Books published by Deep Vellum Publishing

The long-awaited English-language translation debut of Mexican literary maestro Sergio Pitol's 1984 Herralde Prize-winning novel, which paints a riotous picture of a wartime Mexico City filled with refugees and intelligentsia - and murder.

From political fictionalist Alisa Ganieva: a neo-noir portrait of a legal system in which everything is broken and no one is innocent.Offended Sensibilitieschronicles a series of sudden deaths that occur among officials of a provincial Russian town. The events follow a notorious blasphemy law banning forms of expression that offend the sensibilities of religious believers a law passed after Pussy Riots infamous 2013 church-side protest that resulted in their arrest.With this novel, Ganieva moves beyond the Dagestani setting of her previous award-winning books, published in English by Deep Vellum:The Mountain and the WallandBride and Groom. InOffended Sensibilities, Ganieva seeks to address nationalism, Orthodox religiosity, sexuality, and political corruption. Suffused with a light touch and at times rollicking sense of humor, this timely, entertaining and thought-provoking novel can be read as an allegory for the current political, social, religious, and cultural climate in Russia today.

An intimate, sensuous exploration of memory and desire, delving into loves and lusts past, by award-winning Oulipo member Anne Garreta.

The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life.Mairead Small Staid's debut, The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.

A meditation on water as metaphor for social change, based on the author¿s experiences as an environmental activist.

In the 1990's, Dallas was a basketball wasteland. Luckily for the city, along came Dirk Nowitzki, a towering Wurzburg, Germany native with a cool efficiency and the ability to basket shots from seemingly impossible angles. Nowitzki spent his entire 21-season NBA career with the Dallas Mavericks, the longest tenure of any one player with one team in the league's history, and led them to their first and only NBA championship, while being named a 14-time All-Star, a 12-time All-NBA Team member, and the first European player to receive the NBA's Most Valuable Player Award. Zac Crain, award-winning journalist for D Magazine who moved to Dallas the same year that Nowitzki began his career in the city, memorializes Nowitzki's career through a lyric essay reminiscent of Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain that mixes with author's story with the basketball legend's, charting the highs and lows (and mostly highs) of the Mavs' all-time statistical leader's career and what they mean to the city of Dallas and its now basketball-obsessed citizens.

The poems in Jenei's collection Always Different: Poems of Memory grapple with childhood, memory, and time. The poet looks back forty years and imagines himself as a boy-the narrator of the poems-looking forward into the future. Thus the poems combine moments with sweeps of time, village scenes with rumblings of societal and technological change. In the tradition of Hungarian writers Tamas Nadas and Agota Kristof, Jenei grapples with war and destruction, loneliness, desire, and loss. The literary historian Eva Banki calls Jenei "e;one of the great masters of Hungarian free verse"e;-adding that his poems also hold an epic theme, "e;the strange underworld of the Kadar era, rural Hungary shown through a child's eye."e; Through their storytelling, searching, and rhythms, these poems take us into our communal yet private longing for self-knowledge, history, and home.

Inspired by The Decameron and its dark and satirical novellas, Boccaccio in the Berkshires chronicles the foibles of seven women and three men, all in their twenties, who meet in an online chat room for asymptomatic pandemic survivors. They have all endured the deaths of loved ones and decide to shelter together for fourteen days in an Italianate mansion in the Berkshires, offered to the group rent-free. The vacant but furnished villa provides a luxurious, yet bizarre, setting for members of the chat room, who leave their homes in different cities around the United States.Over the course of their stay, they bond together in unexpected ways as they tell each other stories, ranging from the personal to the ludicrous, at times riffing on the absurdity of Boccaccio's tales. A terrible storm fractures the group and forces the characters to come to terms with their own lives as they pursue love, faith, and the truth that medieval history ultimately reveals.

This magical debut novel follows a woman and a young girl a world apart from each other whose paths cross in the most unusual of ways.

Love in Defiance of Pain: Ukrainian Storiesaims to bring the riches of contemporary Ukrainian literatureand of contemporary Ukraine, tooto the world.While Ukraine is under sustained attack, many in the West have marveled at the nations strength in the face of a barbaric invasion. Who are these people, what is this nation, which has captivated the world with their courage? By showcasing some of the finest Ukrainian writers working today, this book aims to help answer that question.There are war stories, but there are also love stories. Stories of aging romantics in modern Ukraine, and of modern Ukrainians in Vienna and Brooklyn, a fantastical tale set on a mysterious island where people never die, a wild lovers romp through modern-day Ukraine, a sobering account of an American war photographer, and a post-modern tale of a botanist in love. Some of these stories have been published beforeindeed, many are award-winning and acclaimedwhile some are appearing for the first time, making their rightful debut on the world stage. The range of voices, settings, and subjects in this vivid and varied collection show us how to love in defiance of painan apt phrase taken from the very first story in this book. Readers will be delighted and moved, and will gain insight into the proud history and contemporary life of Ukraine.Authors include:Sophia Andrukhovych, Yuri Andrukhovych, Stanislav Aseyev, Kateryna Babkina, Artem Chapeye, Liubko Deresh, Kateryna Kalytko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, Vasyl Makhno, Tanja Maljartschuk, Taras Prokhasko, Oleg Sentsov, Natalka Sniadanko, Olena Stiazhkina, Sashko Ushkalov, Oksana Zabuzhko, and Serhiy ZhadanProceeds from the sale of this collection will be donated to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

"In this bilingual collection of linked poems, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early twentieth-century Cyprus, sixteenth-century Scotland, and more. As the threads of each poem draw together, it is as if the protagonist, in his travels through the twentieth century, encounters the likes of Odysseus, Cervantes, Columbus, and Rembrandt, all moving in multidimensional synchronicity. By gathering these threads, readers participate in the production of meaning, stitching together their own reading of the story. The collection's fluid treatment of time makes a masterful declaration about the function of poetry: perhaps history is nothing more than the presence of innumerable human voices, some more and some less powerful, coexisting in an eternal present"--

Originally written as a series of viral Facebook posts, then released as a cult hit in St. Petersburg, Meshchaninova's serialized memoir-novel tackles gender politics and abuse with honest, cutting language. Stories of A Life depicts the life of Natasha, a young woman who suffers abuse first at the hands of her stepfather Sasha and then by young men in the village nearby. This powerful, postmodern novel witnesses the Dickensian struggles of provincial life and reckons with the complicity of fellow women. Starkly down-to-earth yet funny and informal, Stories of A Life demands that we bear witness to the bleakness of a young womanhood in post-Soviet Russia. Meshchaninova is held in high regard as part of a new wave of women filmmakers in Russia, and with this collection cements her position as a woman willing to stare down the viewer and demand complicity.

What really (might have) happened when Jack Ruby, nightclub owner, brass knuckle-slinger, and inveterate fan of Corbusier, decided to kill the killer of JFK? In this first-ever trade publication of Bob Trammell's work, Jack Ruby mythos loops between fact, fiction, and spectacle to satirize Dallas' place on the world stage. Jack Ruby & The Origins of the Avant-Garde in Dallas caricaturizes everyone from Bob Thornton to Joseph Beuys; fodder for JFK conspiracy theorists, innuendo-readers, ingenious speculators, and pursuers of The Truth About Dallas At Large.With an introduction by Ben Fountain and afterword by David Searcy, this volume also includes Trammell's "e;Quiet Man"e; story cycle from over the course of his long, countercultural writing career, lamenting a generation that lost much by embarking on a search for themselves in a city-and world-unwilling to support its brightest artists.

Garreta's first novel in a decade follows the mania that descends upon a family when the father finds himself in possession of a concrete mixer. As he seeks to modernize every aspect of their lives, disaster strikes when the younger sister is subsumed by concrete.Through puns, wordplay, and dizzying verbal effect, Garrta reinvents the novel form and blurs the line between spoken and written language in an attempt to confront the elasticity of communication.

This modern classic of global feminist literature, the only novel by one of Romania's most heralded poets, styled as a long letter addressed to the man who is about to leave her, a woman meanders through a cosmic retelling of her life from childhood to adulthood with visionary language and visceral, detail. Like a contemporary Scheherazade, she spins tales to hold him captivated, from the small incidents of their lives together to the intimate narrative of her relationship to womanhood. Through a dreamlike thread of strange images and passing characters, her stories invite the reader into a fantastical vision of love, loss, and femininity.

The latest work in English by renowned Peruvian-Mexican cult writer Mario Bellatin, a short, allegorical novel that questions truth, art, language, and the split between East and West.

A young woman contemplates the end of her life as she's known it as tragedy after tragedy accumulates around her, threaded with her relationship to desire, consent, and control.

This vibrant collection of short stories, the first literary translation to English from Sierra Zapotec, updates magical realism for the 21st century.

A photo collection pulled from the world of artist-actor Harry Goazwith evocative and ironic subtitles.

An inspiring personal memoir of self-discovery from leading philanthropist and arts advocate Donna Wilhelm

A Narco Acid Western told in interlinked poems, using themes from the ongoing drug war taking place in a fictional U.S./Mexico border town.