Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
The Box in Which We Live by Samuel Rafael Barber
Encompassing a wide range of formal approaches and genres, Samuel Rafael Barber captures the disparate manifestations of power and powerlessness in this era of global neoliberalism. The stories in The Box in Which We Live investigate the existential torment inflicted upon marginalized people by individuals, institutions, and states complicit in oppression. Across these experiments, a comic absurdity emerges and a distance grows between the individual and the collective in a media-oversaturated world.
Things We Lost in the Fire: Four Graphic Stories by Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell)
Electric, disturbing, and wholly original, the stories of Things We Lost in the Fire explore multiple dimensions of life and death in contemporary Argentina. Each haunting tale simmers with the nation’s troubled history, but among the abandoned houses, black magic, and superstitions, there is also friendship, compassion, humor, and love.
Celebrated artist Lucas Nine transforms Enriquez’s unique blend of literary horror into a mesmerizing graphic adaptation of four of her “phenomenal” (Vanity Fair) stories. Featuring more than 100 pages of full-color illustrations, this edition maintains the suspense and psychological terror of Enriquez’s fiction, while adding new layers of visual meaning and immediacy to her “propulsive and mesmerizing” (New York Times) tales.
They Hold Grudges by Diana Rojas
As a kid, Rob was his uncle Pablo’s favorite, and the whole family knew it. Pablo’s only flaw was his wife, Mara, whom everyone called idiosyncratic—or plain crazy—and their son, Pablito, who took after her. But they all loved Pablo, so they put up with his wife and son and lived by the Golden Family Rule: no serious quarrels, no harboring of resentments, no anger, no grudges.
Many years later, Pablito brings an accusation against Rob that punctures the harmony. If they ignore it, will it simply go away? Does anyone even believe Pablito? Gossip and whispers swirl, unleashing doubts, paranoia and betrayal, while Rob embarks on a desperate quest to clear his name.
They Hold Grudges is a riveting exploration of the lines we draw between loyalty and truth. With layered, taut prose, it examines what we’re willing to sacrifice to keep the peace, and what remains if the truth is buried.
VAGABOND CITY 