"Fables & Futures" Reading List

Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by The Guardian

Longlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry. Picked for Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction in Translation of 2020. Named a Book of the Year by NPR, Vox, and The New Statesman. Picked for Loyalty Books’ Holiday List.

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of the much-buzzed-about novel The Mere Wife

"Brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand."
–Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

"The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist translation that radically recontextualizes the tale."
–Barbara VanDenburgh, USA Today

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world—there is a radical new verse translation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements that have never before been translated into English, recontextualizing the binary narrative of monsters and heroes into a tale in which the two categories often entwine, justice is rarely served, and dragons live among us.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. The familiar elements of the epic poem are seen with a novelist’s eye toward gender, genre, and history—Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child, but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation of Beowulf, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation.

New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife.

From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives Gren, short for Grendel, as well as his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

#1 New York Times bestseller Maria Dahvana Headley’s soaring sky fantasy Magonia is now in paperback!

Aza Ray Boyle is drowning in thin air. Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak—to live.

So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of her medication. But Aza doesn't think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name.

Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who's always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. Aza is lost to our world—and found, by another. Magonia.

Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power—but as she navigates her new life, she discovers that war between Magonia and Earth is coming. In Aza's hands lies fate of the whole of humanity—including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?

The stunning sequel to Maria Dahvana Headley’s bestselling, critically acclaimed Magonia tells the story of one girl who must make an impossible choice between two families, two homes—and two versions of herself.

Aza Ray is back on earth. Her boyfriend, Jason, is overjoyed. Her family is healed. She’s living a normal life, or as normal as it can be if you’ve spent the past year dying, waking up on a sky ship, and discovering that your song can change the world.

As in, not normal. Part of Aza still yearns for the clouds, no matter how much she loves the people on the ground.

When Jason’s paranoia over Aza’s safety causes him to make a terrible mistake, Aza finds herself a fugitive in Magonia, tasked with opposing her radical, bloodthirsty, recently escaped mother, Zal Quel, and her singing partner, Dai. She must travel to the edge of the world in search of a legendary weapon, the Flock, in a journey through fire and identity that will transform her forever.

In this stunningly original debut, go beyond the legend of Queen Cleopatra and discover a passion steeped in the bloodlust of vampires…

The year is 30 BC. A messenger delivers word to Queen Cleopatra that her beloved husband, Antony, has died at his own hand. Desperate to save her kingdom, Cleopatra strikes a mortal bargain in exchange for Antony’s soul, transforming her into an immortal—a vampire with superhuman strength and an insatiable hunger for blood.

Leaving a trail of fiery retribution, Cleopatra journeys from the tombs of Egypt to the ancient underworld in order to meet her husband again. But to resurrect him, Cleopatra will need to challenge mythical beings with power beyond comprehension—risking the fate of both this world and the next for a love that will not die…  

The "poignant and hilarious" (Newsday) story of one woman's twelve months of dating anyone—absolutely anyone—who asked her out.

At some point every woman who's single (and not by choice) wonders whether she's not somehow responsible for her predicament. Is she too choosy? Should she have given that guy with the combover and the mother issues a shot? Maybe three full feet isnt too much of a height difference . . .? Maria Dahvana Headley had been there, cherry-picking the men shed dated based on a variety of criteria, and clearly it wasnt getting her anywhere.

The Year of Yes is the hilarious and hopeful account of Headley's quest to find a man she could stand (for longer than a couple of hours). Frustrated by her own ineffective taste, she resolved to leave her love life up to fate, dating anyone who asked her: homeless men, a millionaire, several non-English speakers, a mime, and even two women. And finally, one man whose baggage would have disqualified him in any other year . . . but this was the Year of Yes, when Headley would finally discover what was really important.

A hybrid-genre carnivalesque of trauma and rebirth, Fablesque harnesses the power of old tales to dispel the disenchantments of women and animals in the #MeToo era. Blending fiction and myth, personal essay, prose poetry and verse, and spanning scales from local to celestial, chanelling voices of the voiceless and the mighty, Fablesque speaks to the apocalyptic moment of the present.

Harnessing folktale, fairy tale, and collage, the poems embrace constraint as a starting point for liberating new content and for addressing constructions and intersections of gender, race, power, and time. The collection embraces the great feminist tradition of retelling old tales to imbue them with female subjectivity, speaking to the thoughts, desires, and outrages of contemporary American women.

In this hybrid novella of trauma and survival, Anna Maria Hong re-imagines and extends the tale of Hansel and Gretel, breaking its received patterns of abandonment and abuse to set G. to wander a world racialized and gendered by power dynamics at every turn. Survivor, artist, hero, G.'s decisive action at the Witch's oven becomes the kernel of a new identity, independent and resilient, capable of transforming cruel stories into a cunning, masterful feminist bildungsroman.

Praise for H & G:
"In H & G, Anna Maria Hong brilliantly re-visions the 'Hansel and Gretel' fairytale for the post-post-modern 21st century. Or explodes it, producing a text brimming with biting wit, feminist insight, psychological incisiveness, and a hybrid narrative daring that turns genre on its head. G., a 'Korean American fraülein' who is 'sick of the high road' is willing to tear the whole fantasy edifice of our illusions down as she journeys toward deeper truths, and thankfully, she and H. take us along for their sometimes-frightening, always enlightening rides."
–John Keene

Winner of the 2017 CSU Poetry Center First Book Competition, selected by Suzanne Buffam

Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, 2019

Praise for Age of Glass:

““The engine of alchemy / was rage. The small man's history of winning / was long but irrelevant,” remarks Anna Maria Hong midway through Age of Glass. This caustic suite of ludic sonnets upcycles old stories—myths, fairytales, fables, clichés—into bright, prismatic spells for the end of days. “Slant reuses / the cant of the box,” the canny speaker incants. “A palindrome pulse / recalibrates luck.” Open this book to any page and you'll be met with lines so timely, so tonic, and so lexically dexterous you'll feel enchanted, however fleetingly, to cohabit this age.”
—Suzanne Buffam

“Like the 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose sonnets echo and upstage a notably male and European literary tradition, Anna Maria Hong demonstrates in her own labyrinthine sonnets 'the monstrous breadth' of her poetic abilities, offering in them radical interpretations of myths and fairy tales that speak to our time and dazzle us with their wit and linguistic virtuosity. No one is writing like Anna Maria Hong in this Age of Glass.”
–Rosa Alcalá

“Anna Maria Hong's poems—in this case a book of astoundingly innovative sonnets—confirm to us the credo we store in our hearts: that with intelligence, musicality and a love of language poetry can make any subject compelling and revelatory. But it takes a poet with a rare talent like Anna Maria Hong to make us see and joyously declaim what we believe. Age of Glass is a book I've been hoping to read for a long time, from a poet whose work I’ve admired for a longer time."
–Khaled Mattawa

 

USA Today Bestseller

A Debutiful “Best Debuts of the Year”

“Rich and wise, humming with confidence.” -New York Times Book Review

“A knockout. Eleven knockouts. One KO for every story.”-Elizabeth McCracken

“Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is a frontrunner for Book of the Year.” -Debutiful

From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.

A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.