Books published by Spuyten Duyvil

Third Eye Rising explores the neurodiversity of India through two of the country's most compelling aspects: family ties and spiritual faith. In a land where divisions of caste and class threaten survival, where the religious are corrupt and the corrupt religious, and where dogmas and superstitions impede economic and individual progress, Shroff shows how spiritual realizations impact daily lives and how they help withstand circumstances of corruption, greed, betrayal, prejudice, and personal loss. In the title story, "Third Eye Rising," a young wife must prove her innocence to her sadistic in-laws; in "The Kitemaker's Dilemma" a nomadic kitemaker takes it on himself to save a melancholic boy from exile; in "Bhikoo Badshah's Poison" a migrant youth, employed in the city, attempts to shed the burden of his caste; in "Diwali Star" a retired police inspector draws on the events of the epic Ramayana to redefine his relationship with his sons; in "A Matter of Misfortune" two childhood friends have a face-off over the two faces of India: urban and rural; in "Oh Dad!" a dutiful son takes it on himself to protect his father from an unscrupulous taxman; in "An Invisible Truth" an employer delves into his manservant's life only to get a life-changing insight into his own. Through these stories, we learn how in India it is spiritual faith that unifies, inspires, and frees its recipients from the bondage of struggle. Shroff has tackled his subject-the darker side of India-with the full democracy of his imagination and an empathy that believes in the eternal unity of man.

Just like in Paris, there are men in Calais who deal in human trafficking. They frequent the bars at the harbor to see if there are any newcomers. I was sitting together with my two travel companions, the spice merchant''s son and the man from Rouen. We were in the middle of eating a meal which consisted of meat and cabbage when an elderly sailor entered. He sat down at the end of the table and started interrogating us. He wanted to know where we came from and how tall we were.  

The master hovers over us, and the sound of stirred liquids floats in the hermetic air. I smell chimney soot, spring water, the urine of a child, alcohol, beeswax, oil; all coming together in this concoction bound to penetrate into our wooden fibers. At this point, my consciousness is shallow; I have yet to grow fully. Nevertheless, I know I embody another consciousness, older and larger-the consciousness of the sung and unsung instruments. Music is our core, our lifeline; and that is eternal.

The expression "middle passage" evokes the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean which was necessary to convey black slaves from Africa to America. By juxtaposing "against" to this tag, Steve Light's text seeks to organize a response to the heinous political and commercial enterprises which punctuate our past, recent, and contemporary histories featuring genocides and ecocides.

All the echoes of memory and the rapidly disintegrating past come into play in Rebecca Goodman's beautiful meditative novel-a chamber piece for embattled voices that unfolds inside the natural world. The narrator, taking on different guises, tries to make sense of what it means to be alive, "these things I can think and feel." Goodman writes at perfect pitch, looking back, looking forward, on the border between holding on and letting go. I couldn't stop reading.

Eros and Thanatos. Love and Death. The majestic themes of life and literature that characterize Jürg Amann's entire body of work are delicately woven together in Lifelong Bird Migration, his last collection of poems to be published. The poems are accompanied with the searing question of "how she was intended, our World where love subsides, and ... if she is intended at all." Precise, masterful but searingly lucid, these poems talk of love in the inevitable vision of a final departure and of a yearning of faith lost. Compiled by the poet himself before his untimely death in 2013 and faithfully brought to life in English by award-winning translator, Marc Vincenz, Lifelong Bird Migration brings together the quintessence of Amann's small yet influential oeuvre of verse.

Joseph Brodsky wrote about Derieva''s poetry: "The real authors here are poetry and freedom themselves."Tomas Venclova (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University. Contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic) wrote:"The poetry of Regina Derieva is an outstanding and unusual phenomenon. It corresponds to the poetical experience of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and Brodsky, and at the same time keeps pace not only with contemporary Russian but also perhaps world literature. Regina Derieva is a modern poet who employs not only traditional but also free verse. Yet she writes out of time, or rather, in the time of the Old Testament and Revelation. While reading Regina Derieva''s poems, it occurred to me that tradition is something greater than only poetic tradition. Her poetic creations call to mind theWord -- Psalms and Prophets, and especially the parables of the Gospels. Following elevated models, Regina Derieva sets in motion secret resources of speech, discovering its paradoxical nature. Lively beat of dictionary, unexpected substitution of notions and interchange of bitterly re-interpreted quotations give her poetry profundity, and quite often, epigrammatical precision. Her images are rather capricious and elusive, at first sight even accidental; but this is deceptive accidention, which is only the other side of necessity."

In these days when most short fiction is so affected that it seems to move across the page like a vain actor across the stage, Watson''s words give us something good and something real. In this his work is of rare value. No one who enters into it will emerge quite the same.

Literary Nonfiction. "This beautiful prose collection strikes very deep notes. Rachel Hadas, known for her formal dexterity and intelligence, demonstrates here a remarkable fluency in moving from the disarmingly personal to the perceptively literary-critical, from the daily round to the ancient world, and from heartbreak to wonderment. Poetry is alive in her, as is a calm, humane attentiveness to the normalcy of grief and the possibilities of consolation." Phillip Lopate"As I read TALKING TO THE DEAD, I felt I was engaged in a wide- ranging, personal, pleasurable, and erudite conversation with Rachel Hadas herself. She is deft, as few others are, at integrating her deep scholarship with a compassionate understanding of the human and the humorous everyday, and as she turns her sharp eye, clear intelligence, and ready wit on subjects as various as Dante and dreams, Homer and Plath, snakes and centaurs, illness and invisibility, she never fails to surprise, stimulate, and satisfy both heart and mind." Lydia Davis"