Undiscovered Americas

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  Ships in Houston

  Nadia Villafuerte and Julie Ann Ward

  Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with Mexico might grab more headlines, these stories take place mostly in Mexico, where stringent immigration policies target Central American migrants, causing them to make fateful—and even fatal—decisions born from desperation, as these migrants live in fear of being deported from Mexico back to Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras. Bringing Villafuerte’s work into English for the first time, Ward deftly unfurls the author’s edgy and fragmentary stream-of-consciousness narrative style, creating a translation that is at once as jarring as it is deeply humanizing, giving readers unfettered access to complex characters in just a few page turns. Moving through the extreme push and pull of liminal spaces in Chiapas, Nadia Villafuerte’s stories of everyday horror—and hope—in Ships in Houston will haunt you long after you close the book.

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  Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune

  Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean MacDonald

  “Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

  So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean MacDonald, an edition of Allen’s Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune is available to readers for the first time as an open access, hybrid book from Downstate Legacies, part of its ongoing translation and lost books series, Undiscovered Americas.

  In this novel of manners set in Capitolia (a thinly veiled stand-in for Columbia, South Carolina, the author’s hometown), Allen recounts the entangled lives of the De Vernes and the Tremaines, two well-to-do black families. The novel unfurls the stories of multiple tragedies endured by each family through episodes of romance, mystery, and murder. Chief among these is the love triangle involving protagonist Gertie Tremaine, esteemed doctor Will De Verne, and Gertie’s sister Lenore “Gypsy” Tremaine. The heartbreaks that follow lead Gertie to lament the “mountains of misfortune” she and her family endure. Even though Allen regarded the novel as “a girlish protest against what seemed to be serious dangers threatening our race,” she insists her “object was not to gain ‘name and fame’ but to call the attention of thinking people to these blots in our social firmament.” It is with great excitement that we reintroduce this overlooked classic to contemporary readers.

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  Mimola or the Story of a Casket

  Antoine Innocent and Susan Kalter

  Appearing for the first time in English, Antoine Innocent’s 1906 novel Mimola or the Story of a Casket weaves the story of Mimola, daughter of Madame Georges, who suffers from an incurable nervous disease, with an investigation of the traditions of Haitian Vodou. Desperate to end her daughter’s affliction, Madame Georges goes on a pilgrimage across Haiti to Ville-Bonheur to help her ailing daughter. Along the way, she meets a woman whose son, Léon, suffers from a similar disorder. Will their mothers’ devotion be enough to ensure the children’s recovery? Will the suffering Mimola and Léon embrace Vodou beliefs and implore the African divinities for mercy? Expertly translated from the French and including critical materials by Susan Kalter, Mimola brings Innocent’s important fin de siècle novel to Anglophone readers.