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Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen. 
 
Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistolary novel, telling the story of a family through the fragmented and disparate perspectives of daughter, mother, and grandmother. Yet even as each woman endures her private struggles with love and betrayal, youth and maturity, knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, the Cascadeis forge a solidarity that transcends generations. In turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this novel is a triumph of narrative voice and literary style from one of Italy’s most renowned writers.
 

Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
This book has been translated thanks to a contribution from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

A pivotal summer in the life of Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontë sisters

In imagined diary entries from the summer of 1812, twenty-nine-year-old Maria Branwell is pondering a momentous choice. Far from her Cornish home, working with her aunt and uncle at their Methodist boys’ school on the moors of Yorkshire, she has just been introduced to the Irish clergyman Patrick Brontë. The two are powerfully drawn to one another, resulting in a proposal Maria accepts wholeheartedly—yet reservations begin to surface. From her earliest years she has felt marked by an uncommon destiny, one she had assumed incompatible with an ordinary life of marriage and children. Does marriage fit into that destiny? Or is there a different path to take? The choice of this woman forgotten by history will alter the course of literature forever.

A radical engagement with Robert Walser’s correspondence that turns literary criticism into an act of creative recovery.

Robert Walser’s letters to Frieda Mermet, the laundry manager at a Swiss psychiatric hospital, offer an intimate and enigmatic glimpse into the mind of a writer whose literary fortunes waned even as his influence grew in the decades following his death. Covering nearly thirty years, from 1913 to 1942, these letters chart Walser’s transition from a celebrated modernist to a man institutionalized, yet still deeply engaged with language and identity.

In Reading Robert Walser, Simon Wortham studies Walser’s letters within the broader context of modernist literature and deconstruction, and also imaginatively reconstructs Mermet’s possible lost responses, blurring the lines between criticism and creativity. The result is an innovative exploration of authorship and the act of reading itself—one that deepens our understanding of Walser’s life and work while questioning the very nature of literary correspondence.

“I feel somehow that of all the writing I am doing, my diary is the most important.” So wrote the beloved and bestselling author, poet, and playwright Carol Lynn Pearson in her 1979 diary. Several years before, she recorded, “I feel the imperative of history. . . . Add that to my being a household word to many and I cannot escape the feeling that in many years there might be a number of people interested in these pages.” That time has now come.  

 Unbeknownst to almost everyone but herself, Pearson kept a near-daily diary since she was a teenager, recording her remarkable story in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mormon America. In this first of a four-volume series, Pearson chronicles her love for her church but also her troubling experiences and concerns with its patriarchy, historic doctrine of polygamy, omission of a feminine divine, and homophobia. Readers will rejoice with her as her first book of poetry, Beginnings, sells an astonishing 150,000+ copies and puts her on the map in the 1960s, empathize with her as she watches her church help kill the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and mourn with her as her mixed-orientation marriage ends and she cares for her former husband in her home as he dies of AIDS in the 1980s. The sensitive-girl-turned-strong-woman who emerges in these diaries insists that we move from patriarchy into partnership, change our destructive policies towards Queer people, and invite God the Mother back into our heavenly family.

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.

One of the liveliest novels to come out of Russia in recent years, The Soul of a Patriot is, on the surface, a series of amusing letters written at the death of Leonid Brezhnev. The fictional Evgeny Popov's account of his family history becomes a rambunctious portrayal of the lives of ordinary Russians from the revolution to Brezhnev's death. As Popov pokes fun at every aspect of Russian culture and tradition, layer upon layer of satire turn convention inside out.

Freely parodying conformist Russian writing, this novel takes its lead as much from Sterne and Diderot as from the brilliant Russian satirist Mikhail Zosh­chenko. In the offhand witticisms and jaunty humor speaks the spirit that sur­vived the "era of stagnation" of Soviet literature.