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Winner, 2022 MLA Fenia and Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies

From the Jewish Provinces showcases a brilliant and nearly forgotten voice in Yiddish letters. An insistently original writer whose abrupt departure from the literary scene is the stuff of legend, Fradl Shtok composed stories that describe the travails of young women looking for love and desire in a world that spurns them. These women struggle with disability, sexual violence, and unwanted marriage, striving to imagine themselves as artists or losing themselves in fantasy worlds. The men around them grapple with their own frustrations and failures to live up to stifling social expectations. Through deft portraits of her characters’ inner worlds Shtok grants us access to unnoticed corners of the Jewish imagination.
 
Set alternately in the Austro‑Hungarian borderlands and in New York City, Shtok’s stories interpret the provincial worlds of the Galician shtetl and the Lower East Side with literary sophistication, experimenting with narrative techniques that make her stories expertly alive to women’s aesthetic experiences.

When civility is just a mask, what happens when it slips? This collection of gripping stories pries open the cracks in urban life, revealing the chaos and cruelty beneath.

Home in the Dark peels back the polished surface of middle-class life to expose the shadows lurking underneath: violence, betrayal, and the unsettling truths we refuse to see. In these fifteen gripping stories, Jayanta Dey weaves a world where desperation takes strange forms: a woman on the brink of suicide finds an unlikely savior in a rat, a stolen clock carries the weight of communal hatred, and a writer–publisher duo rides the highs of literary success—until their lucrative business in pornography turns against them.

Set in Calcutta and its suburbs, these tales decipher the moral and psychological conflicts simmering beneath genteel facades, where people will do anything to survive. With elements of the macabre and the psychological, Home in the Dark delivers sharp twists that unsettle as much as they illuminate. Translated from Bengali by Sayari Debnath, this collection brings a new and daring voice to readers, offering a rare glimpse into the dark undercurrents of contemporary urban life in India.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro has been widely acclaimed Peru's master storyteller. Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo.

Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of the fantastic playfully interrupt some of the stories. As Ribeyro's characters become swept up in circumstances beyond their understanding, we see that the only freedom or dignity left them comes from their own imaginations.

The fifteen stories included here are "Terra Incognita," "Barbara," "The Featherless Buzzards," "Of Modest Color," "The Substitute Teacher," "The Insignia," "The Banquet," "Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote)," "The Little Laid Cow," "The Jacaranda Trees," "Bottles and Men," "Nothing to Do, Monsieur Baruch," "The Captives," "The Spanish," and "Painted Papers."

Five tales of social satire from a forgotten sensation of nineteenth-century Russian literature

In 1830s and ’40s Russia, A.  F. Veltman’s eccentric writings were a fixture on the bookshelves of the reading public. In his era, his work influenced writers including Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. The five stories collected here, united by themes of social satire, display Veltman’s characteristic pivots between the tragic, comic, and grotesque. 

“Erotida” riffs on the genre of the society tale with linguistic puns and a bizarre plot resolution. In “Roland the Furious,” provincial officials mistake a traveler for a high-ranking government functionary. “Travel Impressions, and, among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums” plays on the travelogue genre and includes what may be the first description in Russian literature of journey by railroad. “A Traveler from the Provinces; or, A Commotion in the Capital” parodies the Moscow literary salons of Veltman’s day. Finally, “It’s Not a House, but a Plaything!” toys with yet another storytelling convention of the time—the Russian folkloric tradition of “house spirits.”
 

Ann Scott-Moncrieff was a highly regarded writer and poet of the cultural revival of Scottish literature in the inter-war period that is often called the second Renaissance. The author of the internationally popular tales for children Aboard the Bulger (1935), The White Drake and Other Tales (1936), and Auntie Robbo (1941), Scott-Moncrieff was no peripheral figure in the Scottish literary scene of the 1930s and was seen as more than ‘just’ a children’s writer in her time. She and her husband George Scott-Moncrieff moved in circles of literary nationalism and Catholicism – the religion to which they (alongside several of their contemporaries) converted. Ann Scott-Moncrieff’s short stories traverse wide ground and are full of rich reflection about women’s lives, children’s interior worlds, class, the condition of Scotland in the inter-war years, Scottish Church history, and rural life. And while there is very little in the way of overtly Catholic material in these stories, they are undoubtedly the work of a writer of the Catholic literary imagination. Mediation, grace, tradition and revelation are all observable strands which are woven carefully throughout these beautifully crafted works. The stories themselves give voice to Scotland’s girls, spinsters, young women and wives in the early decades of the twentieth century. They are at different times wry, ironical, hilarious, tragic, and full of feeling. But despite being a lively poetic presence with a strong, individual voice, Ann Scott-Moncrieff’s work for adults has fallen out of print and (until now) her short fiction has never been anthologized, meaning that its significance has gone largely unrecognized by contemporary critics and literary historians, and a new generation of readers has been denied the pleasure of reading her profound and witty work. This collection of her short fiction, brought to a new generation of readers, shows her to be a deft, lively, and gifted Catholic woman writer, whose work is deserving of renewed critical attention and re-evaluation.

Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1991, 1991 Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre. The World of Kate Roberts offers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words. The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' fiction: material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture."