Read globally with the UI International Writing Program (IWP), a unique conduit for the world’s literatures, connecting well-established writers from around the globe, bringing international literature into classrooms, introducing American writers to other cultures through reading tours, and serving as a clearinghouse for literary news and a wealth of archival and pedagogical materials. The Residency, which runs from runs from late August to mid-November, is designed for established and emerging creative writers — poets, fiction writers, dramatists, and non-fiction writers. Join us for a series of writers panels over the noon hour on Fridays in September and October: Library Calendar of IWP Events
The bread the devil knead
Allen-Agostini, Lisa, author.
FICTION Allen-Agostini, Lisa
Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she's covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home. Bringing us her truth in an arresting, unsparing Trinidadian voice, Alethea unravels memories repressed since childhood and begins to understand the person she has become. Her next step is to decide the woman she wants to be.
Cyber mage : a novel
Hossain, Saad Z., author.
SCIENCE FICTION Hossain Saad
"Speculative fiction novel set in post-apocalyptic Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2089, after residents have discovered how to survive with biological nanotech. Cyber Mage, the teenager moonlighting as a hacker, crosses paths with mercenary Djibrel and together they seek out the fate of the Djinn, a magical super race of genies"--
Maybe Esther : a family story
Petrowskaja, Katja, 1970- author.
BIOGRAPHY Petrowskaja, Katja
"An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman's family across twentieth-century Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents. Her idea blossomed into this striking and highly original work of narrative nonfiction, an account of her search for meaning within the stories of her ancestors. In a series of short meditations, Petrowskaja delves into family legends, introducing a remarkable cast of characters: Judas Stern, her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomatic attaché in 1932 and was sentenced to death; her grandfather Semyon, who went underground with a new name during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, forever splitting their branch of the family from the rest; her grandmother Rosa, who ran an orphanage in the Urals for deaf-mute Jewish children; her Ukrainian grandfather Vasily, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation forty-one years later--and settled back into the family as if he'd never been gone; and her great-grandmother, whose name may have been Esther, who alone remained in Kiev and was killed by the Nazis. How do you talk about what you can't know, how do you bring the past to life? To answer this complex question, Petrowskaja visits the scenes of these events, reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century and bringing to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity."
The body by the shore
Khair, Tabish, author.
FICTION Khair Tabish
"Harris Maloub, a killer with an erased official past, now in his fifties, is visited by someone who could not be alive and given an assignment. In Aarhus, Denmark, Jens Erik, police officer on pre-retirement leave, somehow cannot forget the body of a Black man recovered from the sea some years ago. On an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea, turned into a resort for the very rich, Michelle, a young Caribbean woman, realizes that the man she has followed to this job is not what he claims to be. And neither is the rig, where a secret laboratory bares to her a face that is neither human nor animal. Behind all this, there lurks the ghost of a seminar in 2007: most of the participants of that seminar are dead or untraceable. Why was their obscure research on plants and fungi and microbes so important? What is the secret that killed them? What is the weapon that powerful syndicates are trying to obtain - or develop? Narrated from the perspective of the post-pandemic world around 2030, but moving back in time to cover all of the 21st century, and even bits and pieces from the 20th and the 19th, The Body by the Shore is a novel of suspense and speculation about the complexity of life and intricacy of the earth. It is also a novel about reason and emotion, love and despair, greed and hope, human beings and microbes. When the narrative strands come together, a world of great terror and beauty is revealed to the reader"--
Apricots of Donbas : poems
I︠A︡kymchuk, Li︠u︡bov, author.
891.7914 /Yakimchuk
"Apricots of Donbas is a bilingual collection by award-winning contemporary Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk. Born and raised in a small coal-mining town in Ukraine's industrial east, Yakimchuk lost her family home in 2014 when the region was occupied by Russian-backed militants and her parents and sister were forced to flee as refugees. Reflecting her complex emotional experiences, Yakimchuk's poetry is versatile, ranging from sumptuous verses about the urgency of erotic desire in a war-torn city to imitations of childlike babbling about the tools and toys of military combat. Playfulness in the face of catastrophe is a distinctive feature of Yakimchuk's voice, evoking the legacy of the Ukrainian Futurists of the 1920s. The poems' artfulness go hand in hand with their authenticity, offering intimate glimpses into the story of a woman affected by a life-altering situation beyond her control"--Amazon.
Moving a stone : selected poems by Yam Gong = Ban shi : Yinjiang shi xuan
Yinjiang, 1949- author.
895.1152 /Yinjiang
"Yam Gong is a leading Hong Kong poet who has worked as a laborer since adolescence and produced many of his poems during his work breaks. An outsider poet, he explores the synthesis of everyday life and philosophical inquiry. Using shifting tonal registers, he refashions borrowed language, including English song lyrics, Cantonese wordplay, Chinese folk stories and poems, news reports, prayers, and slang. This bilingual volume is the first book-length collection of Yam Gong's poems in English, drawing from his most important work over the past forty years. Moving a Stone: Selected Poems of Yam Gong is the fourth title in Zephyr's Hong Kong Atlas series, the only series in the world to showcase Hong Kong poetry in English." --
Home home
Allen-Agostini, Lisa, author.
YOUNG ADULT FICTION Allen-Agostini, Lisa
After being hospitalized for depression, fourteen-year-old Kayla is sent from her home in Trinidad to live with her lesbian aunt in Canada. Although lonely at first, Kayla soon discovers new friends and a new sense of hope and belonging in a family that accepts her as she is, demonstrates unconditional love, and welcomes diversity.
Kundo wakes up
Hossain, Saad Z., author.
FICTION Hossain Saad
Hundreds of miles away from the techno-utopia of Kathmandu, the all-powerful, all-seeing AI known as Karma has gone silent, leaving the dying city of Chittagong--along with all its remaining residents--to continue its inexorable fall into the sea. Kundo, once a famous artist with the Karma points to prove it, goes searching for his missing wife, only to uncover more inexplicable disappearances. And so Kundo and a group of motley companions embark on a tumultuous journey through an overwhelming maze made up of Chittagong's neighborhoods, the hidden backrooms of video game parlors, and the depths of cyberspace, culminating in the realm of the djinn themselves, in search of love, redemption, and a good meal.
Hijabistan : stories
Javeri, Sabyn, author.
FICTION / Javeri, Sabyn
A young kleptomaniac infuses thrill into her suffocating life by using her abaya to steal lipsticks and flash men. An office worker feels empowered through sex, shunning her inhibitions but not her hijab ... until she realizes that the real veil is drawn across her desires and not her body. A British-Asian Muslim girl finds herself drawn to the jihad in Syria only to realize the real fight is inside her. A young Pakistani bride in the West asserts her identity through the hijab in her new and unfamiliar surroundings, leading to unexpected consequences. The hijab constricts as it liberates. Not just a piece of garment, it is a worldview, an emblem of the assertion of a Muslim woman's identity, and equally a symbol of oppression. Set in Pakistan and the UK, this unusual and provocative collection of short stories explores the lives of women crushed under the weight of the all-encompassing veil and those who feel sheltered by it.
Riambel
Hein, Priya N., author.
FICTION Hein, Priya
Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family. Just across the road from the slums where she grew up, she encounters a world that is starkly different from her own - yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her. In Riambel, Priya Hein invites us to protest, to rail against longstanding structures of class and ethnicity. She shows us a world of natural enchantment contrasted with violence and the abuse of power. This seemingly simple tale of servitude, seduction and abandonment blisters with a fierce sense of injustice.
Besiege me
Wong, Nicholas, 1979- author.
821.92 /Wong
A new collection six years after Nicholas Wong won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, BESIEGE ME opens with a timely mocking tone that confronts the tension between China and Hong Kong. Poems in the book speak queerly of urban existences crushed by political and economic powers --"What cities & bodies deny a sometime-crisis, / not knowing they're a series of which?" Behind the portrayals of the speaker, his parents, his home city, and domestic migrant workers there, the collection boldly outlines the vulnerability of entrapment and its masochistic pleasures. BESIEGE ME seeks for a redefinition of transcultural poetics with its linguistic playfulness. --from Amazon
Hot Maroc : a novel
ʻAdnān, Yāsīn author.
ON ORDER BOOK
"After becoming enamored with the internet and the thrill of anonymity he finds there, Rahhal Laâouina opens the Atlas Cubs Cyber Café, where his patrons include politicians, journalists, and hackers. However, Rahhal soon finds himself mired in the dark side of the online world-one of corruption, scandal, and deception. Adnan presents a narrative of contemporary Morocco-and the city of Marrakech-with an infectious blend of humor, satire, and biting social and political commentary"--
Tal vez monstruos : fragmentos de [Incognita flora Cuscatlanica]
Salamanca, Elena, 1982- author.
ON ORDER BOOK
Two excerpts from the book-length poem Incognita flora cuscatlanica (winner of the xxvi Premio Juegos florales de Sensuntepeque in 2021).
Djinn city : a novel
Hossain, Saad Z., author.
SCIENCE FICTION Hossain Saad
Indelbed is a lonely kid living in a crumbling mansion in the super dense, super chaotic third world capital Of Bangladesh. His father, Dr. Kaikobad, is the black sheep of their clan, the once illustrious Khan Rahman family. A drunken loutish widower, he refuses to allow Indelbed go to school, and the only thing Indelbed knows about his mother is the official cause of her early demise: "Death by Indelbed." But When Dr. Kaikobad falls into a supernatural coma, Indelbed and his older cousin, the wise-cracking slacker Rais, learn that Indelbed's dad was in fact a magician--and a trusted emissary to the Djinn (or genie) world. And the Djinns, as it turns out, are displeased. A "hunt" has been announced, and ten year-old Indelbed is the prey. Still reeling from the fact that genies actually exist, Indelbed finds himself on the run. Soon, the boys are at the center of a great Diinn controversy, one tied to the continuing fallout from an ancient war, with ramifications for the future of life as we know it.
Namaste Trump and other stories
Khair, Tabish, author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJgmTcpJpPD7fycQbP9Rrq
FICTION Khair Tabish
"The short story "Namaste Trump" starts in a deceptive domestic setting, where a servant from the hinterlands is patronized and exploited by an upwardly mobile urban family. But as the nation celebrates Trump's visit and copes with the pandemic, it ends up becoming a prophecy of endless haunting. This sets the agenda for a series of stories that delve into fracturing or broken lives in small-town India over the past fifty years. In the novella-length "Night of Happiness," pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms; bothers no one; and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide. What will he discover: madness or something worse? In a series of three linked stories, "The Corridor," "The Ubiquity of Riots" and "Elopement," Khair traces, through the eyes of an adolescent, the tensions of living as a liberal Muslim in India in the 1970s and 1980s, tensions that isolate families, break friendships, and point to the violence to come. The narrator of these stories, now a busy professional, returns in the third person in another story, "Olden Friends are Golden," about belonging and exclusion on WhatsApp. Then there is "Scam," a flippantly narrated story about a crime that can only be comprehended as a scam perpetuated by the victim, and in "Shadow of a Story" violence returns to a village family in an unimaginable shape. "The Thing with Feathers" is perhaps about hope, but it is hope beyond despair, hope perhaps gone mad: or, is all hope mad now? Finally, "The Last Installment" narrates two farmers, a father and a son, in a village of North India, caught in a corporate vice: the breathless sentences of the story making the reader sense the desperation of the central character as he finally fights to breathe, to live. By turns poetic, chilling, and heartbreaking, ranging from understated realism to gothic terror, this is a book of stories about precarious lives in a world without tolerance"--
Invisible Kitties
Yoyo, Yu
ON ORDER BOOK
In this whimsical and inventive debut—perfect for fans of The Guest Cat and Calvino’s Invisible Cities—a young couple’s daily life is disrupted by their newly adopted cat, who soon initiates them into the wondrous world of felines.
Nobody killed her
Javeri, Sabyn, author.
FICTION Javeri, Sabyn
The nation sinks deep into mourning as news of former Prime Minister Rani Shah's assassination arrives. Intelligence agencies, opposition leaders, the army top brass, her closest relatives - all seem to be shifting in their chairs even as special investigative teams gear up to file a report. Conspiracy theories abound for there were many who stood to gain if she pulled out of the imminent elections. The needle of suspicion points most immediately to Madam Shah's close confidante Nazneen Khan, who was seen sitting right beside her in the convoy and, oddly, escaped the bomb blast unscathed. Sabyn Javeri's tale of intense friendship between two ambitious women unfolds in a country steeped in fanaticism and patriarchy. Set against a backdrop of intrigue and political machinations, this is a novel about love, loyalty, obsession and deception. Nobody Killed Her is dark noir meets pacy courtroom drama. An electrifying debut you will rave about to everyone you meet.
Landsmoder
Salamanca, Elena, 1982- author. https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PCjxkbVvmTpkP8wFrXtWfVP
ON ORDER BOOK
"Landsmoder, by the Salvadoran poet, historian, and performance artist Elena Salamanca, is a searing, and sometimes grotesque, exploration of the intersections between nationalism, dogma, patriarchy, and violence. Originally read aloud from the oldest standing monument in San Salvador’s centro histórico, the performance poems in Landsmoder retool the laudatory pomp of patriotic ceremony to protest the weaponization of national myth as a mask for erasure, cruelty, and neglect at the hands of the state. This unflinching collection, whose title comes from a Norwegian word that Salamanca translates as zmadre de la patriay — or zmother of the nation/homeland/fatherlandy— is a work of feminist grief, rage, and irony populated with churning wombs, bloodied flags, and rattleboned she-wolves. Appearing now in a bilingual edition nearly a decade after it was first performed, Landsmoder remains an urgent subversion, loud as ever, both on and off the page"--Publisher's website.
Just another Jiihadi Jane
Khair, Tabish, 1966- aut
RECEIVED
Via internet komen twee Engelse meisjes in aanraking met de jihad, maar eenmaal in Syrië blijkt het alles behalve een heroïsche strijd.
The gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
Hossain, Saad Z., author.
SCIENCE FICTION Hossain Saad
"When the djinn king Melek Ahmar wakes up after millennia of imprisoned slumber, the world is vastly different from what he remembers. Arrogant and bombastic, he comes down the mountain expecting an easy conquest: the wealthy, spectacular city-state of Kathmandu, ruled by the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant Al Karma. To his surprise, he finds that Kathmandu is a cut-price paradise, where citizens want for nothing and even the dregs of society are distinclty unwilling to revolt. Everyone seems happy, except for the old Gurkha soldier Bhan Gurung. Knife saint, recidivist, and mass murderer, he is an exile from Kathmandu, pursuing a forty-year-old vendetta that leads to the very heart of Karma. Pushed and prodded by Gurung, Melek Ahmar finds himself in ever deeper conflicts until they finally face off against Karma and her forces. In the upheaval that follows, old crimes come to light and the city itself may be forced to change forever."--
Crevasse
Wong, Nicholas, 1979- author.
ON ORDER BOOK
'Crevasse, Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. Crevasse collects poems that seek to uncover the seam connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Written in English, Wong's second language after Cantonese, these meticulously wrought poems achieve a careful de-familiarization of language - its reliance on sound and sense and the painstaking, word-by-word accrual of meaning - to both enact and exemplify the irreducible persistence of the body through illness, dislocated desires, and colonization. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language - a decision that frees him to strip down, interrogate, and ultimately reorient the fragmented complexities of the multiple marked communities he inhabits: queer, Asian, Hong Kong native, poet, reader, lover. The results are a stunning array of poems, both lyric and experimental, which seek to lay bare the gap between perfect familiarity and inevitable distance - "The layered self/ on a plate,/ slain by silver-/ware."--
Speaking in code
Modirwa, Phodiso, author.
896.3 /Modirwa
Phodiso Modirwa is a writer and poet from Botswana. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in 20.35 Africa, The weight of years: an Afro anthology of creative nonfiction, PRAXIS magazine, Jalada 08: Bodies, Kalahari review, Ake review, the Rising phoenix review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Botswana President's Award for Contemporary Poetry and recently completed a residency at the Gaborone Club's Art Residency Centre.