Doing our best since 2009
Research has always enriched my creative activities as a writer, much more than just as a way of finding useful information for my books. I do research in order to write. I use the reading I do for my books to provoke composition.
Farah Ali’s Telegraphy pulls off quite the literary feat: it manages to make a ghoulish fascination with human bodies—living, dead and transitioning from the former to the latter—into something ethereal, a necessarily spiritual preoccupation. Sustained by the remarkable, otherworldly voice of its narrator, Telegraphy tells the story of Annie, a woman born in Pakistan in…
“In the end, we’re all free because in the end, we’ll be dead.” This fatalistic maxim is the epigraph of Ana Paula Maia’s slim novel On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan from the Portuguese. Linking liberation to death, the phrase is attributed to Bronco Gil, a prison inmate who first appears…
Milo Todd‘s novel, The Lilac People (Counterpoint Press), a national best-seller, was named a Stonewall Honor Book and an American Library Association Notable Book. The Lilac People is the story of a trans man and his girlfriend who are ripped from their best lives by the ascent of Hitler, the Holocaust, and the subsequent liberation by the Allies…
In Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon, the nameless narrator, an elder of the Evenki – nomadic reindeer herders in northeast China – recounts her ninety years of life. The loves and losses of her private world reflect outward changes as modernity, nation-building, and the extraction of local natural resources encroach upon her…
Writing requires invention. Choosing which words, which scenes that will make the beginnings, the middles, and the ends is an inherently creative act. And yet we all know that writers cannot possibly invent the world.