10/21/2025
Mattia Filice, who spent almost twenty years working as a driver for the French railway, has poured into Driver, a novel, the kind of obsessive, specialized knowledge which can only emerge from the accumulation of a long-held professional routine. Composed of a striking mixture of prose and free verse, we are immersed in the episodic dramas of the train: delays, accidents, malfunctions, shift changes. Filice, detail by tender detail, conveys the effects of the passage of time, and of the continual struggle for dignity and solidarity.
Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang. “Young at the Time” follows a student who develops an unwelcome crush on his teacher. The primary protagonist of “Genisis” is a young woman from a downwardly mobile family, who works at a pharmacy and is pursued by an unscrupulous young man, until the narrative takes up the story of her mother’s unhappy marriage. “Blossoms Alfoat, Flowers Adrift” tells, in a back-and-forth manner, the story of an immigrant who travels from the countryside to Shanghai and then to Hong Kong, following and losing family amidst the uncertainties of post-civil-war China.
These two books go on sale today.
