LITMIR.BIZ

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award “Tonic for the spirit: a charming, deeply moving, unerringly human story, perfectly shaped and beautifully told.” — The Globe and Mail Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute and her daughter. But living back in Algren with her parents and working for the longtime mayor, Hosea Funk, has its own challenges: Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister—even if that means keeping the town’s population at an even 1,500. Bringing to life small-town Canada and all its larger-than-life characters, A Boy of Good Breeding is a big-hearted, hilarious novel about finding out where you belong.

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"Robison's minimalism is more like a slap in the face: it's short, it stings, and you wonder who in tarnation did that to you." — The New York Times Enter Eve. Based in New Orleans, she's a location scout for a movie production company and complacently married to Adam. «Now you know,» she says. «Our names really didn't bother me that much until the mail started arriving addressed to 'Adam and Eve Broussard.'» He's just been diagnosed with a grave illness and gone back to the palatial family home where his parents reside. It's all just fine with Eve—or so she tells herself at the beginning. But standing left of center in this still-prosperous but mortally wounded family does not get easier as the weeks wear on. As she negotiates her way around the anger of Adam's despised twin brother Saunders, maintains her friendship with his beautiful and volatile wife Petal, and protects what's left of the innocence of her niece Collie, Eve finds more than the Louisiana heat oppressive.

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“Subtraction stands out as a high-wire act of the novel form—taut in expression yet rich with humanity, expertly crafted and unfairly neglected.” — The Millions “Robison delivers a sparkling valentine about a Harvard poetess and her great love for a drunken Dean Moriarty type, at his best when he’s on the road . . . A funny, beautifully written novel, dry and bubbly as good champagne.” — Kirkus Reviews Paige Deveaux, poet and Harvard professor, is tracking her husband Raf, who has vanished once again. Paige trails him to Houston, where he is holed up in a seedy bar, drunk and cheerfully ashamed of himself. He’s very glad to see her: she’s the only girl for him (and he should know—he’s tried most of the others). Finding Raf is one thing, but holding on to him is another. To sober him up, to keep him sober, to keep him, Paige enlists Raf’s old friend Raymond (himself an ex-alcoholic) and Raf’s new friend Pru, a holistically inclined contortioniststripper. For a while life, and Raf, seem to settle down. But this foursome is nothing but trouble for one another. Pru is a hit-and-run artist, a sexual desperado who has already broken Raymond’s heart, and now Raymond is growing sweet on Paige. As Raf says, “Assorted wretchednesses ensue.”

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"Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world." — New York Times Book Review Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within. "Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they inhabit." — The San Francisco Chronicle «Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land, . . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty.» —Hans Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune

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This is her first novel in twenty years, completing the trilogy that began with The Revolution of Little Girls (nominated for a Southern Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction) and [i]Terminal Velocity< (also a Lambda nominee) Among the awards Boyd has won are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford.

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice «Erotic, paranoiac and lightly fantastical.» — The Wall Street Journal "Ismail Kadare's readers are astonished every year when the Nobel committee overlooks him. . . . A Girl in Exile , published in Albanian in 2009, may rekindle the worldwide hopes." — The New York Times Book Review During the bureaucratic machinery of Albania’s 1945–1991 dictatorship, playwright Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. A girl—Linda B.—has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession. He soon learns that Linda’s family, considered suspect, was exiled to a small town far from the capital. Under the influence of a paranoid regime, Rudian finds himself swept along on a surreal quest to discover what really happened to Linda B. "At a time when parts of the world are indulging nostalgia for communism, Kadare’s novel confronts the infuriating impossibility of art in an autocratic, anti-individualist system." — The Washington Post " A Girl in Exile confirms Kadare to be the best writer at work today who remembers—almost aggressively so, refusing to forget—European totalitarianism." — The New Republic

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This is a reissue of a poetic, compact novel by celebrated Japanese author, Hiromi Kawakami (the original 2012 Counterpoint edition was titled The Briefcase (9781582435992); Strange Weather in Tokyo is the title of the wildly successful UK edition (Granta) Strange Weather in Tokyo was Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014 and won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001 This reissue will coincide with Europa's publication of Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop (9781609453992, June 2017) and Counterpoint's re-release of Manazuru , another lauded Kawakami novel (9781640090187 August 2017) «[In Japan] we have something called 'palm-of-the-hand stories,' brief and strangely evocative pieces of fiction so short they might fit in your palm…conjuring an underlying, unseen world that lies beyond with just a brief description or a few words.» —Hiromi Kawakami The two rereleased novels complement each other: both are concise, poetic meditations on the cyclic patterns of loneliness and love–one protagonist is in the city, the other is on the seaside "Each chapter of the book is like a haiku, incorporating season references to the moon, mushroom picking and cherry blossoms…I cannot recommend Strange Weather in Tokyo enough, which is a testament to the translator who has skillfully retained the poetry and beauty of the original." &mdash;The Japan Society

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Long-listed for the National Book Award Winner of the Crook's Corner PrizeWinner of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association A New York Times Notable Book “Brilliantly juxtaposing World War II, the ’80s and post-Katrina present, Sexton follows three generations of a black New Orleans family as they struggle to bloom amid the poison of racism.” — People Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Jackie’s son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm. For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s critically acclaimed debut is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.

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Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice " Here in Berlin is one of the most interesting new works of fiction I've read . . . The voices are remarkably distinct, and even with their linguistic mannerisms . . . mark them out as separate people . . . [This novel] is simply very, very good." — The New York Times Book Review Here in Berlin is a portrait of a city through snapshots, an excavation of the stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin—its complex, troubled past still pulsing in the air as it was during World War II. Critically acclaimed novelist Cristina García brings the people of this famed city to life, their stories bristling with regret, desire, and longing. An unnamed Visitor travels to Berlin with a camera looking for reckonings of her own. The city itself is a character—vibrant and postapocalyptic, flat and featureless except for its rivers, its lakes, its legions of bicyclists. Here in Berlin she encounters a people's history: the Cuban teen taken as a POW on a German submarine only to return home to a family who doesn’t believe him; the young Jewish scholar hidden in a sarcophagus until safe passage to England is found; the female lawyer haunted by a childhood of deprivation in the bombed-out suburbs of Berlin who still defends those accused of war crimes; a young nurse with a checkered past who joins the Reich at a medical facility more intent to dispense with the wounded than to heal them; and the son of a zookeeper at the Berlin Zoo, fighting to keep the animals safe from both war and an increasingly starving populace. A meditation on war and mystery, this an exciting new work by one of our most gifted novelists, one that seeks to align the stories of the past with the stories of the future. "Garcia’s new novel is ingeniously structured, veering from poignant to shocking . . . Here in Berlin has echoes of W.G. Sebald, but its vivid, surprising images of wartime Berlin are Garcia’s own." —BBC Culture, 1 of the 10 Best Books of 2017

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"Rarely has a marriage so come alive in a work of fiction. . . So intense, beautifully written, shining with 'felt life,' it is truly gripping—riveting." —Joyce Carol Oates Abigail McCormick and Ray Stark are both poets, married nearly twenty-five years in what has always been a passionate relationship despite deep class differences. Ray is the son of West Virginia coal miners and was abused as a child—but now he is a distinguished poet with a part-time position at Brown. Abby grew up in San Francisco’s posh Pacific Heights and, having abandoned poetry, she spends her energy on a new teaching position at UC Berkeley. Abby’s decision to accept the post sets the stage for Ray to stray, especially as he struggles with a heart condition.He’s tortured by his affair with the graduate student he’s fallen in love with, but is determined to stay married—he fights to get over Tory for years. A despairing Abby finds solace in her return to riding horses and writing poems, but as she suffers privately, she becomes dependent on sleeping pills and alcohol. Ray’s health worsens—proves nearly fatal—and another cross-country move threatens to push them further apart. Alternating seamlessly between Ray’s and Abby’s perspectives, The Use of Fame is a gripping exploration of how closeness and despair can warp a lover’s perception.

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