The first major book from a longtime legend in underground literature; known by citation and word of mouth, but only now emerging with a work that will earn a broad audience. “Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is why I want to read. There are few books at all that expand the exploration of family, outsider sex, animal love, therapy and surreal vision and even fewer writers who do it as well as Claire Donato. My mind and heart are thankfully changed forever.” —JAMIE STEWART of Xiu Xiu and author of Anything That Moves “Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts moves and feels like a novel of ideas, yes, but also a lookbook of Rorshachs; a concept cookbook for famished phantoms; a fragmentary tour de force a la Duras. On every page, it lines the mind with vibrant space, as extraordinary in its candor about desire, artifice, and intimacy as it is with wordplay, wit, and social theory. “Death is a mirror of time, and life is not as heavy as it seems,” Donato writes, beckoning us forward through the void of realism as might an imaginary friend we thought we’d lost—or should I say ‘guardian angel’?” —BLAKE BUTLER, author "In Claire Donato's fiction, I am both looking in and being looked at. The depths of desire are on display, laying bare the complexity and the ugliness that often comes with it." —MOLLY SODA, artist "Claire Donato's prose is at once playful and masterful, charming and haunting—I loved these short stories with huge imaginations." —CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else "Love is a source of radical questioning whose only enemy is indifference. Claire Donato’s fever dream of a novel goes toe to toe with today’s anomie, stretching our only resource left, language, so we can navigate a 21st century landscape of violently changing relationships, with one another, with the natural world, and with our bodies." —JAMIESON WEBSTER, psychoanalyst and author In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their world: a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken. Donato’s fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult traditions: Donnie Darko, Wings of Desire, Daisies, and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with "Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains. Cover photo: Jimmy DeSana Contact Paper, 1980 Vintage C-print © the Jimmy DeSana Trust Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York

A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways Domestirexia goes beyond the entanglement of "domestic" and "anorexia” exploring a behind-closed-doors sensuality, borne in the concept of making home. Home can be a space of both resistance and discomfort that one desires or takes pleasure in enjoying. Rote notions of home and the domestic are reimagined in these poems as estranging, excessive, and populated by unknowable characters. Exploring themes of family, sacrifice, disease, death, money, cooking, romance, sex, art, and the visceral qualities of the everyday, the poems twist themselves into binds for the reader to undo or surrender to. Quarantined at her in-law’s house during Covid, Novak wrote these poems while watching The Great British Baking Show, reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, skimming Grimm Brothers fairy tales, and babysitting an infant. These are poems about wanting to misbehave. Light voyeurism at home, with gin and cake.

A sorrowful daughter works through her grief after her father dies.

“Amina Cain is a beautiful writer. Like the girl in the rearview mirror in your backseat, quiet, looking out the window half smiling, then not, then glancing at you, curious to her. That is how her thoughts and words make me feel, like clouds hanging with jets, and knowing love is pure.” —Thurston Moore Amina Cain’s Creature brings together short fictions set in the space between action and reflection, edging at times toward the quiet and contemplative, at other times toward the grotesque or unsettling. Like the women in Jane Bowles’s work, Cain’s narrators seem always slightly displaced in the midst of their own experiences, carefully observing the effects of themselves on their surroundings and of their surroundings on themselves. Other literary precursors might include Raymond Carver and John Cage, with Carver’s lucid prose and instinct for the potency of small gestures and Cage’s ability to return the modern world to elementary principles. These stories offer not just a unique voice but a unique narrative space, a distinct and dramatic rendering of being-in-the-world.

Poetry. Following her genre-bending novella BURIAL, Claire Donato's first full-length collection of poems THE SECOND BODY meditates on love, language, animals, science, and death. An independent digital arts curator at Babycastles Gallery in Manhattan and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Architecture Writing and BFA Writing programs at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Claire is both the author and the titular second body of the text, in which she appears as a character and female subject alienated by doom, greenhouse gases, Gchat, and sex. As Donato writes in "Corpse Pose," "There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text." THE SECOND BODY is the fractured self that emerges into a 21st century landscape of terrorism and hyperreality, exported via corporate networks to the cloud. "What is THE SECOND BODY? Alice in the pit of despair, humming pop songs and practicing inversions. The ocean, sex, void, women. Dead chickens. 'Doves at the edge of the lake / Falling across the age of the computer.' A bomb going off on the patriarchy. Gloom and glee, bones and teeth: this is how Claire Donato is trying to describe the world to you."--Kate Durbin "When a speaker in Claire Donato's poem 'Grief Interlude' says, 'I care in different meanings, none of / Which are paraphrasable,' we're getting to the root of these poems, which will try everything to articulate the broken and reverent heart that made them. These poems are thick with music and formally rangy and sort of amazing for the things they actually did to me, among which: hurt; puzzle; astonish; delight. Which is to say--they moved me. They move me. Hard to paraphrase that too."--Ross Gay "Generous, violent, open, and dark, THE SECOND BODY continuously lays clear a self-other, and that self- other continuously extends into the universe. As a person, and a reader, I feel very thankful for that, to be in that kind of space, in that kind of literature."--Amina Cain "Claire Donato is a rare and beguiling voice. I am tempted to call her a sincere trickster--the love-child of Joseph Cornell and Carrie Brownstein, perhaps. There is great rigor beneath her verse, and her themes--the body in pain, supplementarity, simulacra, sexuality as textuality, the flexible borders of species-being--are striking in the precision of their arrangements, and the delicacy of their assembly, suspended between the suggestive and the vivid. 'There are ways in which to see inside a person's body using text,' she writes, and her second body--an uncanny, rewarding companion--is well worth listening to."--Dominic Pettman, author of Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age "Claire Donato's THE SECOND BODY answers and deepens the anxiety that I can't stop feeling and that poetry like hers can't stop making us feel. 'I Will Not Die Here,' 'The Pleasure of Tearing Down the Forest,' 'Off to the Nervous Museum'--titles that unnerve you, set over writing that remains unnerving and yet is remarkably studied, political, socially engaged--particularly with the making and remaking of the female subject, necessarily and unashamedly sexualized, but in edgy, productively discordant registers."--John Cayley

Jason's sister is always scaring him but when he gets a new mirror the horror really begins.

With Jinx as their newest crew member, the misfits of the Angry Ghost head to Pirate Cove, a popular trading post. But people are going missing there, and many say ghosts are responsible! With Bug's smarts and the misfits' courage, they decide to investigate. Will Pirate Cove ever be safe again? Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Spellbound is an imprint of Magic Wagon, a division of ABDO.