Hailed as“powerful” (GMA), “important” (Poets & Writers), and “momentous” (BookPage), a queer coming-of-age novel set in 1990s India, about a young man who joins a traveling street theater troupe, seeking to outrun the dark secrets of his past
“[A] poised, elegant debut…A story about queer desire, the comfortable lies families tell themselves to survive, and art’s power…While there is a rich, stories tradition of queerness in South Asian art, culture, and mythology, queer literature is still a relatively sparse canon. This makes Akella’s novel, and his voice, all the more important.”
Poets & Writers
“Momentous…The most moving, frustrating and alluring part of The Sea Elephants is Shagun himself…Akella uses myth as the framework for The Sea Elephants, which allows Shagun’s story to feel ancient and sacred.”
BookPage
A recent chapbook from Emily Barton Altman, a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award who holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from the University of Denver.
In The Machine We Trust, Tim Conrad’s narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape-sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away.
The characters striving in this forgotten America are smart and kind and lost, disappointed by the men in their lives, yet determined to carve out a place in this world. Together, these stories are a tender portrait of our desire for love and acceptance, all told in language that is suspenseful, moving, and perfectly written.”
Michael Nye, author of Until We Have Faces
Tim Conrad is something of a Raymond Carver for the new millennium-his everyday people glow with the power of loss and suppressed longing.”
Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals In Everyday Life
“Guzzetta’s history is an important study, introducing English-language readers to a genre that changes the shape of our conversations around historiographic theater and theater of the real. Unpacking a form with the intimate storytelling of Spalding Gray and the fearless national soul-searching of the best documentary theater, The Theater of Narration shows us new ways of feeling the past through performance.”
Ryan Claycomb, author of Lives in Play: Autobiography and Biography on the Feminist Stage
“Theater and history come together in this intriguing study of a unique Italian performance art in which a single storyteller recounts a moment of history from the perspective of ordinary people. Guzzetta traces the theater of narration from its origins to the first performances in the 1980s and across two generations of narrators. She explicates how its ethnographic and dialogic elements weave personal histories into a tapestry depicting a common, collective past.”
Antonio Scuderi, author of Dario Fo: Framing, Festival, and the Folkloric Imagination
Earthly and sidereal, Cindy Hunter Morgan’s beautifully realized new book takes memory as its talisman, always mindful that “the stars watch from long ago.” But “long-ago” can fade like invisible ink, as when a homemade Halloween costume both erases and silences a girl at her new school, or when warrior paint impishly applied to a mother’s face prompts her baffling retreat to the hideout of her sewing room. Given so much disappearance, “After the Dragonflies” strives “to see the world in slow motion”; but just as often, Hunter Morgan’s poems convey the eerie exactitude of time-lapse photography, duration quickened to reveal the world’s secret acts of becoming. Time after time, Far Company discovers those liminal moments when the unseen shades into vision. Who wouldn’t wish to linger there?
Steven Cramer, author of Listen and Clangings
If you make yourself available to Cindy Hunter Morgan’s poems, they will revivify your experience of the most ordinary aspects of everyday life. Layering the childhood fears, wonders, and myths of her imagination in the animal world, she creates a kind of chrysalis for the emergence of a more deeply realized awareness of our present human experience. These poems shine and resonate.”
Dan Gerber
“Eswaran balances the bitter with the sweet, sharing a compelling and thoughtful story that is a welcome addition to Indian queer cinema. I’m also reminded of Buddha’s parable of the raft, perhaps most fitting for a film entitled Kattumaram: on one side of the water, there are traditions and social norms to live up to, and one is trapped by them. But if you build a raft, it can carry you away to a place where you can escape them, a place where you can allow your true self to emerge and flourish.”
Katherine Matthews for LIFF 2019 Special Review: Kattumaram
At twenty-seven, Robin Silbergleid decided to become a single mother by choice; The Baby Book depicts her long struggle to build her family through assisted reproductive technology. It is a bold, multi-voiced narrative of reproductive choice, including infertility treatment, recurrent miscarriage, and high-risk pregnancy.
Sophisticated and gripping, this depiction of a single woman’s experience of donor insemination, miscarriage, and birth is a major accomplishment. This artistic response to a common but little discussed human experience is powerful and moving. The Baby Book is at once evocative and informative; it takes the literature on pregnancy loss to a whole new level.
— Linda Layne, author of Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America and producer of Motherhood Lost: Conversations
Robin Silbergleid’s The Baby Book is a relentless, fierce examination of miscarriage, loss, pregnancy, and labor that is both a commentary on modern medicine as well as a timeless reflection on motherhood, grief, and desire. A brutal and resilient narrative! I hope that this book creates much-needed dialogues.
— Julianna Baggott, author of This Country of Mothers
CURB maps our post-9/11 political landscape by locating the wounds of domestic terrorism at unacknowledged sites of racial and religious conflict across cities and suburbs of the United States.
Curb is more than a personal poetics of loss and identity. It is even more than a well-written eulogy of five murdered South Asian Americans. It is a profound act of poetic debridement for the South Asian American diaspora, and an insistent plea to resist erasure by first acknowledging, absorbing, processing, and remembering our own communal histories.
-Jenny Bhatt, NPR
Divya Victor’s vigorously researched hybrid work expertly shows how the discrimination embedded in American social practices acts against the South Asian community to devastating effect. …Lyric poems blend with journalistic narrative to transform documentation into artful revelation.
Jaquira Díaz, Rigoberto González, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Khadijah Queen
Judges Citation, PEN America Open Book Award
The latest from veteran actor, screenwriter, and producer Bill Vincent, who plays “Gar” in this 2024 film by Joel Potrykus, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Oak Cliff Film Festival and the AQCC Award from the Fantasia Film Festival.
“You want to be a film maker, be out there making films. Be shooting, anything… ‘Cause everytime you do it you learn something from it”
The Evolution of Bert is a dramatic, comedic, musically infused surreal tale of love and fantasy and of coming to consciousness. It is the story of young man’s evolution into himself.
“”It’s in black-and-white and it evokes memories of Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It,'” said festival director Susan Woods.”
Mike Hughes for The Lansing State Journal
“I guess my motto is, ‘Make films where you are, whenever you can.’ And to me, it doesn’t matter whether they are short or long.”
Professor Jeff Wray
