Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction Book List

Forthcoming

The Four-Chambered Heart
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

The Four-Chambered Heart, Anaïs Nin’s 1950 novel, recounts the real-life affair she conducted with café guitarist Gonzalo Moré in 1936. Nin and Moré rented a house-boat on the Seine, and under the pervading influence of the boat’s watchman and Moré’s wife Helba, developed a relationship.

Available

Children of the Albatross
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

This novel, from Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior series, plays out in two parts: “The Sealed Room” and “The Café.” Nin portrays her characters—many of whom represent Nin herself—with intense psychological depth as she boldly depicts eroticism, homosexuality, and androgyny using richly layered metaphors and her signature diaristic style.

Fine Boys
A Novel
By Eghosa Imasuen

Set in Nigeria during the pro-democracy movement and told from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old Gen-Xer, Ewaen, this coming-of-age novel examines the violent university confraternities during the mid-1990s.

Cover of 'The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga'

The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
By Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Larry Siems

This stirring, poetic tale features a Bedouin man whose irrepressible love for his family, his camels, and his way of life fuels his harrowing journey into the Sahara Desert to find a lost camel and his struggle to preserve a culture on the brink of profound change.

The Cape Cod Bicycle War
and Other Stories
By Billy Kahora

Billy Kahora’s long-awaited debut collection includes stories that have appeared in Granta and McSweeney’s, and have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

Cover of 'Good-bye, Son and Other Stories'

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Lewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Cover of 'Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories'

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Allison Pease
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in France, the stories collected in Waste of Timelessness contain many elements familiar to those who know her later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels. Seeded with details remembered from childhood and from life in Paris, the wistful tales portray artists, writers, strangers who meet in the night, and above all, women and their desires.These

Winter of Artifice
Three Novelettes
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Laura Frost

Swallow Press’s reissue of Winter of Artifice, with a new introduction by Laura Frost, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of Anaïs Nin who laid the groundwork for later writers, but whom critics frequently dismiss as solipsistic or overblown.

Ladders to Fire
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Benjamin Franklin V
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Anaïs Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other.

A Spy in the House of Love
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Anita Jarczok

Although Anaïs Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic “distillations” of her secret diaries.

Cover of 'Cases of Circumstantial Evidence'

Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
By Janet Lewis
· Introduction by Kevin Haworth

This is the first digital version of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a collection of three historical novels by noted American writer Janet Lewis.

The Trial of Sören Qvist
By Janet Lewis
· Introduction by Kevin Haworth

Originally published in 1947, The Trial of Sören Qvist has been praised by a number of critics for its intriguing plot and Janet Lewis’s powerful writing. And in the introduction to this new edition, Swallow Press executive editor and author Kevin Haworth calls attention to the contemporary feeling of the story—despite its having been written more than fifty years ago and set several hundred years in the past.

The Wife of Martin Guerre
By Janet Lewis
· Introduction by Kevin Haworth
· Afterword by Larry McMurtry

The Wife of Martin Guerre—based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France—is “one of the most significant short novels in English” (Atlantic Monthly). Originally published in 1941, it still raises questions about identity, belonging, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.

Cover of 'The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron'

The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
By Janet Lewis
· Introduction by Kevin Haworth

This historical novel is the third and final book in American poet and fiction writer Janet Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series, based on legal case studies compiled in the nineteenth century. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Lewis returns to her beloved France, the setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre, her best-known novel and the first in the series.

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Literary Fiction