The texts in this list are curated through my personal interest and recommendations from publishing companies, authors, and publicists. Please contact me with upcoming releases. Understand that I will only include two texts per publishing company. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
Black Lawrence Press
Dyke (geology) by Sabrina Imbler
24 pages – Black Lawrence Press / Bookshop
“Through intertwined threads of autofiction, lyric science writing, and the tale of a newly queer Hawaiian volcano, Sabrina Imbler delivers a coming out story on a geological time scale. This is a small book that tackles large, wholly human questions—what it means to live and date under white supremacy, to never know if one is loved or fetishized, how to navigate fierce desires and tectonic heartbreak through the rise and eventual eruption of a first queer love. “When two galaxies stray too near each other, the attraction between them can be so strong that the galaxies latch on and never let go. Sometimes the pull triggers head-on wrecks between stars—galactic collisions—throwing bodies out of orbit, seamlessly into space. Sometimes the attraction only creates a giant black hole, making something whole into a kind of missing.” In vivid, tensile prose, Dyke (geology) subverts the flat, neutral language of scientific journals to explore what it means to understand the Earth as something queer, volatile, and disruptive.” –from the Black Lawrence Press website
BlazeVOX
Yet to Come by Cris Mazza
328 pages – BlazeVOX / Amazon
“Decades before #metoo, Cal chose his punishment for going too far with a girl he was crazy about: a life-sentence with a woman he could not love, whose frequent rages, untapped spending and ruthless children were his means to distract himself from longing and regret. The girl from his past also condemned him to periodic postcards bearing no return address. Rather than increasing his despair, the postcards helped stoke the imaginary life he maintained with her, including dialogue about his plight, images of her showing up while he plays his sax in a nightclub, and even sex, the very realm that had initiated her retreat from him.” -from the BlazeVOX website
Dissonance Press
Under the Belly of the Beast by Cori Bratby-Rudd (editor)
127 pages – Dissonance Press
“What is Beauty? What makes a Beast? Cori Bratby-Rudd’s Under The Belly of the Beast shatters the fanciful conventions of dehumanization and desire through a collective bombardment of queer writers, trans writers, writers of color—those for whom defining beauty and beast is an everyday battle for survival, identity, and love. Under The Belly of the Beast is no make-believe fairy tale, but something far more brilliant and fantastic: a relentless elegy for the human, authentic, and true.” –from the Dissonance Press website
Gaudy Boy
The Experiment of the Tropics: Poems by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil
64 pages – Amazon
“By braiding the music of anthropology with the intimacy of the lyric, Lawrence Ypil explores history’s archives and excavates a city, both real and imagined, that is constituted by the shimmer of petal and porch, coral and brass—a river-refrigerator where women catch their reflections on the sheen of magazines and men lean against the walls of old houses and beckon, come here. So, we approach. The Experiment of the Tropics is a meditation on the nature of cities, the revelatory power of photography, and the startling capacity of poetry to cut into the violent but redemptive parts of history.” -from the Singapore Unbound website
KERNPUNKT Press
The Fabulous Dead by Andriana Minou
130 pages – KERNPUNKT Press/ Amazon
“The Fabulous Dead is a collection of un-historical fiction, a type of literature that deals with the undoing of history and its reweaving into surreal fables. Famous and fabulous dead characters find themselves in dream-like situations that influence the living in unexpected ways. Brahms is having telephone troubles and is a sauerkraut addict, Marlene Dietrich lives in an ice-cream freezer, Gus Grissom has a secret affair with Dante’s Beatrice, and Virginia Woolf, Sarah Kane and Sylvia Plath drink bloody Marys in the living room. This book is an intricate mosaic of identity, individuality, and lives wasted or enjoyed. The Fabulous Dead is, perhaps above all, a ball-masque oscillating between the eternal and the ephemeral.” –from the KERNPUNKT Press website
Mason Jar Press
Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf by Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes
65 pages – Mason Jar Press
“In the mythic world of Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, two characters are cosmically intertwined, both moored to their past and to the expectations of society. Through syllabic and prose poems, the collection asks questions about what happens when people find themselves in a cycle of violence. Myths, retold over centuries, also mean that these cycles repeat through the storytelling. Both Ashley and the Wolf are modern, but they are forever tied to their myth.” –from the Mason Jar Press website
Open Letter Books
Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda (Trans. Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent)
230 pages – Open Letter/ Amazon
“The novel that defined Mercè Rodoreda’s most prolific period is finally available in English for the first time. Set in 1920s Spain, Garden by the Sea takes place over six summers at a villa by the sea inhabited by a young couple and their beautiful, rich, joyous friends. They swim, drink, tease each other, and fully enjoy themselves. All the while, the guests are observed by the villa’s gardener, a widow who’s been tending the garden for several decades. As the true protagonist of the novel, we get to see the dissolution of these magical summers through his eyes, as a sense of darkness and ending creeps in, precipitated by the construction of a new, larger, more glamorous villa next door. Considered by many to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Rodoreda has captivated readers for decades with her exacting descriptions of life—and nature—in post-war Spain, and this novel will further her reputation and fill in an important piece of oeuvre.” –from the Open Letter Books website
[PANK]
Sisyphusina by Shira Dentz
96 pages – [PANK]
“Sisyphusina is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, Sisyphusina circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book’s images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled “Aging Music,” is the book’s coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author’s voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.”
Press 53
Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden
80 pages – Press 53/ Amazon
“Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Relentless as the disaster itself, Eden seizes control of our deepest emotional centers, and, through insightful perspective, holds us in consideration of loss, helplessness, upheaval, and, perhaps most stirring, what to make of, and do with, survival. Her collection is also a cultural education, sure to encourage further reading and research. Drowning in the Floating World is, itself, a tsunami stone—a warning beacon to remind us to learn from disaster and, in doing so, honor all that’s lost.” –from the Press 53 website
Rose Metal Press
Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems by Judith Dowd
144 pages – Rose Metal Press
“What does it mean to sacrifice for someone else’s art? Audubon’s Sparrow answers this question by way of a verse biography of Lucy Bakewell, the intrepid and largely unsung wife of the artist and naturalist John James Audubon. Set in the early decades of the 19th century, an era of dramatic growth and expansion in America, the book follows Lucy and John James as they fall in love, marry, and set off to make a life on the western frontier. Juditha Dowd weaves together lyric poems, imagined letters, and diary entries in Lucy’s voice with excerpts from Audubon’s journals and published works (which many believe Lucy helped to write and edit) to offer an intimate exploration of the thoughts of a young wife and mother. Moving from port to port along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Lucy struggles to square the family’s poverty with her husband’s desire to abandon business and pursue his passion for nature. In a time when women are rarely permitted to work outside the home, Lucy draws on her education and musical talents to become a teacher, freeing Audubon to travel abroad seeking a publisher for The Birds of America. As she wards off financial ruin, Lucy’s natural confidence and independence emerge, along with a very different life from the one she expected. Nimbly written and sympathetically rendered, Audubon’s Sparrow is an enchanting blend of research and imagination—an indelible portrait of an American woman in need of rediscovery.” –from the Rose Metal Press website
Sagging Meniscus Press
Life’s Tumultuous Party: Reduced to its Essential Partycycles by Marvin Cohen
234 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/ Amazon
“Parties are my library,” says notorious party-crasher, Lower East Side denizen, and exuberantly idiosyncratic prose stylist Marvin Cohen. In this surrealistic suite of stories, dialogues and other party-dances, Cohen dissects party-going as both celebrant and philosopher, “romping in the wildness and mystery of parties” and finding there the “pulse and throb and beat” of our individual and collective natures. –from the Sagging Meniscus Press website
Seven Stories Press
A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux (Trans. Alison L. Strayer)
160 pages – Edelweiss/ Amazon
“In this devastating yet deceptively simple work of autofiction, Ernaux retraces the origins of her identity as an artist to the height of the Algerian War, and the loss of her innocence at the cusp of womanhood. Sifting through the wreckage of her memory, she queries its nature: whether we possess it, construct it, view it like a photograph, or as a form of cinema; whether, long suppressed, it may be resurrected and reconstituted as narrative—and where, in such an act, the author ends and the character of the author begins. ‘What is the belief that drives her, if not that memory is a form of knowledge?’ she asks. In A Girl’s Story, Ernaux cements her position as a writer of immense depth and grace.” —Sarah Gerard
No-Signal Area: A Novel by Robert Perišić (Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursa)
368 pages – Edelweiss/ Amazon
“Oleg and Nikola—hustlers, entrepreneurs, ambassadors of capitalism—have come to the town of N to build an obsolete turbine, never mind why. Enlisting the help of former engineer Sobotka, they reopen the old turbine factory, preaching the gospel of “self-organization” and bringing new life to the depressed post-communist town. But as the project spins out of control, Oleg and Nikola find themselves increasingly entangled with the locals, for whom this return to past prosperity brings bitter reckonings and reunions. At once a savage sendup of our current political moment and a rueful elegy for what might have been, this sprawling novel blends tragedy and comedy in its portrayal of ordinary people wondering where it all went wrong, and whether it could have gone any other way.” -from the Edelweiss website
Two Lines Press
b, Book, and Me by Kim Sagwa (Trans. Sunhee Jeong)
134 pages – Two Lines Press
“Best friends b and Rang are all each other have. Their parents are absent, their teachers avert their eyes when they walk by. Everyone else in town acts like they live in Seoul even though it’s painfully obvious they don’t. When Rang begins to be bullied horribly by the boys in baseball hats, b fends them off. But one day Rang unintentionally tells the whole class about b’s dying sister and how her family is poor, and each of them finds herself desperately alone. The only place they can reclaim themselves, and perhaps each other, is beyond the part of town where lunatics live—the End. In a piercing, heartbreaking, and astonishingly honest voice, Kim Sagwa’s b, Book, and Me walks the precipice between youth and adulthood, reminding us how perilous the edge can be.” –from the Two Lines Press website
University Press of Mississippi
Conversations with William T. Vollmann by Daniel Lukes (editor)
229 pages – University Press of Mississippi
“Across fiction, journalism, ethnography, and history, William T. Vollmann’s oeuvre—which includes a “prostitution trilogy,” a septology (Seven Dreams) about encounters between first North Americans and European colonists, and a more-than-three-thousand-page philosophical treatise on violence—is as ambitious as it is dazzling. Conversations with William T. Vollmann collects twenty-nine interviews, from early press coverage in Britain where his career first took flight, to in-depth visits to his writing and art studio in Sacramento, California. Throughout these conversations, Vollmann (b. 1959) speaks with candor and wit on such subjects as grief and guilt in his work, his love of guns and his experience of war, the responsibilities of the artist as witness, the benefits of looking out into the world beyond the confines of one’s horizon, the limitations of what literature can achieve, and how we can speak to the future. Bringing to the fore several expanded, unpublished, and hard-to-find interviews, this volume offers a valuable set of perspectives on a uniquely rewarding and sometimes overwhelming writer. On the road promoting his books or in a domestic setting, Vollmann comes across as reflective and humane, humble in his craft despite deep dedication to his uncompromising vision, and ever armed with a spirit of mischief and capacity to shock and unsettle the reader.” –from the University Press of Mississippi
Wave Books
DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
152 pages – Wave Books
“Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said’s notion of “the intertwined and overlapping histories” in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.” -from the Wave Books website
The Shore by Chris Nealon
104 pages – Wave Books
“The five poem-essays of Chris Nealon’s The Shore give space and voice to the complexity of contemporary life, admitting bafflement and dismay but also creating openings for indiscreet hope. Queer and anti-capitalist, they urge us not to be ruled by our fears, while always ethically navigating the forces—race, class, age, gender, and others—that put us each in different places of power. Nimbly exploring connections among beauty, friendship, and politics, The Shore gives our era of crisis a language at once vernacular and philosophical, in a form that’s both teeming and fluid.” –from Wave Books
Xocord
Puddle is an Ocean to an Ant by Cal LaFountain
3 hours and 53 minutes – Xocord/ Amazon
“Puddle Is an Ocean to an Ant is the first and last book of its kind by Cal LaFountain. This scattered journey drifts from Tennessee to North Carolina to Vermont, exploring an aimless American life after college. A series of audio travel stories dissects the tension that results when persona collides with reality, the webs of addiction, and the burden of striving to establish a world of one’s own.” –from the Xocord website
7.13 Books
Edie on the Green Screeen by Beth Lisick
244 pages – Amazon
“California Interest. In late ’90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city’s alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn’t changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium’s end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart. New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick’s first novel Edie on the Green Screen chronicles Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider’s wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, “What comes after It?” –from the 7.13 website
