[Available for purchase now on this site.  Also available through our distributor, Itasca Books, our preferred US outlet Powell's Bookstore, our preferred UK bookstore Blackwell's and also available, we are told in France.]

Announcing publication of Golden Gate and Other Stories by the justly celebrated Clarence Major.  As Luis Alberto Urrea says, “Clarence Major is the voice of our country singing sweet and bitter and loud.”

The book is a gathering of thirteen unpublished stories of aspiration, thriving and authentic lives set in California’s Bay Area. A few examples: A frustrated married woman searching for happiness online and at conferences. A reporter from San Francisco goes to Rome to interview the widow of a world-famous deceased American novelist. A young woman goes on a date with a young man just to teach him a lesson. In a San Francisco boarding house, a man is the bane of everyone’s existence. Two children are disappointed when their mother marries while they are away visiting their father. A dilettante throws parties everybody loves. A communist from France becomes paranoid when the man she is dating might be spying on her.

CLARENCE MAJOR’s two previous collections of short stories are Fun & Games and Chicago Heat; his novels include Dirty Bird Blues (a Penguin Classic), Such Was the Season, a Literary Guild selection, My Amputations, winner of the Western States Book Award; Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals. Major won a National Book Award Bronze Medal and many other awards. He was elected to The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century American Literature at the University of California at Davis.

We’re happy to publish in our pocket series, bearing an imaginative and stylish cover by Faruk Ulay, all six Marco and Marian stories, written at the beginning of the new century by “distinguished elder statesman [Norman] Lock (Kirkus Reviews)”  As in Norman’s A History of the Imagination and Love Among the Particles, Dutch Stories is a commingling of Postmodern wit and playfulness, enchantment and disenchantment, rendered in the author’s virtuoso style.

Search under Norman Lock to see his other Ravenna Titles: Escher’s Journal, The King of Sweden, Two Plays for Radio (one copy left), Trio, Notes to ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for March Knauf’s Universe, Triple No. 4, In the Time of Rat (a narrative poem), The Long Rowing Unto Morning (now out of print), Impossible Objects (now out of print), Under the Balconies of the Moon (pamphlet)

Piercing, unpredictable, sometimes unsettling, but always frothing with the type of raw honesty one can only find in the sharpest fiction, these stories leap from the page and into the reader’s psyche, reminding us that life is precious, imperfect and ultimately meant to be hope-filled.  Len Kuntz has an eye for dissecting the mangled parts of our lives, his ear pressed keenly against every one of our closed doors, be they the bedroom, the dining room, or the attic where we keep our most cherished secrets.

Read the interview!  https://nancystohlman.com/2019/12/09/so-you-wrote-a-book-len-kuntz/

Elizabeth Alexander, of New Mexico, formerly of Seattle, has given us a collection of published and unpublished stories set variously in “reality” and in the narrator’s imagination, featuring intermittently recurring characters—most notably a sentient dashboard doll. They treat Jim Crow, World War II, the Algerian War, and the “war on terror” while exploring social and personal loss.  The cover features an original image by Cooper Renner.

In an interview in Uncanny Valley, the title story is described thus: “On Anzio Beach” is made of characters and events that at first seem whimsical, but then reveal themselves as complex and somber, or even melancholy—as an example, Alet is a talking terrier, but he’s also the reincarnation of the narrator’s father’s friend, returned in this dog body for only a short time.

In the tradition of Ben Marcus, Matthew Derby, and David Ohle, Daniel Borzutzky’s fictions mine the fables that comprise our understanding of ourselves: the tales that are woven up so intricately with us we cannot tell where we begin and our histories end. He turns these stories inside out and makes them new. He frees us from them so we can weave them back again. This is his first collection and it met with considerable positive comment.

Three modern, edgy and superb stories by famous Mexican author Mario Bellatin—Chinese Checkers, Hero Dogs and My Skin Luminous—translated by Cooper Renner. This, his first book to appear in English, promises us an fascinating, unsettling and important new voice in modern writing. In these stories the narrator speaks rationally, cleanly, carefully, with a sense of precision and progression. But the life he describes is not rational, clean precise or progressive. His focus seems to be on exploring the ins and outs of specific situations. He is not plot-driven, nor do his characterizations seem to function in the normal way—that is, to create a sympathetic character whom the author leads through some sort of growth process to a sort of epiphany. Any given one of his sentences, isolated from its context, might seem like an ordinary narrative sentence in a traditional work. Bellatin’s contexts don’t work that way: situations and thought repeat and recur in an apparently random fashion; he refuses to orchestrate climaxes and artificial excitements, even where a conventional writer would immediately do so.

This edition is now out of print.

At the border between the lyrical and prosaic, Thomas Wooten appears. He describes a city both fantastic and real, both magical and ordinary. And then there is his attention to detail, the craft with which his sentences are constructed. He spins a tale, as the old ones did, turning filament into sails.

The world we think we know shifts and turns otherworldly in the short stories and flash fictions that make up Eric Bosse’s Magnificent Mistakes. In smooth, subtle prose, Bosse moves through the lives of a menagerie of misfits, crackpots, and odd ones out. A bookstore clerk can’t shake the feeling of being watched. A son uses a camcorder to cajole his mother into assessing his life. A kinky, submissive inventor struggles to let go when his girlfriend dumps him. A widow pleads for a rabbi’s advice as her houseplants grow wild. A Zen master takes drastic measures to teach a young monk about impermanence. And a guy with a cold befriends a duck. Lit through from start to finish with an oblique sense of the darker side of life, this imaginative collection of stories evokes tenderness even as it refuses to forgive.

With the voice of No Through World, the reader enters into a world of multiple gravities, a world where individuals constantly risk fracture and disintegration, where the threat of disappearance is echoed in numerous shadows that populate each corner and closet…the narrator dreams, hallucinates, wishes beyond his own powerlessness… Phillip John Usher (foreword)

from the Foreword: Søren Gauger’s stories are metaphysically contoured against his protagonists, so that when they try to gain a foothold, they always slip: it is this contour of entrapment that makes Gauger’s universe so engaging; a universe that seems to be contracting rather than expanding, as elements soar inward. These are comedies of custom and trauma, of hollow reproductions of ritual without origin, set in a universe on the brink of imploding. T. Raphael Rivlin, Montreal