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Liveright Publishing

A home for outstanding works of literature that define and redefine our culture. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Liveright Publishing Corporation grew out of the storied Boni & Liveright press, one of the most important publishers of the early twentieth century. Under the editorial guidance of Horace Liveright the firm captured the flowering literature of the 1920s and 1930s, publishing some of the most celebrated American writers of the period, including William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson

, Gertrude Stein, Anita Loos, and Theodore Dreiser. Alongside these great authors were poets of equal prominence, such as Ezra Pound, T.S. and Robinson Jeffers, as well as founding members of the Harlem Renaissance and European intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. In choosing titles for publication, Horace Liveright sought out writers whose works, he hoped, would stand the test of time. As a result, a disproportionately high number of writers that the house signed up became foundational forces of modern literature and culture.

10/10/2025

Kicked off the book tour last night in Ann Arbor with a sell out of 1,100 at Rackham Auditorium. Had to turn some away, unfortunately. Schuler Books, GLSM Director Bruce Lynn, who introduced me, and the crowd were all great! Thanks to all!
Check out the next stops on my site: johnubacon.com/book-tour/

10/07/2025

In stores *TODAY*! 🌳

“Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph.” —Alexandra Jacobs, 🌱

“The simplicity and depth of this crystal-clear prose fill me with great admiration.” —Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 🌱

From Georgi Gospodinov, the International –winning author of "Time Shelter" comes DEATH AND THE GARDENER, a powerful novel about a father, a son, and the botany of grief.

“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.”

A man named Georgi sits patiently by his father’s bedside, until a final winter morning.

Navigating a season of grief, Georgi parses through the endless stories his father used to tell, and the history of his whole generation—boys born in Bulgaria at the end of the World War II, grown into men “often absent—clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette,” swimming in “other waters and clouds.” Out of a barren village yard, Georgi’s father created a special sanctuary: A lush garden where he would live on in the snowdrop sprouts and the first tulips of spring. But without him, Georgi’s past, with all its afternoons, begins to crack.

With striking acuity, Gospodinov explores the quiet rituals of mourning—how we tame sorrow through storytelling and guide a life through to its end. Spanning from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, the novel draws connections between myth and memory, place and emotion. Full of light and unflinching humor, and masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, DEATH AND THE GARDENER is another profoundly moving work from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).
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10/02/2025

One of only 175 limited signed edition copies available in the U.S. of WINGS: THE STORY OF A BAND ON THE RUN could be yours! Packaged in a deluxe cloth case featuring screen printing, including a bound-in booklet of Wings-era album and single artwork, an exclusive color vinyl of the forthcoming WINGS LP, and a special enamel pin and embroidered patch — each copy will be numbered and signed by Paul McCartney. On sale November 25, available now for pre-order: https://medium.com//wings-the-story-of-a-band-on-the-run-limited-signed-edition-by-paul-mccartney-111b5f599e3f

08/26/2025

“Howard French’s 'The Second Emancipation' stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” ―David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

In stores today, THE SECOND EMANCIPATION ― referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom ― positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.

Determined to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story,” "The Second Emancipation" begins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. Years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana’s first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah’s radical belief in pan-African liberation had both
galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.

In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom, THE SECOND EMANCIPATION becomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

08/19/2025

New in paperback: a satirical tale of a young man flush with newfound wealth who promptly gets swindled, QUINCAS BORBA is an inspired critique of nineteenth-century Brazil.

Hailed in his lifetime as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a storyteller known for his wholly innovative narrative techniques and uncanny talent for unraveling the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Brazil. These signature traits are on full display in QUINCAS BORBA, a novel that sees Machado satirize a rapidly changing Rio de Janeiro.

Originally published in 1891, the story begins with the death of its titular character, a mad philosopher infamous for spouting pessimistic theories of “Humanitism.” Borba leaves his fortune―including his dog, also named Quincas Borba―to Rubião, his loyal caretaker and a schoolteacher by trade. Bestowed with opulence beyond his wildest dreams, Rubião is quickly coaxed into the comforts of a rich man’s life―the only stipulation being that he continues to care for the canine Quincas Borba with the same dedication he once did the human. Adrift in the big, bad, bustling world of late-1860s Rio de Janeiro, it isn’t long before Rubião is targeted by the city’s sycophants, who can smell his naïveté from a mile away.

Playfully told by an omniscient and possibly unreliable narrator, the novel is at once irreverent and ambitious, brimming with barbed wit and keen philosophical inquiry. Brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson―the duo credited with introducing a new generation of readers to Machado through their translations of “Dom Casmurro”, “The Collected Stories”, and “Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas”―QUINCAS BORBA is another strikingly modern tale from a blazing progenitor of twentieth-century fiction.

06/20/2025

Now in paperback: Eric Jay Dolin's LEFT FOR DEAD, the true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812—a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation, and the desperate struggle for survival.

Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal—an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.

A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout—involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize—LEFT FOR DEAD shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history.

06/19/2025

“Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.”
― Annette Gordon-Reed, ON JUNETEENTH

06/03/2025

"The Risky, Reality-Bending Thriller You Need This Summer.... [Daley-Ward] uses a full complement of textures to weave this book. The surreal drips into the moments of assumed sobriety, shifting the world around us as we read. To unfurl the story, she reaches for dark comedy, for drama, for poetry, for the absurd.... It’s not just the metaphysical play that stands out; Daley-Ward’s prose also shines from the start.... By harnessing both a poet’s heart and attention to language as well as a fresh ear for millennial humor and drama, Daley-Ward has penned a metaphysical experiment on grief, trauma, family and longing that holds all the excitement of a big summer read."
— Danez Smith, The New York Times

Yrsa Daley-Ward's THE CATCH - the inaugural novel in the Well-Read Black Girl series - is available *now* wherever books are sold!

06/02/2025

In stores *tomorrow!* — Yrsa Daley-Ward's THE CATCH has been named one of the Books to Read in June by the New York Times, one of the Best Books of Summer by the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, and Forbes, and one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, We Are Bookish, The Millions and Book Riot.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.

Find THE CATCH wherever books are sold!

06/01/2025

In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

Discover THE CATCH — in stores this Tuesday.

05/31/2025

The inaugural novel in the Books series, THE CATCH is a darkly whimsical tale of women daring to live and create with impunity. Discover it in stores this Tuesday!

05/06/2025

Happy to J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, authors of SPEAKING IN TONGUES! In this provocative dialogue, a Nobel laureate novelist and a leading translator investigate the nature of language and the challenges of translation.

Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? SPEAKING IN TONGUES―taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos―examines some of the most pressing linguistic issues that plague writers and translators well into the twenty-first century.

The authors address questions that we must answer in order to understand contemporary society. They inquire if one can truly love an acquired language, and they question why certain languages, like Spanish, have gender differences built into them. They examine the threat of monolingualism and ask how we can counter, if at all, the global spread of the English language, which seems to maraud like a colonial power. They question whether it should be the duty of the translator to remove morally objectionable, misogynistic, or racist language. And in the conclusion, Coetzee even speculates whether it’s only mathematics that can tell the truth about everything.

Drawing from decades of experience in the craft of language, both Dimópulos and Coetzee face the reality, as did Walter Benjamin over a century ago in his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” that when it comes to self-expression, some things will always get lost in translation. SPEAKING IN TONGUES finally emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.

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