African futurism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction—Dumas’s stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.Henry Dumas’s fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity, the present and the ancestral. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests. Humming with life, Dumas’s stori...

The incendiary, sensual poems of Essex Hemphill, now in a new landmark selectionFor three decades, the legacy of writer, editor, performer, and activist Essex Hemphill has been lovingly sustained through xeroxed copies of his few published works. They are as potent now as they were in the 1980s. With tenderness and rage, Hemphill's poems unflinchingly explore the complex, overlapping identities of sexuality, gender, and race, the American political landscape, and h...

Description of Book:This book has the dual objectives of bringing cheers and sharpening the intellect (killing two birds with one stone), its jokes becoming progressively funnier and wittier as the humor gets carried away.It deals with topics such as dating, aging, achievement, beauty, social media, ambition, IQ, film stars, singers, etc., with which the reader will feel a close connection, and is in fact a humorous, witty commentary on social affairs with the author acting...

This fast-moving, tightly-wound, and gleefully dark novella contains an entire universe in miniatureConversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents—the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in...

A collection of serial poems, Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement, Josué Guébo’s poems combine elements of history and mythology.Guébo considers the Medite...

The Kitchen Table Translation issue of Aster(ix) Journal explores connections between translation and migration.Featuring the work of immigrant and diasporic translators, it brings personal, cultural, and political dimensions of translation together with literary and aesthetic aspects of the work, and compiles writing and translation from languages including Ahmaric, Arabic, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Ojibwe, Portuguese, Spanish, Telugu,...

"Genius—brilliant, polished and of considerable depth." —Ishmael ReedAn experimental first novel of poem-like compression, Annotations has a great deal to say about growing up Black in St. Louis. Reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s Cane, the book is in part a meditation on African-American autobiography. Keene explores questions of identity from many angles—from race to social class to sexuality (gay and straight). Employing all manner of textual play an...

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection ...

Now in paperback, a bewitching collection of stories and novellas that are “suspenseful, thought-provoking, mystical, and haunting” (Publishers Weekly)Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s...

Ranging from the 17th century to the present and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratves’ novellas and stories draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculativefic=on to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. In “Rivers,” a free Jim meets up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; “An Outtake” chronicles an escaped slave’s fate in the American Revolution;“On Brazil, or Dénouement”...

A landmark collection of poetry by acclaimed fiction writer, translator, and MacArthur Fellow John Keene, Punks: New & Selected Poems is a generous treasury in seven sections that spans decades and includes previously unpublished and brand new work. With depth and breadth, Punksweaves together historic narratives of loss, lust, and love. The many voices that emerge in these poems—from historic Black personalities, both familial and famous, to the poet's friends and lovers in gay bar...

Long anticipated, Recalculating is Charles Bernstein’s first full-length collection of new poems in seven years*.* As a result of this lengthy time under construction, the scope, scale, and stylistic variation of the poems far surpasses Bernstein’s previous work. Together, the poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy.