Summer-Fall 2017 Catalog(Fin)
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FRONTLIST Solar Bones 2–3 Sip 4–5 Savage Theories 6 Never Look an American in the Eye 6 War Porn 7 The Darkest Child 8–9 WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE | AN IRISH TIMES BOOK CLUB CHOICE WINNER OF THE BGE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In fl owing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father’s deft- ness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global fi nancial collapse. Conway’s thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the “vortex of his being,” surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires. Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now. MIKE MCCORMACK is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from County Mayo in Ireland. His previous work includes Forensic Songs; Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award; Crowe’s Requiem; and Getting It in the Head, which was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He lives in Galway. Praise for SOLAR BONES “McCormack is one of our bravest and most innovative writers—he shoots for the stars with this one and does not fall short.”—Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone “Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes.”—The Guardian “Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny . Proust reconfi gured by Flann O’Brien.” —The Literary Review “The work of an author in the full maturity of his talent, Solar Bones climaxes in a passage of savage, Gnostic religiosity: the writing catches fi re as we draw near to the void, pass over into death itself, and therein confront the truth that even in a fallen universe, when all distractions tumble away, the only adequate response to our being is astonishment.” —The Irish Times SOLAR BONES | MIKE MCCORMACK | PUB DATE: 9/19/17 | ISBN: 978-1-61695-853-4 EISBN: 978-1-61695-854-1 | LITERARY FICTION | HARDCOVER | US $25.00/CAN $30.00 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 | 224 PP | RIGHTS: US, CAN, OPEN MARKET 2 3 A LYRICAL, APOCALYPTIC DEBUT NOVEL ABOUT ADDICTION, FRIENDSHIP, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL It started with a single child and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. At night, lights were destroyed so that addicts could sip shadow in the pure light of the moon. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds, rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. And if your shadow was sipped entirely, you became one of them, had to drink the shadows of others, or go mad. One hundred and fi fty years later, what’s left of the world is divided between the highly regimented life of those inside dome cities who are protected from natural light (and natural shadows), and those forced to the dangerous, hardscrabble life in the wilds outside. In rural Texas, Mira, her shadow-addicted friend Murk, and an ex-domer named Bale search for a possible myth- ological cure to the shadow sickness—but they must do so, it is said, before the return of Halley’s Comet, which is only days away. BRIAN ALLEN CARR is the author of several story collections and novellas and has been published in McSweeney’s, Hobart, and The Rumpus. He was the inaugural winner of the Texas Observer short story prize as judged by Larry McMurtry, and the recipient of a Wonderland Book Award. He splits his time between Texas and Indiana, where he writes about engineers and inventors at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Sip is his fi rst novel. Praise for SIP “For a novel about domed worlds devoid of light, Sip has no shortage of luminosity. The precision of the images in this novel illuminates every scene like the water around a lighthouse. A fable about shadow addicts and sealed-over inaccessible domes feels eerily prescient for the increasing volatile divide in the United States.” —Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear “It’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland and are you on team Dome, team Shadowless Army, team Doc, or team shadow-sipping junkies? I know which team I’m on. Brian Allen Carr’s Sip is funny, literate, crass, dark, violent, lyrical, oddly touching, and totally bat-shit crazy. I loved it.” —Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock SIP | BRIAN ALLEN CARR | PUB DATE: 8/29/17 | ISBN: 978-1-61695-827-5 | EISBN: 978-1-61695-828-2 FICTION/SCI-FI | HARDCOVER | US $26.00/CAN $32.00 | 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 | 304 PP RIGHTS: US, CAN, OPEN MARKET 4 5 A debut novel of seduction and madness, hate and love, set in the world of Argentine academia and animated by the spirits of Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Nabokov and Bolaño Praise for WAR PORN Rosa Ostreech struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, “Forceful and unsettling.” sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly —Michiko Kakutani, professor with a highly charged blend of eroticism and desper- The New York Times ation. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group “One of the best and most sex, video games, and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch disturbing war novels in years.” anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory —The Wall Street Journal that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors—animals, who, in the process “War Porn is dire, savage, and of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey. Savage brilliant, a simmering fever-dream Theories wryly explores fear and violence, war and sex, eroticism of a novel that’s as pure and true in and philosophy. its vision of the long war as anything SAVAGE THEORIES | POLA OLOIXARAC | PUB DATE: 12/12/17 | ISBN: 978-1-61695-867-1| EISBN: 978-1-61695-736-0 I’ve read.”—Ben Fountain, FICTION/LITERARY | TRADE PAPERBACK | US $16.00/CAN $20.00 | 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 | 304 PP | RIGHTS: WORLD ENGLISH author of Billy Lynn’s Praise for SAVAGE THEORIES Long Halftime Walk “Philosophy gets sexy in Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories.” —Vanity Fair “A stunning vibrant maximalist whirlwind of a novel. Oloixarac’s wit and ambition are evident on every page.”—Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men “WAR PORN,” N. VIDEOS, IMAGES, AND NARRATIVES FEATURING GRAPHIC VIOLENCE, OFTEN BROUGHT BACK FROM COMBAT ZONES, VIEWED VOYEURISTICALLY OR FOR EMOTIONAL The author of Foreign Gods, Inc. tells his own immigrant’s GRATIFICATION. SUCH MEDIA ARE OFTEN PRESENTED AND CIRCULATED WITHOUT CONTEXT, tale, where what is lost in translation is often as hilarious as it is harrowing. THOUGH THEY MAY BE USED AS EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES. Okey Ndibe’s funny, charming, and penetrating memoir tells of his War porn is also, in Roy Scranton’s searing debut novel, a metaphor for the experience of war in the move from Nigeria to America, where he came to edit the infl uen- tial—but forever teetering on the verge of insolvency—African age of the War on Terror, the fracturing and fragmentation of perspective, time, and self that affl icts Commentary magazine. It recounts stories of Ndibe’s relationships soldiers and civilians alike, and the global networks and face-to-face moments that suture our frag- with Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and other literary fi gures; exam- mented lives together. In War Porn three lives fi t inside one another like nesting dolls; cutting from ines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; recalls an incident of racial profi ling just thirteen days after America to Iraq and back again, as home and hell merge, we come to see America through the eyes he arrived in the US, in which he was mistaken for a bank robber; of the occupied. Scranton reveals the fragile humanity that connects Americans and Iraqis, torturers considers American stereotypes about Africa (and vice-versa); and and the tortured, victors and their victims. juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American. WAR PORN | ROY SCRANTON | PUB DATE: 08/01/17 | ISBN: 978-1-61695-833-6 EISBN: 978-1-61695-716-2 | FICTION/LITERARY | TRADE PAPERBACK | US $16.00/CAN $20.00 NEVER LOOK AN AMERICAN IN THE EYE | OKEY NDIBE | PUB DATE: 9/12/17 | ISBN: 978-1-61695-863-3 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 | 352 PP | RIGHTS: WORLD EISBN: 978-1-61695-761-2 | BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY/MEMOIR | TRADE PAPERBACK US $16.00/CAN $20.00 | 5-1/2 X 8-1/4 | 224 PP | RIGHTS: WORLD ENGLISH ROY SCRANTON is the author of the novel War Porn and the philosophi- Praise for NEVER LOOK AN AMERICAN IN THE EYE cal essay Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.