Syed Afzal Haider’s The Dying Sun and Other Stories is now available at Weavers Press Bookshop. Libraries and bookstores can also pre-order the title which will soon be available at Asterism Books: https://asterismbooks.com/product/the-dying-sun-and-other-stories
Words of praise for Dying Sun
“Syed Haider displays a range and sophistication that is all too rare in American fiction. From the trauma of the partition of India to the meaning of baseball, from parenting to explorations of eros, The Dying Sun and Other Stories is thoughtful and provocative, tackling difficult subjects with sensitivity and wit.” —Charles Holdefer, author of Don’t Look at Me
“In The Dying Sun and Other Stories, Syed Afzal Haider explores with acute insight and sensitivity the sorrows of losing a beloved spouse, of watching one’s parents senesce, and plumbs the complex matrix of feelings summoned by leaving home for a faraway land. Haider likewise contemplates with humor and intelligence parenthood, the workplace, and the fire of carnal desire. This is an immersive work with many joys to offer its readers.” —Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry
Recent titles from Weavers Press:
Purchase from Asterism Books or directly from Weavers Bookshop!
Monica Mody’s poetry collection Wild Fin was released in early February, 2024!
Words of praise for Wild Fin:
“A deeply personal and tender contemplation of ecological grief which, in impressionistic and reflective disclosures, asks us to acknowledge our inalienable enmeshment with each other and with the earth. Monica’s eyes turn upward to a “sky laid waste” and inward, where she is keenly aware that “We long to be porous to another’s knowing.” This book expands our understanding of how transspecies compassion must learn to swim in the dark and deep water of human migrations.”
— Divya Victor, author of Kith and Curb
Moazzam Sheikh’s new novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is the first title welcomed in 2024!
The second novella in the San Francisco quartet is now available.
Words of praise for Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams:
”I’ve not read anything quite like “Unsolaced Faces,” with its scent of unrequited love, its flavor of deceit. In dense poetic language, Moazzam Sheikh explores possession and madness inherent in the pursuit of love, when ardor turns to anger, and devotion leads to desertion. This odyssey exploring sticky love and intellectual fulfillment in bohemian San Francisco will both seduce and confound you.” — William Torphy, author of Motel Stories
Bark Archipelago, a collection of poetry by Sophia Naz, arrived in early 2023. It is available for purchase from our online Bookshop (and other venues such as Small Press Distribution).
Words of praise for Bark Archipelago:
Reading these poems put me in the immediate mind of reading Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge — these poems spin and spark, their language so playful and musical, filled with the energy of sound and motion. Lalla meets Eunice de Souza? An appropriate comparison. Combining the lush sensibility of the Urdu ghazal with the cosmopolitan epigrammatic crack of modern Indian English, Sophia Naz has written a masterful book. —Kazim Ali, author of Sukun: New and Selected Poems
Sophia Naz’s Bark Archipelago hits startling and giddy, inventive and destroyful. Sinewy lines of chime and pun, misdirection and feint make to paint grotesques. Excess tangled in loss, thus “everything will kill you,” even a lawn, even a length of fabric, even marriage. Naz pans slowly over the gory flensing of a whale and later breaks a human body into six members under twilight as gelatinous as blubber. This is a book of material, a broadside of extracted flesh and stone. Things. And the people who are made them. Material: the poet’s language itself should fill your mouth before you spill it into air like “windborne plastic bags”; till the thought-bubbles come, “taking up all the oxygen.” Yes: Bark Archipelago is breathless, racing to the line break before autocorrect can aggress or we wheel and deal the globe to our end.—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho
These mercurial poems—Sphinx-like, “s/addled” with the responsibility of a world in delirium — call in linkages and playful techniques that “rite, ignite” their way into renewal. Something “rubs” free in the space between languages and moves past the amnion to drop into an “unborn sea.” Pay attention. —Monica Mody, author of Kala Pani
Moazzam Sheikh’s novella A Footbridge to Hell Called Love is available! Visit our online bookshop to buy your copy directly from us.
Praise for A Footbridge to Hell Called Love:
“A romantic soul, Aslam is looking for love, intellectual connection, and writerly success in the Bohemian San Francisco at the turn of the 21st Century. Born in Pakistan and passionate about resisting oppression in all forms, he navigates a path uniquely his own in a racially and culturally mixed community. Moazzam Sheikh tells Aslam’s story with affection, tenderness, and good humor, leaving me with the sense of having made a new friend. I loved hanging out with Aslam and took down his book recommendations, too!”
– Olga Zilberbourg, author of Like Water and Other Stories
“Witty and wise, Sheikh’s novel follows the amorous adventures of Aslam Rana, adrift between women and literary rivalries in San Francisco– a comic yet probing tale of contemporary mores and the ultimate quest for connection.”
– Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen
“Aslam is a practical romantic, an assimilating writer in love with movies and gossip, patrolling his landscape of shame with lustful thoughts. In pre-pandemic San Francisco, where people still go to parties and exchange pretentious intellectual chit-chat, Aslam finds himself on a digressive tour of sexual anxieties as the true target of his affection fades out time and again. I found the details of City landmarks and the dialogue so accurate at times, that I almost felt paranoid myself. Laugh and weep, or just keep turning the pages, but behind the words is a genuine paradox about finding your place.”
– David R. Lincoln, author of Mobility Lounge
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