Dorothy Sampler

Dorothy is a feminist publisher based in St. Louis and distributed by New York Review Books. Over the past fiften years, the press has built a celebrated list of fiction and critical writing by women, with the goal of creating a space in the culture where new innovative writing can flourish. Major twentienth-century figures such as Leonora Carrington, Barbara Comyns, and Marguerite Duras create a context, within the Dorothy list, for contemporary works by award-winning international writers such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Renee Gladman, Kate Briggs, Amina Cain, Sabrina Orah Mark, Caren Beilin, and Nathalie Léger. Dorothy has also debuted some of the most exciting writers of today, publishing first books by Jen George, Suzanne Scanlon, Giada Scodellaro, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. As The Atlantic has said: “Dorothy books emerge each fall like ringing endorsement of writers you’ve never heard of by a friend whose taste you can absolutely trust.” This collection features six of the most popular Dorothy titles, selected to introduce readers to the press’s aesthetic variety and breadth. It includes the hauntingly brilliant Complete Stories of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington alongside the cooler atmospheric strangeness of MacArthur “genius” and Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome. On the literary-critical side, it includes French writer Nathalie Léger’s boundary-breaking Suite for Barbara Loden, which Richard Brody in The New Yorker called “a remarkable new book that does everything—biography, criticism, film history, memoir, and even fiction, all at once,” as well as British writer Kate Briggs’s beloved novel/criticism hybrid, The Long Form, about which Audrey Wollen (also in The New Yorker) wrote: “Reading Briggs, I felt the novel, as a genre, lift its head and look around the room, with all the effort, focus, and luminous curiosity of a newborn, seeing in a way it hadn’t seen before.” Rounding out the selection are New Zealand author Pip Adam's award-winning novel The New Animals—which Joy Williams called “a strange, remorseless, powerful book”—alongside the press’s very first title, Event Factory, book one of Renee Gladman’s four-volume Ravicka series, all of which are available from Dorothy. Titles included: The Complete Stories, Leonora Carrington The Taiga Syndrome, Cristina Rivera Garza Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger The Long Form, Kate Briggs The New Animals, Pip Adams Event Factory, Renee Gladman