“Hypnotically written and impressively weird, My Morningless Mornings is an intense and harrowing meditation on Stefany Anne Golberg’s youthful insomnia. More than that, though, it’s a moving mini-portrait of the bond between a father and his daughter. I really loved this book.”― Tom Bissell, author of God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories
From the publisher: In a ranch house in a Vegas suburb, Golberg’s peculiar brand of insomnia lives alongside an ailing father, a professor on permanent leave from the local university. Her mother has moved out, her older brother has gone to college, and she is alone with the night, resisting the fundamental unit by which we measure our lives: the next day itself.
Startling, poignant, and harrowing, Golberg’s voice is informed by an eclectic range of interests, from Bruegel to Jung, Loren Eiseley to Marina Tsvetaeva. Equal parts coming-of-age memoir, art history, and philosophical inquiry, My Morningless Mornings is a young person’s reckoning with consciousness.
Stefany Anne Golberg is a writer and multi-media artist who co-founded Flux Factory, an arts collective in Brooklyn. Co-authored with Morgan Meis, she published Dead People (Zero Books, 2016), a series of eulogies about cultural icons, garnering praise from Adam Gopnik, Tom Bissell, and Keith Gessen, among others. She has written for The Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, and the New England Review, and was Critic in Residence at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She now lives in Detroit where she is creating a museum in her house called The Huckleberry Explorers Club. Golberg has a degree in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and an MFA in music/sound art from Bard College. Her essay “Marat Sade in Las Vegas” was published in NER Digital, and “The Hour of the Wolf” first appeared in NER 38.3.
My Morningless Mornings can be purchased from Unnamed Press or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.
“This book is a must read if you were ever a teenage girl, played a team sport, contemplated witchcraft, and/or were alive in the 80s. If like me, all of these things apply, watch out: this book is going to get you.” —Emily Temple, Lit Hub Senior Editor
From the publisher: Set in the coastal town of Danvers, Massachusetts, where the accusations began that led to the 1692 witch trials, We Ride Upon Sticks follows the 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team, who will do anything to make it to the state finals—even if it means tapping into some devilishly dark powers. In chapters dense with 1980s iconography—from Heathers to “big hair”—Quan Barry expertly weaves together the individual and collective progress of this enchanted team as they storm their way through an unforgettable season.
Helmed by good-girl captain Abby Putnam (a descendant of the infamous Salem accuser Ann Putnam) and her co-captain Jen Fiorenza (whose bleached blond “Claw” sees and knows all), the Falcons prove to be wily, original, and bold, flaunting society’s stale notions of femininity in order to find their glorious true selves through the crucible of team sport and, more importantly, friendship.
Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and the New Yorker. Barry’s poem, “Lion,” appeared in NER 27.2.
We Ride Upon Sticks can be purchased from Penguin Random House or, if your local store is closed for the time being, through Vermont Book Shop and others at Bookshop.org.
“A pivotal book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named ‘among the modern masters'”—Washington Post
From the publisher: Ledger’s pages hold the most important and masterly work yet by Jane Hirshfield, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. From the already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments. They call us to deepened dimensions of thought, feeling, and action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. Hirshfield’s signature alloy of fact and imagination, clarity and mystery, inquiry, observation, and embodied emotion has created a book of indispensable poems, tuned toward issues of consequence to all who share this world’s current and future fate.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, and has edited and co-translated four books presenting the work of world poets from the past. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Hirshfield’s work has appeared in several issues of New England Review including NER 21.2 and NER 25.4.
Ledger can be purchased from Penguin Random House or through your local bookstore at Bookshop.org.