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Grove Press Atlantic Monthly Press Black Cat The Mysterious Press Granta SPRING SUMMER 2012 Winter 2012 JEANETTE WINTERSON BACKLIST To coincide with the publication of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Grove Press has commissioned new artwork by award-winning illustrator Olaf Hajek for the best-selling Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion, and Sexing the Cherry. Sexing the Cherry (978-0-8021-3578-0 • $14.95 • USO) eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9870-9 The Passion (978-0-8021-3522-3 • $14.95 • USO) eBook ISBN: 978-8021-9871-6 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (978-0-8021-3516-2 • $14.95 • USO) eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9872-3 MARCH 2012 “A highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (978-0-8021-2010-6 • $25.00 • USO) eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9475-6 GROVE PRESS HARDCOVERS APRIL From the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award–winning author of the best-selling novel Man Gone Down comes a deeply personal, explosive memoir told through the stories of four generations of black American men in one family THE BROKEN KING A Memoir Michael Thomas Man Gone Down was: • One of The New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books eviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and chosen of the Year as one of their Ten Best Books of 2008 before winning the IMPAC • Winner of the International R Dublin Literary Award, Man Gone Down introduced a new writer of IMPAC Dublin Literary Award prodigious and rare talent. • Featured on the cover of Michael Thomas’s extraordinary new book, The Broken King, traces the The New York Times Book Review lives of the men in his family against the backdrop of the last century-and-a- • A Book Sense Best Reading half in American history. From Reconstruction to the Jim Crow South and Group title the Civil Rights movement, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and • prepublication reading copies beloved, trauma and recovery, race and de-racination, success and failure, soc- available cer and the Boston Red Sox in a beautiful and unique memoir. • 10-city tour The title is borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s line in “Little Gidding”: “If you (Boston • New York City • Philadelphia • came at night like a broken king,” and the work ponders the process of being Washington, D.C. • Miami • Chicago • broken. Reminiscent of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Thomas delivers Los Angeles • San Francisco • Seattle • Toronto) a series of powerful vignettes reaching back to his grandfather who, though • major review coverage trained as a pharmacist could never find work as one; his father, the president • national radio coverage of his class at Boston University, an artist and philosopher who was an unsuc- cessful businessman and a failed parent; to his estranged brother’s lawlessness; • indieBound outreach campaign and his own two sons’ relatively privileged and safe lives in Brooklyn today. • online promotion at Every page rings with the effects of America’s sweeping struggle with race, www.thebrokenking.com class, wealth, education, land, and tradition, while also offering an intimate • reading group guide available online look at the creative mind under stress—a brave, meticulous articulation of $25.00 (Canada: $30.50) madness in its guises through the generations. hardcover 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 448 pp. Thomas’s profound vision of the many forces that shape and break our Memoir (BIO026000) lives makes The Broken King a groundbreaking work—sometimes humorous 978-0-8021-2014-4 eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9453-4 and sometimes grave, both darkly skeptical and genuinely optimistic—on the U.S. and Canadian rights: Grove Press neverending pursuit of wholeness and redemption. All other rights: Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin (212-352-2055) Carton quantity: 24 Export: USCO Residence: Brooklyn, NY 2 Excerpt from THE BROKEN KING “What am I?” I knew the question had been coming. “You’re many things.” He looked at me in a distant, unknowing way. “You’re the descendant of slave and slave master.” He climbed up to the top bunk and lay atop the covers. “What are you?” “The same, sort of.” “What would you have been, back then?” “A slave.” “What would I have been?” “A slave.” He saddened. “Because of you?” “No.” “Because of mom? She’s not a lot of things, is she?” I told him about our lines: the history of the Fowlkes, Allens, Millers and Browns. The Thomases. I told him about Virginia, how my mother had been born not far from the Auld plantation. I told him how Frederick Douglass, in spite of what he went through, married a white woman. I told him that although he was one of our nation’s greatest sons, he spent much of his free life in exile; how a man with a mind like his, freed from the absurd need to argue for his humanity could have done great things; how many people BEN RUSSELL with great minds had forgone what they’d desired or risked MICHAEL THOMAS received his BA from Hunter College what they had so that we could be free. He could be what he wanted, claim both worlds—all worlds—without fear or and his MFA from Warren Wilson College. He is the author of shame. Man Gone Down, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, “We, all of us, are so much more than our color.” And when I looked to him for a response, or another question—he A Public Space, and the anthology The Book of Dads. He teaches was asleep. at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn. PRAISE FOR MAN GONE DOWN: Also available: “Thomas has written a rhapsodic and piercing post–9/11 lament over Man Gone Down aggression, greed, and racism, and a ravishing blues for the soul’s (978-0-8021-7029-3 • $14.00 • USCO) unending loneliness.”—DONNA SEAMAN, BOOKLIST (STARRED REVIEW) “[A] jazzy, sinewy debut . Thomas’s urgent, quicksilver prose makes even the darkest moments of this novel shine.” —CATHLEEN MEDWICK, O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Powerful and moving . Impressive . Thomas knows how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also—fortunately—how much it can take to bring a man down.” —KAIAMA L. GLOVER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 3 APRIL “With Second Person Singular, Sayed Kashua has become one of the most important contemporary Hebrew writers.”—Haaretz SECOND PERSON SINGULAR Sayed Kashua Translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg • Winner of the Bernstein Award • Kashua is the creator of the groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, Arab Labor, and is one of the most “ Fascinating and satirical . Addresses the split identity of the Arab popular columnists for Israel’s newspaper, Haaretz Israeli, with its contradictory wishes and its impossible yearnings. Cou- • Let It Be Morning was short-listed rageously, but also with considerable humor, Kashua . sharpens—for for the International IMPAC Dublin both the characters and the readers—questions of belonging, identity, Literary Award and identification.” —from the Bernstein Award citation • Dancing Arabs won the Grinzane ayed Kashua, the author of two acclaimed novels and creator of the Cavour Prize and was a San Francisco Chronicle groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, Arab Labor, has been widely praised for Best Book of the Year S his literary eye and deadpan wit. An Arab who writes in Hebrew, Kashua defies classification and lives the very contradictions he captures in his • tie-in with author lecture schedule work—straddling two cultures and navigating tricky fault lines with no com- • major review coverage fort zone in sight. He has been featured in The New York Times and Newsweek, • social network marketing campaign and his new novel, Second Person Singular, is internationally considered to be on Facebook and Twitter his most accomplished and entertaining work yet. • indieBound bookseller outreach Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Award, Kashua’s third novel centers on an ambitious lawyer who is one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jeru- • reading group guide available online at www.groveatlantic.com salem. He has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of the city, a large house, speaks perfect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife, Leila, and their two young • newsletter cooperative advertising available children. One day at a used bookstore, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwrit- ing. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous owner—a man, according to the inscription, named Yonatan—pull- $25.00 (Canada: $30.50) hardcover ing at the strings that hold all their lives together. 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 352 pp. With enormous emotional power and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua Fiction (FIC01900) 978-0-8021-2019-9 spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9464-0 is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin. Second Person U.S. and Canadian rights: Grove Press Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissec- All other rights: Sterling Lord Literistic (212-780-6050) tion of the individuals that comprise a divided society. Carton quantity: 32 Export: USCO Residence: Jerusalem 4 Excerpt from SECOND PERSON SINGULAR He put the knife back in the drawer and went to his daughter.