Eladatl

A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes. "Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster. Written and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company,” this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum. "Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. . . . This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "One of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream."—Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel "Visionary, hilarious, anarchic, this assemblage of breakneck dialog, blisteringly brilliant film criticism, bureaucratic documents, revolutionary chatter, mass transit, and fake dreams of the secret police, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels."—Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha "Hilarious and prophetic and profound, truer than truth, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

In the alternate universe of this glitteringly surreal first novel, the Aztecs rule, having conquered the European invaders. Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness, is visited by visions of a parallel world run by the Europeans, where consumerism reigns supreme. Aztecs armed with automatic weapons, totemic powers and blood sacrifice conquer and colonize 1940s Europe, as ghosts of the world wars emerge to haunt contemporary Los Angeles. Atomik Aztex is a hilarious read. A potent concoction, with influences from graphic novels, along with Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the paranoia of Philip K. Dick and William Burroughs, and an outrageous cyber-Aztlán mix reminiscent of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Sesshu Foster is the author of the critically acclaimed City Terrace Field Manual.

A genre-breaking adventure: narrative prose poems filled with awe, yearning, acerbic wit, and crystalline observations.

"An anthology of fugitive writings by Edgar Allan Poe, with appreciations by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, J.K. Huysmans.

WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

WINNER OF THE WHITING AWARD PEN AMERICA LITERARY FINALIST Recommended by Héctor Tobar as an essential Los Angeles book in the New York Times. Carribean Fragoza's debut collection of stories reside in the domestic surreal, featuring an unusual gathering of Latinx and Chicanx voices from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, and universes beyond. "Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is an accomplished debut with language that has the potential to affect the reader on a visceral level, a rare and significant achievement from a forceful new voice in American literature."—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, New York Times Book Review, and author of Sabrina and Corina Carribean Fragoza's imperfect characters are drawn with a sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma's letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women's wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border. "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You renders the feminine grotesque at its finest."—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean "Eat the Mouth that Feeds You will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in American fiction."—Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries "Fierce and feminist, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is a soul-quaking literary force."—Dontaná McPherson-Joseph, The Foreword, *Starred Review ". . . a work of power and a darkly brilliant talisman that enlarges in necessary ways the feminist, Latinx, and Chicanx canons."—Wendy Ortiz, Alta Magazine "Fragoza's surreal and gothic stories, focused on Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women's voices, are sure to surprise and move readers."—Zoe Ruiz, The Millions "This collection of visceral, often bone-chilling stories centers the liminal world of Latinos in Southern California while fraying reality at its edges. Full of horror and wonder."—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review "Fragoza's debut collection delivers expertly crafted tales of Latinx people trying to make sense of violent, dark realities. Magical realism and gothic horror make for effective stylistic entryways, as Fragoza seamlessly blurs the lines between the corporeal and the abstract."—Publishers Weekly "The magic realism of Eat the Mouth that Feeds You is thoroughly worked into the fabric of the stories themselves . . . a wonderful debut."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound.

This volume examines the concerns - political, literary, and identity-based - of contemporary Asian American literatures in neoliberal times.