Inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, El Niño tracks the survival of one woman and a young, undocumented migrant as they journey through the no-man’s-land of a remote southwestern desert. Honey hasn’t seen her mother, Marianne, in more than two years. She drives deep into the once-prosperous border region of the Oro Desert for a surprise visit, only to discover that Marianne has vanished. Alone in an unforgiving environment populated with hostile locals, she meets Chávez, a young “coyote� or human trafficker, who convinces Honey he knows her mother’s whereabouts and agrees to take her there — for a price. As they make their way through the Oro’s brutal no-man’s-land they are tracked by Ocho, a teenage bounty hunter determined to recruit Chávez. And then there is Baez, Marianne’s wizened Shepherd-coyote mix, whose death and life intimately intersect with Honey and Chávez's search for Marianne and who tells the story of the Oro Desert as it slowly comes apart. Told in three distinct voices, El Niño is an intricately constructed and starkly written novel from a bold and inventive new writer.

Spanning the late 1970s to the late 1980s, Nadia Bozak’s thirteen stories are narrated from the perspective of Shell, the only child of bohemian artisans determined to live off their handicrafts and uphold a left-wing lifestyle. At the age of five, Shell’s world is transformed when the family moves into a new house, where she grows up. Over time, she gradually trades her unconventional upbringing for junk food, rock music, and boys. All the while, Shell quietly watches her parents’ loveless marriage fall apart and learns to survive divorce, weight gain, heartache, and first love. A funny, sensitive portrayal of the innocence and uncertainty of childhood and adolescence, Thirteen Shells is a true-to-life collection that is as unforgettable as it is poignant.

Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and, increasingly, to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even today's ""green" movies are ecologically unsustainable production, distribution, and consumption processes. Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource-dependent infrastructures, The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the ""hydrocarbon imagination" has been central to the development of film as a medium.Nadia Bozak's innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media-with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov's prescient eye, from Chris Marker's analog experiments to the digital work of Agnes Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk. Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics, The Cinematic Footprint offers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them.