Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668015148. A novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family. Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth. A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an “Asia for Asians.” Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them.

Aldermere Hall has been waiting for her. Elisabeth Hargrove knows this the way she knows water damage on a manuscript: not from the visible stain but from the buckle beneath it. She is an archivist. She reads what documents try to hide. And the sketchbook hidden in her satchel, left by a woman who vanished two centuries ago, is trying to hide something extraordinary. She arrives at the crumbling estate to marry a man she has never met, a union arranged by a family that has been sending brides to this house for three hundred years. In the portrait gallery, eleven paintings show eleven women in the same dress, wearing the same impossible smile. The twelfth hook on the wall is waiting. The dress is aired and ready. And the roses, hundreds of white roses that should not be blooming in late September, are warm to the touch. The house is beautiful. Every account says so. Beautiful the way a jaw is beautiful when it opens. Something ancient lives beneath Aldermere's roots. It has consumed every bride who came before, and it learns from each woman it takes. It has been learning for a very long time. Elisabeth is the twelfth bride. She has come with a plan and a sketchbook full of warnings. She has the clinical focus of a woman who has traded everything legible in her life for the chance to read something no one else can. But Aldermere has plans of its own. And the house has never lost a bride it wanted to keep. A gothic romantic fantasy about a sentient estate and the woman sent to break its three-hundred-year curse. If it doesn't break her first. For readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Katherine Arden, and Naomi Novik. Fans of Mexican Gothic, Uprooted, and Rebecca will feel at home. If "home" is a house that watches you sleep.

How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of gender When Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one― aoidos , or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words, had no words with which to talk about who she was and what she did. In How Women Became Poets , Emily Hauser rewrites the story of Greek literature as one of gender, arguing that the ways the Greeks talked about their identity as poets constructed, played with, and broke down gender expectations that literature was for men alone. Bringing together recent studies in ancient authorship, gender, and performativity, Hauser offers a new history of classical literature that redefines the canon as a constant struggle to be heard through, and sometimes despite, gender. Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own in order to write. So, too, have women writers through history needed a name to describe what it is they do. Hauser traces the invention of that name in ancient Greece, exploring the archaeology of the gendering of the poet. She follows ancient Greek poets, philosophers, and historians as they developed and debated the vocabulary for authorship on the battleground of gender―building up and reinforcing the word for male poet, then in response creating a language with which to describe women who write. Crucially, Hauser reinserts women into the traditionally all-male canon of Greek literature, arguing for the centrality of their role in shaping ideas around authorship and literary production.

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Present Tense Machine and Knots, a collection of playfully surreal stories about love, death, and metamorphosis. In Evil Flowers, a precise but madcap collection of short stories, Gunnhild Øyehaug extracts the bizarre from the mundane and reveals the strange, startling brilliance of everyday life. Across twenty-five stories, Øyehaug renovates the form again and again, confirming Lydia Davis's observation that her every story is "a formal surprise, smart and droll." The stories converse with, contradict, and expand on one another; birds, hagfish, and wild beasts reappear, gnawing at the fringes. A section of a woman's brain slips into the toilet bowl, removing her ability to remember or recognize types of birds (particularly problematic because she is an ornithologist). Medicinal leeches ingest information from fiberoptic cables, and a new museum sinks into the ground. Inspired by Charles Baudelaire, a dreamer and romantic in the era of realism, Øyehaug revolts against the ordinary, reaching instead for the wonder to be found in fantasy and absurdity. Brimming with wit, ingenuity, and irrepressible joy, these stories mark another triumph from a dazzling international writer.

One of the world’s most war-torn cities is portrayed through a noir lens in this chilling story collection. Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand-new stories by: Muhsin al-Ramli, Nassif Falak, Hadia Said, Ahmed Saadawi, Salima Salih, Roy Scranton, Hayet Raies, Mohammed Alwan Jabr, Dheya al-Khalidi, Hussain al-Mozany, Sinan Antoon, Salar Abdoh, Ali Bader, and Layla Qasrany. From “I Killed Her Because I Loved Her” by contributor Muhsin al-Ramli: The neighborhood, timeless with its narrow, smelly lanes, seemed to have been forgotten since it came into being with the foundation of Baghdad in Abbasid times. The streets were pocked with potholes, noisy with the clamor of children playing and the clatter of peddlers’ carts. On the pavement there were piles of putrid, smoldering garbage: the smoke mixed with the smell of spices, grilled meat, and other foods cooking. The houses were crammed with people and were built of old bricks and planks of wood. If they hadn’t been leaning on each other, the only reason they didn’t collapse was that there wasn’t enough space on the ground between them. From “Post-Traumatic Stress Reality in Qadisiya” by contributor Hadia Said: What I’m telling you is that Baghdad is coming back. Yes. We’ve resumed the necessary insanity. Yes, yes, by God. We removed our suits and stripped to T-shirts and shorts—just like the old days. Exactly like the old days. From “Getting to Abu Nuwas Street” by contributor Dheya al-Khalidi: Baghdad’s streets are desolate after midnight. The dark gathers in front of shops and alleyways. Wooden stalls for selling produce are laid down and intertwined like a broken-down train at a station. I’d always watch the cats chase each other, hiss and fight by the butcher’s shop. But odd there weren’t any stray dogs around, since I used to hear them bark in the capital every day. Maybe they sensed something grave that night, so they were hiding, putting off the hunt for another time.