The Possession of Alba Díaz

Isabel Cañas

When a demonic presence awakens deep in a Mexican silver mine, the young woman it seizes must turn to the one man she shouldn’t trust… from bestselling author Isabel Cañas. In 1765, plague sweeps through Zacatecas. Alba flees with her wealthy merchant parents and fiancé, Carlos, to his family’s isolated mine for refuge. But safety proves fleeting as other dangers soon bare their teeth: Alba begins suffering from strange hallucinations, sleepwalking, and violent convulsions. She senses something cold lurking beneath her skin. Something angry. Something wrong. Elías, haunted by a troubled past, came to the New World to make his fortune and escape his family’s legacy of greed. Alba, as his cousin’s betrothed, is none of his business. Which is of course why he can’t help but notice her every time she enters a room or the growing tension between them… and why he notices her deteriorate when the demon’s thirst for blood grows stronger.

set status

When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine

Francesca Albanese

The first woman to serve as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories conveys the soul of a people through ten unforgettable stories of resilience and humanity. The spirit of a place lies in the people who inhabit it, in the stories that intertwine through its streets. And this is especially true of a land like Palestine, the witness to defining historical transitions and stage to one of the most painful chapters in contemporary history. With a voice both authoritative and deeply human, Francesca Albanese, who had been living in Palestine for many years while following the legal battles of numerous Palestinian families, takes on the role of narrator of the ongoing conflict, starting from the stories of the people she met. Albanese elegantly composes a gallery of stories, characters, and places that allow us to understand what Palestine was like until a year and a half ago, and what it has become today.  “Is it possible that after 42,000 people have been killed, you still cannot empathize with the Palestinians? Those among you who have not uttered a word about what is happening in Gaza demonstrate that empathy has evaporated from this room. Empathy is the glue that makes us stand united as humanity.” —Albanese at the United Nations General Assembly, October 2024

set status

Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

set status

Simulacra and Simulation (The Body, In Theory: Histories Of Cultural Materialism)

Jean Baudrillard

The publication of Simulacra et Simulation in 1981 marked Jean Baudrillard's first important step toward theorizing the postmodern. Moving away from the Marxist/Freudian approaches that had concerned him earlier, Baudrillard developed in this book a theory of contemporary culture that relies on displacing economic notions of cultural production with notions of cultural expenditure. Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproduceability that characterizes our electronic media culture. Baudrillard's book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body. Sheila Glaser is an editor at Artforum magazine.

set status

Sun Poisoning

Phoenix Kathryn

Currently accepting ARC readers. Blurb coming soon!

set status

Sun Poisoning

Phoenix Kathryn

Currently accepting ARC readers. Blurb coming soon!

set status

Into the Riverlands

Nghi Vo

Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be. Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story—beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel—bears more than one face.

set status

Into the Riverlands

Nghi Vo

Wandering cleric Chih of the Singing Hills travels to the riverlands to record tales of the notorious near-immortal martial artists who haunt the region. On the road to Betony Docks, they fall in with a pair of young women far from home, and an older couple who are more than they seem. As Chih runs headlong into an ancient feud, they find themselves far more entangled in the history of the riverlands than they ever expected to be. Accompanied by Almost Brilliant, a talking bird with an indelible memory, Chih confronts old legends and new dangers alike as they learn that every story—beautiful, ugly, kind, or cruel—bears more than one face.

set status