Become a Friend of Dzanc Books or Join Dzanc House’s Donor Drive
Please note: Dzanc does not post any jobs or requests for collaboration on Upwork or any other freelancing website. We’ve heard reports of scammers misusing our logo and employees’ names in phishing scams; please be careful with any offers of remote work, and note that Dzanc never uses Microsoft Teams to contact people.
In True Believer, Jeff Kass intertwines fiction with reality as he delves into the origins of the Marvel superheroes, explores how the Marvel saga informed his own worldview, and implores us all to continue to believe in the forces of good
Through lyric and narrative poems, formal and informal verse, and even a trio of limericks, Kass’s poems both retell classic comic book tales and recall his personal experiences being a True Believer—attending New York City Comic-Con with his childhood friends, wishing he could control the weather while coaching his son’s baseball team, and growing up reading about the Jewishness of The Thing, the Golem-like member of The Fantastic Four, which impacted Kass’s understanding of his own identity.
An ode to what Stan Lee called his devoted readers,True Believeris a call to arms and an invitation to discover the heroic in ourselves. If we can’t be super-powered heroes, we can endeavor to be what those heroes embody: perseverance despite personal doubt, determination in the face of calamitous odds, and faith in the notion that humanity is worth saving.
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
Paperback
ISBN: 9781938603266
A young man known as "the Australian" journeys between New York and Melbourne on a quest of self-discovery in this poignant exploration of loneliness, love, and fatherhood
In her humorous and emotionally resonant debut, Emma Smith-Stevens follows the exploits and evolution of a young man - known only as “the Australian” - over the course of a dozen years, from his time posing for tourist photos as Superman to his life in New York, chasing fame and fortune. Married to a woman he barely knows and struggling to forge a relationship with his son, the Australian travels between the U.S. and Melbourne, seeking to reconnect with his deceased parents through his father’s Australian Outdoor Geographic magazines and the Dreaming Tracks, sacred landmarks his mother longed to explore.
Through this quest for self-discovery, the Australian becomes both more and less enigma: “the idea of this guy you could find in any city, a hostel anywhere in the world, smiling, suntanned, hauling a backpack.” A poignant and at times satirical meditation on masculinity, fatherhood, isolation, New York City, fame, and loss, The Australian examines the human tendency to fall in love with the idea of another person and the importance of knowing one’s essential nature.
Publication Date: May 5, 2025
Hardcover: 184 pages
ISBN: 9781938603297
Also available as an eBook
FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE AND THE 2025 ZORA LEGACY AWARD
In Rabata, everyone has secrets—especially since the arrival of the white American missionaries.
Twenty-year-old Jummai is a beautiful and unassuming house girl whose dreams of escaping her home life are disrupted when an unexpected pregnancy forces her to hide her lover's identity. Tebeya, an ambitious Dublin-educated doctor, has left prestigious opportunities abroad to return to the small town of her birth, and discovers a painful betrayal when she strives to take control of the mission clinic. Zanya is a young translator, enticed by promises of progress, who comes to Rabata to escape a bitter past and finds himself embroiled in a fight against the American reverend for the heart of the church and town.
United by their yearning for change, all three must make difficult decisions that threaten the fragile relationships of the Rabata they know. As tensions mount and hypocrisies are unveiled, the people of Rabata are faced with a question that will transform their town forever: Let the Americans stay, or make them go?
Set against the backdrop of 1970s Nigeria teetering between post-colonial dependency and self-rule, Before the Mango Ripens examines the enduring themes of faith, disillusionment, and the search for belonging. Both epic and intimate, Afabwaje Kurian's debut announces a brilliant new talent for readers of Imbolo Mbue and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Publication Date: September 24, 2024
Hardback: 336 pages
ISBN: 9781950539994
NEW ARRIVALS
Recently published titles available now.
WINNER OF THE IPPY GOLD MEDAL AWARD IN ANTHOLOGIES
A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca Ekwuyasi
A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers’ homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
In sixteen brilliant, wild-eyed stories, Be Gay, Do Crime delivers a celebration and reckoning of why queer people turn to crime–unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.
Paperback - $17.95
Publication forthcoming: 06/03/2025
ISBN 9781938603310
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and The Republic of Consciousness Prize
Following a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation combines the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief in a stunning tale for fans of Allegra Goodman and Rebecca Makkai.
The night after fleeing her mother’s funeral, cellist Louise Rackoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease—the same one responsible for her mother's slow, agonizing passing.
Determined to spare Leon and their daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. Her disappearance forces the Rosenbergs to grapple with how to find meaning in the face of mortality—a manic and mystical quest that sends them careening across the globe, colliding into tattoo artists, Chasidic Jews, playworkers, and witches. And finally, back into each other.
Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm's own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.
Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Hardback: 338 pages
ISBN: 9781938603280
Upcoming titles we’re excited to share with you:
Available for pre-order now!
