{"title":"Great Place Books","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"blocks-world","title":"Blocks World","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eBlocks World\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003eby\u003cstrong\u003e Emma Catherine Perry\u003c\/strong\u003e is a stunning collection of poems exploring the intimate and fraught relationships among \u003cstrong\u003eArtificial Intelligence\u003c\/strong\u003e, the \u003cstrong\u003enatural world\u003c\/strong\u003e, and\u003cstrong\u003e family\u003c\/strong\u003e. Combining formally inventive poems with classic lyricism, \u003cem\u003eBlocks World\u003c\/em\u003e is both deeply human and deliriously extra-human. Giving voice to the \"desire to be known and the pain of being unknown \/ by those you love the most\" \u003cem\u003eBlocks World\u003c\/em\u003e announces the arrival of a stunning new talent.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt once playful and ambitious, self-assured and vulnerable, these poems grapple with the thorny entanglements binding computers, plants, animals, and people together. The poet interrogates a snake: \"If I don't kill you \/ will you kill me? If I don't kill you will you live \/ like a coiled idea in the ground?\" Observing her partner across \"an abundance of onions\" the poet tries and fails to imagine he is \"just some guy \/ in a grocery store \/ who means nothing to me.\" Perry asks her computer how the self survives itself, and the computer answers: \"it might not be as far-fetched as it seems.\"\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEmma Catherine Perry\u003c\/strong\u003e is a poet and scholar from Newfields, New Hampshire. Her poetry has been featured in literary journals including\u003cem\u003e FENCE, Nashville Review\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eQuarterly West\u003c\/em\u003e, and her critical work on antiracist and inclusive writing pedagogy has appeared in peer-reviewed publications. She currently lives in Nebraska and works in the Writing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. \u003cem\u003eBlocks World\u003c\/em\u003e is her debut collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"While reading these poems, I thought the word alarming, and then wondered, do I mean disarming? No, alarming. (\"If I don't kill you will you live \/ like a coiled idea in the ground? \/\/ If you kill me will you mourn me?\") Blocks World, built around two long, beautiful poems that pump life through the book like hearts or lungs, is an uncanny, fiercely inquisitive collection about nature and technology, sisters and fathers, pain and evil. Here there is \"nowhere to live but the land of the self,\" a \"soft apocalypse\"; here the self is an alien intelligence, \"a bloodful machine.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eElisa Gabbert\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Unreality of Memory\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Emma Catherine Perry's Blocks World defies description. This book is an abandoned factory that melts down loneliness and want and arid distances to produce - mysteriously! - abiding love. It's a tangled ethical problem around agency and pain where the fact of suffering is both unknowable and inevitable. It's a joke passed between sisters, between father and daughter, speaker and reader, yearning for connection, consoling and complicating in equal measure. It's a crackling circuit board, a series of inputs and outputs, a computer's elliptical dream. Blocks World is an irreducible event: brilliant, funny, unsettling, and entirely original. A virtuosic debut.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eEdgar Kunz\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eFixer\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"'How can I talk to the people I love' is the urgent question at the core of Emma Perry's bracing debut. Her poignant lyric meditations confront her father, mother, and sister as the central others around whom her sense of self revolves—and dissolves. The obsessive, elusive conundrums framing her family galvanize further epistemicand ontological worries: How can I know you, and how will I know if you know me? If 'the things we share divide us,' where do I leave off and you begin? What or whereis pain, or joy, and what difference, if any, falls between 'grieving \/ and delighting'? Equally concerned with the sentience of nonhuman actors, from the zoological to the artificially intelligent, Perry is a \"bloodful machine\" who runs her empathy through various types of color coding and cluster analysis, trying to feel feeling. As if interfacing with Augustine, 'I know what my problem is,' she says. And yet.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eAndrew Zawacki\u003c\/strong\u003e author of \u003cem\u003eUnsun\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Great Place Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45598190502205,"sku":"9781950987337","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781950987337ita.jpg?v=1688674905"},{"product_id":"cascade","title":"Cascade","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCASCADE BY JULIA HANNAFIN \u003c\/strong\u003eis a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother's overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend's father tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team's research, so does Lydia's growing infatuation with her boss. Cascade will be released on \u003cstrong\u003eApril 16, 2024.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBorn and raised in Berkeley,\u003cstrong\u003e Julia Hannafin\u003c\/strong\u003e now lives in Los Angeles. They have written episodes for television. \u003cem\u003eCascade\u003c\/em\u003e is her debut novel.\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Observing the longing and cruelty of animals as if to avoid consideration of her own grief, the protagonist of \u003cem\u003eCascade\u003c\/em\u003e delivers an anti-bildungsroman which destroys conceptions of youthful transformation. The novel is a secret meditation on gender and addiction that refuses to be defined as such, its proscenium the ragged environmental beauty that Hannafin describes with the expert hand of a naturalist. Disguised as a harrowing and erotic page-turner, the book flashes with other revelations as briefly as the sharks it worships cut through dark water.\"   —\u003cstrong\u003eKathleen Alcott\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eAmerica Was Hard to Find\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eEmergency\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I could feel the salt spray and smell the sea birds as I read \u003cem\u003eCascade\u003c\/em\u003e. What a vivid and compelling depiction of a young woman's short but formative interlude on a stormy, austerely beautiful archipelago. Hannafin conveys both the dramas of the landscape and the dramas of their characters with great precision and beautiful imagery—I was captivated.\"  —\u003cstrong\u003eLydia Kiesling\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of \u003cem\u003eMobility\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Cascade is an utterly captivating debut novel about the promise and bafflement of the body and the natural world. Placing the human in reverential but clear-eyed juxtaposition with the wild, Julia Hannafin evokes the work of writers as varied as Andrea Barrett, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, and Lauren Groff. The result is richly imagined, achingly beautiful, and wholly original: a story of desire, grief, and renewal that will also teach you the proper method for data-tagging sharks in open water.\"  —\u003cstrong\u003eJustin Taylor\u003c\/strong\u003e, author of\u003cem\u003e Reboot\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Great Place Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47885802144061,"sku":"9781950987580","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781950987580ita.jpg?v=1708117085"},{"product_id":"euphoria-days","title":"Euphoria Days","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat makes a happy life? In a slightly off-kilter Madrid of the near future, María, a data analyst, has devoted her career to answering that timeless question with computer programs and algorithms—until a recurring nightmare about worms throws her life into disarray. Others have sought happiness elsewhere: Blasco has turned to internet porn; his wife, Diana, to motherhood; Angélica to what she thinks might be love; and the hapless Carlos to substances and a spiritual guide who may or may not be a hack. But in a world increasingly governed by data, are anyone's decisions really their own? Renowned Spanish writer \u003cstrong\u003ePilar Fraile\u003c\/strong\u003e's first novel to be translated into English, \u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEUPHORIA DAYS\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e traces the intersecting paths of five workers edging toward middle age and grasping at the cheap thrills of optimization. A comedy of errors that shows what happens when we trade autonomy for the false promises of a data-driven existence, from one of the sharpest writers working in the Spanish language today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePilar Fraile\u003c\/strong\u003e is a doctor in comparative literature. Her publications include the novel\u003cem\u003e Las ventajas de la vida en el campo \u003c\/em\u003e(Caballo de Troya-Penguin Random House, 2018) and the short story collection \u003cem\u003eLos nuevos pobladores\u003c\/em\u003e (Ediciones Traspiés, 2014). Her work has been translated into Norwegian, Portuguese and English, and excerpts have appeared in \u003cem\u003eThe Paris Review, Conjunctions\u003c\/em\u003e, and other venues.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLizzie Davis\u003c\/strong\u003e is a translator and an editor at Transit Books. Her recent projects include works by Juan Cárdenas, Daniela Tarazona, Elena Medel, and Begoña Gómez Urzaiz. Her translation of Cárdenas's \u003cem\u003eThe Devil of the Provinces\u003c\/em\u003e was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Pilar Fraile has written a magnificent dystopia in which the calculus of artificial happiness has colonized even the erotic dimension of our bodies. Will we be able to escape, will we find a way to flee this new tyranny?\" - \u003cstrong\u003eJuan Cárdenas\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Great Place Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49154271445309,"sku":"9781950987511","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781950987511ita.jpg?v=1721762693"},{"product_id":"pilgrims","title":"Pilgrims","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 170, 255);\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003ePilgrims\u003c\/em\u003e back in stock on or before 8\/14\/2026!\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\"text-align: center;\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA monk leaves the monastery to search for his\u003cspan style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0);\"\u003e teenage\u003c\/span\u003e brother, who has run away from home in the middle of a high school cross-country race. Alternating between each brother's perspective, \u003ci\u003ePilgrims\u003c\/i\u003e follows its protagonists as they encounter Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, greyhound rescuers, eccentric communists, and tiny cemetery-keepers. A rumination on abandonment and the intimacies we've lost to a world obsessed with progress and material success, \u003ci\u003ePilgrims\u003c\/i\u003e announces the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Great Place Books","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":50826750099773,"sku":"9781950987597","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781950987597ita.jpg?v=1759940073"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/great-place-books.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}