DoppelHouse Press

When Jessica Teich happens upon the obituary of a fellow Rhodes scholar named Lacey, she vows to unravel the truth behind the young woman’s suicide. As Lacey’s story unspools, Teich begins to detect ghostly links to her own life, forcing her to reflect on her own anguished past. A funny, probing and deeply affecting book, The Future Tense of Joy is the luminous account of one woman’s efforts to free herself—and her family—from the demons of her memory. The book explores the daily upheavals of marriage and motherhood, even as it exposes the treachery of silence and honors the consoling power of love.

“'No one was less likely to take her own life.' That’s what her Oxford thesis advisor said. From the moment I stumbled across her obituary, late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I was captivated. This brilliant woman seemed incandescent. She was funny and gifted and generous and beloved. Twenty-seven years old, and a newlywed. Why would she decide to die?"

“Jessica Teich’s understanding of trauma is the infallible authority upon which her tale rests. But the delicacy and nuance with which she renders this story is that of a poet. This beautiful, compassionately imagined book will bring a pang of recognition to anyone who has traveled to young adulthood from a wounded adolescence via the quest for ‘perfection.’”  —MERYL STREEP 

What did Jackson Pollock say to the tree that killed him? Or the wives of Henry XIII behind closed doors? What if Virginia Woolf hadn't killed herself during WWII? Would Abraham Lincoln have anything to impart to Americans at this divisive political moment?

Humorous, lustful, breathtaking, and insightful, Eve Wood's four-part collection of prose poems and epistolary fiction imagines the hidden lives (and deaths) of contemporary artists and the women who married Henry XIII, as well as rendering the coded amorous exchanges between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West and pulling wisdom from under Abraham Lincoln's hat. Eve Wood takes her subjects beyond the looking glass, turns history in on itself and sees our contemporary moment reflected there. Laughing along the way, surprised by her discoveries, we find strength and expression as a panacea for dark times.

Illustrated with plates from Eve Wood's thirty-year signature series of darkly humorous drawings and paintings, including several never exhibited.

A frontline eyewitness account of the Syrian Revolution from prizewinning journalist and activist Hadi Abdullah, who broke the story of Hezbollah's complicity in the Assad regime's crimes.

"This is Hadi al-Abdullah. A few years ago, he was studying to be a nurse. But when war broke out in Syria, he took a different path. He chose to join antigovernment protests and tell the world the story of an uprising that became a civil war. Years of conflict turned him from an eyewitness into a frontline war reporter. This new role of his brought added risk, for himself, and for his friends and colleagues. Sometimes they would go towards the bombs, sometimes the bombs would come towards them."
—New York Times documentary "Dying to Be Heard: Reporting Syria's War"

Abdullah became a trusted voice on social media, where he joined the ranks of cyber-dissenters and reported from the battlefields. After the brutal siege of Homs in 2013, Abdullah fled north to Idlib Province among the rebel factions, which posed their own dangers to young reporters. His memoir tracks his experience as a first responder during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, through the liberation of Syria on December 8, 2024, by which time he had lost many of his closest friends, two of whom were his cameramen. Astonishing for its rendering of friendships forged during war and its impacts, Critical Conditions explores not only the humanitarian concerns of the author and his closest friends who all risked capture, prison, torture, or death every day in the name of a free non-sectarian Syria, but gives centrality to their feelings using creative language and style.

Critically injured in an assassination attempt in Aleppo in 2016, Abdullah spent months in recovery in Turkey, where he was interviewed for a multimedia feature on The New York Times and by Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes for a documentary on the first responder organization The White Helmets. Later that year, Abdullah won the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize. New content in this book gives breathtaking detail to the liberation of Syria over the first week of December 2024 and the Syrian people's response to the fall of a 40-year regime of terror under the Assad family. His Afterword remarks on the challenges for Syrians that lie ahead.

As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper and in the Emmy-award-winning New York Times documentary, the gripping true story of a Jewish teenager who became "The Forger of Paris" for the French Resistance. 

At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

"At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." —Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times

"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." —Jewish Book Council

"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." —Foreword Reviews

A frontline eyewitness account of the Syrian Revolution from prizewinning journalist and activist Hadi Abdullah, who broke the story of Hezbollah's complicity in the Assad regime's crimes.

"This is Hadi al-Abdullah. A few years ago, he was studying to be a nurse. But when war broke out in Syria, he took a different path. He chose to join antigovernment protests and tell the world the story of an uprising that became a civil war. Years of conflict turned him from an eyewitness into a frontline war reporter. This new role of his brought added risk, for himself, and for his friends and colleagues. Sometimes they would go towards the bombs, sometimes the bombs would come towards them."
—New York Times documentary "Dying to Be Heard: Reporting Syria's War"

Abdullah became a trusted voice on social media, where he joined the ranks of cyber-dissenters and reported from the battlefields. After the brutal siege of Homs in 2013, Abdullah fled north to Idlib Province among the rebel factions, which posed their own dangers to young reporters. His memoir tracks his experience as a first responder during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, through the liberation of Syria on December 8, 2024, by which time he had lost many of his closest friends, two of whom were his cameramen. Astonishing for its rendering of friendships forged during war and its impacts, Critical Conditions explores not only the humanitarian concerns of the author and his closest friends who all risked capture, prison, torture, or death every day in the name of a free non-sectarian Syria, but gives centrality to their feelings using creative language and style.

Critically injured in an assassination attempt in Aleppo in 2016, Abdullah spent months in recovery in Turkey, where he was interviewed for a multimedia feature on The New York Times and by Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes for a documentary on the first responder organization The White Helmets. Later that year, Abdullah won the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize. New content in this book gives breathtaking detail to the liberation of Syria over the first week of December 2024 and the Syrian people's response to the fall of a 40-year regime of terror under the Assad family. His Afterword remarks on the challenges for Syrians that lie ahead.

A moving memoir of grief, healing, and the unbreakable bond between man and dog, set against the lush backdrop of rural Ireland.

After the sudden loss of his father, film scholar and father of two boys, Dara Waldron finds unexpected solace in Ireland’s East Clare region. There, on an abandoned farm, he encounters a lone, enigmatic border collie—Oscar. What begins as an animal rescue gradually evolves into a profound companionship that helps Waldron navigate his grief.

Oscar is no ordinary dog. A working sheepdog by nature, his instincts pull him to charge ahead—yet always return. As Waldron embarks on daily walks through misty woodlands and along rugged hillsides, their bond deepens. Each step through the Irish countryside becomes part of a ritual of recovery, trust, and understanding.

In spare, lyrical prose and accompanied by cinematic images of Oscar’s life, A Sheepdog Named Oscar is more than a story of a man and his dog—it’s a meditation on place, memory, the call of the wild, and the quiet strength found in nature and companionship. With reflections on cinema, art, and animal consciousness, Waldron crafts a uniquely soulful memoir that explores the emotional terrain of loss and the redemptive power of connection.

For readers of Jon Katz, Helen Macdonald, and nature-infused memoirs, A Sheepdog Named Oscar is a poignant reminder that sometimes the path to healing begins with a four-legged guide.

"We Bring You an Hour of Darkness is my favorite kind of mystery – one that combines urgent social themes with smart dialogue and a page-turning thrill.” —Lauren Nossett, author of The Resemblance and The Professor

It’s 1993, and the ski company that runs Franklin, Colorado, plans to build a massive new resort in a pristine wilderness home to an endangered wildcat. When eco-terrorists begin a series of attacks on infrastructure and property, the FBI sets up a national task force. While the local police and politicians are melting down, five intrepid reporters at the town’s struggling, woman-owned newspaper must step in to solve the crime. With her newspaper on the brink of collapse, editor Tish Threadgill, still mourning the death of her brother and business partner, is under pressure from a rival publication to sell. But a local literary malcontent turns out to have a ringside seat to the eco-terrorist plot. While trying to stave off the town’s power brokers who would very much like her pesky paper gone, Tish soon finds the mystery at the heart of the attacks is far too close to home.

Ukraine at war in a unique chronicle that examines expressions of the Ukrainian people on the street, in graffiti, murals, and quotidian life.

On his travels to wartime Ukraine, where even the feeling of relaxation is dangerous, Mitja Velikonja observed thousands of images of the culture of war in what he saw on the street and everyday life, from bakeries, road signs, billboards and murals, to unsanctioned graffiti. This street iconography, invested with a patriotic vocabulary, was also informed by his conversations with people, the scenes of destruction, misery, and above all, the strong will to resist, from which everyday heroism emerges.

The author went twice to the war zones of Ukraine and took more than 3,000 photographs of the street iconography of the state of war. Although all nationalists are equally foreign to him, when he talks to people, he asks himself how he would feel in their shoes, how he would react. When war creeps up to our front door, it affects everyone: leftists and right-wingers, nationalists and pacifists, patriots and those who don't care what flag they live under.

"Thus, while driving or waiting anywhere, I took a small test: how long does it take to come across images of war, warrior iconography, vocabulary of emphatic patriotism, the sound of a national awakening song, footage from battlefields. Mostly it was a matter of seconds."

Through these pieces of the culture and a people holding themselves together against an invader through a self-defensive nationalism, Velikonja sees that nationalism hides poverty — the more severe, the bigger the flags. In Ukrainian Vignettes, Velikonja compiles the images, words, impressions and voices of everyday life in war, to help us understand how clearly politics and ideology are displayed directly on the street. His philosophical approach of essays as vignettes allows him to have a critical eye even as he struggles to understand tragic events, and despite his affection for those closest to him. The author remains critical of both sides in his analysis, despite his sympathy for those closer to him.

As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper and in the Emmy-award-winning New York Times documentary, the gripping true story of a Jewish teenager who became "The Forger of Paris" for the French Resistance. 

At seventeen, Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic, technical ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 Jewish men, women, and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years, Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

"At a moment when someone’s passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky’s story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." —Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman for The New York Times

"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." —Jewish Book Council

"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." —Foreword Reviews

An eye-witness account of the Russian/European conflict at the heart of WWII, relevant today as war rages again along similar battle lines in Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus.

In a corner of 20th-century history almost unknown to the English-speaking public, anti-Stalinist Georgians and anti-Hitlerite Germans worked as an arm of the German Resistance, disavowing Hitler’s inhuman "East Policy" mandates and seeking to liberate Caucasian nations from Stalin. Allies Against Two Evils: Georgian P.O.W.s in WWII’s Bergmann Units and the Quest to Liberate the Caucasus from Russian Imperialism by exiled Georgian M.D. Givi Gabliani vividly recalls this time, the hopes of the Georgians who fought in World War II, their solidarity, their tribulations, their devotion to the Jewish people, and why they made the alliances they did.

Gabliani's memoir, written in English and published several years ago in Georgia, contrasts the vision of an ascendant Russian Empire and a decaying West with historical European-Georgian cooperation and the centuries-long quest of the Georgian people for self-determination.

The preface by Georgian-German scholar and former head of the Georgian National Library, Alexander Kartozia examines the legacy of Givi Gabliani and the Gabliani family from the highland province of Svaneti, keepers of 12th century artifacts from Georgia's Golden Age and leaders of the 1920s resistance insurgency against Soviet invasion.

Gabliani envisions a future Europe supporting a trans-Caucasian alliance with mixed races and religions living together equally in tolerance and prosperous harmony, as they had for millennia in Georgia. As a spokesman for the POWs, he coordinates with the Georgian exile government in occupied Paris and Berlin, finding a secret effort afoot in occupied France to save Georgian and other Eastern European Jews. Today, Gabliani's war memoir centers our attention on an active fault line. Across the great conflicts of the twentieth century that undergird and still define the region between Russia, with its imperialist ambitions, and the Black Sea, Georgia and the Georgian people appear as some of the most likely partners for international efforts toward peace.

A collaboration in abstract painting and poetry.

Over the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a poet/curator and a painter correspond in their own mediums, developing a conversation across space and time during lockdown. Part monograph, part poetry collection, Letters Apart presents unusual events of language and a progression of abstracted imagery. In this beautiful and intimate book, personal memories, early Expressionism, lightness and darkness, fear and flights of fancy coexist.

Artist, critic and poet Eve Wood has a ribald sense of humor and for decades has had a distinctive presence in the Southern California art world. This is her first monograph, featuring a collection of off-beat, imaginative color studies populated with birds, animals and irreverent, sometimes naughty personae. Short, laugh-out-loud prose accompanies each of the portraits and vivid scenes. Her dog sleeps on a Ukranian-gold and blue rug; her raven vacuums the house; absurd characters from movies and art stand in for obnoxious or dreamy colors; and the birds – so many birds – sing of freedom.

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes.

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street—based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression—was named an NPR Best Book in 2015.

In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Treštíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996.

Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist.

Helena Treštíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

“The story of the legendary martial arts fighter and kickboxer Oum Ry is by turns pulse-pounding, disturbing, and powerful. His is an astonishing life told beautifully by his daughter Zochada Tat and Addi Somekh. The book will grip you from its first pages and not let you go."

—Jeff Chang, author of Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America  and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

Oum Ry (b.1944) is a former international champion kickboxer who first brought the Cambodian martial art Pradal Serey to the United States. When his family of silver engravers couldn't afford his food or schooling, he lived with monks until seeking out Pradal Serey masters, soon becoming national champion at 23 years old and one of the most famous fighters in the region. For 15 years, he toured Southeast Asia, and without ever suffering a knock-out, won more than 250 fights. After a young man’s dream-life of stardom, parties, and girls, his new wife gave birth to a child in 1975, two months before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and threw the country into the chaos of civil war, where starvation, disease, and mass executions were common.

Oum Ry survived the genocide though much of his family perished. He was saved many times from death in Cambodia due to fame, talent, and his resilience, but suffered a life-threatening attack during Southern California’s epic gang violence of the 1990s. Earlier, as a refugee with his young family in Chicago, Oum Ry learned English while working cleaning hotels. But within a few years, he had an investor in Long Beach, California and opened one of the first kickboxing gyms in the United States.

This is Oum Ry's life story, which is propelled by his highly anticipated return to Cambodia in February 2022 to reunite with family and to pass on Pradal Serey traditions to the next generation.

An eye-witness account of the Russian/European conflict at the heart of WWII, relevant today as war rages again along similar battle lines in Ukraine, Crimea and the Caucasus.

In a corner of 20th-century history almost unknown to the English-speaking public, anti-Stalinist Georgians and anti-Hitlerite Germans worked as an arm of the German Resistance, disavowing Hitler’s inhuman "East Policy" mandates and seeking to liberate Caucasian nations from Stalin. Allies Against Two Evils: Georgian P.O.W.s in WWII’s Bergmann Units and the Quest to Liberate the Caucasus from Russian Imperialism by exiled Georgian M.D. Givi Gabliani vividly recalls this time, the hopes of the Georgians who fought in World War II, their solidarity, their tribulations, their devotion to the Jewish people, and why they made the alliances they did.

Gabliani's memoir, written in English and published several years ago in Georgia, contrasts the vision of an ascendant Russian Empire and a decaying West with historical European-Georgian cooperation and the centuries-long quest of the Georgian people for self-determination.

The preface by Georgian-German scholar and former head of the Georgian National Library, Alexander Kartozia examines the legacy of Givi Gabliani and the Gabliani family from the highland province of Svaneti, keepers of 12th century artifacts from Georgia's Golden Age and leaders of the 1920s resistance insurgency against Soviet invasion.

Gabliani envisions a future Europe supporting a trans-Caucasian alliance with mixed races and religions living together equally in tolerance and prosperous harmony, as they had for millennia in Georgia. As a spokesman for the POWs, he coordinates with the Georgian exile government in occupied Paris and Berlin, finding a secret effort afoot in occupied France to save Georgian and other Eastern European Jews. Today, Gabliani's war memoir centers our attention on an active fault line. Across the great conflicts of the twentieth century that undergird and still define the region between Russia, with its imperialist ambitions, and the Black Sea, Georgia and the Georgian people appear as some of the most likely partners for international efforts toward peace.

The first publication to catalog the complete works of architect and arts advocate Alfred Preis, a Viennese modernist who fled Nazi-occupied Austria and transformed regional Hawaiian architecture, with his best-known project being the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Architect, planner, and arts advocate Alfred Preis (1911–1994) dedicated his many creative talents to his beloved, adopted home, Hawai‘i. Born to a Jewish family, raised, and educated in Vienna, Preis became an exile after escaping from Nazi-occupied Austria in 1939 and briefly being interned as an “enemy alien” when the United States entered World War II. Preis emerged as one of Hawai‘i’s leading modern architects in the 1950s and 1960s. His celebrated architectural career spanned twenty-three years. In this time, he designed almost one hundred and eighty completed projects ranging from residences, schools, commercial buildings, and public parks. His new, regionalist vision for architecture and planning were specific to the Hawaiian context, its people, its tropical climate, and its stunning landscape. Preis’s crowning achievement was his design for the famed USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor in 1962. 

This is the first publication to examine Alfred Preis’s body of work in architecture, which spans from 1939 to 1963, including not only several acclaimed public projects but also illustrating the transition from a European modern language into a regional modernism, unifying both cultures in distinct and pioneering ways. 

In later years through his legislative work, Alfred Preis became a visionary advocate and leader for the public arts, creating the first 1% law in the United States, which stipulated that 1% of all public building construction be used for the purchase of public art.

Charts Wittgenstein’s intellectual development, personal struggles, and movements from Vienna to Cambridge and Norway, and to the battlegrounds of WWI, where he completed what was destined to become the most influential philosophy book of the 20th century.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s way to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the ground-breaking works in the history of philosophy, can rightly be termed an Odyssey. Both in terms of his movements and his intellectual development in the course of writing it, the Tractatus incorporated an exciting, improbable journey. A compendium of scholars has come together at the 100th anniversary of the work’s first official publication in 1922 to detail the main stations in Wittgenstein’s life that would entirely transform philosophy. The years 1912 to 1922 are illuminated through photos, military maps, and letters against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic periods in world history.

The complex theory of language developed by Wittgenstein In the Tractatus had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but extended also to literature, music, film, painting, architecture, anthropology, and economics. Its uniqueness and rigor challenge our perceptions to this day. 

A second-generation Holocaust survivor weaves together fragments of her family’s history and witness testimony in narrative and collage, using her art as transformation and remembrance. 

"Chocolates from Tangier is a bold and innovative ensemble piece that comes straight from the heart. With illustrations by way of words, letters, poems and her own impressive images, artist Jana Zimmer brings her parents’ Holocaust story to life in a moving and meaningful way. Beautiful."
—Wendy Holden, author of Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope

“Never, never, never ask Daddy about her.” For fifty years, Jana Zimmer obeyed her mother’s directive, until her mother died, leaving behind a trove of family photos and documents, mostly in Czech, with just a few cryptic notes as explanation, for her only child to knit the family’s past together. Late in her own life, Zimmer became a visual artist. The words and images in this book convey her journey to understand her parents and their experiences in the Holocaust, filtered through her own discoveries decades after returning to her birthplace, Prague, and to Terezín, where her family was first interned. 

Exhibitions of Zimmer’s artwork in 2007, both in Prague and at the Terezín Ghetto Museum, were mainly inspired by her half-sister, Ritta, who perished in Auschwitz before Zimmer was born, and by her father’s grief over that loss. Ritta’s drawings made in Terezín, now in the Prague Jewish Museum’s collection of children’s artwork from the ghetto, populate Zimmer’s book as well as spare photographs and mementos that reflect Zimmer’s internal world — that of a “Holocaust replacement child.”

In 2015, an exhibition in Germany allowed Zimmer to explore her relationship to her mother’s experiences as survivor of Terezín, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen, and as a Jewish slave laborer in a Nazi aircraft factory in Freiberg, Saxony, in 1944. In both exhibits, and now, in putting together the visual story, their life stories, and her text, Zimmer’s task has been the seemingly impossible — to remember where she had never been, for her parents, who had wanted only to forget, and to find her place between them.

The world attacks us directly, tears us apart through the experience of the most incredible events, and assembles and reassembles us again. Collage is the most appropriate medium to illustrate this reality.   —J. Kolář (Czech, 1914–2002)

“The story of the legendary martial arts fighter and kickboxer Oum Ry is by turns pulse-pounding, disturbing, and powerful. His is an astonishing life told beautifully by his daughter Zochada Tat and Addi Somekh. The book will grip you from its first pages and not let you go."

—Jeff Chang, author of Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America  and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

Oum Ry (b.1944) is a former international champion kickboxer who first brought the Cambodian martial art Pradal Serey to the United States. When his family of silver engravers couldn't afford his food or schooling, he lived with monks until seeking out Pradal Serey masters, soon becoming national champion at 23 years old and one of the most famous fighters in the region. For 15 years, he toured Southeast Asia, and without ever suffering a knock-out, won more than 250 fights. After a young man’s dream-life of stardom, parties, and girls, his new wife gave birth to a child in 1975, two months before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and threw the country into the chaos of civil war, where starvation, disease, and mass executions were common.

Oum Ry survived the genocide though much of his family perished. He was saved many times from death in Cambodia due to fame, talent, and his resilience, but suffered a life-threatening attack during Southern California’s epic gang violence of the 1990s. Earlier, as a refugee with his young family in Chicago, Oum Ry learned English while working cleaning hotels. But within a few years, he had an investor in Long Beach, California and opened one of the first kickboxing gyms in the United States.

This is Oum Ry's life story, which is propelled by his highly anticipated return to Cambodia in February 2022 to reunite with family and to pass on Pradal Serey traditions to the next generation.

The texture of memory and the ability of art and film to bear witness to traumatic events are delicately approached in this book-length essay by a Mekas cinephile. 

For years, filmmaker Peter Delpeut has had Jonas Mekas's Movie Journal within easy reach of his desk. Since his student days, he has been a great admirer of the Lithuanian-American ‘Godfather of avant-garde cinema’. Until he was startled in June 2018 by an article in The New York Review of Books. Historian Michael Casper claimed that Mekas had deliberately forgotten or misrepresented certain events during World War II. Seeded by this controversy over Mekas’s memories of his Lithuanian youth and Mekas’s pain over his subsequent exile, Delpeut’s essayistic and self-reflective book flowers into an inquiry about memory and forgetting; the moral compass of the future that cannot find its bearing in the past; the abilities of art to witness; and the roles we all must play in writing the adequate history of events too traumatic for a just accounting. 

Although there is little doubt that Mekas himself never participated in the horrors of the Holocaust in Lithuania, his silence about the fate of his Jewish countrymen and neighbors could be said to enable a rewriting of history, at the sacrifice of witness testimonies. As Delpeut follows Mekas through films, diaries, his public performances, his speeches, and finally his testimony given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), he encounters an impasse for which he was not prepared.

Just a game? This intriguing visual title looks deep into the underbelly of football (soccer) fandom, featuring a vast photographic archive of fans' graffiti and street art captured by a pioneering ‘graffitologist’. At the intersection of the street and sport we find themes of the day: how racial, ethnic, and class tensions play out in visual culture.

On the fringe of sports culture are the Ultras, the football fans whose pyrotechnics, chants, wildly creative stunts, and hooliganism are infamous. Using selections from his archive containing hundreds of photographs of Ultras' street art and graffiti, including everything from elaborate murals to stickers to “scratchitto” incisions and spray-paint duels, award-winning author Mitja Velikonja introduces readers to the visual iconography of a fascinating underworld.

The Ultra subculture is built by “no-bodys,” the anonymous (primarily) men whose attachments to their teams, specifically in Europe and post-socialist states, sometimes cross the lines into nationalist sentiments and militaristic “Blood and Soil” extremism. After examining general themes and trends in street art and tifo club graffiti, Velikonja embarks on a case study of fans from his native Slovenia and touches on the roles of neighboring football fans in the Balkan Wars. He continues with an analysis of political and socially progressive graffiti, local trends and circumstances, as well as its role in the United States. As he peels back layers of misinformation and misrepresentation, he cues our understanding of factional mindsets within histories of political instability, arguing for dissensus being a critical element to democracies. In the end, we understand that while always under siege, the ultra-fans require nothing less than fidelity and devotion, but precisely to what can be determined — it's anyone's game to call.

A deserted Paris house holds the mystery of a brilliant Viennese modernist who worked alongside Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos before vanishing.

Wyeth takes readers on a deeply personal and revelatory journey. This research process, which readers experience vicariously, makes Wyeth’s prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions. […] For late architect and painter Jean Welz, designs should reflect one’s aesthetic and political commitments. This narrative will resonate with anyone interested in the politics of architecture, or the pursuit of knowledge at large.
—Hyperallergic "BEST ART BOOKS OF 2022"

Welz’s having been “lost” is indeed a travesty of architectural history to which the book serves as a welcome antidote.
—Artforum

A leading painter still highly regarded in South Africa, Jean Welz's prior architectural career has been virtually unknown until a string of discoveries unfolded for author and filmmaker Peter Wyeth, allowing him to narrate this amazing true tale of genius. Trained in ultra-sophisticated, but conservative Vienna, Welz was sent to Paris for the 1925 Art Deco exhibition by his influential employer, renowned architect Josef Hoffmann. There he met preeminent modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. The latter employed him to assist in building a house for the founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara. They all mixed in avant-garde circles at the Dôme Café in Montparnasse along with Welz’s classmate from Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welz’s future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed by Nazis; and photographer André Kertész.

Through Welz’s South African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters, portfolios, and photographs generations after Welz’s death that unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of Corbusier’s “Five Points of Architecture,” a gravestone for Marx’s daughter, and the many ways that Welz disappeared amongst his collaborators, intentionally and not. This account of why Jean Welz did not become a famous name in architecture takes us through his brother’s Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an uncompromising artist’s vision at the same time sifting through significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welz’s built projects and visionary designs.

Hyperrealist photographer Amir Zaki’s new monograph covers 20+ years of photographic work, following his widely reviewed book California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks. Includes an essay and interview.

A double gatefold sculptural monograph with no singular entry or exit and three spines, Amir Zaki, Building + Becoming opens to a full width of roughly 40 inches and brings multiple series into focus: suspended landscapes, rocks, carvings, and hyper-realist California beach architecture, which like his skateparks (also included), are uncannily quiet and devoid of people. “I am looking for a kind of strangeness within the commonplace … where something familiar and unfamiliar is initially welcoming yet alienating, using digital technology as a means to an end.”

Literary critics Walter Benn Michaels and Jennifer Ashton discuss Zaki’s manipulation of space through evenness, which is accomplished by creating a perfectly technically focused object: “The point is not that the pictures overcome physical limits, but that they violate the logic of our eyesight.” Referencing the history of landscape and modern photography in California (Edward Weston, Ansel Adams), Michaels and Ashton show that Zaki’s insistence on marrying technology seamlessly with this tradition results in continuity, an “addition through subtraction” of the third-dimension. 

Zaki has been interviewed for NPR online and featured or reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, as well as having been interviewed in Dezeen, Wallpaper, The New Order, Elle Decor, Hypebeast, GUP Magazine, and Aramco World. His last book, California Concrete is in the top 50 in Skateboarding books and top 150 in Individual Photographer books on Amazon.

A daughter breaks the family silence about her mother’s schizophrenia, reframing hospitalizations, paranoia, illness, and caregiving through a feminist lens.

Claire Phillips’ elegantly written and unflinching memoir about her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer diagnosed in mid-life with paranoid schizophrenia, challenges current conceptions about mental illness, relapse and recovery, as well as difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease. Told in fragments, the work also becomes a startling reflection on the evolution of feminism as seen through mother-daughter relationships.

Only with her mother’s final relapse at age 73 did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock magazine, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015.

An illustrated survey of artist hoaxes, including impersonations, fabula, cryptoscience, and forgeries, researched and written by an expert “fictive-art” practitioner.

In her groundbreaking book, internationally recognized multimedia artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge reflects on the most urgent question of today: where does truth lie, and how is it verified? Encouraging readers to critically question the role art plays in shaping reality, Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation defines a new genre of art that fabricates evidence to support a central fiction. Interweaving contemporary "fictive art" practice with a lineage of hoaxes and impostures dating from the 17th century, LaFarge offers the first comprehensive survey of this practice.

The shift from the early information age to our "infocalypse" era of rampant misinformation has made fictive art an especially radical form as it straddles the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination. Artists deploy a wide range of practices to substantiate their fictions, manufacturing artefacts, altering photographs, and posing as experts from many different fields. A fictive-art practitioner herself, LaFarge explores and underscores the myriad ways art can ground or destabilize one's lived reality, forcing us to question our subjective experience and our understanding of what counts as evidence.

Many examples of these curious and sometimes notorious fabrications are included - from nonexistent artists and peculiar museums to cryptoscientific objects like fake skeletons and staged archaeological evidence. From the intriguing Cottingley fairy photographs "captured" in 1917 by teenage sisters, to the Museum of Jurassic Technology; from the work of artists like Iris Häussler, Joan Fontcuberta, and Eva and Franco Mattes to the enigmatic encyclopedia known as the Codex Seraphinianus, fictive art continues to reframe assumptions made by its contemporaneous culture. With all the attendant consequences of mistrust, outrage, and rejection, fictive art practitioners both past and present play upon the fragile trust that establishes societies, underlining the crucial roles played by perception and doubt.

A poet's hiking vacation turns deadly in soaring Mojave heat; his true survival story leaves you with chills. Rosenthal’s shocking ordeal was covered by The Discovery Channel and on "Fight to Survive" with Bear Grylls.

A real estate broker in Downtown Los Angeles, Ed Rosenthal's passion is poetry, writing about the historic buildings he sells and advocates to preserve. He hates slumlords, is fed up with his buyers, and finally escapes to the Mojave to bathe at a natural spring and take his favorite hiking trip in Joshua Tree National Park. But his vacation soon turns into a nightmare. Over six grueling days without water, food, or hope, he discovers a well of perseverance in the snippets of his life that play over the deadly but inspiring landscape, in which he finds himself utterly and inexplicably lost. The God of Random Chance has, despite his best efforts his whole life, finally caught up to him. He describes his ordeal and its setting in intimate, vivid detail: surreal visions mix with wayfinding and intuitive wisdom in a poet’s-eye view of the life-lessons and magic that the desert can hold.

A conversation between an artist and a gardener in the California border-landscape about creation, change, and loss.

An intertextual, fictionalized narrative weaves together several years of Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg’s observations, research, video recordings, and paintings based on logbooks kept by gardener Chris Shea. Meyenberg’s conversations with Shea about his ephemeral landscape infer the change and loss inherent in human life and propels the deep emotional intelligence of this bilingual book as it reflects on time, creation, and the inspiration of the natural world. Shea’s remarkable, nuanced, and delicate language for color is reflected in Meyenberg’s layered appreciation for the garden Shea tended until the end of his life. Eloisa Haudenschild, Director of inSite, commissioned Meyenberg’s project with Shea for haudenschildGarage in La Jolla, California, and enlisted curator Ruth Estévez, the text’s author.

For more information about the project see the haudenschildGarage website or DoppelHouse.com. Note: This book has two parts, one in English, one in Spanish.

A memoir by an American who almost single-handedly introduced Soviet rock to the free world, [...] Stingray, who wrote this memoir with her daughter, Madison, nicely captures her daring amid an atmosphere of liberation and fear, and she's a study in moxie and enthusiasm.
—Kirkus Reviews

As one of the first American musicians to break through the Soviet scene, and one of the few women to be seen as an equal amongst Leningrad’s pantheon of rock superstars, Stingray’s perspective on the development of late Soviet rock is probably the single most important source for those who want a birds-eye view of late Soviet youth culture, and Stingray’s stories are as entertaining as they are relevant and illuminating.
—Alexander Herbert, author of What About Tomorrow?: An Oral History of Russian Punk from the Soviet Era to Pussy Riot

Wild and vivid — a rollicking memoir of romance and rock ‘n’ roll in an era of upheaval and transition. From Los Angeles to Leningrad and back again, Joanna’s story is borne along by her infectious, headlong enthusiasm. It’s quite a ride.
—Patrick Radden Keefe, creator of the Wind of Change podcast and author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

The history of Russian rock music could have been very different without Joanna Stingray. Joanna was friends with rock musicians, recorded songs with them, shot their videos and brought them clothes and instruments from the West. Her video footage, capturing young icons of Russian rock like Viktor Tsoi, Sergei Kuryokhin, Timur Novikov and Boris Grebenshchikov, is rare evidence of the golden era of the Soviet underground.
—The Moscow Times

Red Wave is a warm and conversational autobiography about a lost world, peopled with courageous artists risking their freedom for the ideas of expression, art, and rock ‘n’ roll. [...] We root for her and her friends to overcome bureaucracy, oppression, isolation, deprivation, and the heavy footsteps of the KGB. [...] In a readable and personable way, Red Wave helps shine some light into this remarkable corner of rock history.
—Tim Sommer, Guernica

The Great War drama by Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, restaged by Sengl in "stunning display" of taxidermied rat-actors, with commentary.

When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus’.

– Bertolt Brecht

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY – TOP 10 IN ART, ARCHITECTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY, Fall 2018

With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl (b. 1974) has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus’ nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915–22). Featuring Sengl’s entire installation, the DoppelHouse Press edition also includes essays that examine her ambitious dramaturgy, which condenses Kraus’ ten-to-fifteen hour drama into an abridged reading of its themes: human barbarism, the role of journalism in war, the sway of popular opinion and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus’ original provide a window to see his other “war” — a war on the misuses of language itself.

Published in conjunction with the centenary anniversary of the Armistice, which ended The Great War but bred another soon to come, this edition of The Last Days of Mankind offers an agit-prop protest crossing the boundaries of art and spanning the knowledge of the century that has passed since Kraus penned his play. Deborah Sengl offers her stylistic model for envisioning human folly through animal actors, who become more than human, while confronting a violence particular to humankind, laced with selfishness and greed.

Contributors include modernist poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff (The Edge of Irony, University of Chicago Press 2015); arts writer Matthias Goldmann; Paul Reitter (editor/contributor to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Harper, 2013); and Associate Professor of German, Anna Souchuk.

Prokop’s meticulous history restores Jacques and Jacqueline Groag to their rightful places in the pantheon of Viennese Modernists.

Prokop explores their individual careers in Vienna and Czechoslovakia, their early collaborations in the 1930s, their lives as Jewish émigrés, and the couple’s unique contributions in Britain for postwar exhibitions, monuments, furniture and textile design, even a dress for future-queen Elizabeth II. Full color edition, supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

A surprising and revealing memoir populated with art historians, art influencers, and the former lover and lifelong friend of Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood. 

Francis M. Naumann, a distinguished expert on Dada and Marcel Duchamp reflects upon his mentors, including Leo Steinberg, John Rewald, and perhaps his greatest influence: Beatrice Wood, a renowned ceramic artist and one of the most prominent participants in New York Dada. Wood set Naumann upon a course of original research that would define him, but also provided a moral platform for what an art historian could be. Artwork by Kathleen Gilje; French flaps.

In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk (b. 1930) colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia.

The abandoned daughter of Pablo Neruda speaks through “incandescent poetic prose full of magical realism, biographical details and psychological insight."

Winner of the Fintro Prize for Literature

Malva, a precocious eight-year-old ghost, is running amok in the afterlife with a cadre of other lost children. She searches for her father, the famous poet Pablo Neruda, and wants him to know the details of her small, but not insignificant life. Why did he abandon her, and her mother Maria? And what became of him? Who was he before he had a child? And what did she, his only child, mean to him?

From her omniscient perspective, the once disabled and mute Malva now travels through the world and through time, seeing her father as a young boy, later as he courted her mother in Dutch-Indonesia, and how his political passions drove his life. She scrutinizes every moment, seeking to understand and resolve her loss. With the wisdom of a child, she picks up her father’s pen and conducts literary mischief, courting the great poets of our time and bringing her chosen ghostwriter, Hagar Peeters, news of her own father, who was a journalist in Chile during the coup and Neruda’s mysterious death.… Startling, profound, and graceful, Peeters brings to readers the world Malva could not describe in life, an extraordinary story of love that spans earth and heaven.

Hagar Peeters (b. 1972), nominee for Dutch Poet Laureate, has won numerous prizes and published several volumes of poetry: Enough Poems Written About Love Today (1999), Suitcases of Sea Air (2003), Runner of Light (2008) and Maturity (2011). She spent ten years researching the life of Malva in The Netherlands and Chile. She lives in Amsterdam with her son.

The abandoned daughter of Pablo Neruda speaks through “incandescent poetic prose full of magical realism, biographical details and psychological insight."

Winner of the Fintro Prize for Literature

Malva, a precocious eight-year-old ghost, is running amok in the afterlife with a cadre of other lost children. She searches for her father, the famous poet Pablo Neruda, and wants him to know the details of her small, but not insignificant life. Why did he abandon her, and her mother Maria? And what became of him? Who was he before he had a child? And what did she, his only child, mean to him?

From her omniscient perspective, the once disabled and mute Malva now travels through the world and through time, seeing her father as a young boy, later as he courted her mother in Dutch-Indonesia, and how his political passions drove his life. She scrutinizes every moment, seeking to understand and resolve her loss. With the wisdom of a child, she picks up her father’s pen and conducts literary mischief, courting the great poets of our time and bringing her chosen ghostwriter, Hagar Peeters, news of her own father, who was a journalist in Chile during the coup and Neruda’s mysterious death.… Startling, profound, and graceful, Peeters brings to readers the world Malva could not describe in life, an extraordinary story of love that spans earth and heaven.

Hagar Peeters (b. 1972), nominee for Dutch Poet Laureate, has won numerous prizes and published several volumes of poetry: Enough Poems Written About Love Today (1999), Suitcases of Sea Air (2003), Runner of Light (2008) and Maturity (2011). She spent ten years researching the life of Malva in The Netherlands and Chile. She lives in Amsterdam with her son.

In this memoir, replete with Jewish humor and sardonic Russian irony, exiled Russian journalist and human rights advocate Arkady Polishchuk (b. 1930) colorfully narrates his evolution as a dissenter and his work on behalf of persecuted Christians in 1970s Soviet Russia.

An intimate, often humorous exploration of the intertwining cycles of death, rebirth and coincidence through the eyes of an existential artist.

An amazing game of mirrors. […] Original and promising.
—Le Monde

2014 Anton Wachter Prize for Best First Novel; Golden Book Owl Reader's Choice Award; Opzij Feminist Literature Prize; 2014 Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt Prize; Nominated for the John Leonard Prize, National Book Critics Circle

Meet Minnie Panis, a young and talented conceptual artist navigating love affairs, her unexpected success in the art world, and her relationship with an emotionally distant mother. After surviving a near-death experience falling through the ice during her ultimate artwork, Minnie begins to uncover the truth behind her premature birth with the help of the doctor who saves her life—as it turns out—twice. Entering into his clinic, whose motto is All the fish needs is to get lost in the water, Minnie arrives at the border of life’s ebb, where meaningful art and revelations occur.

Niña Weijers’ remarkable, inventive novel depicts a contemporary conceptual artist at the height of her fame, whose blasé art project has unintended consequences. Weijers invokes Kurt Vonnegut in the course of the narrative, and this novel shares Vonnegut’s sense of how things can be simultaneously real and absurd. Movies and books notoriously fail to capture the social and spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary art world, but Weijers nails it. Her book is beautifully written, surprising and often profound.
—Chris Kraus

The oral history of a renowned Czech writer, whose optimism and faith in people survived grueling experiences under authoritarian regimes.

Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was a renowned Czech writer and translator born to Jewish parents. Her bestselling memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her crime novel Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street—based on her own experiences living under Stalinist oppression—was named an NPR Best Book in 2015.

In the tradition of Studs Terkel, Hitler, Stalin and I is based on interviews between Kovály and award-winning filmmaker Helena Treštíková. In it, Kovály recounts her family history in Czechoslovakia, starving in the deprivations of Lodz Ghetto, how she miraculously left Auschwitz, fled from a death march, failed to find sanctuary amongst former friends in Prague as a concentration camp escapee, and participated in the liberation of Prague. Later under Communist rule, she suffered extreme social isolation as a pariah after her first husband Rudolf Margolius was unjustly accused in the infamous Slánsky Trial and executed for treason. Remarkably, Kovály, exiled in the United States after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, only had love for her country and continued to believe in its people. She returned to Prague in 1996.

Heda had an enormous talent for expressing herself. She spoke with precision and was descriptive and witty in places. I admired her attitude and composure, even after she had such extremely difficult experiences. Nazism and Communism afflicted Heda's life directly with maximum intensity. Nevertheless, she remained an optimist.

Helena Treštíková has made over fifty documentary films. Hitler, Stalin and I has garnered several awards in the Czech Republic and Japan.

"Few things are more satisfying in sci-fi with a literary bent than mingling high-brow cultural speculation with low-brow humor. [...] Readers who favor the sensual detail and daring brilliance of Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller, George R.R. Martin, and Frank Herbert will find much to enjoy in this dazzling translation of a writer little known in North America." 
– William J. Grabowski, Library Journal

The world as we know it is over. After a genocide waged upon humans, the reign of the animals has begun.

The indifferently wise Cyrus Golden the Lion rules the three-city state that is now what remains of Europe. Yet, other forces stir while the king of beasts sleeps--the last struggling human resistance, the Atlanteans with their mysterious undersea plans; the factions of Badger, Fox and Lynx within the empire itself; and, in the jungles across the ocean, a ceramic form of postbiological life. Welcome to the setting of Dietmar Dath's futuristic novel, The Abolition of Species, presenting an imaginative and highly original take on the decline and rebirth of civilization.

Cyrus the Lion sends the wolf Dmitri Stepanovich on a diplomatic mission, and in the course of his journey he discovers truths about natural history, war, and politics for which he was unprepared. The subsequent war that breaks out in The Abolition of Species will come to span three planets and thousands of years--encompassing treachery and massacres, music and mathematics, savagery and decadence, as well as the terraformation of Mars and Venus and the manipulation of time itself. By turns grandiose, horrific, erotic, scathing, and visionary, The Abolition of Species is a tale of love and war after the fall of man and an epic meditation on the theory of evolution unlike any other.

One of Germany's most celebrated contemporary writers, Dath has distinguished himself through works that deftly combine popular culture--particularly music--with left-wing politics and the fantastic. The Abolition of Species embodies the best of what Dath is known for and will cement his reputation among English readers excited to discover one of the freshest voices in contemporary literature.

Two books by Maurice Rajsfus, a French activist and former investigative journalist for Le Monde, who shares his research and personal recollections in order to shed new light on France's role in the Holocaust. 

In the first volume, "Operation Yellow Star," Rajsfus meticulously analyzes archival documents, demonstrating the extent of police collaboration with the Vichy regime and how it facilitated the persecution, deportation, and ultimately the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Examining long-unseen arrest records and transcripts, Rajsfus seeks to understand how and why many average French citizens resisted Nazi occupation while others were willingly complicit. In the second book, "Black Thursday," Rajsfus recounts his own experiences of July 16, 1942, when he and his family were arrested as part of the Vel’ d'Hiv roundup, the largest ever in France, of 13,000 Jews. While most of those detained during the two-day sweep eventually died in Auschwitz, the author survived and has spent the rest of his life grappling with his country's betrayal. Together, the two volumes by Rajsfus offer a damning exposé of the bureaucracy of genocide, laying bare how cultural bias, political self-interest, and the influence of right-wing media led to the implementation of the Yellow Star as a segregationist device and determined France’s culpability in the Holocaust.

Maurice Rajsfus is the author of thirty books and from 1994–2012 he created and circulated "Que fait la police," a "Cop Watch" bulletin detailing human rights abuses. He lives in Paris with his wife, sons and grandchildren.

Phyllis Aronoff has won the Jewish Literary Award for translation and the translation prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation. She was president of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and from 2007–2015 represented translators on the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada.

Mike Mitchell (b. 1941) is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.

An intimate, often humorous exploration of the intertwining cycles of death, rebirth and coincidence through the eyes of an existential artist.

An amazing game of mirrors. […] Original and promising.
—Le Monde

2014 Anton Wachter Prize for Best First Novel; Golden Book Owl Reader's Choice Award; Opzij Feminist Literature Prize; 2014 Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt Prize; Nominated for the John Leonard Prize, National Book Critics Circle

Meet Minnie Panis, a young and talented conceptual artist navigating love affairs, her unexpected success in the art world, and her relationship with an emotionally distant mother. After surviving a near-death experience falling through the ice during her ultimate artwork, Minnie begins to uncover the truth behind her premature birth with the help of the doctor who saves her life—as it turns out—twice. Entering into his clinic, whose motto is All the fish needs is to get lost in the water, Minnie arrives at the border of life’s ebb, where meaningful art and revelations occur.

Niña Weijers’ remarkable, inventive novel depicts a contemporary conceptual artist at the height of her fame, whose blasé art project has unintended consequences. Weijers invokes Kurt Vonnegut in the course of the narrative, and this novel shares Vonnegut’s sense of how things can be simultaneously real and absurd. Movies and books notoriously fail to capture the social and spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary art world, but Weijers nails it. Her book is beautifully written, surprising and often profound.
—Chris Kraus

This hybrid book examines the art and politics of “The Nude” in various cultural contexts, featuring books of canonical western art pirated and either digitally- or hand-censored in Iran by anonymous government workers. 

Author Glenn Harcourt uses several case studies brought to the fore by American painter Pamela Joseph in her recent “Censored” series. Harcourt’s rigorous, culturally-measured and art historical approach complements Joseph’s appropriation of these censored images as feminist critique. Harcourt argues that her work serves as a window toward larger questions in art. These include an examination of the evolution of abstraction; the role of women in western society, as seen through the history of painting the body; the effects of western art on cultures outside the west (sometimes referred to in Iran as “west-toxication”); and how artists in non-western countries, specifically those in Iran living under rules of censorship that specifically prohibit representation of the body, engage with the history of western art found in the censored books.

Harcourt’s discussion of Iranian contemporary artists focuses on censorship tropes in portraiture, including works by Aydin Aghdashloo, Gohar Dashti, Katayoun Karami, Daryoush Qarezad, Manijeh Sehhi, Newsha Tavakolian, and others. Issues of privacy and security prevent some Iranian artist insiders from being named, but studio images as well as recipes for removal of the censored marks along with testimony from artists who are now living outside Iran provide reference for many English-speaking readers who don’t otherwise have knowledge of the country’s strict policies.

Image reproductions ranging from the pages of the censored books themselves, to Joseph’s paintings, to artwork by contemporary Iranian artists, make the book visually intriguing, timely, and visually fascinating reading.

Beginning in the early morning hours of July 16, 1942, and lasting for two days, the French police went beyond Nazi ordinances and took it upon themselves to arrest and imprison more than 13,000 Jews at a Paris sporting arena, the Vélodrome d'Hiver. 

For most of the Jews, this detention without water, food, or sleep was the first horrific step toward death in the concentration camps. Using recently opened police files, Maurice Rajsfus details the internal organization of the police, showing the mechanisms of this raid in particular and of raids in general, making the book an indispensable micro-history of the Holocaust. A uniquely detailed study of a notorious incident of cooperation between xenophobic and anti-Semitic forces. Shocking, large compilation of published articles in the collaborationist press that promoted social discord and hatred of Jews, distorted or obscured the raids on immigrant Jews in Paris under Nazi occupation, and used emotional appeals to nationalism to justify persecution. A companion piece to Rajsfus's Operation Yellow Star / Black Thursday (DoppelHouse Press, 2017), The Vél d'Hiv Raid, is the only contemporary analysis of the roundup, its precursors and its aftermath, including witness and police reports, shocking excerpts from the collaborationist press, and speeches by contemporary French politicians whose official apology is still not complete and terribly overdue. 

With a foreword by Israeli activist and author Michel Warschawski. 

Maurice Rajsfus (b. 1928), a former investigative journalist for Le Monde, survived the Vél d'Hiv roundup. He has written thirty books, including many examining the Vichy regime and its legacy in French police culture. Several of his books about his World War II experiences are the basis of a YA comic published by Tartamudo editions, as well as a theatrical production and a film. He lives in Paris with his family.

Beginning in the early morning hours of July 16, 1942, and lasting for two days, the French police went beyond Nazi ordinances and took it upon themselves to arrest and imprison more than 13,000 Jews at a Paris sporting arena, the Vélodrome d'Hiver. 

For most of the Jews, this detention without water, food, or sleep was the first horrific step toward death in the concentration camps. Using recently opened police files, Maurice Rajsfus details the internal organization of the police, showing the mechanisms of this raid in particular and of raids in general, making the book an indispensable micro-history of the Holocaust. A uniquely detailed study of a notorious incident of cooperation between xenophobic and anti-Semitic forces. Shocking, large compilation of published articles in the collaborationist press that promoted social discord and hatred of Jews, distorted or obscured the raids on immigrant Jews in Paris under Nazi occupation, and used emotional appeals to nationalism to justify persecution. A companion piece to Rajsfus's Operation Yellow Star / Black Thursday (DoppelHouse Press, 2017), The Vél d'Hiv Raid, is the only contemporary analysis of the roundup, its precursors and its aftermath, including witness and police reports, shocking excerpts from the collaborationist press, and speeches by contemporary French politicians whose official apology is still not complete and terribly overdue. 

With a foreword by Israeli activist and author Michel Warschawski. 

Maurice Rajsfus (b. 1928), a former investigative journalist for Le Monde, survived the Vél d'Hiv roundup. He has written thirty books, including many examining the Vichy regime and its legacy in French police culture. Several of his books about his World War II experiences are the basis of a YA comic published by Tartamudo editions, as well as a theatrical production and a film. He lives in Paris with his family.

Two books by Maurice Rajsfus, a French activist and former investigative journalist for Le Monde, who shares his research and personal recollections in order to shed new light on France's role in the Holocaust. 

In the first volume, "Operation Yellow Star," Rajsfus meticulously analyzes archival documents, demonstrating the extent of police collaboration with the Vichy regime and how it facilitated the persecution, deportation, and ultimately the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Examining long-unseen arrest records and transcripts, Rajsfus seeks to understand how and why many average French citizens resisted Nazi occupation while others were willingly complicit. In the second book, "Black Thursday," Rajsfus recounts his own experiences of July 16, 1942, when he and his family were arrested as part of the Vel’ d'Hiv roundup, the largest ever in France, of 13,000 Jews. While most of those detained during the two-day sweep eventually died in Auschwitz, the author survived and has spent the rest of his life grappling with his country's betrayal. Together, the two volumes by Rajsfus offer a damning exposé of the bureaucracy of genocide, laying bare how cultural bias, political self-interest, and the influence of right-wing media led to the implementation of the Yellow Star as a segregationist device and determined France’s culpability in the Holocaust.

Maurice Rajsfus is the author of thirty books and from 1994–2012 he created and circulated "Que fait la police," a "Cop Watch" bulletin detailing human rights abuses. He lives in Paris with his wife, sons and grandchildren.

Phyllis Aronoff has won the Jewish Literary Award for translation and the translation prize from the Quebec Writers' Federation. She was president of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and from 2007–2015 represented translators on the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada.

Mike Mitchell (b. 1941) is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.

Adolf Loos—A Private Portrait is an unusual, literary biography featuring lively, often humorous, “snapshots” of Viennese-Czechoslovak architect Adolf Loos.

"A valuable fine-grained portrait… The English translation of her book is fluent and accurate, conveying well the tone of Claire Loos’ original (which, in turn, to some extent mimics Loos’ own writing style). Richly informative." 
—Christopher Long, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

"Claire Beck Loos, a gifted photographer and writer, … reveals much about her ex-husband’s mercurial persona in a series of conversationally-toned vignettes …. Claire died tragically at 38, at the Riga concentration camp; her memoir thus becomes a haunting tribute not only to Loos's talents, but to her own.."

—Judy Pollan, Modernism Magazine

An intimate collection of vignettes reveals Loos’ personality, temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1929-1933) and the ways in which he helped shape Modern architecture. This translation, by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders, is the first English edition, the book having enjoyed several reprints in German.

The author, Claire Beck Loos, was a photographer and Adolf Loos’ last wife. She was born in 1904 in Czechoslovakia; her family were Jewish industrialists and important early clients of Loos, commissioning several apartments in Pilsen and works by the architect’s friend Oskar Kokoschka. In addition to being a biography of her husband, Adolf Loos—A Private Portrait also serves as a self-portrait of Claire, a vibrant young artist who died a tragic and untimely death at Riga, a Nazi concentration camp, in 1942. The book includes supplemental texts by Claire’s niece Janet Beck Wilson, biographical materials and previously unpublished artistic photographs by the author.

The never-before published memoir of design pioneer Paul T. Frankl, known for his Skyscraper furniture and work for Hollywood elite.

Viennese émigré Paul T. Frankl was a pioneer of early modern design in America, known for his “Skyscraper” furniture of the 1920s and later for the work he did for Hollywood celebrities such as Fred Astaire, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. His autobiography, thought for decades to be lost, was written at the end of Frankl’s long career and is a vivid account of his early life, his rise in the profession, and his many travels in search of ideas and forms. What will now be known as Frankl’s last book is written in a captivating style befitting the personality of a gentle and cultured man who revolutionized and advocated for American modernism.

This edition, hand-sewn with a printed linen cover, won a design award in Austria and is introduced and annotated by modern design scholar Christopher Long, author of Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design (Yale 2007). The book includes a remembrance written by his daughter Paulette Frankl as well as many previously unpublished photographs and drawings.