2019 Books & Authors
WTAW Press is proud to publish the following books Fall 2019.
The books (e-books, also) are available for purchase in our store.
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Free discussion guides for readers can be downloaded here. Please see this page for ordering information for groups and organizations.
You can download our most recent catalog here.
CHIMERICA: A NOVEL by ANITA FELICELLI
Down-and-out Tamil American trial lawyer Maya Ramesh fights to save a painted lemur come to life, and in settings that range from Oakland, California, to a Malagasy rain forest, becomes a champion for them both. In magical realist tradition Anita Felicelli's satiric novel, CHIMERICA, looks at the inherent absurdities that drive systems of culture, power, and law.
Fans of Marquez, Kelly Link, and Helen Oyeyemi will find CHIMERICA a spirited investigation of the ways in which art is codified and commodified—a contemporary philosophical, non-ideological, novel about art, originality, and American culture.
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“Felicelli’s remarkable CHIMERICA is a coolly surrealist legal thriller—in turns sly, absurd, emotionally vivid, and satirically incisive—that shifts the reader into a world just adjacent to our own.”
—Jonathan Lethem
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“Felicelli blends the matter-of-fact with the mysterious in this utterly unique and compellingly readable debut. CHIMERICA is more than the story of a woman coming into her own power; it’s a keen dive into the worlds of law, visual art, and marriage. You really couldn’t ask for a novel with better ingredients. Did I mention there’s a talking lemur? THERE’S A TALKING LEMUR.”—Kelly Luce
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Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent (Stillhouse Press), which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and other books. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times (Modern Love), Slate, SF Chronicle, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She's a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a Voices of Our Nations (VONA) alum. Her work has placed as a finalist in Glimmer Train contests and received a Puffin Foundation grant. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a triple major in English, Rhetoric, and an Interdisciplinary Field Studies major (art and anthropology). She made a sharp turn away from art and design her last year of college, and attended UC Berkeley School of Law, where she studied human rights, constitutional law, and copyright. She was born in a city in South India and grew up in the Bay Area, where she lives with her spouse and three children.
LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES by OLGA ZILBERBOURG
With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies—of state, parentage, displacement, and identity.
LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg’s stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self—and in ways that are often bewildering—against an uncharted landscape of American culture.
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"Like Water is a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope. Olga Zilberbourg ... writes of Russia and America, parenthood and aging, history and identity. Throughout, she peels back the timelessness from the old verities and offers them newly made, freshly observed, gathered in this collection of wonders."
—Anthony Marra
“The stories in Like Water, to quote a character in one of them, vibrate with life. They may be brief, but don't call them short-shorts or flash or micro anything, these are fully engaged encounters with life and death and birth and motherhood and all that comes in-between.”
—Peter Orner
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of three Russian-language collections of stories, the latest of which was published in Moscow in 2016. Her English-language fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Confrontation, Feminist Studies, Tin House’s The Open Bar, Epiphany, Santa Monica Review, and other print and online publications. Her criticism has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Common, and Electric Literature. Where Does the Sea Flow, a short film based on one of her stories, was a finalist in the Manhattan Short Film Festival. Her work won the 2017 San Francisco’s Litquake Writing Contest and the 2016 Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize. She serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she came of age during her country’s disintegration. She became one of the first in a wave of post-Soviet youth to study abroad and in the United States. A few years later, working in market research in Boston, she took her first creative writing workshop. Currently, she makes her home in San Francisco with her husband and two children.