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives.

From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle.

The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.

Blending literary fiction, speculative fiction, and lyric prose, The Chimeras explores how communities create meaning in the wake of radical uncertainty. At its core, the novel is concerned with enduring human questions of belonging, family, memory, and faith in language itself. The book will appeal to readers of contemporary literary fiction, speculative literature, and works that push the boundaries of narrative form.

The City of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark was first published in 1945 by Random House and reprinted by the University of Nevada Press in paperback in 1991 with a new foreword by Robert Laxalt.

Clark’s novel broke new ground in his telling of the story of the rites of passage of a boy, Tim Hazard, into adulthood in the setting of the Western town of Reno, Nevada. The descriptions of Reno’s landscape and the realistic characters depict the role of nature during the tumultuous stages of adolescence and the potential risk of obstruction and loss in the attainment of maturity.

An authentic rock band story from Chicago to Nashville and, just maybe, back again

On the cusp of turning thirty, Chicago indie musician Maggie Corbin has hustled for a decade, set on making her rock and roll dreams come true. Her band, Spinning Birds, fronted by Maggie and her romantic partner Matt Turkish, releases a debut record to critical acclaim, hits the road, and begins working on a follow-up. From the outside, her path looks like success—but as streaming deconstructs the industry and Maggie’s relationships shift and slip, the question remains: Can you live for art alone?

When a sudden move back to the South forces Maggie to reframe her dreams and reckon with familial rifts and her past—while still fighting to reimagine what her future could be—a natural disaster in Nashville and a surprise encounter with a character from her childhood shift her perspective on healing, community, and the ties that bind. Drifting in and out of songwriting sessions, cozy kitchens, and moments of bearing witness to the curious power of the natural world, The Come Apart celebrates the times when we must come fully undone in order to put ourselves back together.
 

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is Sarah Orne Jewett's most popular book. In its elegantly constructed sketches, a worldly, anonymous writer spends the summer in a tiny Maine fishing village where she hopes to find peace and solitude. As she gains the acceptance and trust of her hosts, the community's power and complexity are slowly revealed. While its episodes portray the difficulty and loneliness of rural life, they also display its dignity and strength, particularly as expressed in the bonds between women: mothers, daughters, and friends.

This centennial edition contains a facsimile of the original text, thereby restoring the novel to Jewett's own version, which had been considerably altered in other published versions, plus four related stories. Further enhancing the importance of this volume is editor Sarah Way Sherman's introduction, which includes a sketch of Jewett's life and professional development, a commentary on textual accuracy, and a discussion of the book's themes and techniques as well as its historical context.

IndieReader Approved!

Renowned—albeit washed-up—author Peter Zemeckis (“Z”) is relishing the sunset of a life spent single when Dr. Nancy Chu crash-lands in the bungalow next door. As Nancy’s family drags him into deeper water, Z must rethink the ending to his own story.

Spanning from Amarillo, Texas, in 1977 to La Jolla, California, in 2012, The Daughters is a kaleidoscopic meditation on family, memory, and the invisible forces that bind us. Z’s narrative interweaves small-town rodeos with amateur radios, teen angst with parental love. Shard by shard, he pieces together the story of a fractured family struggling to reassemble itself.

Like particles, Z’s characters (and neighbors) are both small and singular, but their stories ripple like waves—colliding, refracting, and reshaping one another across generations. Elegant, intricate, and deeply moving, The Daughters reverberates long after its final page is turned.

2020 Reading the West Book Awards, Longlist for Fiction
2020 Association for Morman Letters Finalist, Fiction

The Desert Between Us is a sweeping, multi-layered novel based on the U.S. government’s decision to open more routes to California during the Gold Rush. To help navigate this waterless, largely unexplored territory, the War Department imported seventy-five camels from the Middle East to help traverse the brutal terrain that was murderous on other livestock.

Geoffrey Scott, one of the roadbuilders, decides to venture north to discover new opportunities in the opening of the American West when he—and the camels—are no longer needed. Geoffrey arrives in St. Thomas, Nevada, a polygamous settlement caught up in territorial fights over boundaries and new taxation. There, he falls in love with Sophia Hughes, a hatmaker obsessed with beauty and the third wife of a polygamist. Geoffrey believes Sophia wants to be free of polygamy and go away with him to a better life, but Sophia’s motivations are not so easily understood. She had become committed to Mormon beliefs in England and had moved to Utah Territory to assuage her spiritual needs.

The death of Sophia’s child and her illicit relationship with Geoffrey generate a complex nexus where her new love for Geoffrey competes with societal expectations and a rugged West seeking domesticity. When faced with the opportunity to move away from her polygamist husband and her tumultuous life in St. Thomas, Sophia becomes tormented by a life-changing decision she must face alone.

2020 Reading the West Book Awards, Longlist for Fiction
2020 Association for Morman Letters Finalist, Fiction

The Desert Between Us is a sweeping, multi-layered novel based on the U.S. government’s decision to open more routes to California during the Gold Rush. To help navigate this waterless, largely unexplored territory, the War Department imported seventy-five camels from the Middle East to help traverse the brutal terrain that was murderous on other livestock.

Geoffrey Scott, one of the roadbuilders, decides to venture north to discover new opportunities in the opening of the American West when he—and the camels—are no longer needed. Geoffrey arrives in St. Thomas, Nevada, a polygamous settlement caught up in territorial fights over boundaries and new taxation. There, he falls in love with Sophia Hughes, a hatmaker obsessed with beauty and the third wife of a polygamist. Geoffrey believes Sophia wants to be free of polygamy and go away with him to a better life, but Sophia’s motivations are not so easily understood. She had become committed to Mormon beliefs in England and had moved to Utah Territory to assuage her spiritual needs.

The death of Sophia’s child and her illicit relationship with Geoffrey generate a complex nexus where her new love for Geoffrey competes with societal expectations and a rugged West seeking domesticity. When faced with the opportunity to move away from her polygamist husband and her tumultuous life in St. Thomas, Sophia becomes tormented by a life-changing decision she must face alone.

The city of Warsaw, under Russian rule in the late 1870s, is the setting for this story. The middle-aged hero, Wokulski, bold and successful in business, is being destroyed by his obsessive love for the frigid, aristocratic society ‘doll’ Izabela. The embattled aristocracy, the new men of finance, Dickensian tradesmen and the urban poor all come vividly to life on the vast, superbly detailed canvas.

Jane, aka @erejane, a thirtysomething professional web influencer, lives in her aunt’s spare bedroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her only confidant is Brian, a potter who is thrilled that the internet allows him to connect without having to leave his nearby home and studio. With limited options and a dwindling bank account, Jane lands a high-paying gig that requires her to travel to a wildlife refuge on a remote island near San Francisco to publicize a marine biologist’s shark study.

However, when a global pandemic strikes with astonishing speed, the scientists surrounding Jane succumb one by one; meanwhile, Brian grapples with neighbors living out their apocalyptic movie fantasies. When real-world events force them to set aside their online personas, Jane and Brian are forced to decide what—or whom—they care for the most.

Told through traditional narrative and imagined social media posts—which often appear, as they do in life, out of chronological order—The Doomscroller’s Companion is as engaging as it is unexpected.

Finalist, PEN USA Literary Award for Fiction

A road trip through myth, memory, and madness.

The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong is a novel which plunders, in a gleeful, two-fisted fashion, the myth and pop-culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a story fueled on pot fumes and blues, borrowing and distorting the rigid conventions of the traditional western. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as interchangeable as their outfits; men strike poses from Gunsmoke, and horses are traded for Trans-Ams. Pidgin, the half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion—of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence—where television offers redemption, and “the Indian always gets it up the ass.”

Having escaped the porn factories of Utah, Pidgin heads for Clovis, NM to bury his father, Cline. But the body is stolen at the funeral, and Pidgin must recover it. With the aid of car thief Charlie Ward, he criscrosses a wasted New Mexico, straying through bars, junkyards, and rodeos, evading the cops, and tearing through barriers "Dukestyle." "Charlie Ward slid his thin leather belt from his jeans and held it out the window, whipping the cutlass faster, faster, his dyed black hair unbraiding in the fifty mile per hour wind, and they never stopped for gas." Along the way, Pidgin escapes a giant coyote, survives a showdown with Custer, and encounters the remnants of the Goliard Tribe—a group of radicals to which Cline belonged.

Pidgin's search allows him to reconcile the death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth-making, and will eventually place him in a position to rewrite history. Jones tells his tale in lean, poetic prose. He paints a bleak, fever-burnt west—a land of strip-joints, strip-malls, and all you can eat beef-fed-beef stalls, where the inhabitants speak a raw, disposable lingo. His vision is dark yet frighteningly recognizable. In the tradition of Gerald Vizenor's Griever, The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong blazes a trail through the puppets and mirrors of myth, meeting the unexpected at every turn, and proving that the past—the texture of the road—can and must be changed.

The Fetishists, originally published in Arabic as Al Majus, is considered the masterpiece of Ibrahim al-Koni, one of the most prolific and important writers in Arabic today. In The Fetishists, Al-Koni explores what happens when a writer asks the novel to speak of and for the Sahara, when rival cultures clash, and when communities seek to build a utopia on Earth as individuals struggle between a desire for material well-being (represented by gold dust) and a need for spiritual meaning. As the story opens, Sultan Oragh of Timbuktu, who has already lost most of his power to Fetishist Bambara leaders of the forestlands, fears he will lose his only daughter, Tenere, as a human sacrifice to their god Amnay. The sultan sends Tenere to seek refuge with fellow Tuareg nomads in the plain. But even in their traditional, nomadic community, a competition rages between jihadi militant Islam; moderate Anhi Islam, which is the ancient Tuareg Law; and the cults of gold dust and of traditional African folk religions.

In this epic novel, Al-Koni blends Tuareg folklore and history with intense, fond descriptions of daily life in the desert, creating a mirror for life anywhere. Through its tragic rendering of a clash between the Tuareg and traditional African civilizations, the novel profoundly probes the contradictions of the human soul as it takes the reader on a unique spiritual adventure inside the Tuareg world.

A sharp, witty send-up of the literary world, set in the world of book publishing—a must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamt of (or dreaded) getting published. 

Cyril Cordouan is the beleaguered editor at Fulmen, a distinguished publishing house known for its solid but not particularly popular literary titles. Every day, Cyril faces an avalanche of subpar manuscripts, struggling to find a glimmer of quality amid the piles of drivel. Rejections are a routine part of his job, but aspiring authors don’t take kindly to their works being dismissed, and one distraught writer tragically ends his life after his manuscript is declined. 

Devastated, Cyril decides to create an outlet for these rejected writers. Can group therapy for the hopelessly hopeful cure Cyril’s woes? Not quite. Between vengeful widows, surprise bestsellers, and a crippling crisis of conscience, Cyril’s life is a hilarious disaster. 

With sharp wit and keen insight, Laclavetine, himself an industry insider, offers a satirical look at the literary world along with thought-provoking commentary on the nature of literary ambition, rejection, and the often ridiculous realities of the publishing industry.