GRAYWOLF PRESS

GRAYW OLF P R E SS
New Titles & Selected Backlist Fall 2015
Graywolf Press
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B O A R D O F D I R E C TO R S
Ed McConaghay (chair), Catherine Allan, Trish F. Anderson, Carol Bemis, Mary Ebert, Lee Freeman, Chris Galloway,
James Hoecker, Shirley Hughes, Tom Joyce, Will Kaul, Chris Kirwan, Ann MacDonald, Jim McCarthy, Allie Pohlad,
Mary Polta, Bruno A. Quinson, Gail See, Roderic Southall, Judy Titcomb, Emily Anne Tuttle, Melinda Ward
B OA R D E M E R I T U S
Marilynn Alcott, Ann Bitter, Page Knudsen Cowles, Sally Dixon, Colin Hamilton, Betsy Hannaford, Diane Herman,
Katherine Murphy, Mary Polta, Gail See, Kay Sexton, Margaret Telfer, Melinda Ward, John Wheelihan,
Margaret Wurtele
N AT I O N A L C O U N C I L
James Hoecker (chair), James Alcott, Ann Bitter, Marion Brown, Mary Carswell, Edwin C. Cohen, Ellen Flamm,
Vicki Ford, Lee Freeman, David Galligan, Betsy Gardella, Betsy Hannaford, Barbara Holmes, Mark Jensen,
Sheela Lampietti, Chris LaVictoire Mahai, Kevin Martin, Dan McCarthy, Maura Rainey McCormack, Dan Moore,
Elise Paschen, Bruno A. Quinson, Susan Ritz, Eunice Salton, Gail See, Stephanie Stebich, Kathryn B. Swintek,
Diane Thormodsgard, Joanne Von Blon, Tappan Wilder
G R A N T A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S
This activity is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating
Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant
from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota.
Additional support has been provided by Amazon.com, the Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation, the
College of Saint Benedict, the General Mills Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Elizabeth C. Quinlan Foundation, and Target.
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover image: © GeorgePeters, istockphoto.com
The eagerly awaited, brilliant, and engaging
new poems by Tony Hoagland, author of
What Narcissism Means to Me
Application for Release
from the Dream
Poems
TONY HOAGL AND
Are we corrupt or innocent, fragmented or whole? Are responsibility and
freedom irreconcilable? Do we value memory or succumb to our forgetfulness? Application for Release from the Dream, Tony Hoagland’s fifth collection of poems, pursues these questions with the hobnailed abandon of one
who needs to know how a citizen of twenty-first-century America can stay
human. With whiplash nerve and tender curiosity, Hoagland both surveys
the damage and finds the wonder that makes living worthwhile. Mirthful,
fearless, and precise, these poems are full of judgment and mercy.
The parade for the slain police officer
Poetry, 96 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback, $16.00
September
978-1-55597-718-4
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
ALSO AVAILABLE
goes past the bakery
Twenty Poems That Could Save
America, Essays, Paperback
(978-1-55597-694-1), $16.00
and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.
—from “Note to Reality”
Unincorporated Persons in the Late
Honda Dynasty, Poetry, Paperback
(978-1-55597-549-4), $15.00
What Narcissism Means to Me,
Poetry, Paperback
(978-1-55597-386-5), $16.00
Praise for Tony Hoagland
“Few [poets] deliver more pure pleasure. His erudite comic poems are
backloaded with heartache and longing, and they function, emotionally, like
improvised explosive devices.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Tony Hoagland is a provocateur, a brash interventionist, a deeply engaged
Whitmanian poet and critic who poses, like the master, as ‘one of the
roughs.’”
—Edward Hirsch

TONY HOAGLAND is
the author of four previous
poetry collections, including Unincorporated Persons in
the Late Honda Dynasty and
What Narcissism Means to Me,
a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award.
He lives in Santa Fe, New
Mexico.
O n e o f t h e B e s t B o o k s o f t h e Ye a r
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist * The New York Times Book Review (Top 10)
Entertainment Weekly (Top 10) * New York Magazine (Top 10) * Chicago Tribune (Top 10)
Publishers Weekly (Top 10) * Time Out New York (Top 10) * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus
Booklist * NPR’s Science Friday * Newsday * Slate * Refinery 29
“Deftly interweaving personal history, cultural analysis, science journalism, and literary criticism, On
Immunity investigates vaccinations from many angles—as the mechanism that protects us from disease,
a metaphor for our wish for invulnerability, and a class-based privilege. . . . [Biss] has been compared
to Joan Didion, and the reasons are obvious here. Like Didion she has a gift for coming at her subjects
—Bookforum
from all sides, in unsentimental, lyrical prose.”
“Elegant and bracing. . . . On Immunity is remarkable for its scope. Biss’s reading of the political dimensions of vaccination, on the ways in which one’s own health and sickness are contingent on that of others,
is particularly thoughtful and penetrating.”
—Slate
“A welcome antidote—or ‘inoculation,’ as the subtitle suggests—against the toxic shouting match
occurring between ‘anti-vaxxers’ and their opponents. . . . Biss leaps nimbly through a vertiginous
range of subjects. . . . Brilliant and entertaining.”
—The Boston Globe
“On Immunity casts a spell. . . . There’s a drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this
material. She’s a poet, an essayist, and a class spy. She digs honestly into her own psyche and into those
of ‘people like me,’ and she reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.”
—The New York Times
“A whirlwind 163-page spin through medical history, literature including Dracula and Candide, and
musings on what it means to make individual decisions that affect the health of an entire community. . . .
—The Dallas Morning News
A coherent, eloquent plea for a sense beyond oneself.”
“[On Immunity] weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a
—The New York Review of Books
tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.”

A New York Times Book Review
Top Ten Book of the Year, now in paperback
On Immunity
An Inoculation
EULA BISS
In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children’s air,
food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children,
or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding
immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations
on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire’s Candide, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring, Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On
Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we
are all interconnected—our bodies and our fates.
Praise for On Immunity
“Subtle, spellbinding. . . . Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to
‘calm the imagination, not to incite it,’ and On Immunity also seeks to cool
and console. But where Sontag was imperious, Biss is stealthy. She advances
from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to
herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“By exploring the anxieties about what’s lurking inside our flu shots, the
air, and ourselves, [Biss] drives home the message that we are all responsible
for one another. On Immunity will make you consider that idea on a fairly
profound level.”
—Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A
“[An] elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space
between research and reflection, investigating our attitudes toward immunity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens.”
—Los Angeles Times

Nonfiction, 224 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
September
978-1-55597-720-7
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Frances Goldin Literary Agency
This book is made possible through a
partnership with the College of Saint
Benedict, and honors the legacy of
S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished
teacher at the College. Support has been
provided by the Manitou Fund as part of
the Warner Reading Program.
ALSO AVAILABLE
Notes from No Man’s Land, Essays,
Paperback (978-1-55597-518-0),
$16.00
The Balloonists, Essays, Ebook
(978-1-55597-919-5), $9.99
EULA BISS is the author of
The Balloonists and Notes from
No Man’s Land, which won
the National Book Critics
Circle Award in criticism.
She teaches at Northwestern
University.
An E xcerpt from Changing the Subjec t
It gets ever harder to stay free of the electronic grid and its dual dynamic, which shatters old supporting
structures while at the same time fostering the new model of disengaged engagement. Our love affair
with e-mail offers an excellent instance. The basic electronic transmission is one thing. It offers ease and
a real-time immediacy that the conventional written letter can’t hope to match, and our communications have proliferated accordingly. But it’s a trade-off. For one thing, to send and receive e-mail is also
to move into the system of e-mail, to become implicated in the network. As a user I get both the frictionless burst of the contact—the immediate breaching of the space/time divide—and also the sensation,
slippery but real, of taking a half step back from myself.
When I enter the network, I feel there is something different in my peripheral vision—maybe in my
life itself. Focused though I am on a single communication, I am also distractingly aware of the perpetual
possibility of other communications. The portal to the whole world is theoretically open. This is one of the
features of being inside a network mesh: incessant peripherality, an awareness of the larger world at every
moment a click away. And because of this I occupy a different gravity field; I’m lighter, more porous. The
difference between old and new modes is not purely imaginary. The writing of the paper letter presumes
the fact of physical transmission—real time, real space, and literally tangible message. The subliminal continuity corroborates my sense of being in the world, just as writing and receiving e-mail puts me inside a kind
of parenthesis—at a level of remove.
To use the new modes of communication, as I do—as we pretty much all do—is to accept the laws of
the new system, both the changed sense of facility and access, and the subtle inner self-division, and, yes,
a growing difficulty with the former ways. Now if I write, fold, address, stamp, and post a letter, it almost
feels like an imposition, like I’m pushing against the grain. But sometimes it is only by pushing that we discover that there is a grain.

Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural
consequences of ongoing, all-permeating
technological innovation
Changing the Subject
Art and Attention in the Internet Age
SVEN BIRKERTS
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might
affect the way we read literature and experience art—the very cultural
activities that make us human.
After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of
everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone,
but communicates via email and spends some time reading online. In
Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself
and others—the distraction when reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources;
an increasing acceptance of “hive” behaviors. “An unprecedented shift is
underway,” he argues, and “this transformation is dramatically accelerated
and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation.” He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and
he brilliantly describes the countering energy available to us through acts
of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated
existences are not conducive to creativity.
It is impossible to read Changing the Subject without coming away with a
renewed sense of what is lost by our wholesale acceptance of digital innovation and what is regained when we immerse ourselves in a good book.
Praise for Sven Birkerts
“One of America’s most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and
fiction that matter.”
—Susan Sontag
“Birkerts on reading fiction is like M. F. K. Fisher on eating or Norman
Maclean on fly casting. He makes you want to go do it.”
—Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker

Nonfiction, 272 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
October
978-1-55597-721-4
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
ALSO AVAILABLE
The Other Walk, Essays, Paperback
(978-1-55597-593-7), $15.00
The Art of Time in Memoir,
Reference, Paperback
(978-1-55597-489-3), $12.00
SVEN BIRKERTS is the
author of nine previous
books, including The Other
Walk, The Gutenberg Elegies,
The Art of Time in Memoir,
and My Sky Blue Trades.
Director of the Bennington
Writing Seminars, he also
edits the journal AGNI
based at Boston University.
Birkerts lives in Arlington,
Massachusetts.
A new collection of stories set in the West from
“one of the most gifted and versatile of
contemporary writers” (NPR)
H a l f a n I n c h o f Wa t e r
Stories
PE RCIVAL E VE RE T T
Fiction, 176 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
September
978-1-55597-719-1
Ebook Available
Brit.: Graywolf Press
Trans., 1st ser., audio, dram.:
Melanie Jackson Agency
ALSO AVAILABLE
Glyph, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-667-5), $15.00
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell,
Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-634-7), $15.00
Erasure, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-599-9), $16.00
Assumption, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-598-2), $15.00
Percival Everett’s long-awaited new collection of stories, his first since
2004’s Damned If I Do, finds him traversing the West with characteristic
restlessness. A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is
found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death
of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she
drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and
sees a beloved dog that had died years before.
For the plainspoken men and women of these stories—fathers and
daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians—small events trigger sudden shifts
in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about
how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives
rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny
resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of
the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the
hands of master storyteller Percival Everett, the act of questioning leads to
vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected.
Praise for Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
“[A] stark, shattering novel. . . . Deeply moving.”
—The Wall Street Journal
PERCIVAL EVERETT is
Distinguished Professor of
English at the University
of Southern California and
the author of nearly thirty
books. He has fly-fished the
West for over thirty years.
He lives in Los Angeles.
“Percival Everett numbers among his very best.”
—Lydia Millet, Los Angeles Times
“Funny, insightful, and unpredictable. . . . Everett is a master of his trade.”
—Time Out Chicago

“A literary titan of his time, one of the
most innovative novelists in contemporary
Latin American letters.”
—The Washington Post
O n e O u t o f Tw o
A Novel
DANIEL SADA
T R A N S L AT E D F RO M T H E S PA N I S H B Y K AT H E R I N E S I LV E R
The most distinctive thing about the Gamal sisters is that they are, essentially, indistinguishable (except for a modest mole). The twin spinsters
spend their time trying to mask any perceptible differences they have while
working hard at their thriving tailoring business in a small town in rural
northern Mexico. When? Thirty years ago? Fifty years ago? Who can say—
the world seems not to intrude on Ocampo over much.
Gloria and Constitución take an almost perverse delight in confusing
people about which one is which. But then a suitor enters the picture, and
one of the sisters decides that she doesn’t want to live a life without romance
and all the good things that come with it. The ensuing competition between
the sisters brings their relationship to the breaking point until they come up
with an ingenious solution that carries this buoyant farce to its tender and
even liberating conclusion.
Suffused with the tension between our desire for union and our desire
for independence, One Out of Two is a giddy and comic fable by one of the
giants of contemporary Latin American literature.
Praise for Daniel Sada
“It’s impossible not to be swept along by Sada’s manic language, his
Cervantean plot twists.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Sada’s works were a polyphonic parade of voices, a Mexican cacophony.”
—The Paris Review
“Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems
to me the most daring.”
—Roberto Bolaño

Fiction, 88 pages, 5 x 8
Paperback, $14.00
November
978-1-55597-724-5
Ebook Available
Brit., 1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., dram.: Tusquets Editores
ALSO AVAILABLE
Almost Never, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-609-5), $16.00
DANIEL SADA was born
in Mexicali, Mexico, in
1953, and died in 2011, in
Mexico City. Considered
by many as the boldest and
most innovative writer in
Spanish of his generation,
he published eight volumes
of short stories, nine novels,
and three volumes of poetry.
KATHERINE SILVER is an
award-winning translator.
F r o m “A N o t e o n L a n g u a g e ”
The language of this novel evolved as I wrote it over a period of three years, often seeming to do so
beyond my control. Eventually, in an attempt to prevent things getting entirely out of hand, I tried to
hem it in with some rules.
The first and most important rule was that I wanted to use only words which originated in Old English.
The vast majority of the vocabulary of this novel consists of words that, in one form or another, existed in
English one thousand years ago. The exceptions are cases where words did not exist for what I wanted to say,
or where those that did were so obscure today, or hard to pronounce or read, that they would have detracted
excessively from the flow of the tale.
The second rule was that I did not use letters which did not exist in Old English. The OE alphabet was
more limited than ours. There was, for example, no letter “k”—it is replaced by “c,” which is always pronounced like the modern “k,” never like the modern “s.” There was no “v” either; “f” takes its place in words
like “seofon” (seven). “J” and “q” were similarly absent. . . .
Choosing OE, or pseudo-OE, forms for the novel’s vocabulary means that the reader has to initially
wrestle with OE pronunciation. This can be tricky to compute at first, but once grasped it becomes, I hope,
second nature. So “sc,” for example, is pronounced “sh”—as in biscop. “Cg” makes a “dg” sound in words
like bricg (bridge). “G” can be pronounced both as a hard letter, as in mergen (morning), or as a soft equivalent of “y” when it appears in words like daeg. “Hw” sounds like “w” in words like hwit (white). . . .
The early English did not see the world as we do, and their language reflects this. They spoke their truth,
as we speak ours. I wanted to be able to convey, not only in my descriptions of events and places but through
the words of the characters, the sheer alienness of Old England.
F r o m t h e o p e n i n g o f T h e Wa ke
the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when
i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not
cepe me still
when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all
time. a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc. none had thought a wind lic this
colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman* when the tales he tells is
blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness
none will loc but the wind will cum. the wind cares not for the hopes of men
the times after will be for them who seen the cuman
the times after will be for the waecend
* traveling storyteller, poet and newsbringer

“A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic,
as beautiful as it is riveting.”
—Eimear McBride, New Statesman
T h e Wa ke
A Novel
PAUL KINGSNORTH
In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror
was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network
of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.
In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set one thousand years in the past,
Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the
unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end
of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is
determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the
scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged
by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly
unclear.
Written in what the author describes as “a shadow tongue”—a version of
Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The
Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and
immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster’s world is to
feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and
haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major
literary achievement.
Praise for The Wake
—Philip Pullman
“Extraordinary.”
“Reading [The Wake] is to be immersed in the past and in a story in a way
that I haven’t really felt since childhood. . . . The most glorious experience
I’ve had with a book in years.”
—Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“My top book of the year so far. Just superb.”
—Eleanor Catton, winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

Fiction, 384 pages, 5½ x 8¼
Paperback, $16.00
September
978-1-55597-717-7
Ebook Available
Brit.: Unbound
1st ser., audio: Graywolf Press
Trans., dram.: The Marsh Agency
PAUL KINGSNORTH is a
former journalist and deputy
editor of the Ecologist magazine and has won several
awards for his poetry and
essays. He is also the author
of two works of nonfiction.
In 2009, he cofounded the
Dark Mountain Project, an
international network of
writers, artists, and thinkers
in search of new stories for
troubled times. The Wake is
his first novel.
The first publication of the poetry of Liu Xia,
wife of the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize
recipient Liu Xiaobo
Empty Chairs
Selected Poems
LIU XIA
T R A N S L AT E D F RO M T H E C H I N E S E B Y M I N G D I
AND JENNIFER STERN
I N T RO D U C T I O N B Y L I AO Y I W U
F O R E W O R D B Y H E RTA M Ü L L E R
Poetry, 224 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback, $20.00
November
978-1-55597-725-2
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Bernstein Literary Agency
A Lannan Translation Selection
ALSO AVAILABLE
June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo,
Poetry, Hardcover
(978-1-55597-610-1), $26.00
Selected from thirty years of Liu Xia’s poetry, and including some of her
haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under
duress, a voice in danger of being silenced. These poems are felt and
insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep
beyond those constraints and toward love.
I didn’t have a chance
to say a word before you became
a character in the news,
everyone looking up to you
as I was worn down
at the edge of the crowd
just smoking
and watching the sky.
A new myth, maybe, was forming
there, but the sun was so bright
LIU XIA is a Chinese poet
and artist. She has been
living under strict house
arrest since her husband,
poet and activist Liu Xiaobo,
was imprisoned in 2009 for
“inciting subversion of state
power” and then received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
I couldn’t see it.
—from “June 2nd, 1989 (for Xiaobo)”
“Liu Xia’s nature is to be an unrestrained bird. . . . Instead, she became a tree.
She can’t move her own nest—Liu Xiaobo can’t move, so she can’t either as a
result. She’s turned from a bird into a tree, her feathers becoming white and
withered. But as a tree she still sings the songs of birds. When a bird is dying,
her singing is sorrowful. These are the only songs, the dying songs, of Chinese
poetry since June 4th, 1989. Escape, Liu Xia, I know you can.” —Liao Yiwu

“Diane Seuss writes with the
intensity of a soothsayer.”
—Laura Kasischke
Four-Legged Girl
Poems
DIANE SEUSS
In Diane Seuss’s Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves
into pain and rapture, as she recounts a life lived at the edges of containment. Ghostly, sexy, and plaintive, these poems skip to the tune of a jump
rope, fill a wishing well with desire and other trinkets, and they remember
past lush lives in New York City, in rural Michigan, and in love. In the final
poem, she sings of the four-legged girl, the body made strange to itself and
to others. This collection establishes Seuss’s poetic voice as rich and emotional as any in contemporary poetry.
For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way,
Poetry, 88 pages, 7 x 9
Paperback, $16.00
October
978-1-55597-722-1
Ebook Available
Brit., trans., audio, dram.:
Graywolf Press
1st ser.: Author c/o Graywolf Press
it was yielding,
but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied
with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I’d believed,
but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret
queen
—from “Oh four-legged girl, it’s either you or the ossuary”
Praise for Four-Legged Girl
“A great passion issues from the pages of Four-Legged Girl. . . . This book is a
wise, wild, continuous gift. It will make you lean in and listen; it will make
you this poet’s devotee. These poems are tremendous in every way. Diane
Seuss: holy smoke!”
—Terrance Hayes
“Seuss blazes up into the dark and dirty corners of youthful folly, in poems
that are visually sharp and linguistically alive; her voice is lucid, earthy,
mordant, and funny. No pity, no quarter, for the old self: ‘Some of us claw
our way to the bottom,’ Seuss writes, ‘transcend downward. There at the
hub / of the drain we swirl.’”
—Dana Levin

DIANE SEUSS is the author
of two previous poetry collections, It Blows You Hollow
and Wolf Lake, White Gown
Blown Open, winner of the
Juniper Prize for Poetry.
Her poems have appeared in
Best American Poetry 2014, the
Georgia Review, New Orleans
Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
She is writer-in-residence at
Kalamazoo College and lives
in Michigan.
“Will put Allen in the company of writers such as
James Joyce, August Wilson, and Ralph Ellison.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Rails Under My Back
A Novel
J E F F E RY R E N A R D A L L E N
W I T H A N E W I N T RO D U C T I O N B Y C H A R L E S J O H N S O N
Fiction, 576 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback, $18.00
October
978-1-55597-723-8
Ebook Available
Brit., audio: Graywolf Press
1st ser., trans., dram.: Cynthia
Cannell Literary Agency
ALSO AVAILABLE
Holding Pattern, Fiction, Paperback
(978-1-55597-509-8), $15.00
Song of the Shank, Fiction,
Paperback (978-1-55597-680-4),
$18.00
JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
is the author of two poetry
collections, two novels, and
a story collection. Born in
Chicago, he holds a PhD in
English from the University
of Illinois at Chicago and
is a professor of English at
Queens College, as well as
an instructor in the writing
program at New School
University and at New York
University. He is also the fiction director at the Norman
Mailer Center Writers Colony.
When it was first published fifteen years ago, Jeffery Renard Allen’s debut
novel, Rails Under My Back, earned its author comparisons to some of the
giants of twentieth-century modernism. The publication of Allen’s equally
ambitious second novel, Song of the Shank, cemented those lofty claims.
Now, the book that established his reputation is being restored to print in
its first Graywolf Press edition. Together, the two novels stand as significant achievements of twenty-first-century literature.
Rails Under My Back is an epic that tracks the interwoven lives of two
brothers, Lucius and John Jones, who are married to two sisters, Gracie
and Sheila McShan. For them, their parents, and their children, life is full
of departures; someone is always fleeing town and leaving the remaining
family to suffer the often dramatic, sometimes tragic consequences. The
multiple effects of the comings and goings are devastating: these are the
almost mythic expression of the African American experience in the half
century that followed the Second World War.
The story ranges, as the characters do, from the City, which is somewhat
like both New York and Chicago, to Memphis, to the West, and to many
“inner” and “outer” locales. Rails Under My Back is a multifaceted, brilliantly
colored, intensely musical novel that pulses with urgency and originality.
Praise for Rails Under My Back
—Chicago Tribune
“A tour de force.”
“Besides Joyce and Faulkner, other 20th-century novelists whose work
Allen’s calls to mind are Dos Passos, Ellison and Henry Roth—an indication
of the remarkable literary company in which this novel may be seen to move.”
—The New York Times Book Review

R E C E N T
B A C K L I S T
I Refuse
The Pinch
A Novel
A Novel
PER PETTERSON
STEVE STERN
T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E
NORWEG IAN BY DON BARTLE T T
Fiction, 368 pages, Hardcover
(978-1-55597-715-3), $26.00
Fiction, 288 pages, Hardcover
Ebook Available
(978-1-55597-699-6), $25.00
Ebook Available
A Woman Loved
A Novel
Ashes in My Mouth,
Sand in My Shoes
ANDREÏ MAKINE
T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E F R E N C H
BY GEOFFRE Y STR ACHAN
Stories
PER PETTERSON
Fiction, 256 pages, Paperback
T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E
NORWEG IAN BY DON BARTLE T T
(978-1-55597-711-5), $16.00
Fiction, 128 pages, Paperback
Brief Loves That Live Forever
Ebook Available
(978-1-55597-700-9), $14.00
A Novel
Ebook Available
ANDREÏ MAKINE
T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E F R E N C H
BY GEOFFRE Y STR ACHAN
Tesla: A Portrait with Masks
Fiction, 180 pages, Paperback
A Novel
(978-1-55597-712-2), $16.00
V L A D I M I R P I S TA L O
Ebook Available
T R A N S L AT E D F R O M T H E
SERBIAN BY BOGDAN R AKIC
AND JOHN JEFFRIES
Letter to a Future Lover
Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions,
and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries
Fiction, 472 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-697-2), $18.00
ANDER MONSON
Ebook Available
Nonfiction, 176 pages, Hardcover
(978-1-55597-706-1), $22.00
Ebook Available
The Infernal
A Novel
Leaving Orbit
MARK DOTEN
Notes from the Last Days of American
Spaceflight
Fiction, 440 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-701-6), $18.00
MARGARET L A Z ARUS DE AN
Ebook Available
Nonfiction, 320 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-709-2), $16.00
Ebook Available
Dark Lies the Island
All Who Go Do Not Return
Stories
A Memoir
K E V I N B A R RY
SHULEM DEEN
Fiction, 192 pages, Paperback
Nonfiction, 288 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-688-0), $16.00
(978-1-55597-705-4), $16.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available

R E C E N T
B A C K L I S T
The Argonauts
Citizen
MAGGIE NELSON
An American Lyric
Nonfiction, 160 pages, Hardcover
CL AUDIA R ANKINE
(978-1-55597-707-8), $23.00
Poetry/Nonfiction, 160 pages, Paperback
Ebook Available
(978-1-55597-690-3), $20.00
Ebook Available
Ongoingness
The Empathy Exams
The End of a Diary
Essays
SARAH MANGUSO
LESLIE JAMISON
Nonfiction, 104 pages, Hardcover
Nonfiction, 248 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-703-0), $20.00
(978-1-55597-671-2), $15.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available
3 Sections
Selfish
Poems
Poems
V I J AY S E S H A D R I
ALB ERT GOLDBARTH
Poetry, 88 pages, Paperback
Poetry, 184 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-716-0), $16.00
(978-1-55597-708-5), $18.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available
The Last Two Seconds
The Overhaul
Poems
Poems
M A RY J O B A N G
K AT H L E E N J A M I E
Poetry, 96 pages, Paperback
Poetry, 64 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-704-7), $16.00
(978-1-55597-702-3), $16.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available
Station Zed
Black Cat Bone
Poems
Poems
TOM SLEIGH
JOHN BURNSIDE
Poetry, 96 pages, Paperback
Poetry, 80 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-698-9), $16.00
(978-1-55597-714-6), $16.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available
My Feelings
Turning into Dwelling
Poems
Poems
N I C K F LY N N
CHRI STOPHER GILB ERT
Poetry, 96 pages, Paperback
Poetry, 208 pages, Paperback
(978-1-55597-710-8), $16.00
(978-1-55597-713-9), $16.00
Ebook Available
Ebook Available

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