Schaffner Press

Editorial assistant Miles holding out for a peanut butter bribe before heading into the office.

Fall news from Schaffner Press (including extra-small editorial assistant Miles). Hope you all enjoy the changing seasons as much as possible and stay kind.

mailchi.mp/7c36980cc502...

Today, @schaffnerpress.bsky.social released the final cover of GENERATOR, a debut novel coming in January, now with a blurb from Marie Claire: “a radiant autofiction.” Read an excerpt @vol1brooklyn.bsky.social www.vol1brooklyn.com/2025/04/24/p...

Need an early review or booksellers copy? DM or @ us

Nature's Unsung Heroes A new book highlights some underappreciated flora and fauna of our natural world. What do we learn from observing nature, and how are we all interconnected?

Caroline Sutton, author of "Eyes in the Soles of My Feet: From Horseshoe Crabs to Sycamores, Exploring Hidden Connections to the Natural World," talks about horseshoe crabs on Maine Public Radio:

The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura By Tierno Monénembo & Translated by Ryan Chamberlain Véronique Bangoura, we learn, goes on daily jaunts in Paris with her wheelchair-using husband, and on one of those meets Madame Corre. It turns out Corre recognized the language she heard Véronique speak on the phone as originating from Guinea, and she wants Véronique to tell her story-why she's in Paris, and how she came to be (as Madame Corre mistakenly believes) a personal care assistant to the man in the wheelchair. Madame Corre has her own painful history to share, and suspects Véronique does too. And it is indeed from this shared place of pain that the women begin to bond--and even to understand one another across their seeming divide. The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura tells of the atrocities that happened in Guinea under dictator Sékou Touré from 1956 to 1982. After my initial struggles with style, I began to enjoy the rhythm of this work and Véronique's singular voice. She's the survivor of a complicated past, who through a series of unlikely events has escaped to that place in exile where she encounters Madame Corre-a woman whose own past shares unlikely parallels with Véronique's. All stories of political turmoil make more sense to us on a human level, and in this emotional and moving retelling of the brutality of Touré through the lives (and many deaths) of Véronique and Madame Corre, Tierno Monénembo brings what would otherwise be a distant news story and past history to the present experience of the reader. Excellent and memorable

For @thesundaylongread.bsky.social recently:

The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura
By Tierno Monénembo & Translated by Ryan
Chamberlain

From @schaffnerpress.bsky.social

A hand holds a copy of "Eyes in the Soles of my Feet" in front of a Little Free Library.

Happy publication day to "EYES IN THE SOLES OF MY FEET: From Horseshoe Crabs to Sycamores, Exploring Hidden Connections to the Natural World" by Caroline Sutton!

(And now that the finished book is out, one lucky reader will find an ARC in a Little Free Library in an undisclosed location. 🦀)

Schaffner Press – BOOKS OF SOCIAL RELEVANCE FOR DISCERNING READERS Schaffner Press is an independent publishing company based in Tucson, Az. which focuses on books of high literary quality and topics of social concern.

We're excited today to give a shout out Schaffner Press for sponsoring the upcoming ALTA conference, ALTA48: Visions and Versions, held November 5-8 in Tucson, AZ! This crucial support helps to make the conference possible. Thank you! @schaffnerpress.bsky.social schaffnerpress.com

Review | ‘We the People’ says we need to make the Constitution easier to change Historian and best-selling author Jill Lepore argues that the difficulty and rarity of amendment has led to a stifling of popular will, among other problems

Schaffner Press author Michael Bobelian, whose most recent book is “Battle for the Marble Palace," reviewed "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution" by Jill Lepore for
@washingtonpost.com:

World Kid Lit Month 2025: Fall Picks for All Ages by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, Ruth Donnelly, Katy Dycus, Deborah Iwabuchi, Lori Sieling, Catherine Xinxin Yu, & Hongyu Jasmine Zhu

Hurray for #WorldKidLitMonth! Seven contributors have assembled a list of thirteen children’s, middle-grade, and YA reads translated from nine languages. Whether you're looking for a book for yourself or the kids in your life, we have something for everyone! wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...

Cover image for "Eyes in the Soles of My Feet" with the PW logo. Text says "Insightful Revelatory Thought-Provoking.)

Publishers Weekly reviews "Eyes in the Soles of My Feet: From Horseshoe Crabs to Sycamores, Exploring Hidden Connections to the Natural World" by Caroline Sutton, out next month: www.publishersweekly.com/9781639640812

You might be able to see from this shot that the cover design, a map of London from 1890, lines up across the spines of the four volumes. A little design Easter egg.

"I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited."

- Jorge Luis Borges

Pictorial textile artwork in quilt form with images of red and pink flowers on tall green stems

Anna-Maria Schipper Vermeiren, contemporary quilt artist of Haaften, The Netherlands #UnravellingWomensArt

The newspaper's logo is at the top and beneath it is a crab with "arms" crossed (it is not a horseshoe crab).

Caroline Sutton, author of “Eyes in the Soles of My Feet: From Horseshoe Crabs to Sycamores, Exploring Hidden Connections to the Natural World" (out in October!), wrote an op ed for @easthamptonstar.bsky.social about protecting horseshoe crabs.

Read it here: www.easthamptonstar.com/guestwords-o...

BOTD: Remembering the eternal Ray Bradbury. Here he is surrounded by his collection, and the wisest thing he ever said about collecting ( and he said a lot of wise things )

Happy birthday, Ray Bradbury, you were the king of dropping six-page stories a kid could read once in 7th grade English class and be haunted by for the rest of their life

Ray Bradbury (with scenes from the François Truffaut film adaptation of the Bradbury novel "Fahrenheit 451") - BOTD

"Real conservation means not just focusing on the plight of a single species but on the ecosystem in which it lives, supports others, and is supported." - Caroline Sutton, author of “Eyes in the Soles of My Feet" in @easthamptonstar.bsky.social

www.easthamptonstar.com/guestwords-o...

A bookshelf containing some of the books in translation I've read over the past few years - many by women.

An ongoing thread of some excellent books by #womenintranslation - all read since last August. 🧵

#WITMonth #TranslationThurs #BookSky #ReadWomen 💙📚

Day of Translation Festival Returns Katie Kitamura and Jhumpa Lahiri will headline the Center for the Art of Translation’s sixth annual Day of Translation festival, slated for September 18 at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.

Katie Kitamura and Jhumpa Lahiri will headline the Center for the Art of Translation’s sixth annual Day of Translation festival, slated for September 18 at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.

This is delightful!

Interesting! You're right––and that's a great explanation WHY it's a regionalism.

Just finished this wonderful book, which will stay with me for a long time.

Relatedly, read everything Harare Review of Books recommends. I've been working through the recs all summer and it has made my reading life shine. ✨

It's beautiful!

Always heard "and you don't get upset." Rhymes better, too!

A hand holds the ARC of "Eyes on the Soles of My Feet" on a beach. A red bookmark sticks out and the background matches the bookmark.

Coming in October 🦀

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

REVIEW JACQUELINE NYATHI THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF VERONIQUE BANGOURA A NOVEL BY TIERNO MONÉNEMBO TRANSLATED BY RYAN CHAMBERLAIN To live, to die and to tell Should we protect the world from our pain, and our pain from the world, or share it far and wide? IN TRANSLATION, the idiomatic expressions and mannerisms of the original language can sometimes interrupt the reader's flow. But if that happens in the first pages of Tierno Monénembo's new novel, keep going. The tale of the woman who will be known as Véronique Bangoura is enthralling. On one of her daily jaunts with her wheelchair-using husband Véronique meets Madame Corre, who recognises the language she speaks as originating from Guinea. Madame Corre wants Véronique to tell her story- why she's in Paris and how she came to be (as Madame Corre mistakenly believes) a personal care assistant to the man in the wheelchair. Madame Corre, you see, has her own painful history to share, and suspects Véronique does too. From this shared place ofpain the women bond and come to understand one another across their seeming divide. The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura weaves its story around the atrocities that happened in Guinea under Sékou Touré from 1956 to 1982. In the moving retelling of of Touré's brutality through the lives (and many deaths) of Véronique and Madame Corre, Monénembo brings what would otherwise be a distant news story and past history to the present experience of the reader. Once any initial struggle with style in translation passes, the rhythm of this work begins to resonate, along with the singular voice of Véronique - an outstanding character who has survived a complicated past and escaped it through a series of unlikely events.

Also inside, on p27: from me about The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura x Tierno Monénembo, Ryan Chamberlain (tr.), which is out now from @schaffnerpress.bsky.social.

Thanks to @laurencerand.com for the review copy!

#Guinea

Review copies of The Bone Whisperers (@schaffnerpress.bsky.social, 2024) are available. Shelf Awareness said it, “demands slow and thoughtful attention. It will cause readers to reflect on how their own lives have been touched by—or spared from—the effects of war.”

Email: LaurenCerandPR@gmail.com.

Women in Translation month is coming up again in August. Not sure if interest is waning as it was quieter on Twitter the past couple of years and I'm not sure if it has transferred to Bluesky.

I'm reading for a review column during August with an all female line up so far.

#witmonth to take part.

Join us this October for our course at the Poetry School (@poetryschool.bsky.social):

poetryschool.com/courses/tran...

"In this course, we will look at ways of developing other modes of seeing – chief among them, the use of the Archive as both prompt and source material for new work."

It sounds so fun!