New Title Alert! José Alaniz’s Tales of Bart Drops on March 6th!

Hot on the heels of the buzz surrounding Alaniz’s Puro Pinche True Fictions (FlowerSong Press, 2023), we're thrilled to debut his latest work in our Brown Ink series, Tales of Bart.

A Parisian café waiter discovers a mysterious package of documents left by a fugitive-like stranger, unraveling a kaleidoscope of multilingual wordplay, historical intrigue, dystopian visions, and literary puzzles. Tales of Bart—a nod to Alexander Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin—follows the scandalous exploits of “evil” translator Fruitvale Bart. Spanning Republic-era Texas, 19th-century Russia, far-future Atalanta, and 1990s Los Angeles, each vignette is tied to Bart’s provocative translations. Alaniz’s novel probes the nature of translation—faithful reproduction or creative reinvention—and explores art, colonial legacies, postmodern alienation, and the horrors of the self in dazzling, thought-provoking layers.

José Alaniz, a native of Edinburg, Texas, is a professor at the University of Washington specializing in Slavic languages, literatures, cinema, media, and comics studies. A celebrated author of fiction and comics, his recent works include Puro Pinche True Fictions (2023, FlowerSong Press), The Phantom Zone and Other Stories (2020, Amatl Comix), and The Compleat Moscow Calling (2023, Amatl).