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Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river.
The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker.
Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.
Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul.
Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and The Emperor of Gladness. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the American Book Award, he used to work as a fast-food server, which inspired The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.
The Emperor of Gladness
A Novel
By Ocean Vuong
Category: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Press
May 13, 2025
Language: English
416 pages
ISBN-10:059383187X
ISBN-13:978-0593831878
Hardcover
$30.00
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Fierce, frank, witty poetry about cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, and end-of-life
Written in the last three years of her life, Andrea Werblin Reid‘s To See Yourself As You Vanish is a collection of unsparingly brave and insightful poems about her experience with ovarian cancer. Frank, fierce, and witty, her work does not hide behind cliches, platitudes, or tropes, but addresses the hopes, frustrations, fears, and longings that would be easy to leave unspoken.
She offers friendship and understanding to those who share her experiences and powerful insights for caregivers and those who work in oncology, hospice, research, and psychology. Of these poems, Reid herself said: “I have struggled with the implications of war metaphors and the perspectives they perpetuate since receiving my own cancer diagnosis.
People living with cancer and other chronic illnesses are not taking up arms, they are living as long and as humanely as possible: not to win or lose, simply to live.” The scenes in these poems are rich and spare, magical and sane, awful and special: “one bird comes to the end of his branch looking like a clever moustache. /one bird comes to the end of his song like an ordinary bird.”
ANDREA WERBLIN REID (1965–2022) is the author of Lullaby for One Fist (Wesleyan, 2001) and Sunday with the Sound Turned Off (Lost Horse, 2014). Her poem “Language is the Virus” was named a finalist for the prestigious Perkoff Prize from the Missouri Review and her work has been published in the LA Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Brooklyn Rail, Pank, Smartish Pace, and more.
THE COLOR OF WAITING
is hypnotic pink, under whose spell
you’ve been living for years
like a small fossilized creature.
or magenta, a bruise
that evolves,
(. . .)
then sharp as the serrated smiles
doctors have been honing for years.
waiting masquerades as the inflatable idea
of hope, waterproofed for safety, maybe,
devoid of vision, punctured that easily
To See Yourself as You Vanish
poetry by
Andrea Werblin Reid
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 09-09-2025 !
88 Pages
Hardcover
ISBN 9780819502070
$26.95
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A brilliant, singular collection of essays that looks to music, fantasy, and pop culture—from Beyoncé to Game of Thrones—to excavate and reimagine what has been disappeared by migration and colonialism.
Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality.
In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.
The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.
Magical/Realism is a wise, tender, and essential collection that carves a path toward a new way of remembering and telling our stories—broadening our understanding of what memoir and cultural criticism can be.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of Beast Meridian, which received a Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and the Texas Institute of Letters John A. Robertson Award. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles with her son.
Publisher : Tiny Reparations Books (May 14, 2024)
Language : English
Hardcover : 384 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593187148
ISBN-13 : 978-0593187142
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 6.26 x 1.3 x 9.31 inches
$29.00
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One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two.
An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant.
She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere.
He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son.
Who is he to her, and who is she to him?
In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.
Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Audition: A Novel
by Katie Kitamura (Author)
Language: English
Paperback
April 8, 2025
Publisher: Riverhead Books
EAN: 9798217045839
21,95 euro
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Eins und Alles
Im Grenzenlosen sich zu finden,
Wird gern der Einzelne verschwinden,
Da löst sich aller Überdruß;
Statt heißem Wünschen, wildem Wollen,
Statt läst’gem Fordern, strengem Sollen
Sich aufzugeben ist Genuß.
Weltseele, komm’ uns zu durchdringen!
Dann mit dem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen
Wird unsrer Kräfte Hochberuf.
Teilnehmend führen gute Geister,
Gelinde leitend, höchste Meister,
Zu dem, der alles schafft und schuf.
Und umzuschaffen das Geschaffne,
Damit sich’s nicht zum Starren waffne,
Wirkt ewiges lebend’ges Tun.
Und was nicht war, nun will es werden
Zu reinen Sonnen, farbigen Erden,
In keinem Falle darf es ruhn.
Es soll sich regen, schaffend handeln,
Erst sich gestalten, dann verwandeln;
Nur scheinbar steht’s Momente still.
Das Ewige regt sich fort in allen:
Denn alles muß in Nichts zerfallen,
Wenn es im Sein beharren will.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Eins und Alles
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The daring and deeply sexy poems in Lonely Women Make Good Lovers are bold with the embodied, earthy, and startlingly sensual.
These unforgettable love poems—queer, complicated, and almost always compromised—engage a poetics of humility, leaning into the painful tendernesses of unbridgeable distance. As Kuipers writes, love is a question “defined not by what we / cannot know of the world but what we cannot know of ourselves.” These poems write into that intricate webbing between us, holding space for an “I” that is permeable, that can be touched and changed by those we make our lives with.
In this book, astonishingly intimate poems of marriage collide with the fetishization of freedom and the terror of desire. At times valiant and at others self-excoriating, they are flush with the hard-won knowledge of the difficulties and joys of living in relation.
Keetje Kuipers’ newest collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The American Poetry Review, and POETRY, and have been honored by publication in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Kuipers lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is editor of Poetry Northwest.
Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
Poems
By Keetje Kuipers
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
April 8, 2025
Language: English
Paperback : 96 pages
ISBN-10: 1960145452
ISBN-13: 978-1960145451
Regular price €17,95
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∗The photo book Streetdreamers from David van Reen (1969-2015) is published posthumously as a tribute to ‘his family’: the streetdreamers in Ethiopia.
David was a sportsman. Working as a trainer in Kenya and Ethiopia, he encountered the people living on the streets on a daily basis: the elderly, children, the disabled, the blind and many more. He decided to do something about it.
With the help of his parents and friends, he founded the Lalibela Foundation in the town of Lalibela, known for its rock-hewn churches. At the same time, he began processing what he saw and experienced by writing, photographing and painting. Several of his books were published between 2008 and 2015, starting with his impressive book of photographs Het land van de verbrande gezichten (The Land of the Burned Faces) and two novels about life in Africa, which he had come to know well.
In the novel Engelen der wrake (The Avenging Angel), David confronts the reader with the tragic living conditions of people in the Kenyan slums, a harsh, ruthless world plagued by vicious gangs, where residents draw hope from friendship and the trust they have in each other. Anbessa’s dochter (Anbessa’s Daughter), a vivid narrative about people on the lowest rung of society in Ethiopia, is based on the everyday realities of the main characters, who despite everything try to make something beautiful out of their lives.
The portraits and landscapes in Het land van de verbrande gezichten reflect his vision of the people of Ethiopia, their culture, their life within family clans, and their religion. In Streetdreamers, he portrays life on the streets: there are many thousands of homeless people in capital city, Addis Ababa.
Streetdreamers
by David van Reen
Publisher: VanSpijk ArtBooks
First edition 2024
Language: English
Hardcover
192 pages
ISBN-10 :9062169651
ISBN-13 :978-9062169658
24.7 x 2.3 x 29.5 cm
€29,50
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Philine
Singet nicht in Trauertönen
Von der Einsamkeit der Nacht!
Nein, sie ist, o holde Schönen,
Zur Geselligkeit gemacht.
Wie das Weib dem Mann gegeben
Als die schönste Hälfte war,
Ist die Nacht das halbe Leben,
Und die schönste Hälfte zwar.
Könnt ihr euch des Tages freuen,
Der nur Freuden unterbricht?
Er ist gut, sich zu zerstreuen;
Zu was anderm taugt er nicht.
Aber wenn in nächt′ger Stunde
Süßer Lampe Dämmrung fließt,
Und vom Mund zum nahen Munde
Scherz und Liebe sich ergießt;
Wenn der rasche lose Knabe,
Der sonst wild und feurig eilt,
Oft bei einer kleinen Gabe
Unter leichten Spielen weilt;
Wenn die Nachtigall Verliebten
Liebevoll ein Liedchen singt,
Das Gefangnen und Betrübten
Nur wie Ach und Wehe klingt:
Mit wie leichtem Herzensregen
Horchet ihr der Glocke nicht,
Die mit zwölf bedächt′gen Schlägen
Ruh′ und Sicherheit verspricht!
Darum an dem langen Tage
Merke dir es, liebe Brust:
Jeder Tag hat seine Plage,
Und die Nacht hat ihre Lust.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Philine
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Totentanz
Der Türmer, der schaut zu Mitten der Nacht
Hinab auf die Gräber in Lage;
Der Mond, der hat alles ins Helle gebracht;
Der Kirchhof, er liegt wie am Tage.
Da regt sich ein Grab und ein anderes dann:
Sie kommen hervor, ein Weib da, ein Mann,
In weißen und schleppenden Hemden.
Das reckt nun, es will sich ergetzen sogleich,
Die Knöchel zur Runde, zum Kranze,
So arm und so jung, und so alt und so reich;
Doch hindern die Schleppen am Tanze.
Und weil hier die Scham nun nicht weiter gebeut,
Sie schütteln sich alle, da liegen zerstreut
Die Hemdlein über den Hügeln.
Nun hebt sich der Schenkel, nun wackelt das Bein,
Gebärden da gibt es vertrackte;
Dann klippert’s und klappert’s mitunter hinein,
Als schlüg’ man die Hölzlein zum Takte.
Das kommt nun dem Türmer so lächerlich vor;
Da raunt ihm der Schalk, der Versucher, ins Ohr:
Geh! hole dir einen der Laken.
Getan wie gedacht! und er flüchtet sich schnell
Nun hinter geheiligte Türen.
Der Mond, und noch immer er scheinet so hell
Zum Tanz, den sie schauderlich führen.
Doch endlich verlieret sich dieser und der,
Schleicht eins nach dem andern gekleidet einher,
Und, husch, ist es unter dem Rasen.
Nur einer, der trippelt und stolpert zuletzt
Und tappet und grapst an den Grüften;
Doch hat kein Geselle so schwer ihn verletzt,
Er wittert das Tuch in den Lüften.
Er rüttelt die Turmtür, sie schlägt ihn zurück,
Geziert und gesegnet, dem Türmer zum Glück,
Sie blinkt von metallenen Kreuzen.
Das Hemd muß er haben, da rastet er nicht,
Da gilt auch kein langes Besinnen,
Den gotischen Zierat ergreift nun der Wicht
Und klettert von Zinne zu Zinnen.
Nun ist’s um den armen, den Türmer getan!
Es ruckt sich von Schnörkel zu Schnörkel hinan,
Langbeinigen Spinnen vergleichbar.
Der Türmer erbleichet, der Türmer erbebt,
Gern gäb er ihn wieder, den Laken.
Da häkelt – jetzt hat er am längsten gelebt –
Den Zipfel ein eiserner Zacken.
Schon trübet der Mond sich verschwindenden Scheins,
Die Glocke, sie donnert ein mächtiges Eins,
Und unten zerschellt das Gerippe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Totentanz
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Stedelijk Museum Schiedam de tentoonstelling: Adya en Otto. Pioniers binnen de avant-garde, een tentoonstelling over het bijzondere leven en werk van het kunstenaarsechtpaar Otto van Rees (1884-1957) en Adya van Rees-Dutilh (1876-1959).
Ze zijn in hun vroege jaren, als pril gezin, omringd door bekende kunstenaars als Arp, Mondriaan en Picasso. In deze tijd leveren zij een unieke bijdrage aan beeldbepalende stromingen zoals dada en kubisme en het ontstaan van abstracte kunst.
Adya en Otto waren al tijdens hun leven bekend in toonaangevende kringen van kenners en kunstenaars. Toch is hun werk nog relatief onbekend bij het grote publiek. Als wegbereiders van de 20ste-Eeuwse moderne kunst krijgen deze kunstenaars in Stedelijk Museum Schiedam alsnog een eerbetoon. Met ruim zeventig werken uit hun pionierende jaren is voor het eerst sinds bijna vijftig jaar een groot overzicht van Adya en Otto samen in een tentoonstelling te zien. Met speciale aandacht voor Adya, die als vrouwelijke kunstenaar in de door mannen gedomineerde kunstgeschiedenis van de twintigste eeuw niet de waardering heeft gekregen die ze verdient.
Adya Dutilh (1876 – 1959) en Otto van Rees (1884 – 1957) ontmoeten elkaar rond 1902 in Blaricum waar Otto’s vader een landbouwkolonie heeft gesticht.
Adya is acht jaar ouder dan Otto en heeft gedegen teken- en schilderlessen gevolgd in Brussel. Otto maakt zijn HBS-opleiding niet af, maar krijgt wel schilderlessen.
Op aanraden van kunstenaar Jan Toorop vertrekt Otto in 1904 naar Parijs, al snel gevolgd door Adya. Daar wonen ze, te midden van internationale avant-garde kunstenaars, in het ateliergebouw Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre en later op diverse adressen in kunstenaarswijk Montparnasse.
Adya en Otto*
*Pioniers binnen de avant-garde
28 september 2024 t/m 9 maart 2025
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Hoogstraat 112
3111 HL Schiedam
+31 (0)10 246 3666
info@stedelijkmuseumschiedam.nl
Catalogus
Otto en Adya van Rees – Pioniers binnen de avant-garde
Door Irène Lesparre
In een bundeling van artistiek talent en onstuitbare energie zorgde de avant-garde in het begin van de vorige eeuw voor grote omwentelingen in de kunsten. Otto van Rees en Adya van Rees-Dutilh behoorden tot de kern van deze jonge pioniers in Parijs.
Dit boek verduidelijkt hun rol aan de hand van talrijke artikelen uit die periode. Otto en Adya wisten hun stijl steeds te vernieuwen en nieuwe technieken te omarmen, van de eerste kubistische experimenten tot abstractie, van collage tot de vorming van DaDa in Zürich.
Hun werk veroorzaakte regelmatig opschudding maar gaf mede-kunstenaars juist inspiratie om gebaande paden te verlaten. Otto en Adya waren zowel partners in de kunsten alsook elkaars levensgezellen. Hun ruimhartig karakter maakte dat vele collega’s zich bij hen thuis voelden en zij een kern werden in een internationaal netwerk.
Taal Nederlands
Pagina’s 120
Formaat 23 x 28 cm
Bindwijze Paperback
ISBN 9789462625884
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Neue Liebe, neues Leben
Herz, mein Herz, was soll das geben?
Was bedränget dich so sehr?
Welch ein fremdes, neues Leben !
Ich erkenne dich nicht mehr.
Weg ist alles was du liebtest,
Weg, warum du dich betrübtest,
Weg dein Fleiß und deine Ruh –
Ach, wie kamst du nur dazu !
Fesselt dich die Jugendblüte,
Diese liebliche Gestalt,
Dieser Blick voll Treu und Güte
Mit unendlicher Gewalt?
Will ich rasch mich ihr entziehen,
Mich ermannen, ihr entfliehen,
Führet mich im Augenblick,
Ach, mein Weg zu ihr zurück.
Und an diesem Zauberfädchen,
Das sich nicht zerreißen lässt,
Hält das liebe lose Mädchen
Mich so wider Willen fest;
Muss in ihrem Zauberkreise
Leben nun auf ihre Weise.
Die Veränderung, ach, wie groß!
Liebe! Liebe! Laß mich los!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Neue Liebe, neues Leben
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Women Poet’s Prize and Nan Shepherd Prize winner: Nina Mingya Powles publishes a much-anticipated second collection in July 2025
– In the Hollow of the Wave examines Orientalism, art and artmaking in a time of ecological crisis in distinctive poems that are elemental and tactile, shaped by memory and landscapes of the body.
Powles’ debut poetry collection, Magnolia, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Ondaatje Prize.
Nina Mingya Powles (born 1993) is a New Zealand poet and essayist. Born in Wellington, Powles has spent time living in Shanghai and London.
Her poetry and essay collections are inspired by nature and her Chinese – Malaysian heritage, and she has received a number of notable awards including the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018.
In the Hollow of the Wave (Poems)
by Nina Mingya Powles
Nine Arches Press
ISBN: 9781916760226
Publication date: 24th July 2025
Format: Paperback
72 pp
ISBN: 9781916760226
Price: £11.99
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