Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
Love at Least by Yukiko Motoya (translated by Kamil Spychalski)
Twenty-five-year-old Yasuko has been living with her kind but apathetic boyfriend Tsunaki for three years. During this time, she has battled waves of depression and hypersomnia, staying in bed for days on end, mired in ennui.
When Tsunaki begins working longer hours, Yasuko tries to take over some of the house chores in the hope of breaking out of her rut, but cannot even manage to cook dinner without ending up sobbing in a pitch-black hallway. Any attempt to get her life together seems only to highlight Yasuko’s brokenness. As everything threatens to fall apart, she makes a spectacular last-ditch effort to wrench Tsunaki out of his indifference and find something to ground her in the world.
Radical, comical, and energetic, Love at Least is a sincere and compelling story of a young woman searching for connection.
A STONE’S THROW FROM C R A Y by Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander’s A Stone’s Throw from C r a y takes up and is moved by radical Black creativity. To be thrown here unfolds an experience of human connection, struggle, and transformation within and outside institutionalized and Afro-Caribbean contexts. The poems skip across surfaces while collapsing personal and collective histories, thereby shifting spaces of potential that also unsettle Alexander’s demarcations.
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan
Winner of the prestigious Edge Hill Prize and the second story collection in Claire Keegan’s bestselling body of work, Walk the Blue Fields was first published in 2007 to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. In “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Henrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose motive emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waiting to perform a marriage battles his memories of a lost love, an affair that made him question all to which he has dedicated his life.
A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of the world’s greatest fiction writers and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.
