Summary

2024 Foreword Indies Finalist, Multicultural Adult Fiction
2024/25 Story Prize Longlist

In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, photographs, fairy tales, fables, and relics all add texture and meaning to an exploration of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman in a culture that excuses the behavior of men. Throughout, girls and women contend with the expectations, limitations, and challenges of becoming the heroine of one’s own life.

How to Make Your Mother Cry—Shah’s follow-up to her award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance—continues the rich tradition of innovative feminist work by Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By braiding stories and images with fictional letters to a beloved English teacher, the collection defies traditional autofiction, epistolary, and short story conventions. These astonishing stories about friendship and love, resilience and survival establish Shah as an exciting new voice in contemporary fiction.

Contents

[soundtrack]

I. A girl walks into the forest
The Girl with Two Brothers
Mary, Staring at Me
Dicot, Monocot
Mandala
(Divination)

II. A girl is lost in the woods
(Independence, Iowa)
How to Make Your Mother Cry
Watch Over Me; Turn a Blind Eye
Climate, Man, Vegetation
Ithaca Is Never Far
Xylem
(Everybody’s Greatest Hits)

III. A girl claws her way out
(The Granite State)
The Half King
Skeleton, Rock, Shell

Companion Texts
Ephemera Archive
Liner Notes
Gratitudes & Ghost Tracks

Author

Sejal Shah is an artist, dancer, poet, writer, and teacher whose work crosses genres and disciplines. The daughter of immigrants from Kenya and India, she is the author of the award-winning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance and the groundbreaking essay on invisible disability and neurodiversity “Even If You Can’t See It.” She lives in Rochester, New York.

Reviews

“How to Make Your Mother Cry is an incredible cross-cultural manifesto of word and body: What is home. What is mother. What is family. What is self. What is woman, and how do we story her.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and Verge

“Urgent, intense, and intimate, the stories in Sejal Shah’s How to Make Your Mother Cry conjure memories and stir the soul. A clever and beautifully crafted collection!”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“Sejal Shah has written a stunning hybrid work, and I’m in awe of its candor, risk, and craft—this is a book I will recommend to other writers, professors of creative writing, and readers of literary texts. I see Shah’s book as broadening and supporting the larger conversation of work by writers of color.”
—Jon Pineda, author of Let’s No One Get Hurt

“Each sentence is its own jewel box of pleasures and delights. Like works by Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, and Claudia Rankine, this groundbreaking collection will be a touchpoint for years and decades to come.”
—Rahul Mehta, author of No Other World and Feeding the Ghosts

“If a queer text is an unsettled one, crossing cultures, crossing genres, then this book rescripts what we think we know. Shah is a master storyteller who keeps us knowing differently. How to Make Your Mother Cry is bold and brave. A collection for a new century.”
—Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood

Summary

A trippy and darkly funny portrait of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is the tragicomic yarn of one troubled college dropout’s desperate attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed working man.

In the wake of his father’s death, Garrett Deaver washes up at a salmon processing plant in his dad’s old stomping grounds of Alaska. There, he renames himself Beaver—because just like a beaver, he’s “an industrious motherfucker”— and vows to become a supervisor at Klak Fancy Salmon, LLC. But moving up within the industry’s seasonal underclass is anything but simple, and soon he finds himself with real, and imagined, enemies at the plant. As amphetamines scramble his sense of reality, and secrets about his father’s life are revealed, the job he’d hoped would bring him salvation threatens to leave him broke, alone, and—maybe even literally—underwater.

Author

Jake Maynard is a fiction writer and essayist from Pennsylvania. He has held a few different jobs in the Alaskan commercial fishing industry. His writing appears in Southern Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review, the New Republic, the Baffler, the New York Times, and others. Slime Line is his first novel.

Reviews

"Maynard is a bold new American voice in fiction, and he's arrived with a fillet knife. Christ I loved this book."
— Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks and Gods of Howl Mountain. 

“A cult classic is born. Jake Maynard’s inspiring Slime Line is a backward glance at what the American novel could achieve before it got highjacked by English departments. Stumbling through the stinking grist of the salmon processing slums, written with fish-gut fingers, and fueled by an impetuous, chemical verve of prose a la Thom Jones, Slime Line exposes Alaska’s wage-slave work camps via the addled observations of its indefatigable narrator, one Garrett Deaver, a kid wielding a filet knife manically passionate about a job that will leave him beaten, abandoned, and hiding from the police inside a floating trailer park while still attempting to solve the mystery of his father’s death. Sinclair and Steinbeck would applaud this novel’s eye, but it’s Maynard’s outrageous characters loosed upon the Alaskan seacoast that propel Slime Line into page-turning madness. Maynard gets
every word right.”
— Lee Durkee, author of The Last Taxi Driver and Stalking Shakespeare. 

“Maynard’s Slime Line is an arresting read that sinks its claws deep into your gut and dares you to blink. It’s a story of hard work, loss, exploitation, and family set against a backdrop of blood, ice, and heavy machinery at an Alaskan fish processing plant peopled by misfits, scoundrels, and ghosts. You’ll never look at a salmon filet the same way again.”
— Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor

“A bold and forceful and glorious book, like a beer bottle smashed to bits over your head, leaving you sticky with glass shards. Jake Maynard’s Slime Line depicts the world how it really is, or one hard slice of it anyway: the puke-inducing Alaskan commercial fishing sector. You’ll learn how to gut a salmon in one chapter, then how to lose a family in the next. In both cases, it’s not pretty. (“Everything,” as Maynard tells it, “comes out clean except for the heart.”) This is an eviscerating read, at once improbably raw and real.”
— Ben Purkert, author of The Men Can’t be Saved

“Slime Line is a deeply compelling novel. Maynard’s energetic prose is as gritty and raw as Alaska itself.”
—Callan Wink, author of August

“There aren’t enough gross books about work. This is a story that hasn’t yet been told, and thank goodness Maynard was in right place to bear witness and tell it. Slime Line is a wild romp, both compelling and educational. It will change how people approach fish processing—and work, even—in Alaska.”
—Brendan Jones, author of The Alaskan Laundry

"Slime Line is a stone-cold winner: a book about the dirty work of capitalism, searching for a missing father, and reckoning with your legacy. It’s full of fish guts and lousy shifts, but it’s also driven by a big, beating heart. I found it impossible to put down. As in all great books, the big catch here is the truth, and Jake Maynard hauls it in, one gorgeous sentence after another. Tender, musical, sad, funny as hell. Read it.”
—Steve Almond, author of All the Secrets of the World and Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow

Summary

A light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of hitchhiker’s guide to the more-than-human world—Isaac Yuen’s Utter, Earth is a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders.

In a time of dirges and elegies for the natural world, Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Highlighting life that once was, still is, and all that we stand to lose, this living and lively mini encyclopedia (complete with glossary) shines the spotlight on the motley, fantastical, and astonishing denizens with whom we share this planet.

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code BULK30 at checkout.

Contents

1. Din
Yes, You Can Leave the Hospital Without Naming Your Baby
Second Best Is Best

2. Spectacle
On Sights Unseen
102 Briefly Mentioned, Mostly Living Things
The Perfect Party Guest

3. Contact
A School Is a Type of Shoal
A Hearth Is a Kind of Home

4. Exchange
A Breath in Four Parts
How to Make Friends and Keep Them Lifelong
Life Lessons from the Odd and Ancient

5. Duress
How to Debate as a Fish
Giving Up on Your Dreams
Going Down to Ground

6. Rebound
Creature Career Counseling
Reinvention Is a Matter of Necessity

7. Sustain
Pick-A-Mix, Build-A-Beast
So You Want to Write an Animal Essay

Brief Thoughts on Almost Every Mentioned, Mostly Living Thing (in Alphabetical Order)
Acknowledgments

Author

Isaac Yuen is a first-generation Hong Kong Canadian author. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Orion, Shenandoah, Tin House, and numerous other publications. He has held residencies and fellowships at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Switzerland and the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Studies in Germany. Utter, Earth is his first solo book.

Reviews

“To shoal is to be social, to sense together, we learn in one of Yuen’s more-than-human essays. But to school is to sweep together in unison, to dazzle with coherence. It’s this spirit of schooling that animates Utter, Earth, essays that—in their curiosity, play, and care—aim to weave us back into a world of which we are but one small part. How would our language change if we invited nonhuman others alongside us again in fellowship, if our lives not only allowed for but celebrated everything swimming just beyond the limits of what we know? It’s not time for school, it’s time to school, to school with the creatures of Utter, Earth, the lemurs, leopards, and leafcutter ants, the wombats, waterbuck, and wildebeest, to school with others to find ourselves again.”
—David Naimon, host of Between the Covers

“Utter, Earth leaps, ranges, delves—or should I say rabbits, antelopes, and elephant seals? Isaac Yuen’s playful, precise book will delight biologist and linguaphile alike. With persnickety glee and accuracy, he holds obscure facts of the more-than-human world up to the light in a style that’s a mashup of Rachel Carson, Gary Larson, Ross Gay, David Sedaris, and David Attenborough. The enthusiasm and delight of Utter, Earth is infectious, and that’s just the point. Yuen wants us to fall in love with the beings we share this amazing planet with, to realize the human way of living, breathing, birthing, eating, working, and caring is not the acme but just one option among many wonderful, amazing ways of being—and we could perhaps learn a thing or two from dung beetles and hagfish if we allowed ourselves to be curious. I laughed aloud while reading Utter, Earth, and the naturalist in me bows to the huge body of knowledge and research that permits Yuen’s accuracy to sing with such a light touch. Do yourself a favor and read every page, including the ‘Brief Thoughts on Almost Every Mentioned, Mostly Living Thing’ that serves as a quasi-appendix. You’ll leave your chair ready to appreciate the world around you anew.”
—Elizabeth Bradfield, naturalist, author of Toward Antarctica, and coeditor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry

Summary

Sisters Roxy and Coco are two glamorous harpies—mythical bird women—attempting to outrun extinction and fix the planet by preventing child abuse, one child at a time.

When Roxy is suddenly attracted to her human supervisor at a social work agency a hundred years too early, Coco is very suspicious. Luring Roxy with his scent, Tim is also on the payroll of a fake conservationist intent on her less-than-legal collection. Coco swoops in to vet Tim, but Interpol is hot on her trail for a series of curious homicides. (Surveillance has a very hard time convincing his boss of what he’s monitoring.) When the sisters find themselves trapped, Chris, a bipolar skateboarding truant, tries his best to rescue them but it’s Stewie, Coco’s colleague, who turns the story inside out. Roxy and Coco climaxes at a gala of egg fanciers who scramble to escape the harpies’ talons.

Action figure–worthy, for readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell, this modern take on these fabled women touches on mental illness, racism, animal rights, and the rights of children.

Author

Author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, memoir, biography, and translations from the Nuer, Terese Svoboda has received the Guggenheim, Bobst Prize in fiction, Iowa Poetry Prize, National Endowment for the Humanities translation grant, Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Jerome Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts media grants, O. Henry Award, Pushcart Prize for the essay, and three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships.

Reviews

“[A] wry and rambunctious fable . . . . The book offers brief and staggered visions of family, in all its complex permutations. Here, flocks settle into wonderfully unlikely formations. It’s possible that the most dangerous thing for anyone, harpy or human, is the decision to fly alone.”
— Hilary Leichter, New York Times Book Review

“Existing at the sweet spot between Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, and James Purdy’s I Am Elijah Thrush, Roxy and Coco plucks a creature out of myth to bring it into our present—and does so in a way that keeps a steady eye on the flaws of our own weird moment. Rarely has fantastic fiction managed to say so much so deftly about the real while still offering a terrific, strange, and highly original read.”
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“There are many mythic reimaginings out there, but I can guarantee you that Roxy and Coco is unlike anything you’ve read—Terese Svoboda’s harpies are winged avengers, a celestial task force who save kids who have been abused by their terrestrial protectors. Who but Svoboda with her talons descending from the clouds could wrest so much humor, poetry, and beauty from the abyss?”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World and Swamplandia!

Summary

Hell’s Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices wherever he saw them at major risk to his own life and became an early interpreter of Appalachian labor history.

His writings and actions from the 1920s to the 1960s helped shape southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Through Crawford’s Weekly, a newspaper active from 1920 to 1935, Crawford challenged the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and the private police forces of coal barons. The wounds received for these efforts were the closing of his paper and a bullet to his leg during a Harlan County strike in the 1930s. In his work after journalism, he led the West Virginia branch of the Federal Writers’ Project during the political standoff over the contents of the state’s official guidebook.

In Hell’s Not Far Off, Josh Howard resurrects strands of a radical tradition centered especially on matters of labor, environment, and race, drawing attention to that tradition’s ongoing salience: “Present-day Appalachia’s fights were [Crawford’s], and his fights are still ours.”

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Young Newspaper Editor

2. Getting Shot in Harlan County

3. A Critic Fails at Politics

4. The Editor as Public Historian

5. An Inability to Adapt

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Author

Josh Howard is the cofounder of Passel Applied History Consulting, where he works as an applied historian. He lives in Virginia with his partner and cat and writes about Appalachia, legal history, sports, and the National Park Service.

Reviews

“Howard’s meticulous research and artful telling of Bruce Crawford’s story offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of a radical newspaper publisher whose social and political impact extended well beyond the rural Appalachian community in which he published.”
—Michael Clay Carey, author of The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia

“Appalachian mountain journalist and businessman Bruce Crawford was variously an outspoken critic of the 1920s Klan, a self-described leftist radical fighter for Appalachian coal mining families in the 1930s, a dedicated New Dealer who earned the wrath of an anti-union Democratic West Virginia governor, and a reactionary critic of Civil Rights and New Left activists. Despite his unpredictable political journey, Crawford’s reputation for personal bravery and integrity was never in question. Josh Howard’s work will rescue this brilliant, mercurial figure from undeserved obscurity and fascinate readers interested in Appalachian history and American politics.”
—John Hennen, author of A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199

Summary

The first book to take a feminist geographical approach to infrastructure, Gendered Infrastructures delves into the complex relationships between identity, social relations, and infrastructure. By drawing on feminist scholarship to enable new frameworks for critical study, this edited volume explores the gendered nature of infrastructures as diverse as Senegal’s waste disposal, Vietnam’s cement industry, and Lilongwe’s water kiosks. The chapters consider how infrastructural assemblages rework and shape gendered relations, identities, and meanings across space, while tracing the intersectionality of relations and uneven geographies that surround infrastructure. Ultimately, the contributors show how gender is always present in the quotidian building blocks that organize the socio-material world and daily life.

Edited by Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok, and the third book in Amy Trauger and Jennifer Fluri’s Gender, Feminism, and Geography series, the original essays in Gendered Infrastructures respond to and build upon a “new infrastructural turn in critical scholarship”—one that has helped enliven studies of identity across scale. The volume is relevant to geographers, anthropologists, architects, sociologists, urban researchers, and other interdisciplinary scholars interested in the gendered and social dimensions of infrastructure.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Yaffa Truelove and Anu Sabhlok

1. Concretizing Modernity: The Gendered Labor of Cement Infrastructures in Vietnam
Christina Schwenkel

2. Gender Relations and Infrastructural Labors at the Water Kiosks in Lilongwe, Malawi
Cecilia Alda-Vidal, Alison L. Browne, and Maria Rusca

3. Gendered Infrastructures of Discard in Dakar, Senegal
Rosalind Fredericks

4. Placing Oppression (with)in Public Infrastructures: Tracing an Intersectional Relationship between Gender, Violence, and Technology
Anshika Suri

5. Severing the Spatial Leash: Promoting Women’s Right of Mobility through Digital Disruption and a Feminist Ethics of Care
Linda Carroli and Deanna Grant-Smith

6. Trains, Trees, and Terraces: Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism and Resistance in the Refaim Valley, Israel-Palestine
Gabi Kirk

7. Informal Transport Infrastructures: Gendered Experiences of Moving around the Peripheries of Quito, Ecuador
Cristen Dávalos and Julie Gamble

8. “Dirty Phone”: Infrastructures of Violence against Women in Urban Kerala
Nabeela Ahmed and Ayona Datta

9. Infrastructure of Recyclable Waste as Assemblages: From Scavengers on the Ground to Recycling Workers in Collectives
Margarida Queirós, Antonio Cezar Leal, Fernanda Regina Fuzzi, and Mário Vale

10. Conceptualizing Bodies as Urban Infrastructure: Gender, Intimate Infrastructures, and Slow Infrastructural Violence in Urban Nepal and India
Yaffa Truelove and Hanna A. Ruszczyk

11. Looking into Wells: Picturing the Gendered Relations of Water Infrastructure in Southwest Cameroon
Jennifer A. Thompson

Afterword
Anu Sabhlok and Yaffa Truelove

Contributors

Index

Author

Yaffa Truelove is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Program in International Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on urban and feminist political ecologies of water, urban infrastructure, and the governance of Indian cities.

Anu Sabhlok is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali. Her work lies at the intersection of feminist geography, architecture, labor studies, and critical infrastructure studies.

Reviews

“This collection offers insights into the ways in which infrastructural challenges, restrictions, breakdowns, and opportunities intersect with gendered labor, mobility, and the ability to effectively access spaces and live in specific places. It will undoubtedly make important and lasting contributions to the extant literature in feminist geography and geographies of development.”
Jennifer L. Fluri, coauthor of Engendering Development: Capitalism and Inequality in the Global Economy
 

Summary

The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following JayLynn, along with her cousins Zaria and Angel, as they come of age struggling against their mothers’ drug addictions.

JayLynn heads to college intent on gaining distance from her depressed mother, only to learn that her mother’s illness has reached a terrifying peak. She fears the chaos and instability of her extended family will prove too much for her boyfriend, whose idyllic family feels worlds, not miles, apart from her own. When bats invade Zaria’s new home, she is forced to determine how much she is willing to sacrifice to be a good mother. Angel rebels on Derby night, risking her safety to connect with her absent mother and the wild ways that consumed her.

Mama Said separates from stereotypes of Black families, presenting instead the joy, humor, and love that coexist with the trauma of drug abuse within communities. Kristen Gentry’s stories showcase the wide-reaching repercussions of addiction and the ties that forever bind daughters to their mothers, flaws and all.

Contents

Mama Said
A New World
A Satisfying Meal
A Sort of Winning
Origin Story
A Good Education
Grown Folks’ Business
Introduction
To Have and to Hold
Animal Kingdom
In Her Image
Everything You Could Ever Want

Acknowledgments

Author

Kristen Gentry received her MFA from Indiana University. Her award-winning fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Jabberwock Review, and other journals. She is a VONA and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference alumna, as well as a member of the inaugural Poets & Writers publicity incubator cohort for debut authors. Her passion is helping Black women and girls share their stories—the ones they’ve lived and the ones they create. She lives and writes in Louisville, Kentucky. Learn more at kristengentry.com.

Reviews

“A celebration of Black family life that will make you laugh and cry in equal measure.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The collection will reshape what you think about the region and the people that inhabit it.”
—Debutiful

“Surprising and revelatory. Mama Said is funny and smart, with many wonderful images, arresting descriptions, and well-developed characters with rich interior lives. I love this book.”
—Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us

“This book has staying power. Mama Said is a collection of brilliant stories that are of Kentucky, of Louisville, of Black communities throughout the United States. They are rooted in geographic specificity yet expand to far-reaching bounds of culture, family, and belonging. The characters and their struggles and triumphs will vibrate within your heart and mind long after the last pages are turned.”
—Crystal Wilkinson, former poet laureate of Kentucky and author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts

“Mama Said is a tough yet tender glimpse into a complex community in a city full of strife and love. The characters contain a depth not often seen in a collection of stories, and readers are sure to be thinking about their lives and relationships long after finishing the last (tear-jerking!) page.”
—Maggie Henriksen, Carmichael’s Bookstore