Kaya Press – serie

The U.S. debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as "the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy" and by CNN as "the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange." Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

Until his death in 2012 at age 100, legendary filmmaker Kaneto Shindo was a living link to more than 70 years of Japanese cinema history. Screenwriter of more than 200 films and director of more than 40, Shindo earned international praise for his masterpieces Children of Hiroshima and The Naked Island, and for the fantastical proto-horror film, Onibaba. In this volume, Shindo narrates his career, from his beginnings as an art director and fledgling screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, to his collaborations with such luminaries as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa and Kinji Fukasaku, to his breakout into independent filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond. This first-ever English language book on Shindo's work is a stunning introduction to one of film's great overlooked masters. It includes the full screenplay of The Naked Island and a foreword by Benicio del Toro.

Capturing the 1990s independent film scene and art world through a collection of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa along with photographs and other artifacts from his archiveIf Films Could Smell is at once an assemblage of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa (born 1962) from his nearly 30 years as a filmmaker and artist, and a time capsule of the independent film scene and art world of the 1990s as told through artifacts, diary entries, letters, emails, photographs, script notes and assorted bric-a-brac from Bogawa's archives. As with many of Bogawa's films, it's a collage that doesn't try to hide its seams, a jumble of ideas both realized and unrealized, an exploded diagram and a manifesto. The title conveys his interests in personal and cultural memory, and how these intersect with one's identity. Bogawa's work has been variously described as "experimental," "Asian American" and "independent cinema." This volume lays out these labels and dissects them, sometimes humorously. Straddling genres, If Films Could Smell is a document of possibility and provocation.

Named one of 5 Writers Under 35 by National Book Foundation, 2019Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen’s debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or “notes to the self,” in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on “how to live”––or perhaps more urgently “why to live,” a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success.Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Gawker, NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

The first volume in Kaya's series examining the work of a new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinemaCalled “the world's most original action auteur” by the Village Voice, Takeshi Kitano is already legendary in Japan, where he is known both for his inventive films and for his legendarily caustic alter ego, comedian Beat Takeshi. In the United States, his stylishly noir aesthetic has both influenced and been admired by such directors as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino. His emotionally intense yet lyrical films have won him worldwide acclaim and honors, including the Grand Prix for Hanabi [Fireworks] at the Venice Film Festival. Now, the long-awaited Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano offers a collection of essays on the internationally acclaimed film director by Casio Abe. Despite his impact on contemporary cinema, very little critical work on Kitano's films exists in the United States. Abe's book, originally published in Japan, combines a detailed look at Kitano's filmography with an incisive critique of the consumerist culture which Kitano's films play against. It is also purportedly Kitano's favorite book on his own work. This translation of Abe's writings on Kitano has been updated with articles that discuss Kitano's most recent releases, up to and including Dolls (2002), as well as extensive appendices and footnotes. Abe is one of Japan's preeminent cultural critics, and his book gives a rare and insightful look into the workings of one of the largest media cultures in the world. This will be the first book devoted exclusively to Kitano's work to be published in the United States. Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano is the first volume in Kaya's Wicked Radiance series, which examines the work of a new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinema.

America and Other Poems is the first English translation of a single volume by the seminal Japanese Modernist poet, Ayukawa Nobuo. One of Japan's most influential yet overlooked poets, Nobuo was an important voice for peace and probity in the years that followed World War II and the collapse of Japan's rationale for war. This landmark selection spans from 1947 through 1976, and includes work ranging from early writings about the poet's experience on the front line to poems focused on the influence of Western culture on Japanese society. Nobuo's lyrical, complex poetry offers a rare perspective on war from an ordinary Japanese soldier's point of view. It also provides a window into the complex postwar relationship between Western literary culture and the Japanese struggle to make sense of postwar accountability. This award-winning translation also features texts by Shogo Oketani, contextualizing Nobuo's life and work.

Hari Alluri has been described by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as a writer who "carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape." In The Flayed City, he offers an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants in a collection of charged poems that sweep together "an archipelago song" scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual—displacement, family, violent yet delicate masculinity, undervalued yet imperative work—Alluri's lines quiver with the poet's distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with "gravity and blood" where "the smell of ants being born surrounds us" and "city lights form constellations // invented to symbolize war." The Flayed City offers a powerful glimpse into a secondary world whose cities, cultural histories and trajectories are hybrids or "immigrated" versions of this one.

Described by Bob Holman as "Li Po in drag, the voice of New America," Koon Woon exploded onto the poetry scene in the late 1990s. Largely self-taught, and struggling with both mental illness and homelessness, Seattle-based Woon wrote about the back alleys and tenement rooms on the margins of immigrant culture. His first collection, The Truth in Rented Rooms (included in this volume), won a PEN poetry prize and earned praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garrison Keillor. Water Chasing Water is Woon's second collection, and continues his exploration of loneliness and memory with poems and essays that seek out "This light / Without which existence is not detectable."

Illuminated by pop fantasies, Donna Summer disco tracks and teen passion, the fiercely earnest characters in Rolling the R’s come to life against a background of burning dreams and neglect in a small 1970s Hawaiian community. In his daring first novel, R. Zamora Linmark treats the music of the Bee Gees and schoolyard bullying as equally formative experiences in the lives of a group of Filipino fourth-graders living in Kalihi, Honolulu, who call themselves the "Farrah Fawcett Fan Club." The characters’ stories unfold largely in the documentary detritus of their lives—their poems and prayers, book reports and teacher evaluations—all written in carefully observed, pitch-perfect vernacular. Now back in stock, Linmark’s tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin and perspective roll every "are," throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of cultural assimilation. Rolling the R’s goes beyond "coming of age" and "coming out" to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, "stylish, shameless and beautiful." This special twentieth anniversary edition includes a new essay by the author, introducing one of the most original and iconic stories of the Asian diasporic experience and an essential work of fiction in the Asian American literary canon. R. Zamora Linmark (born 1968) is a writer and poet currently based in Honolulu and Manila. He has published three poetry collections, two novels and adapted Rolling the R’s for the stage in 2008.

Glimmering with candor and dead-on humor, this memoir tells the story of the meteoric rise of Japanese American filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (born 1965), from 1980s teenage delinquent in Honolulu to Ivy League slumster to take-no-prisoners movie auteur with a serious attitude problem, detailing Moritsugu's dive into drinking, drugging, narcissism and a fast and polluted lifestyle that might arguably have been the biggest influence on his string of utterly original films. The New York Times describes his work as "funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating"; his first feature was tagged by Rolling Stone as "one of the greatest punk rock movies of all time." The book includes hundreds of never-before-seen color and black-and-white photographs, production stills, journal entries, love and rejection letters, notes and drawings. Film sets constructed of 1,000 pounds of rotting meat; offers from studio moguls shot down in seconds; contracts burned in record company offices: it's all here, the ups and downs of one of the world's most extreme and uncompromising movie directors.

"You're not allowed to have a girlfriend until college, my mother warned. And you'd better get into an Ivy League school!David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend Unless He Gets into an Ivy League College is the first official young adult novel from Ed Lin, author of the acclaimed novels Waylaid and This Is a Bust. Humorous and socially complex, the book tells the story of an Asian American New Jersey high-school student as he navigates multiple social circles as well as parental pressures to get As and conform to cultural norms and expectations. Amid these pressures from outside is the fear he will die alone, whether he gets into Harvard or not.Exploring class tensions (for example, regular school in an upscale, Asian-majority suburb versus weekend Chinese school in working-class Chinatown) and contemporary social neuroses, David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend is an already hotly anticipated book from an author whose debut novel, Waylaid, established him as a pioneering, provocative, welcome new voice in young adult fiction.Ed Lin (born 1969), a journalist by training, is the author of several award-winning books, including: Waylaid, his literary debut; the Robert Chow crime series, set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown (This Is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run and One Red Bastard); and the Taipei Night Market crime series (Ghost Month, Incensed and 99 Ways to Die). Lin is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and his son Walter.

A furious, multiform examination of the devastation wrought by anti-Asian racism in AmericaTruong Tran’s provocative collection of poetry, prose and essays is a stunning rebuttal to the idea of anti-Asian racism as a victimless crime. Written with a compulsion for lucidity that transforms outrage into clarity, Book of the Other resists the luxury of metaphor to write about the experience of being shut out, shut down and othered as a queer, working-class teacher, immigrant and refugee.What emerges from Tran’s sharp-eyed experiments in language and form is an achingly beautiful acknowledgment of the estrangement from self forced upon those seduced by the promise of color-blind acceptance and the rigorous, step by step act of recollection needed to find one's way home to oneself.Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1969. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words and 100 words (coauthored with Damon Potter). He also authored the children’s book Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant to Say Please Pass the Sugar. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Tran lives in San Francisco where he teaches art and poetry.

Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

"Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art." –Yoko OnoIn the 1970s, estranged from the institutions and practices of high art, avant-garde artist and award-winning novelist Genpei Akasegawa (1937–2014) launched an open-ended, participatory project to search the streets of Japan for strange objects which he and his collaborators labeled "hyperart," codifying them with an elaborate system of humorous nomenclature.Along with "modernologists" such as the Japanese urban anthropologist Kon Wajiro and his European contemporary, Walter Benjamin, Akasegawa is part of a lineage of modern wanderers of the cityscape. His work, which has captured the imagination of Japan, reads like a comic forerunner of the somber mixed-media writings of W.G. Sebald, and will appeal to all fans of modern literature, art, artistic/social movements and writing that combines visual images and text in the exploration of urban life.In this revised edition, Matthew Fargo's original US translation of Akasegawa's hilarious, brilliantly conceived exercise in collective observation is accompanied by reflections from noted scholars Jordan Sand and Reiko Tomii, as well as a new essay by Akasegawa scholar William Marotti and a reflection on Akasegawa's legacy as a teacher by writer, artist and composer Masayuki Qusumi, a former student of Akasegawa's.

"[Max Yeh] is a writer on the rampage, but his appetite is for history, for political meaning, for ethical life … He imagines America back to Columbus and forward again, mapping his own brain, and possibly ours…" —E.L. DoctorowMade available again by Kaya Press for the first time in decades, The Beginning of the East is an audacious, high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through the experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus' "aberrations, delusions and fantasies" on the brutality and political posturing of the American present. Having uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. This dazzling tapestry of stories travels east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, sliding between points of view and time periods to demonstrate what can be wrought by the imagination.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).

A sprawling epic of Western civilization where Greek theater, Marxist thought, British imperialism and American football collideIn Ramblings in the West, the third of Max Yeh's book-length "pseudo-fictions," time and space collapse into a continuous, digressive stream where the giants of the past become everyday people. Lying on his couch while his back heals, the unnamed narrator imagines his life as a travel memoir in the mode of Herodotus, Montesquieu or Goldsmith. He does so through the repeated invocation of the long-held Western tradition of using foreign visitors to bridge the East–West divide. These feats of perspectival dexterity make it possible for him to drive Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the Syracuse Airport and listen to Isaac Newton lecture on the laws of motion and chat with Charles Darwin as he tries to understand who and why he is. Elliptical and encyclopedic, Ramblings in the West blends travel memoir and dream journal to show how our lives carry the story of civilization itself.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).

Foster's breakthrough collection of prose poetry is a hymn to the collective memory of Los Angeles that "corrals the mundane and the serious into a single tight space" (Tracy K. Smith, former US Poet Laureate)Described by legendary Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman as "the best since Kerouac and beyond" and by the San Francisco Bay Guardian as "pure California mainlined straight into language that sears the skin off 99 percent of what purports to be literary competence," Sesshu Foster's (born 1957) landmark collection of prose poetry, City Terrace Field Manual, maps the physical and psychological terrain of the predominantly Chicano neighborhood in Los Angeles where he grew up. LA's explosive past becomes its eternal present in this guide to reading the face of a neighborhood—its histories and inhabitants, landmarks and wars. Foster's formally and substantively inventive prose poems describe the multiplicity, double vision and explosive tension that lead from the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans to warfare on the streets of Watts and Koreatown to the frustrated anger of a boy punching out factory windows with his bare fists. This new, expanded edition provides visual maps to accompany Foster's words, and celebrates the impact his book has had by including original writings by Karen Tei Yamashita and others in response to Foster's poetic provocations.

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

More mind-bending speculative fiction by one of South Korea's most provocative science fiction writersFollowing the landmark English-language publication of Everything Good Dies Here, Kaya Press delivers more provocative thought experiments by pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings on internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea. Not Yet Gods explores the universe-shattering effects of teenage anger cross-pollinated with radiation-induced psychic powers, unscrupulous governments and corporate avarice.In the aftermath of a nuclear explosion set off in North Korea, an ordinary South Korean high school classroom becomes ground zero for the discovery of a radical new source of energy: children capable of conducting and amplifying the telepathic and telekinetic powers of those around them. Told as a series of interlinked stories, Djuna’s fractally unfolding thought experiments interrogate the nature of power, disability and illusion in the potential end of history.Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s. They have published nine short story collections, three novels and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

Considered India's first graphic novel, River of Stories is made available in the US for the first time since its original publication in 1997Published with Kulhar Books.In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Sardar Sarovar Dam project in Western India became the focal point of a massive grassroots social movement. People from all over the country converged to voice their opposition to environmental destruction and the forced relocation of Indigenous Adivasi communities. Orijit Sen's account of the Narmada Dam—told in the form of a graphic novel—is drawn from his personal experiences. Weaving together the history of the resistance movement with local accounts and tribal folklore, River of Stories is an inspiring document of environmental activism, as well as an important milestone of Indian comics history. This new edition features a conversation with the artist by author and illustrator Tessa Hulls, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography. Also included is a foreword by Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize–winning author of The God of Small Things.Orijit Sen (born 1963) is a graphic artist, muralist, cartoonist and designer based in Goa, India.

A meditation on homeland, belonging and activism: the inspiring life story of pioneering Korean American academic Elaine H. KimThe story of writer, editor and professor Elaine H. Kim begins in the 1940s with a childhood marked by social isolation. In Primary Sources, Kim's much-anticipated memoir, the trailblazing scholar reflects upon the experiences that shaped her life's remarkable path: growing up as one of the few Korean Americans on the East Coast, going to Korea to teach only to realize that identity functions as both a bridge and a barrier, and becoming the first Asian American woman to gain tenure at UC Berkeley and helping to found the Ethnic Studies Department and the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program there. Throughout, Kim writes with honesty and humor about single motherhood, activism and the radical act of building community across differences. Primary Sources is both a personal journey and a deeply compassionate invitation to collectively rethink belonging and justice in order to imagine a future shaped by us all.Elaine H. Kim (born 1942) is Professor Emerita of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also served as President of the Association for Asian American Studies and on the National Council of the American Studies Association.

A formally experimental and absurdist mock-epic poem that melds speculative fiction and travel writingSomething on the horizon inches toward the drunken villagers of Zonal Beach, but what—or who—could it be? In First Contact, Warren Liu presents a hilarious, polyphonic poem that narrates the agonizingly slow-motion progress of a first contact encounter between coastal natives and shipwrecked would-be colonizers. Liu's wry, humorous poetry uses three distinct voices to highlight the inherent farce of coming up against a world entirely different from one's own. Slipping between tropes of colonial myth-making and alien encounters, Liu animates the strange, slanted rhymes of history with a voracious wit and deft ear. Whether narrating the choral chatter of the bewildered villagers or a mystic's pop-culture-informed oracular visions or the epistolary reminiscences of a lost exile, Liu demonstrates again and again how colliding with a new culture always happens first as farce, then as farce once more.Warren Liu is a professor of English at Scripps College in Claremont, California.

A poetic tribute to the oft-silenced grief induced by gender-based violencePublished with Kulhar Books.At the heart of Ansley Moon's spare, haunting collection of poems, Register the Missing, is a heartbreaking exploration of the often impossible choices faced by mothers and daughters in a world where over 50 million Indian girls have been lost to female infanticide, feticide and gender-based violence. Interspersed with archival documents and photographs, Moon's poems move deftly between the voices of a widow forced to relinquish her daughter, an orphaned child navigating identity and inherited loss and a chorus of unclaimed girls who remind us that "nothing stays buried, not even a daughter." Whether taking on historical tragedy and erasure or adoption or the mundanity of citizenship paperwork and mornings in a new city, Moon's poetry creates a poignant intervention against cultural silence that reminds us of the possibility of finding yourself at the very moment you thought you were lost.Ansley Moon (born 1982) is the author of How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press, 2011). Moon is an adoptee and a cofounder of the Starlings Collective.

Brian Castro’s award-winning novel, The Garden Book, is a meditation on loneliness, addiction and exploitation. Set in the years between the Depression and the Second World War in Australia’s Dandenong Ranges, it follows the emotionally turbulent life of the beautiful Swan Hay (born Shuang He)--her marriage to the passionate yet brutal Darcy Damon, her love affair with the aviator Jasper Zenlin and her rise to literary fame overseas after her poetry is translated into French without her knowledge. Fifty years after her disappearance into institutions and a life of poverty and despair, Norman Shih--a rare-book librarian and "expert in self-effacement"--begins to piece together the life and losses of Swan. Tracking down clues from guesthouse libraries, antiquarian bookshops and Swan’s own haunted writings, Shih fills out a portrait of early twentieth-century Australian lives wracked by modernist impulses of racial prejudice.

Lydia's Funeral Video is a one-woman play written and performed by Sam Chanse, a playwright and performer based in New York and California. In this apocalyptic satire, devout bank clerk Lydia Clark-Lin has 28 days to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, shoot her own funeral video and do some standup comedy. As the camera rolls and Lydia gamely sets about her grim task, what seems like paranoia blossoms into a deeper understanding of herself that is at once comic and heartbreakingly prescient. This publication unites the full theater script of Lydia's Funeral Video with a new counterpoint narrative and stream-of-consciousness illustrations that enhance this dynamic realization of a live theater experience in book form. Also included are notes and an essay about the origins and development of the piece, as well as a special mini-flipbook. Seamlessly weaving in questions of race, gender identity and more existential questions, Lydia's Funeral Video is bold, unpredictable storytelling at its inventive and unsettling best.

Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts of history. Written from a series of video notes taken over a period of ten years, this narrative of a son’s love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are. Ravva’s American Canyon has been described by poet and author Kevin Killian as “a complex reworking of memoir form, using the tools of poetry remelted, as in Vulcan’s forge, to slash away at the ghosts and ghouls of conventional prose usage. The new journalism, Ravva-style, stimulates the nerve endings with its alternately lush and spare renditions of some spectacular settings...” Ravva has given readings and performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts and the Sorbonne.

Mouth, Lisa Chen's debut collection of poetry, gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice--fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room. In language filled with humor, insight, and hallucinatory wit, Chen uses fables, instructions, poems carved in the loneliness of Angel Island barracks, medical reports, classified ads and reality shows to reach out to "a visitor from the country of you/where I didn't speak the language." These are poems to delight in and roll around on your tongue. They are at once a record of and a song for the discarded, overlooked, and unheeded speech that takes place in between the words we manage to speak but that rarely say what we want.

Lament in the Night collects two remarkable novellas by the author Shosun Nagahara, translated from the Japanese for the first time. The title novella, originally published in 1925, follows itinerant day laborer Ishikawa Sazuko as he prowls the back alleys and bathhouses of Los Angeles, looking for a meal, a job or just someone to hold onto. The second novella follows a young mother working her way through bars and nightclubs after being abandoned by her gambling-addicted husband. Written in a deadpan tone that is both evocative and precise, this dazzling exercise in 1920s naturalist noir promises to become a classic of American literature. This first-ever English language publication of Lament in the Night opens up a whole realm of American literature that has been woefully underpublished and unexplored--namely, the literary heritage of non-English-speaking immigrants in America. Nagahara was influenced by many Western writers--especially Knut Hamsun, whose work he translated into Japanese--and his novels combine the gritty sensibility of Los Angeles noir with elements of Japanese traditional storytelling and epistolary techniques.