Etruscan Press – förlag

Diane Thiel’s The White Horse: A Colombian Journey takes us on a magically real journey into the Pacific coast rain forests of Colombia. Equal parts travel narrative, ecological essay, historical account, and memoir, this book allows us to experience a reality stranger than fiction.

In Bruce Bond’s seventh book, we see a sustained exploration of mortality and its embodiment in the consolations of beauty, most notably in music.

H L Hix’s poetry collections have not been merely collections. Each fulfils a vision that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts: each poem contributes to a sequence, each sequence talks to another. For readers already acquainted with Hix’s ambitions, then, the subtitle “Obsessionals” (instead of “Selected Poems”) will need no explanation: from collections that don’t just collect, what sense would it make for a selection just to select?Hix’s poems were already at work rewriting and recontextualizing the language of others, language from sources as various as fragments of Pythagoras, apocryphal gospels, and speeches of George W. Bush. In First Fire, Then Birds, Hix keeps at the task, recontextualizing his own poems, creating a revision (seeing anew) and recomposition (putting together afresh) of an already distinctive body of work.

This collection, from one of America’s foremost African-American poets, is crisply comic, disalarmingly frank, and aurally bold. It threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood. Along the way it immerses the reader in palpable moments —the importance of remembering, the complexity of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness.

In this captivating family saga, narrator Isidore Mirsky finds his close-knit family and community suddenly coming apart. Facing the illness of family members and the loss of homes in a recession-plagued urban town, he also contends with an overwhelming new desire – his feelings for his wife's sister. The Burning House finds its narrator at his most vulnerable and explores what it means to be a good man amidst chaos.

No Hurry is a book of poems for the ageing in body but youthful in spirit, for those interested in continuing to ask most meaningful questions as they head “downhill”: What does it mean to be alive? What shall we make of this journey from birth to death? How can we find meaning and joy amid our mortality and suffering?

An American expatriate hopes to quell his grief for a long-lost son in the stillness of his photographs of the Dodecanese Islands. But soon friendship and then love for a woman wounded in her own family-born grief propels him toward life again, where stillness is set into motion and identity might be recovered, against odds, in a foreign place.

In a memoir that Lance Olsen calls “fascinating, horrifying, unfalteringly honest”, award-winning writer Renée D’Aoust draws from her experiences as a modern dancer in New York City during the nineties. Trained at the prestigious Martha Graham Center, D’Aoust intertwines accounts of her own and other dancers’ lives with essays on modern dance history. Her luminous prose spotlights this passionate, often brutal world. Scarred, strained, and tough, bearing witness to the discipline demanded by the art form, Body of a Dancer provides a powerful, acidly comic record of what it is to love, and eventually leave, a life centred on dance.

The mysterious death of a high-profile defence lawyer propels his daughter into an investigation of the shady deals and characters that led to his disbarment. This searing detective noir memoir paints a vivid portrait of a Greek American family caught up in scandal-obsessed, drug-addicted California in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

The world in Sara Pritchard’s book is a known world and yet a strange place, with a cast of homeless characters who wander in and out of the stories of the collection, all set in the same university town. The linked stories take place during the time when gender discrimination in the American workplace was blatant, and when classified ads were labelled “male” or “female” accordingly.

Set simultaneously in the farm country of Wisconsin and a small mining town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado during the nineteenth century, this new novel by Peter Grandbois follows the lives of three brothers as each strives to re-create himself despite the forces that work to determine his identity. Though told from the point-of-view of many characters, the novel revolves around Killian, the oldest of the three, as he attempts to recapture a childhood as ephemeral as a dream.While Killian’s brother Henry strives to make the town prosperous and his brother Eli prays to maintain the town’s spiritual centre, it becomes clear as the novel progresses that the centre will not hold. Violence, lust, and greed tear at the fabric of the town until the only possibility for healing arrives in the form of a snowfall that lasts for three months, burying the town. It is here events take a surreal turn as individual identity collapses.Nahoonkara, an Ute Indian word that means, “land of the rising blue”, offers a place outside our preconceived notions of reality and identity, a place where we are free to re-imagine ourselves.

An Archaeology of Yearning explores a father’s effort to understand a family landscape altered by autism.  Ultimately, however, the book is not about autism; it is about the central role of storytelling in sustaining human connections and the power of shared desires in embracing difference.

A humorous and heartrending portrait of expatriate life, The Greatest Jewish American Lover in Hungarian History draws upon the hazards and confusions that occur when the Old World meets the New. In venues as diverse as Israel, Hungary, Paris, Cambridge, and even Texas, the stories portray life in an increasingly connected and globalised world. Michael Blumenthal displays the erotic zest of Philip Roth and the grim humanism of Isaak Babel.

In The Arsonist's Song Has Nothing to Do with Fire, Vivian Foster connects with an arsonist and a radical plastic surgeon whose mission is to build human wings. Allison Titus is the author of a book of poems, Sum of Every Lost Ship. This is her first novel.

Surrendering Oz is a memoir in essays that charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl. From her early job as a proofreader at The Guinness Book of World Records through a series of dominating and liberating friendships and secret connections, the author takes charge of her life as a Texas professor, writer and wise student of her own soul.Reader’s Digest says reading Surrendering Oz “is like having a conversation with a bracingly honest but fundamentally kind friend. In 15 pitch-perfect essays, she chronicles her hard-earned rejection of the cultural fairytales of womanhood as she comes fully into possession of her life”.

This is a book of journeys, but it is not a guidebook. In twelve essays, Cannot Stay delves into why we leave our front porch in the first place. It speaks to the experience of travel, to what it means to shake loose of your identity and stuff all you need in a worn daypack. Cannot Stay bears witness to how travel reawakens us to the world by revealing the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.

Crave is a coming-of-age memoir that chronicles a young girl’s journey through abuse and impoverishment. The effusive narration descends into the depths of personal and sexual degradation, perpetual hunger for food, safety and survival. While moving through gritty exposés of poverty, abuse, and starvation, Crave renders a continuing search for sustenance that simply will not die.Laurie Jean Cannady is most recognisable through her voice. Lyrical and august, yet strangely intimate, her lucid memory for the texture of daily existence weaves the reader into the fabric of the story. We discover that the most slender threads bind the strongest.It is no surprise this memoir is a narrative about a victim who becomes a survivor. Cannady is assertive, motivational, and unafraid to reach her target audience: women, African-Americans, high-school students, college students, survivors of physical and sexual abuse, veterans, people raised by single parents, and folks who are living in or have lived through impoverishment.

This is a book of journeys, but it is not a guidebook. In twelve essays, Cannot Stay delves into why we leave our front porch in the first place. It speaks to the experience of travel, to what it means to shake loose of your identity and stuff all you need in a worn daypack. Cannot Stay bears witness to how travel reawakens us to the world by revealing the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange.

Crave is a coming-of-age memoir that chronicles a young girl’s journey through abuse and impoverishment. The effusive narration descends into the depths of personal and sexual degradation, perpetual hunger for food, safety and survival. While moving through gritty exposés of poverty, abuse, and starvation, Crave renders a continuing search for sustenance that simply will not die.Laurie Jean Cannady is most recognisable through her voice. Lyrical and august, yet strangely intimate, her lucid memory for the texture of daily existence weaves the reader into the fabric of the story. We discover that the most slender threads bind the strongest.It is no surprise this memoir is a narrative about a victim who becomes a survivor. Cannady is assertive, motivational, and unafraid to reach her target audience: women, African-Americans, high-school students, college students, survivors of physical and sexual abuse, veterans, people raised by single parents, and folks who are living in or have lived through impoverishment.

Following her big hit, American Amnesiac, Raptosh’s Human Directional zigzags across consciousness, searing through old patterns of thought and offering new directions for the mind, heart, and world. Raptosh points the way to what Montaigne called “unlearning how to be a slave”. With the deadly precision of the fey, Human Directional reveals the heartbreak and absurdity of our world by exploring – and often exploding – its most sacred memes.

The Candle is a record, unlike any other in literature, of an American poet's staring into the central atrocities of the twentieth century, of his struggle against soul-sickness as he attempts, over almost fifty years, by way of despised and barbaric poetry (in Theodor Adorno's terms), to find ways to realise (make real), to understand, and to remember.

One Turn Around The Sun is a panorama of poems that attempt to define the twilight during which a person becomes caretaker of parents and begins to grind against that old saying, “Life is too short”. The book also studies the intricacies of being a self, a particular personality shaped by forces seen and unseen, both knowable and not. At times, the various voices might be considered characters that agree and sustain one perspective. In other cases, contending sensibilities imply an underlying argument. This is especially true of the book within the book, which is entitled “The Hilt”.Several questions drive this collection, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a liveable world. This is a book intended to bolster an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation.

All the Difference is a captivating account of the author’s transformation from a visibly disabled young woman to someone who could, abruptly, “pass” for able-bodied. In prose that is searing and humorous Patricia Horvath details her experiences with bracing and spinal fusion, as she considers the literature of physical transformation and how folk and fairy tales shape our attitudes towards the disabled.

Will Dowd takes us on a whimsical journey through one year of New England weather in this engaging collection of essays. As unpredictable as its subject, Areas of Fog combines wit and poetry with humour and erudition. A fun, breezy, and discursive read, it is an intellectual game that exposes the artificiality of genres.

It is late 1948 and days before his wife is to give birth for the first time, Ghassan is approached by two talking jackals threatening that, if he doesn’t paint the signs of the newly named villages and towns, his wife will give birth to a goat. Thus begins the exile to Gaza of Ghassan and his goat.In the mode of Borges, Calvino and Coetzee, In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees presents linked mytho-poetic tales delving beneath the long Palestinian diaspora; the history of Gaza is told as never before: through the eyes of a night guardian of a talking goat; a carrier pigeon that befriends a young boy who sells photos of martyrs; a refugee who eats books and then recites them word for word; a Palestinian father who sneaks animals into Gaza through a labyrinth of tunnels; a talking sheep who is caged in the Gaza Zoo.These mystical voices echo in the mind of an American stranger as he witnesses the beauty and horror of this ancient, suffering land. In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees is a disquieting allegory of the clash between the powerful and the silenced.

The world of Wattle & Daub is inhabited by mysterious and peculiar creatures. A woman who fears the living thing in her apartment walls. An office-based streaker with an axe to grind. Automatons that finally recognise their creator. A disgraced crusader. A terminally ill man resorting to hypnotism to quit smoking. The couple who conceive an alarm clock. A dying brain unspooling receding memories of a funfair.With ear-dizzying force, the stories in this debut collection meld and stretch into truly new directions. Every page is mined with humour, sympathy, and blistering language that mark Brian Coughlan as a unique fabricator of short tales.

What if music could bring about a revolution? What power might reside in such a musical work, and to what madness would its listeners be driven? A haunting tale of love, loss and obsession, Sixteen can also be read as a fascinating literary thriller revolving around the mystery of music.

Museum of Stones is a magnificent and bracing trek through motherhood. In a series of well-placed stones of urgent prose poetry, it reveals the fates in store for this newborn boy: wrists “no wider than a straw” and sternum sporting a tiny tower of gauze, hospital monitors aglow in their wide range of numbers and, later, “neatly folded sheets of paper crammed with lists of [the boy’s] numerical codes”. The book illumines the mutable states of the mother: the means by which she must carve herself, with “no distortions or duplications”, from what precious daily clay is left.

A wild ride on the madcap streets of Guatemala City. A twilight walk through old Havana with a Cuban mailman. A canoe trip in search of a lost grave in the Everglades. These are some of the experiences Stephen Benz describes in this insightful and evocative collection of personal essays.