Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In a new series for early readers, Mousse receives an unexpected visit--and forms an unlikely friendship.

Mousse loves his solitary life by the sea. In the mornings, he strolls on the beach to take in the fresh air. He swims in the cool water. And he waits for the tide to bring him the day's small treasures. Today, however, a visitor comes ashore in his living room, a truly unexpected visitor. A creature named Barnacle...

In this delightfully illustrated picture book for early readers, Claire Lebourg depicts the unexpected pleasures in helping others and finding friendship in unexpected places.

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

2022 International Booker Prize, Finalist
2022 National Book Award, Finalist
2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist
New York Times Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Bookforum

Selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bj rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. The three volumes of Jon Fosse's Septology--The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name--collected in for the first time in this limited hardcover edition, are a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience--incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.

A subtle and intimate accounting of a daughter's final days with her mother, set amid the rush of Tokyo's red-light district.

Drawing on her own experiences as a hostess and adult film actor, Gifted--Suzumi Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English--offers a nuanced, frank, and intimate portrayal of the lives of a mother and daughter getting by (or not) in an industry rarely depicted authentically in literary fiction.

In the last days of her mother's life, a young woman living in Tokyo's red-light district is thrust into a split existence. By day, she negotiates her new role as caregiver of an abusive parent. By night, she drifts home from the hospital, goes out with other sex-workers, thinks about quitting smoking, and numbly remembers Eri, a friend who died the summer before. Her sensitivity to the details of her surroundings grounds an otherwise unstable world, one where each interaction requires a subtle negotiation of economic and sexual power, and proximity rarely means intimacy or connection. Gifted was nominated for the 167th Akutagawa Prize in 2022.

Markham delivers a probing meditation on grief, memory, and memorialization... Plaintive and powerful, this is hard to forget.--Publishers Weekly

A speculative essay on language in the face of climate catastrophe: how we memorialize what has been lost and what soon will be, pushing public imagination into generative realms.

I am in need of a word, writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost--a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative--the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a ghost forest of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park--in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create a psychic space for feeling while spurring action and agitating for change?

Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

A deeply felt chronicle into the wilderness of the first forty days of new motherhood.

In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Ayşegül Savaş becomes fascinated by the mythology around the first forty days after giving birth, and the invisible beings that are said to surround the mother. In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out. A friend lends a book that suggests forty days of rest and fortifying broths and avoiding wind and cold.

In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, forty days are seen as a period of trial and transformation. They are often journeys into the wilderness and its vast and unruly territories. When the baby arrives, Savaş charts her own path into the wilderness of new motherhood--a space of contradiction, of chaos and care, mothering and being mothered. What is the trial of the postpartum crossing? writes Savaş. Where will mother and child emerge once they have left the wild?

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A New Yorker Best Book of 2023

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, the Beckett of the twenty-first century (Le Monde).

From one of the preeminent poets of the Arabic-speaking world, a brilliant work of creative nonfiction retracing the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine.

A subtle and universal exploration of identity.--Aida Alami, The New York Times

Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. For the next three decades, it's as if Enayat never existed at all.

Years later, when celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal stumbles upon Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, she embarks on a journey of reflection and rediscovery that leads her ever closer to the world and work of Enayat al-Zayyat.

In this luminous biographical detective story, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife though interviews with family members and friend, even tracking down the apartments, schools, and sanatoriums where Enayat spent her days. As Mersal maps two simultaneous psychogeographies--from the glamor of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past--a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms. With Traces of Enayat, Iman Mersal embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject.

A writer finds solitude and salvation tracing the lives and deaths of three of her literary lights in a haunted and lyrical travelogue from NBCC Award-winner Tezer Özlü.

An unnamed writer embarks on an obsessive journey through Europe, drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols--Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka--putting her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs.

Untethered and spirit-like herself, she moves among European cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and Belgrade. At times there are companions--lovers and others--but she remains steadfast in her solitude. As she is uncannily drawn to Pavese's suicide, her journey transmutes passion for literature into desire for meaning.

Occupying a liminal space between past and present, life and death, Journey to the Edge of Life is a deeply inquisitive, atmospheric, and rebellious novel that shows what such a journey can mean for a woman who has spent her life within the confines established by others.

For the first time in English, a forgotten masterpiece from an enigmatic master of Argentine fantastic literature.

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English readers for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient.

The collection's central novella follows Ramón Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland. After he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body, Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other novices subject to the same undisclosed project--all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school's dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one...

An overlooked master of Argentine fantastic literature, Ángel Bonomini garnered praise among peers and contemporaries like Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, before slipping mysteriously into obscurity. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, Bonomini was forty-three years old in 1972 when he published The Novices of Lerna, the first of four books of short stories he released before his death at age sixty-four.

WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE TRANSLATION PRIZE

A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance.--Kirkus Reviews

The Bell JarGood Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey's most beloved writers.

The narrator of Tezer Özlü's novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü's status as one of Turkey's most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.

2023 International Booker Prize, Longlist

New York Times Editors' Choice

A real-time study in crippling self-consciousness, the fragility of normalcy, and the reality of violence.--The New York Times

Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family's farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife's fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet's quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar
car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing
a nightmarish chain of events.

Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier's The Birthday Party is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

New York Times Editors' Choice
Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize

Septology named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

Fosse's fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.--The Guardian

Fosse's portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bj rgvin, a couple hours' drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bj rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.

This 10-year anniversary edition celebrates a classic of Ugandan
literature.

First published in Kenya in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim, Kintu is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Divided into six sections, the novel begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda Kingdom. Along the way, he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. In an ambitious tale of a clan and a nation, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu's descendants as they seek to break from the burden of their shared past and reconcile the inheritance of tradition and the modern world that is their future.

An irreverent semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.

--We have read Proust but we're not sure

--Who has really read Proust

--Besides a few Proustians

--We are no Proustians

--Despite not being anti-Proustian...

Speak / Stop comprises two interrelated texts: a chorus of unidentified voices followed by a work of literary criticism that only Noémi Lefebvre could write--a semiotic fever dream that weighs meaning and meaning-making against idea and ideology.

Abstracted, irreverent, and full of biting satire, Lefebvre picks apart hypocrisies in our lives and the language of our lives, skewering our literary pieties before delving headfirst into the paradox of self-criticism. Working against conventional notions of genre and form, Speak / Stop is a madhouse of earthworm sentences interrogating concerns of class and taste, ease, and inclusion/exclusion that are the foundations of Lefebvre's work.

The essential lecture delivered by the 2023 Nobel Laureate in Literature, published for the first time in a collectible edition.

If there's any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening, says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity, and existential uncertainty of the human experience. It is only in the silence that you can hear God's voice, he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. Maybe.

Boston Globe Best Books of 2018

This short but profoundly moving novel by the young Brazilian writer is one of the finest explorations of love you will find anywhere this year.--John Freeman, The Boston Globe

After a falling out, Cora and Julia reunite for a long-planned road trip through Brazil. As they drive from town to town, the complications of their friendship resurface. By the end of the trip, they must decide what the future holds, in a queer, coming-of-age debut novel that has been celebrated in Brazil.

An unmitigated delight.--The New York Times

What exactly is a piece of art? What is it meant to capture? And how do we find the courage to believe in our work?

It's the week of her gallery opening and none of Paty's paintings are ready. She asks her friends to pose in her studio, and the outcome is... just dreadful. After seeing the way Paty has portrayed them, one after the other, they leave in a huff. Paty wonders whether she should cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, Michou, the gallery owner, forbids it. And Paty is in for a surprise on opening day...

What exactly is a piece of art? What is it meant to capture? How do we find the courage to believe in our work? Claire Lebourg's watercolor illustrations convey all the worry and self-doubt that comes with any creative practice and show us that maybe the secret lies in believing in yourself.

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
New York Times Editors' Choice
Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize
2022 International Booker Prize, Finalist
2022 National Book Award, Finalist
2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist
New York Times Editors' Choice
Septology named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

Fosse's fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.--The Guardian

Fosse's portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bj rgvin, a couple hours' drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bj rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.

With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and--it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century--different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.--WYATT MASON, HARPERS

Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bj rgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers--two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life. Written in melodious and hypnotic slow prose, A New Name is the final installment of Jon Fosse's Septology, a major work of Scandinavian fiction (Hari Kunzru) and an exquisite metaphysical novel about love, art, God, friendship, and the passage of time.

A book-length essay on beauty and revolution as seen through the work of Jean-Luc Godard.

As Joanna Walsh watches the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she considers beauty and desire in life and art. There's a resistance, in Godard's women, writes Walsh, that is at the heart of his work (and theirs). She is captivated by the Paris of his films and the often porous border between the city presented on screen and the one she inhabited herself. With cool precision, and in language that shines with aphoristic wit, Walsh has crafted an exquisitely intimate portrait of the way attention to works of art becomes attention to changes in ourselves. Taut and gem-like, My Life as a Godard Movie is a probing meditation by one of our most observant writers.

My Life as a Godard Movie is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.