Celebrate the First Four Titles in the Calico Series!
Our fall fundraiser is on! Now through October 31, donate to support the Calico Series, contemporary world writing, and emerging authors and translators. Your gift makes future Calico collections possible.
Back in the before times (or late 2019), we announced the launch of a new series we decided to call Calico. In that first announcement we shared that the Calico Series would be dedicated to capturing vanguard works of translated literature—curated around a particular theme, region, language, historical moment, or style—in vibrant, collectible editions.
Series Editor Sarah Coolidge shared the inspiration behind Calico in that introductory post: “Calico collections explore aspects of the present moment without the usual limitations of book publishing: genre, form, style, or a single author. We asked ourselves: What would we like to read that’s not being published? The result is Calico. We hope you enjoy it too.”
We set out to upend expectations and give readers a glimpse of the incredible range of work from around the world. Each volume is a reminder of what literature can be and what literature can do. And the series shines a light on the artistry of translators, including emerging translators who are honing their craft.
We hope you’ve been enjoying the series! Now that there’s a complete set of four Calico editions, it seems like the perfect time to pull together highlights and reviews in one place for easier reading. Plus, we’ve included links to virtual launch events from the past year in case you missed them.
Upcoming Calico titles will feature contemporary Russian poets, works of literature that include visual elements, Franco-Caribbean writing, translations from Kiswahili, and more! All of this is only possible with the support of our donors, and we hope you’ll consider a gift to our fall fundraising appeal.
On to the highlights!
That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction
Released in March 2020, this was the perfect collection for the pandemic. Seven stories from Hong Kong and mainland China illustrate just how difficult it can be to discern reality from absurdity, comedy from horror.
Booklist called it “compelling and provocative”, Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review and named it a Book of the Week(opens in a new tab), describing it as “by turns cryptic and revealing, phantasmagorical and straightforward, these tales balance reality and fantasy on the edge of a knife.” That We May Live also featured Yan Ge’s “Flourishing Beasts”, translated by Jeremy Tiang, included in her novel Strange Beasts of China(opens in a new tab) (July 2021).
Home: New Arabic Poems
The second Calico collection explores the intimate world of everyday life, its agonies and delights. The bilingual volume shares contemporary poetry from Egypt, Palestine, Tunisia, Iraq, and across the Arabic-speaking world—voices sorely underrepresented in the U.S.
The Paris Review called Home “unbelievably exciting” and made it a Staff Pick(opens in a new tab) for September 2020. An excerpt appeared in Literary Hub(opens in a new tab) and it was a Book Riot Great Fall 2020 Books in Translation(opens in a new tab) pick. Editor Sarah Coolidge was interviewed by ArabLit(opens in a new tab) and Executive Director & Publisher Michael Holtmann talked to the Three Percent blog(opens in a new tab). In case you missed it, we celebrated the book’s launch at a virtual event(opens in a new tab) with contributing translators Robyn Creswell, Hodna Nuernberg, and Rawad Wehbe.
Elemental: Earth Stories
Our third Calico title speaks of climate catastrophe, geological time, and mythology; a global gathering of engaged, innovative eco-lit. Elemental features fiction and reportage from eight authors working in eight different languages.
Elemental made it onto Ms. Magazine‘s “Reads for the Rest of Us”(opens in a new tab) list, which gushed, “I love this series.” BuzzFeed(opens in a new tab) reviewed the book for Earth Day and called it “a must-read collection.” We featured an author roundtable on our blog with Tamar Weiss-Gabbay, Farkondeh Aghaei, and Erika Kobayashi. And we partnered with Point Reyes Books on a virtual conversation(opens in a new tab) with contributors Jessica Cohen, Allison Charette, and Brian Bergstrom.
Cuíer: Queer Brazil
Published in September 2021, Cuíer brings together Brazil’s legendary and pioneering queer writers together in English translation for the first time and against the backdrop of Bolsonaro’s emboldened far-right regime. The bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography features thirteen writers spanning four decades.
Publisher’s Weekly(opens in a new tab) described the book “as expansive and full of life as the country itself”; MacArthur “genius” and American Book Award winner John Keene called Cuíer “nothing less than divine!” Caio Fernando Abreu’s “Three Letters For Beyond the Walls”(opens in a new tab) (tr. Ed Moreno) is excerpted in The Paris Review and Marcio Junqueira’s poem “saturday”(opens in a new tab), translated by Johnny Lorenz, appears in Literary Hub. And we co-presented a virtual book launch with Books are Magic with contributors Bruna Dantas Lobato, Johnny Lorenz, and Natalia Affonso (link coming soon).
If you enjoy the Calico Series, please consider donating to our fall fundraising campaign! You’ll make future collections possible. Plus you’ll be supporting emerging translators, women writers, and writers and translators of color.
