June 2020: Books Available for Review

Reviewers interested in receiving one of the books listed below for a review to appear in New England Review of Books (full-length review or interview), Clarion (full-length, microreview, review column, or interview), Pusteblume (for works in translation), or Poetry Northeast (for works pertaining to poetry and poetics) are asked to email press@penandanvil.com with a request. Please include any links to previous published reviews, and a brief description of the project you have in mind.

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1. Albakry and Maggor: Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution
2. Ben Hinson: Eteka: Rise of the Imamba
3. Arlie Russell Hochschild: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
4. Franck Salameh: The Other Middle East
5. J.D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy
6. Gary Fincke: How Blasphemy Sounds to God
7. Joan Naviyuk Kane: Milk Black Carbon
8. R. Marie Griffith: Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
9. Nadya Hajj: Protection Amid Chaos: The Creation of property Rights in Palestinian Refugee Camps
10. Joshua Bennett: The Sobbing School
11. Joel Edward Goza: America's Unholy Ghosts
12. Alan King: Point Blank
13. Yahia Lababidi : The Artist as Mystic
14. Umberto Saba: Ernesto
15. Eilis Dillon: The Island of Horses
16. Ryunosuke Akutagawa: Mandarins: Stories
17. Cass Sunstein: #REPUBLIC: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
18. Gabriel Gudding: A Defense of Poetry
19. Qais Akbar Omar: A Fort of Nine Towers
20. Sergey Gandlevsky: A Kindred Orphanhood
21. Viktor Sosnora: A Million Premonitions
22. H. E. Bates: A Month by the Lake and Other Stories
23. Katie Peterson: A Piece of Good News
24. Owen Davies: A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination and Faith during the First World War
25. Kristin Dimitrova: A Visit to the Clockmaker
26. A. Marie Houser: After Coetzee: An Anthology of Animal Fictions
27. Carrie Jerrell: After the Revival
28. Alexandra Chreiteh: Ali and His Russian Mother
29. Paul Hudon: All in Good Time
30. Michael Sims: Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes
31. Justine Mintsa: Awu's Story
32. Yahia Lababidi: Balancing Acts
33. Joshua Corey: Beautiful Soul
34. Ann Morgan: Beside Myself
35. Alex Epstein: Blue Has No South
36. Jack Kohl: Bone Over Ivory
37. Tom Sexton: Bridge Street at Dusk
38. Syeus Mottel: Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders
39. Clint Smith: Counting Descent
40. Richard Littler: Discovering Scarfolk
41. Machado de Assis: Dom Casmurro
42. Mary Maxwell: Emporia
43. Outcast: Feridon Rashidi
44. Szilárd Borbély: Final Matters: Selected Poems, 2004-2010
45. Michael Wolff: Fire and Fury
46. Austin Smith: Flyover Country
47. Tess Taylor: Forage House
48. Brenda Hillman: Fortres2
49. Kelly and Zetzsche: Found in Translation: How Languages Shapes Our Lives and Transforms Our World
50. Lawrence Shainberg: Four Men Shaking
51. Michael Schmidt: Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
52. Micklethwait and Wooldrige: God Is Back
53. Alyson Foster: Heart Attack Watch
54. Michael Shermer: How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science
55. ed. Roberta Micallef: Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age
56. Kodi Scheer: Incendiary Girls
57. Phillipa K. Chong: Inside the Critic's Circle
58. Allen Ginsberg: Iron Curtain Journals: January-May 1965
59. Stanley Moss: It's About Time
60. Elizabeth and Stephen Ferry: La Batea
61. Liliana Ursu: Lightwall
62. Kevin Gallagher: Loom
63. Meia Geddes: Love Letters to the World
64. Melissa Green: Magpiety
65. Matt Rader: What I Want To Tell Goes Like This
66. Jack Nicholls: Meat Songs
67. Catao and Obstfield: Meeting Globalization's Challenges: Policies to Make Trade Work for All
68. Serhiy Zhadan: Mesopotamia
69. Michael Lista: Strike Anywhere
70. Mary Maxwell: Nine Over Sixes
71. Richard Fein: Not a Separate Surge
72. Hugo Mercier: Not Born Yesterday
73. Glyn Maxwell: On Poetry
74. Karen Swallow Prior: On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books
75. David Ferry: On This Side of the River
76. B. J. Novack: One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories
77. Thanassis Valtinos: Orthokosta
78. James Fenton: Out of Danger
79. Paula Arai : Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra
80. Fei-Hsien Wang: Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China
81. Michael E. Bratman: Planning, Time, and Self-Governance: Essays in Practical Rationality
82. Marko Vešović: Polish Cavalry
83. Subcomandante Marcos: Professionals of Hope: The Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos
84. Ray Greenblatt: Twenty Years on Graysheep Bay
85. Mary Fulbrook: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and The Quest for Justice
86. Hank Fox: Red Neck, Blue Collar Atheist
87. Kniss and Numrich: Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America's Newest Immigrants
88. Marzanna Kielar: Salt Monody
89. Theophile Gautier: Selected Lyrics
90. Giovanni Pascoli: Selected Poems
91. Hose Danial Garcia: shadowslongshoreman
92. Whiskey Radish: Snow Walk (a hand-illustrated chapbook)
93. Ladette Randolph: Solos Volume 3 (an omnibus of Ploughshares fiction)
94. Josef Sorett : Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetic
95. Alison Hawthorne Deming: Stairway to Heaven
96. Carl Phillips: Star Map with Action Figures
97. Dora Malech: Stet
98. Edward Mackay: Swarming
99. Michael Filimowicz: Tatvan
100. Nancy Willard: The Adventures of Anatole
101. Ryan Honeyman: The B Corp Handbook
102. Duo Duo: The Boy Who Catches Wasps
103. Kate Tempest: The Bricks That Built the Houses
104. Andrew March: The Caliphate of Man
105. Bryan Caplan: The Case Against Education
106. Natalya Semenova: The Collector: The Story of Sergei Shchukin and His Lost Masterpieces
107. Rochard Hatch: The Curious Lobster
108. Sergio Chejfec: The Dark
109. Johanna Skibsrud: The Description of the World
110. Buchanan and Powell: The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory
111. Magnus Mills: The Field of the Cloth of Gold
112. Nicholas Buccola: The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. and the Debate over Race in America
113. Ivo Goldstein: The Holocaust in Croatia
114. Edmund Gordon: The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography
115. Laura Van Den Berg: The Isle of Youth
116. Ilija Trojanow: The Lamentations of Zeno
117. Meia Geddes: The Little Queen
118. Andrus Kivirähk: The Man Who Spoke Snakish
119. John Burnside: The Music of Time
120. Michael Tennesen: The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man
121. Helen Vendler: The Ocean, The Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poets & Poetry
122. Marina Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
123. Leonard Kress: The Orpheus Complex
124. Kirk Wulf: The Partly Chosen (pamphlet)
125. Michael Bazzett (trans.): The Popol Vuh
126. Kathleen Graber: The River Twice
127. Olafur Gunnarsson: The Thaw: Stories
128. Angela Flournoy: The Turner House
129. Jerry Z. Muller: The Tyranny of Metrics
130. Miller Oberman: The Unstill Ones
131. Bo Balder: The Wan
132. Iman Humaydan: The Weight of Paradise
133. Robert Priest: The Wolf Is Back
134. Joan Dempsey: This Is How It Begins
135. Jedediah Purdy: This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth
136. Renee Emerson: Threshing Floor
137. Maxim D. Shrayer: Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature: An Anthology
138. Naomi Oreske: Why Trust Science
139. Edmund Jorgensen: World Enough (And Time)
140. Raquel Balboni: XXX Poems
141. Eleanor Wilner: Before Our Eyes
142. Debbie Blue: Consider the Women: A Provocative Guide to Three Matriarchs of the Bible
143. Kathryn T. Long: God in the Rainforest
144. Nancy Freund Bills: The Red Ribbon: A Memoir of Lightning and Rebuilding After Loss
145. Marilyn McEntyre: When Poets Pray
146. Debasish Lahiri: Tinder Tender
147. Nathan J. Robinson: My Affairs: A Memoir of the Magazine Industry 2016-2076
148. Abhay K.: 100 More Great Indian Poems
149. Jane LaForge: Daphne and Her Discontents
150. Richard Scholar: Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
151. Jeffrey H. Ryan: Hermit - The Mysterious Life of Jim Whyte
152. Goirick Brahmachari: Joining the Dots
153. Molly McCully Brown: Places I've Taken My Body
154. Bruce Bond: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand
155. Vanesha Pravin: Disorder
156. CP Surendran: Available Light

Crytids, Comics, and Sfé R. Monster

For fans of cryptids, try Canadian trans artist Sfé R. Monster's collection of monster-centric comics.

Included below is Eth's Skin, a webcomic with a focus on "mermaids, selkies, and sea monsters living in the old growth forests along the northern coast of British Columbia." Gorgeous character designs and visuals---plus this particular webcomic is free-to-read.

Sfé explains their method on their Patreon page thusly:

I create exclusively queer and genderqueer stories- comics that explore the width and breadth of gender identity, and showcase and celebrate the diversity of queerness. 

I am also a monster enthusiast, having made projects ... that investigate the weird, wonderful, and occasionally woeful creatures that lurk around the edge of our reality.  

Mystical beasts are an area of interest for us at Pen & Anvil. We are huge fans of Jorge Luis Borges and his Book of Imaginary Beings, even contributing new entries with our "New Book of Imaginary Beings," published to Clarion issue 17 in the winter of 2014. Over on Twitter, @dasneuesbuch serves as our tribute to Borges' bestiary.

Grolier Picks: Books for Winter Reading

From time to time, the staff of America's longest-running poetry-only bookshop, the logically-named Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, release a list of recommended titles from their current stock. Here is their list for the last week of December 2019.

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SOME TREES by John Ashbery
Comparing him to T. S. Eliot, Stephanie Burt writes that Ashbery is “the last figure whom half of the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible.” After the publication of Some Trees, W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn't understand a word of it. Most reviews were negative. But in this first book of poems from one of the century's most important poets, one finds the seeds of Ashbery's oeuvre, including the influence of French surrealists—many of whom he translated—and abstract expressionism.

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WAKE, SIREN by Nina MacLaughlin
"I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people's tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I'll tell it myself." Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, author Nina MacLaughlin recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men, breathing new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

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MY EMILY DICKINSON by Susan Howe
Susan Howe—taking the poet-scholar-critics Charles Olson, H.D., and William Carlos Williams (among others) as her guides—shows ways in which earlier scholarship has shortened Dickinson's intellectual reach by ignoring the use to which she put her wide reading. Giving close attention to the well-known poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Howe tracks Dickens, Browning, Emily Brontë, Shakespeare, and Spenser, as well as local Connecticut River Valley histories, Puritan sermons, captivity narratives, and the popular culture of the day.

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COLLECTED POEMS of Chinua Achebe
"The father of African literature in the English language and undoubtedly one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century," writes critic Caryl Phillips. Chinua Achebe's award-winning poems are marked by a subtle richness and the political acuity and moral vision that are a signature of all of his work. Focused and powerful, and suffused with wisdom and compassion, Collected Poems is further evidence of this great writer's sublime gifts and it is an essential part of the oeuvre of a giant of world literature.

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WOOLGATHERING by Patti Smith
In this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award-winning author revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self—and its "clear, unspeakable joy"—with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street.

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A THOUSAND MORNINGS by Mary Oliver
In this collection, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether studying the leaves of a tree or mourning her treasured dog Percy, Oliver is open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments and explores with startling clarity, humor, and kindness the mysteries of our daily experience.

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FELON by Reginald Dwayne Betts
These fierce, dazzling poems tell the story of the effects of incarceration, canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace. Betts confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.

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THE ODES OF HORACE translated by David Ferry
The Latin poet Horace is, along with his friend Virgil, the most celebrated of the poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and, with Virgil, the most influential. These marvelously constructed poems with their unswerving clarity of vision and their extraordinary range of tone and emotion have deeply affected the poetry of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Herbert, Dryden, Marvell, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Wordsworth, Frost, Larkin, Auden, and many others, in English and in other languages. Ferry's inspired new translation of the complete Odes of Horace conveys the wit, ardor and sublimity of the original with a music of all its own.

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BLUETS by Maggie Nelson
Since it was first published a decade ago, Bluets has drawn scores of readers with its surprising insights into the emotional depths that make us most human—via two hundred and forty short pieces, by turns lyrical and philosophical, on the color blue. The new beautiful hardcover edition from Wave Books celebrates Nelson's uncompromising vision, inviting longtime fans and newcomers alike to experience and share in an indispensable work that continues to disrupt the literary landscape.

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CEREMONIAL ENTRIES by Joe DeRoche
In these tough-minded and tender-hearted poems, DeRoche explores the spiritual and secular frameworks used to assess the competing claims of body, mind, and soul, and of faith and doubt in divinity, love, and poetry itself. The ceremonies lead from struggles between conflicting goods toward acceptance that the world and our experience of it is always sacred and profane: a place where Satan may be a saint and the light in an image of the infant Jesus Christ can seem as earthbound as celestial, where love can redeem and debase, where poetry can transform, disinfect, and merely feint or fail or cheat.

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Grolier Poetry Book Shop, at 6 Plympton Street in Cambridge, is open Tuesday and Wednesday from 11-7, and Thursday through Saturday from 11-6. Find them online at Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, or on their website at www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org. The Shop is a historic place for poetry lovers and poetry makers, and they deserve your business. Stop by and buy a book, and let them know that Pen & Anvil sent ya.

"Crossed wires. I'm clueless. Got it!"

(Annals of an Editor, #79)

Typically the entries in Annals of an Editor are drawn from my correspondence with authors hoping to work with my small press. This time around, I would like to share an exchange that took place on Facebook.

An academic acquaintance of mine is the editor of a book  being released this week. I saw an announcement about the release, and commented, giving him the email address for our New England Review of Books. My thinking it would be useful for the publisher to have yet another contact for potential reviews coverage. Well, things got a little tense, if not quite outwardly antagonistic.

An Immigration Story

Chukwuebuka Ibeh is a stringer for the New England Review of Books. He is based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and writes to us to share his recent interaction with the passport authorities there.

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On a rainy Friday morning in August, I sat in a small room on the second floor of the Federal Immigration Service Office in Port Harcourt. I wanted to finally do what I had put off doing for a long time—get a passport. I had earlier been connected to an agent who would help guide me through the process. He was not on site when I arrived, so he instead referred me to a co-worker. I was then asked to wait for a minute, and then for a few minutes, and then for a few hours. Finally, when I was called in to submit my application documents and sit for a brief interview, it was almost evening. When I protested over the long wait, I was told I was lucky to have gotten it done today at all.
When I asked how long it would take to get the passport, I was told three weeks.
I asked, why does it take such a long time?
They were currently out of materials, he said. And when the materials do eventually arrive, the people who paid for express delivery would be attended to first.
I paused. I wanted to point out the absurdity of a government office not having the basic materials needed for its running, and wanted to further point out the irony of express delivery. But I was exhausted from the long wait, and late in getting home home, and three weeks wasn’t so bad. So, I let it go.
I returned to school in Bayelsa—a neighboring state—the next day. Tied up with schoolwork, I forgot about the application, allowing for a full month to pass before I called the agent to find out my pickup date. The materials had still not arrived. His tone was apologetic, but removed. He assured me they would definitely arrive the following week.
I called him back on the Friday of the following week. He picked on the third ring and gave me the news in a somber, almost reluctant, manner: no, the materials had not arrived. Not even the ones for express-delivery. When I asked what could possibly be the cause of the delay, he sighed vaguely.
I lost my patience when I called three weeks later to be greeted yet again with the news of the passport’s non-arrival. I raised my voice, calling out the government’s ineptitude, and even threatening to withdraw my application if care was not taken. (In retrospect, I found this funny—for it was only myself who would stand to lose if a withdrawal was effected) The agent waited until my tirade was over before telling me, in a calm voice, that the situation was hardly his fault, and that if anyone needed to be shouted at, it wasn’t him.
In the second week of October, I commenced exams for the second semester of my penultimate year. Preoccupation with these took my mind off the passport for a while, at least consciously. On a Thursday of the third week of the month, I had reason to briefly visit Port Harcourt, and I called, sensing as I did that some hopeful news awaited me. The agent’s silence after our first hello dispelled this hope.
Instead of asking if the passport had arrived, I asked him if it would ever arrive.
Surely, he said.
When?
Very soon.

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Chukwuebuka Ibeh is a staff writer for Brittle Paper, with writing most recently in McSweeney's and on the short list for the Gerald Kraak Prize. Connect with him on Twitter. || Photo by Ashim D’Silva, showing the silhouette of a person at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport; via Unsplash. || Readers may also enjoy the story "At the Airport in Kalai" by Floyd J. Miller, appearing in a 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal; and "Waiting for a Visa" by B.R. Ambedkar, written in 1935 or '36.

What is in a marketing prospectus?

So, you've completed a manuscript... congratulations! And now you want to start sending it to publishers. (Or, shopping it to agents.) Many shops -- Pen & Anvil is one of them -- are prepared to consider a book proposal only if it comes attached to a marketing prospectus. What goes into such a thing?

Well, details and requirements vary. You can find detailed accounts of what is most useful to include in such a document in any guide to submissions, or by consulting an experienced editor or agent; but in our view at Pen & Anvil we believe a prospectus should definitely include:

• an account of what books in market are comparable to yours (and how you made that determination), along with their sales prominence/numbers
• an account of how you'd intend to participate in the sales marketing process -- festivals? course adoptions? reading groups? store appearances? leveraging your social media network? -- in the 1-2 years following your book's publication
• an account of your promotional resources as an author (the size and Klout of your social media audience is relevant, but the more relevant question is: can you explain how you've had success using that social media network to drive a sales campaign, or something analogous like a petition, event registration, etc?)
• a list of your primary "connections" in the literary sales space -- editors, program heads, etc; and so on. 

The whole document might come in at 2-4 pages. Your prospectus should be geared toward answering three questions in the affirmative:

1. Has this author given serious thought to the work involved in promoting a book?
2. Does this author have a realistic understanding of how their book compares to books in the market?
3. Do resources existent to convert promotional labor into sales results for this book?

This might seem like a big ask, even an impediment. "I just wrote a BOOK! Why do I have to do all this additional work?" Actually, though, don't be discouraged by the requirement to prepare a prospectus. You should want only to work with a publisher who is considering the book through the lens of market prospects. If you aren't being asked questions up front, why should you trust that the publisher is oriented and equipped to connect an audience to your project?

You don't have to be a marketing expert to prepare a prospectus -- no publisher is going to expect you to lay out your philosophical preference for the funnel model versus the flywheel, for example. But you do need to be willing to work collaboratively with your publisher on the marketing and promotion of your book if you want to maximize your audience size. Each side is bringing something to the table: your publisher has the business systems, production acumen, and market intelligence; you have the authorial skill, the intellectual property, and the personal incentive. Together, you should work out a plan to work as an integrated marketing team so that your book can be discovered, sold, read, and enjoyed by the reader you want to connect with.