A new series of world literature
Seedbank
Just as repositories around the world gather seeds to ensure biodiversity in the future, Seedbank gathers works of literature from around the world that foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world—exposing readers to new, endangered, and forgotten ways of seeing the world.
The Seedbank series
- The North American debut of one of China’s most celebrated authors, “Chi Zijian’s beautifully realised novel offers a detailed portrait of a way of life hard to imagine today” (The Independent).
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“A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past.”—John Banville
“He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist’s…
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A masterful bilingual collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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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.
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Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.
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The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
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“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”
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Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
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This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
- 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.
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By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
Seedbank audiobooks
Experience poetry in translation as our poets and translators narrate select texts from the Seedbank series. Available wherever you get your audiobooks, but we recommend listening with libro.fm.
The Seedbank series
Explore currently available and forthcoming titles below.
A masterful bilingual collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant.
“Writing in an Endangered Language to Honor, and Challenge, Traditions”
A New York Times feature on Mikeas Sánchez
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.
“We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world.”
The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.
Dan Beachy-Quick on translating ancient poetics
Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people, the first novel in Galsan Tschinag’s saga—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life.
Listen to shamanic singing by Galsan Tschinag
This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego.
Walk through Connemara with Tim Robinson
By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
“However many nations
live in the world today,
however many countless people,
they all had but one dawn.”
—from The Popol Vuh
“A masterpiece of travel and topographical writing, and an incomparable and enthralling meditation on times past.”—John Banville
“He knows this world as no one else does, and writes about it with awe and love, but also with measured grace, an artist’s eye and a scientist’s sensibility.”—Colm Tóibín
- Blog Post
Honoring Tuệ Sỹ
Milkweed is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tuệ Sỹ, whose poems we published in a bilingual edition last year as Dreaming the Mountain, with translations by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins. Born in 1943, Tuệ Sỹ joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, translator, and poet. He actively resisted the idea that Buddhism should serve as a tool for any political agenda, and was well known for his dissidence.
Following study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tuệ Sỹ moved to Saigon, where he became a…
- Blog Post
Excerpt: Introduction to Tim Robinson’s Listening to the Wind
Introduction to Tim Robinson’s Listening to the Wind, a Seedbank series title.
- Blog Post
5 Reasons to Teach This Book: The Blue Sky
Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re featuring The Blue Sky, a novel that originally joined our catalogue in 2006 but will be reissued this summer as part of the Seedbank series.
The Blue Sky is a tale of family—blood and found—and the distances we travel to preserve our chosen bonds. In fictionalizing his own childhood, author Galsan Tschinag walks readers through the familiar and anxious…
- Blog Post
Rest in Peace, Tim Robinson
Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to report that Tim Robinson has died from coronavirus this morning in London. He was 85.
Robinson is the author of numerous books, most notably his two-volume study of the Aran Islands, and his Connemara trilogy, which acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane has called “one of the most remarkable nonfiction projects undertaken in English.” The first volume in the trilogy, Listening to the Wind, was originally published in Ireland in 2006, and we are incredibly honored to have released the book to an American audience last year in September. Robinson’s work…
