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Aysegül Savas

A deeply felt chronicle into the wilderness of the first forty days of new motherhood.

In the final weeks of her pregnancy, Ayşegül Savaş becomes fascinated by the mythology around the first forty days after giving birth, and the invisible beings that are said to surround the mother. “In Turkish, we speak of extracting the forty days, like a sort of exorcism. My grandmothers assure me that it will all get better after forty days are out.” A friend lends a book that suggests forty days of rest and fortifying broths and avoiding wind and cold. 

In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, forty days are seen as a period of trial and transformation. They are often journeys into the wilderness and “its vast and unruly territories.” When the baby arrives, Savaş charts her own path into the wilderness of new motherhood—a space of contradiction, of chaos and care, mothering and being mothered. “What is the trial of the postpartum crossing?” writes Savaş. “Where will mother and child emerge once they have left the wild?”

Transit Books

Undelivered Lectures

The Wilderness

Preti Taneja

"Stunning... poetic, urgent. [Taneja] turns a critical lens toward the way language shapes violence, suggesting that 'power tells a story to sustain itself, it has no empathy for those it harms.'”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education program he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers’ Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt.

Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. “It is the immediate aftermath,” Taneja writes. “’I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.’ The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.”

In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.

Aftermath is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

Aftermath

Mariana Oliver

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize

"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."—The New Yorker

"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home."—Publishers Weekly

In her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other more inaccessible territories: language, memory, pain, desire, and the body. With an abiding curiosity and poetic ease, Oliver leads us through the underground city of Cappadocia, explores the vicissitudes of a Berlin marked by historical fracture, recalls a shocking childhood exodus, and recreates the intimacy of the spaces we inhabit. Blending criticism, reportage, and a travel writing all her own, Oliver presents a brilliant collection of essays that asks us what it means to leave the familiar behind and make the unfamiliar our own.

Migratory Birds

Julia Sanches

Namwali Serpell

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

A New Yorker Best Book of 2020

"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging."—The New York Times

"Serpell’s vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

If evolutionary biologists, ethical philosophers, and social media gurus are to be believed, the face is the basis for what we call "humanity." The face is considered the source of identity, truth, beauty, authenticity, and empathy. It 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. But all of this rests on a specific image of the face. We might call it the ideal face.

What about the strange face, the stranger's face, the face that thwarts recognition? What do we make of the face that rides the line of legibility? In a collection of speculative essays on a few such stranger faces—the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the digital face, the face of the dead—Namwali Serpell probes our contemporary mythology of the face. Stranger Faces imagines a new ethics based on the perverse pleasures we take in the very mutability of faces.

Stranger Faces

Mary Cappello

"[Cappello's] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form."—The Atlantic
In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.

Mary Cappello's Lecture 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 James Baldwin, 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.

Lecture

Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series features original book-length essays of exceptional
literary and cultural value

Undelivered Lectures - The book series

Undelivered Lectures - The book series

Undelivered Lectures books in order

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