Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela https://www.ndbooks.com/book/we-are-green-and-trembling/Cabezón Cámara and Translated by Robin Myers
Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.
Based on a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing critique of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds. In this masterful subversion of Latin American history, Cabezón Cámara finds in the rainforest a magically alive space where transformation is not only possible but necessary. Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, Cabezón Cámara’s new novel sees glimmers of hope for the future amidst a brutal history of colonization.
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che
The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut Split, Becoming Ghost documents Cathy Linh Che’s parents’ experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker’s disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.
Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten
The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.
Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control.
VAGABOND CITY 