Reading Lists
The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind, and the first in the...
Nau’s greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. This...
In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people’s ancient way of life is colliding with the pervasive influence of modernity. And for Dshurukawaa, a young shepherd boy, this means loss—of his siblings, of his...
A Book Riot “Must-Read Book in Translation for 2022”
As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.
In 2007, a...
Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
Art. Garlic...
2020 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE FINALIST
From celebrated Belgian author Geneviève Damas, a modern fable about friendship, self-determination, and the power of education.
Illiterate, isolated, and held at arm’s length...
From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
From one of Norway’s leading writers, translated into English for the very first time, comes a transatlantic novel of dreams, sacrifice, and transformation set at the turn of the twentieth century.
The year is 1874. Nesje...
A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.
One of the most important contemporary poets working in German makes his American debut in this compact, light-footed, and curious dual-language collection. These poems, crafted with the care of a master gardener tending his topiary, seem to...
In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, readers find themselves in a darkly comic, sensual, and contradictory world. The author’s unorthodox—even blasphemous—religious sensibility yields something ultimately hopeful: a belief...
The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important...
Simultaneously occupying past, present, and future, this collection suffuses image with memory and darkness with abundant light. In these masterful translations—printed alongside the original Vietnamese—the poems sing out with the wisdom that...
In these poems, presented in both Portuguese and English, butcher shops, sex, and machine guns sit in spirited dialogue with language, absence, and time. The resulting collection is varied as well as unified, brilliantly textured and layered.
Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, it discusses the joys and problems that face...
In this anthology, women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any...
An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021
A Literary Hub Most...
A New York Times Best Seller
Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year
From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world,...
Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, the Pimicikamak community at Cross Lake have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the local dam. The author, who grew up in the nearby town of Jenpeg, returns...
Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between.
Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between “seed” and “summit” of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the...
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart...
“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.”
So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern...
These poems are engaged in the work of recovery, making visible what is often intentionally erased: the movement of domestic workers on a weekday morning in Brooklyn; a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, fondly sharing photos of his dog; the...
Heian-period Japanese women writers, science fiction, and the author’s own experience as a second-generation immigrant: these are some of the sources these poems use to explore the connection between identity and language. Wonderfully lyrical and...
As the young daughter of an affluent Parsee family in Lahore, Lenny is keenly observant of the city’s astonishing diversity—Muslims and Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, coexisting together. But as Lahore descends into sectarian violence, Lenny’s...
Loading his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and widowed mother-in-law into a bullock cart, Faredoon Junglewalla—Freddy for short—leaves his ancestral village for the bustling city of Lahore. Despite the nagging of his unbearable mother-in-law,...
The sea is an impossible force in this collection: it is both a majestic presence that predates man, and something to carry with us wherever we go. These brilliantly translated poems, presented in both Chinese and English, introduce an important...
This groundbreaking anthology presents a revelatory portrait of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. What emerges from this conversation of outsiders and insiders, Vietnamese and American voices, is a worldly sensibility descended from the...
Drawing on a dizzying array of sources—including Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Korean folklore, and Turkish proverbs—this winner of the American Book Award explores the entangled myths that accompany the experience of immigration. These poems...
At once ancient and contemporary, personal and political, grounded and yet uniquely dazzling, this extraordinary collection blends Asian and Western sensibilities in a pioneering way. With wit and energy, these poems define the author’s existence...
In this anthology, women survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki write of the attack’s cause, effects, and aftermath. In potent prose and poetry, these women bear witness to the shared responsibility for bringing about war, any...
Now a Major Motion Picture from Focus Features, Starring Kevin Costner and Diane Lane
It’s September 1951, in Dalton, North Dakota: years since George and Margaret’s widowed daughter-in-law left with their only grandson...
An Esquire “Best Book of Spring 2022”
A Publishers Weekly “Best Book of Summer 2022”
A Kirkus “Best Book of May 2022”
A San Francisco Chronicle “Most Anticipated Novel of 2022”
A...
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the racism and the...
Tormented by the loss of his wife, department store window-dresser Colton Kemp decides to raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins. “A book that makes grand promises and delivers” (New York Times), ...
This novel takes readers from nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq, from the battlefields of the First World War to the deserts of Mexico and Texas. Throughout, relationships are forged and broken, wars are fought, and...
When a car explodes in Kabul ten years after 9/11, a journalist discovers that its passengers—three fellow ex-pats—had formed an unlikely love triangle. As the journalist learns more, the narratives of their lives become inseparable from the...
Born and raised in the Arctic, Cutuk Hawcley has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. But when he leaves for the city as a young man, incompatible realities collide, forcing Cutuk to choose between two worlds—both...
In this modern classic, the charges of a young Sioux woman force David Hayden’s father, the sheriff of their small town, to confront his older brother, a charming war hero and respected doctor. This novel is an astonishing tale of love and...
A haunting novel spanning several generations, following a Dakota family’s struggle to preserve their way of life and their sacrifices to protect what matters most. Weaving together the voices of four indelible women—including tough, bookish...
As a botanist, the author has been trained to examine nature with the tools of science; as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our teachers. Here she brings these two lenses together,...
Alone in the world and placed in a horrific boarding school, Saul Indian Horse is surrounded by violence and cruelty. At the urging of a priest, he finds a tentative salvation in hockey. Yet as Saul’s victories mount, so do the racism and the...
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged but also startlingly lush, and even its...
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this...
As a small boy in remote Alberta, the author was immersed in his Cree family’s history, passed down in the stories of his mother, Bertha. But after a series of tragic losses, Bertha turned wild and unstable, and their home life became chaotic....
After suffering a devastating accident, rodeo cowboy Joe Willie Wolfchild retires to his family’s ranch to mend. There he meets Aiden, a troubled city teenager, and Claire, his mother—and three damaged people slowly begin to heal together.
When sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight is summoned by his ailing father, Eldon, Franklin’s sense of duty clashes with the resentment he feels for his father’s many years of neglect and drinking. But when the two men set out together on one last...
These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times...
Nau’s greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. This...
In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people’s ancient way of life is colliding with the pervasive influence of modernity. And for Dshurukawaa, a young shepherd boy, this means loss—of his siblings, of his...
In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd...
In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the...
In the second volume of his beloved Connemara trilogy, cartographer Tim Robinson continues to unearth the stories of this rich landscape—weaving placelore, etymology, geology, and the meeting of sea and shore into the region’s mythologies.
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding “that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe.” In this...
Nau’s greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. This...
From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place’s geography, ecology, and history. Footstep by footstep, moment...
The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind, and the first in the...