Transit Introduces Undelivered Lectures
Transit Books introduces Undelivered Lectures, a new narrative nonfiction series featuring book-length essays by international and American writers.
“We want to provide an outlet for discursive prose of exceptional literary and cultural value that’s more lasting than a magazine piece but less substantial than a 300-page hardback,” said Transit publisher Adam Levy. “Undelivered Lectures is an opportunity to introduce readers to boundary-pushing works of narrative nonfiction in slim, handsome editions.”
Beginning in September, Transit will publish the first two titles in the series, Lecture by Mary Cappello (September 8) and Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell (September 29).
The books will have a unique series design, and will be promoted as stand-alone titles for a general trade audience, with sales and distribution in North America by Consortium / Ingram.
Lecture by Mary Cappello is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture.
Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Cage, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms—from the aphorism to the note—and give new life to knowledge’s dramatic form.
A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, Cappello is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island and the author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack.
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell probes the contemporary mythology of the face.
The face underlies our ideas about what constitutes a human, how we relate emotionally, what is pleasing to the eye, and how we ought to treat each other. This rests on a specific image of the face; we might call it the ideal face. Stranger Faces looks instead at the face that thwarts recognition—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—and imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.
A winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Serpell is a Zambian writer and Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2019.
For media inquiries, rights queries, and to request review copies of individual titles, contact Adam and Ashley Levy at editors@transitbooks.org
LECTURE
by Mary Cappello
On Sale September 8, 2020
Paperback Original
9781945492426
5 x 7 | $15.95
STRANGER FACES
by Namwali Serpell
On Sale September 29, 2020
Paperback Original
9781945492433
5 x 7 | $15.95
About Transit Books
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books publishes a carefully curated list of award-winning literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, essay, and prose that falls somewhere in between. Transit authors have received or been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker International Prize, the National Translation Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and more.