We are incredibly excited to announce that Kaya Press will be having our biggest season of books EVER in Spring 2017. Starting at the end of February, we’ll be releasing NINE NEW TITLES, SIX OF WHICH are ready for pre-order now. We wanted to send a special message out to our community, our fans, our supporters — those who understand the importance of telling stories and making art in these hard times.

Please support us and cutting edge Asian diasporic literature by pre-ordering some of our forthcoming books through our website today! You’ll receive the books early, with special Kaya Press gifts included in your bundle. Check out the list of books below, and thank you for your support.

ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY by QM Zhang |

Pub Date Feb. 28, 2017, Pre-Order Available by February 6th.

Part memoir, novel, and historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Mixing images and text in the manner of W.G. Sebald, Zhang blurs the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, memory and imagination, and the result is a literary page-turner of one woman racing against time to uncover and reimagine her family’s origin story. “ACCOMPLICE TO MEMORY is a stunning achievement, an exquisitely rendered map to the mysterious territory of history, memory and the imagination.” – Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

 

THE FLAYED CITY by Hari Alluri

Pub Date March 8th, Pre-Order Available by February 13th

In this beautiful poetry collection, The Flayed City, Alluri gives an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants, imagining the souls that reside in “broom-filled nights”, “skyscrapers for buoys”, and under an “aluminum rising sun”. The charged poems in The Flayed City sweep together “an archipelago song” scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. “Hari Alluri is Michaux for our time. Which is to say: he is the poet who is able to find myth in our days of sorrow and displacement, when so many lose homes and identities, Hari Alluri offers a new music. When cities are destroyed by fire, Hari Alluri offers lyric fire that heals the heart, that lets the imagination save us. – Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa 

THE SECRET ROOM by Kazim Ali

Pub Date March 1st, Pre-Order Available by February 6th

In Kazim Ali’s wildly inventive novel The Secret Room, written as musical score for a string quartet, he asks: How does one create a life of meaning in the face of loneliness and alienation from one’s own family, culture, or even sense of self? During the space of one single day, the lives of four people converge and diverge in ways they themselves may not even measure. “This is a text that suggests not to worry about how to read it. Rather, it extends an invitation to allow the text to happen with us (and/or for us to happen with the text), and this is a Revolutionary Hermeneutics: to open to the experiences of pain and awe.”- Selah Saterstrom, author of Slab and Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics

STOLEN ORANGES by Max Yeh

Pub Date May 23rd, Pre-Order Available May 1

A Chinese American historian discovers six anonymous documents in Spanish and Chinese in places ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico City and constructs a hitherto unknown correspondence between the Chinese Ming Emperor Wanli and Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. As he did in his acclaimed previous novel, The Beginning of the East, Yeh continues to remap literary conventions. Layering documentary evidence, conflicting translations, and cultural contexts, Yeh sends ripples through the idea of historical fiction in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Described as “a writer on a rampage, with an appetite for history,” by E.L. Doctorow, Yeh’s Stolen Oranges reimagines the relationships of the past and the present.

SO MANY OLYMPIC EXERTIONS by Anelise Chen

Pub Date May 23rd, Pre-Order Available May 1

Blending elements of self-help, memoir, and sports writing, So Many Olympic Exertions opens with graduate student Athena Chen hearing news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide. She is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through a fascinating collection of anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing (ie., bloody) world of sports, the novel questions the validity and usefulness of our current narratives of success by focusing attention on seemingly mundane, unexpected, or “failed” moments. “With its passionate and penetrating empathy, So Many Olympic Exertions is a book that will pierce you with feeling and leave you eager to read what she creates next.”— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

 

THE GARDEN BOOK by Brian Castro

Pub Date May 23rd, Pre-Order Available May 1

Brian Castro’s award-winning novel, The Garden Book, is 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. “Castro’s work is all the more notable for its intelligence, humour and daring. There are many fine writers in Australia, but few who are prepared to wrestle so intensely with the limits of the expressible.” — James Ley, Sydney Morning Herald