Showing results by publisher "Guernica Editions" in Literature & Fiction

A brooding fugitive hides out in a crumbling hotel that was once filled with celebrities enjoying the successes of postwar America. He is a racist with a criminal past, an anti-hero who reflects on the ruins of the South and simultaneously on the life of a German performance artist called “Jupp”. The fictional Jupp is a thinly-veiled cipher for the late real-life German artist, Joseph Beuys.

De Angelis, an inscrutable northerner, is travelling to a small town perched in Sicily’s hinterland to negotiate a real estate transaction, only to find himself embroiled in a criminal conspiracy. While en route, the train he’s on mysteriously breaks down, forcing him to spend the night in a squalid whistle stop. What follows is a web of unsettling events, involving child prostitution and brazen killings. And at the heart of it: an alluring blue-eyed girl, Marinella....

In Itzel II, we continue to follow Nauta, Itzel, and Basta through the cascading outcomes of their desire for agency and for change in their world. We move from the Oaxaca coast back to Mexico City, from Nauta's Brooklyn streets to her time in Canada, from the attraction between Basta and Itzel that has altered the characters' friendship to the rumours and reckonings that result.

The first of two-part novel, Itzel I tells the story of three disparate characters swept up in the drama of the Mexican student movement of 1968 whose ending in the Massacre in Tlatelolco on October 2nd, a date now always commemorated in Mexico, changed their lives forever. Broad in scope and exuberant in style in the best tradition of Latin American literature, this book roots its readers in the ebullience of Mexico's daily life and language, even as they are made to confront the horrors of history, to examine the difficulties of friendship and family.

Marianne Ackerman's second collection of stories for Guernica puts the focus on women, their ascent into selfhood, the beauty and carnage of their journey. Literary Montreal is the setting of two stories spun around an alpha poseur, George. Picking up from the Gothic shadows of "Albert Fine" in Holy Fools (Guernica, 2014), Ackerman follows the lives of an Ontario farm family marked by a bloody incident they struggle to understand.

A flash fiction novel, The Sea-Wave details the aftermath of the kidnapping by an elderly and emotionally damaged man of a severely disabled, wheelchair-bound, unusually bright, depressive 12-year-old girl incapable of speech. The novel consists of the girl's entries in her diary-like memorandum book, entries that relate her own surprising thoughts on her kidnapping, family, and disabilities.

What begins as backyard diversion swells into a hilarious and absurd obsession: to grow the world’s largest pumpkin and, with the help of an entrepreneur friend, build a pumpkin empire to make everything from snacks to toilet paper. All to win him fame and fortune (and perhaps the affection of an alluring neighbor).