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.
Astrophil Press
Harvestman by Steven Von Till
University of South Dakota
“Steve Von Till’s poems are lamentations—elegies for the loss of wildness, songs of hope, chants of spirit, and dreams of survival. In Harvestman, Von Till meditates on what it means to be human during a time of modern alienation from nature, the past, community, and ultimately from ourselves. This is the first collection from Von Till, who is primarily known as a singer and guitarist in the highly influential and genre defying collective, Neurosis, which has been credited with changing the face of heavy music over the last 35 years. In these tender passages, Von Till seeks meaning and mystical significance in the natural world, where he finds himself in the vastness of the ocean and the majesty of the forested mountain ranges. Shamanistic visions of ancestors and elemental forces create a unique form where gothic Americana merges with ancient mythologies in minimalistic poems that ask us to contemplate history, genetic memory, and the complexities of humanity. This worldly and weathered first work of poetry and collected lyrics is a history lesson from old punk rock bard turned rural spiritual poet, who connects us to the American West and older wisdoms.” –from the Astrophil Press website
Swerve: A Novel of Divergence by Vincent James, Rowland Saifi, McCormick Templeman
Astrophil Press
“Swerve is a dreamscape detective novel caught up in a multiversal calamity. Swerve jostles and hums. Swerve might be Galileo’s cousin, Margret Cavendish’s niece, and Stephen Hawking’s step-child. Swerve is a once in a generation book that tells the story of three distinct detectives who move across the United States and beyond, uncovering pieces of a mercurial puzzle spanning space and time. As each section unfolds and is interpreted through the others, the detectives’ stories begin to collapse, rewrite, and ultimately, illuminate each other. Taking on a set of constraints (involving dice, reference authors, and geographic points) reminiscent of an OULIPO novel, Swerve invites readers to participate in the investigation alongside the characters, gathering clues, assembling narrative, and piecing together resonances. Come join the mystery—Swerve will not disappoint.” –from the Astrophil Press website
Black Ocean
Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture by Anais Duplan
126 pages – Black Ocean
“Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, “liberation.” With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology—luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey—Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author’s own journey of gender transition while writing the book.” –from the Black Ocean website
Braddock Avenue Books
Sybelia Drive by Karin Cecile Davidson
314 pages – Braddock Avenue Books
“In the small lake town where LuLu, Rainey, and Saul are growing up, day-to-day life is anything but easy. Navigating the usual obstacles of youth would be enough for anyone, but for this trio a world marred by the Vietnam war, detached parents, and untimely death create circumstances overloaded with trouble. Yet through their unyielding resourcefulness and the willingness to expose their vulnerabilities, these three friends discover deeper bonds than even they could ever imagine. Told through kaleidoscopic images and in prose that will keep you on the edge of your seat, Sybelia Drive is a story of three friends who push beyond the typical woes of childhood into teenage years transformed by the shared baggage of a generation, years when men walk on the moon; students are killed during a peace demonstration at Kent State; and the obligations of military service claim the lives of fathers, husbands, and children. Investigating the personal impact of social upheaval with unparalleled sensitivity and depth, Sybelia Drive is a novel that will stay with you for a long, long time. It is an extraordinary debut.” – from the Braddock Avenue Books website
Clash Books
Born to be Public by Greg Mania
206 pages – Clash Books/ Bookshop
“In this unique and hilarious debut memoir, writer and comedian Greg Mania chronicles life as a “pariah prodigy.” From inadvertently coming out to his Polish immigrant parents, to immersing himself in the world of New York City nightlife, and finding himself and his voice in comedy. Born to Be Public is a vulnerable and poignant exploration of identity (and the rediscovery of it), mental health, sex and relationships, all while pursuing a passion with victories and tragicomic blunders. At once raw and relatable, Mania’s one-of-a-kind voice will make you shed tears from laughter and find its way into your heart.” –from the Clash Books website
Coffee House Press
Gold Cure by Ted Mathys
104 pages – Coffee House Press/ Bookshop
“Lustrous, tender, and expansive, Gold Cure moves from boomtown gold mines and the mythical city of El Dorado to the fracking wells of the American interior, excavating buried histories, legacies of conquest, and the pursuit of shimmering ideals. Ted Mathys skewers police brutality in a 16-part poem built on the bones of a nursery rhyme and drives Petrarchan sonnets into shale fields deep under the prairies. In crystalline language rich with allegory and wordplay, Mathys has crafted a moving elegy for the Anthropocene.” –from the Coffee House Press website
Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau
248 pages – Coffee House Press/ Bookshop
“Fifteen-year-old Monk drifts through a monotonous existence in a grimy Chinatown apartment with her “grumpy brown couch” of a dad, until she meets high school senior Santa Coy (santacoyshotsauce@gmail.com). For a moment, it looks like he might be her boyfriend. But when Monk’s dad becomes obsessed with Santa Coy’s artwork, Monk finds herself shunted to the sidelines as her father and the object of her affections begin to hatch a scheme of their own. To keep up, Monk must navigate a combustible cocktail of odd assignments, peculiar places, and murky underworld connections. In Jamie Marina Lau’s debut novel, shortlisted for Australia’s prestigious Stella Prize when she was nineteen years old, hazily surreal vignettes conjure a multifaceted world of philosophical angst and lackadaisical violence.” –from the Coffee House Press website
Fiction Advocate
Dear Knausgaard by Kim Adrian
194 pages – Bookshop
“In a series of warm and often funny letters, essayist and memoirist Kim Adrian delivers a compelling feminist critique of the 6-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. Adrian’s book of letters begins as a witty and entertaining response to a seminal work and transforms into a fierce and powerful interrogation of the darker social and cultural forces informing Knausgaard’s project. Through an examination of the curious operations of intimacy demanded on both sides of the page by all great literature, DEAR KNAUSGAARD ultimately provides a heartfelt celebration of the act of reading itself.” -from the Bookshop website
Looking Was Not Enough by Irena Yamboliev
162 pages – Bookshop
“Middlesex is the story of a character who changes profoundly in order to remain fundamentally himself. It’s about recognizing how risky and contingent any physical description is, and how ambiguous dualities can be blended into beautifully coherent wholes. As the child of Bulgarian immigrants, Irena Yamboliev knows what it’s like to construct your own identity. In LOOKING WAS NOT ENOUGH, she uses her background in biology and literary scholarship to put Middlesex into conversation with Barthes, Ovid, and other texts that examine the way our gender, sex, nationality, and culture can experience a metamorphosis. The result is an illuminating theory of our own self-formations.” -from the Bookshop website
Homebound Publications
Into the Thin by Stephen Drew
300 pages – Homebound Publications/ Bookshop
“It felt like an emotional crucifixion – a dark year in which a father figure passed, a friend and mentor suffered a terminal illness, one child entered psychosis, another child took his life, a 14 year marriage ended. As a new life began, an ancient pilgrimage called from across an ocean. Would it hold any answers? Were there any answers to be had? Questions are always temporal, but it seems pilgrimage follows the designs of the eternal. Join in a transcendent journey of the body, heart, mind, and spirit from the French Pyrenees Mountains, crossing northern Spain for 500 miles to the city of Santiago de Compostela, and beyond to the coastal town of Finisterre. Share the experience of walking a thousand year old road, the Camino de Santiago, the Way of Saint James, and its miraculous, mysterious ways. In parts a travelogue, a love letter to Spain, and a chronicle of change under the influence of grace, this is a story told in the language of the soul. Suffused with resilience, it is a dialogue between humanity and its spirit. It calls.” -from the Homebound website
Syn & Salvation by Beth Kander
300 pages – Homebound Publications/ Bookshop
“In the third and final installment of the Original Syn epic, everyone and everything is on the verge of explosion. The Original rebels are quietly gearing up for their first uprising in decades, with Ere and Asavari playing critical roles in the fight for freedom; meanwhile, the Syns are distracted by other problems – including a mysterious electromagnetic pulse that begins periodically shuddering through their world, causing damage and devastation. Cal has fallen hard for Ever, who still cannot remember her past entanglement with Ere. And as Dr. Felix Hess fights to maintain control in an increasingly chaotic landscape, a new would-be ruler edges into view. Power struggles, prophecies, and people who just want their freedom all collide in the race to a conclusion that none of them saw coming.” -from the Homebound Publications website
Milkweed
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and other Astronishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
184 pages – Milkweed/ Bookshop
“From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction—a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home: the grounds of a Kansas mental institution, where her Filipina mother was a doctor; the open skies and tall mountains of Arizona, where she hiked with her Indian father; and the chillier climes of western New York and Ohio. But no matter where she was transplanted—no matter how awkward the fit or forbidding the landscape—she was able to turn to our world’s fierce and funny creatures for guidance. “What the peacock can do,” she tells us, “is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.” The axolotl teaches us to smile, even in the face of unkindness; the touch-me-not plant shows us how to shake off unwanted advances; the narwhal demonstrates how to survive in hostile environments. Even in the strange and the unlovely, Nezhukumatathil finds beauty and kinship. For it is this way with wonder: it requires that we are curious enough to look past the distractions in order to fully appreciate the world’s gifts. Warm, lyrical, and gorgeously illustrated by Fumi Nakamura, World of Wonders is a book of sustenance and joy.” -from the Milkweed website
Open Letter Books
The Clerk by Guillermo Saccomanno (Trans. Andrea G. Labinger)
138 pages – Open Letter Books/ Bookshop
Winner of the 2010 Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novel
“Perfectly normal men and women head to their desks every day in a city laid to waste by guerrilla incursions, menaced by hordes of starving people, murderous children and cloned dogs, patrolled by armed helicopters, and plagued with acid rain. Among them is the Clerk, who is willing to be humiliated in order to keep his job—until he falls in love and allows himself to dream of someone else. To what depths is a man willing to go to hold on to a dream? The Clerk tells a story that happened yesterday, but that still hasn’t happened, and yet is happening now. A story we didn’t even notice because we’re too tied up in our own jobs, salaries, appearances. This novel embraces an anti-utopia, a world of Ballard but also of Dostoyevsky.” –from the Open Letter Books website
This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels by Subimal Misra (Trans. V. Ramaswamy)
296 pages – Open Letter Books/ Bookshop
“Subimal Misra—anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer—is one of India’s greatest living writers. This collection of two “anti-novels” is the first of his works to appear in the U.S. “This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale” is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker’s strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant. “When Color Is a Warning Sign” goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretense of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc. Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order.” -from the Open Letter Books website
Otis Books
Directory by Christopher Linforth
80 pages – Small Press Distribution
“Directory collects the lives of interconnected twins and triplets whose identities switch and blur and fracture as their plural selves crisscross the country. The inhabitants of the collection explore the causes of their trauma, reliving memories of past existences, looking for an end to their pain.” – from the Small Press Distribution website
Rescue Press
Bright Archive by Sarah Minor
200 pages – Rescue Press
“In Sarah Minor’s adventurous and investigatory debut collection of essays, Bright Archive, place and space are inextricably linked through an imaginative exploration of the patterns, shapes, and systems that alternately organize and disrupt our ordinary intimacies. From a recollection of a summer spent working in an Italian commune to the business of mollusks in Minor’s grandparent’s hometown in Iowa; from the history of the mapping of the Mississippi River to the mythologies of the image of “the lean;” from studies of soffits and hidden spaces to the freedom found at the top of an island birch tree, these essays reach beyond the classically confined trajectories of literary nonfiction. Using elements of memoir, concrete poetry, archival research, interview, performance, and design in a radiant kaleidoscope of storytelling, the essays in Bright Archive delight in challenging the reader’s habits of interaction with the page and its possibilities.” –from the Rescue Press website
Seven Stories Press
Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel (Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine)
96 pages – Edelweiss/ Bookshop
“Intricately woven masterpieces of craft, mournful for their human cries in defiance of our sometimes less than human surroundings, Nettel’s stories and novels are dazzlingly enjoyable to read for their deep interest in human foibles. Following on the critical successes of her previous books, here are six stories that capture her unsettling, obsessive universe. “Ptosis” is told from the point of view of the son of a photographer whose work involves before and after pictures of patients undergoing cosmetic eye surgeries. In “Through Shades,” a woman studies a man interacting with a woman through the windows of the apartment across the street. In one of the longer stories, “Bonsai,” a man visits a garden, and comes to know a gardener, during the period of dissolution of his marriage. “The Other Side of the Dock” describes a young girl in search of what she terms “True Solitude,” who finds a fellow soul mate only to see the thing they share lose its meaning. In “Petals,” a woman’s odor drives a man to search for her, and even to find her, without quenching the thirst that is his undoing. And the title story, “Bezoar,” is an intimate journal of a patient writing to a doctor. Each narrative veers towards unknown and dark corridors, and the pleasures of these accounts lie partly in the great surprise of the familiarity together with the strangeness.” –from the Edelweiss website
Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova (Trans. Ann Goldstein)
224 pages – Edelweiss/ Bookshop
“Born and raised in coastal Sicily, Ida has since shaken her salty roots for adult life in Rome. She’s married, has a career, and is comfortable in her decision to age childless; but still finds herself unsatisfied. When Ida’s mother calls her back to Sicily to help sell Ida’s childhood home, Ida must reckon with the trauma that has informed all of her decisions thus far: the disappearance of her father when she was 13. The mystery behind her father’s exit became the reason for every spat between Ida and her mother growing up, and the reason Ida never fully gave herself to the friendships and relationships she’s moved through since adolescence. On this trip home, Ida must face her original heartbreak, and the people who became collateral damage, with the hopes of saving her marriage and family in the future. To say this is beautifully translated doesn’t even scratch the surface; Goldstein, who has also translated Elena Ferrante’s novels, finds poetry in Terranova’s every line. Together, these two artists have birthed an aching, translingual masterpiece.” —Booklist
Sibling Rivalry Press
The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! by Miah Jeffra
140 pages – Sibling Rivalry Press/ Bookshop
“A river’s edge, if approached too close, can sweep a body beyond itself.” In The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, Miah Jeffra perfects apostrophe as canticle, a host of heroes beckoning the reader deeper into the waters of selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra’s mother among them. Jeffra explores the nature of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and love, taking a tiny hammer to the stability of the limits of perception, troubling the tether between perception and memory. At once memoir and cultural criticism, this collection discovers itself as a book about forgiveness, family, and the truths we find in “the lightness of a door,” “the probability of a radio,” the long line between one story and another.” –from the Sibling Rivalry Press website
Soft Skull Press
Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother by Douglas A. Martin
256 pages – Soft Skull Press/ Bookshop
“Branwell Brontë–brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne–has a childhood marked by tragedy and the weight of expectations. After the early deaths of his mother and a beloved older sister, he is kept away from school and tutored at home by his father, a curate, who rests all his ambitions for his children on his only son. Branwell grows up isolated in his family’s parsonage on the moors, learning Latin and Greek, being trained in painting, and collaborating on endless stories and poems with his sisters. Yet while his sisters go on to write Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Agnes Grey, Branwell wanders from job to job, growing increasingly dependent on alcohol and opium and failing to become a great poet or artist.” -from the Soft Skull Press website
Tin House
A Girl Is a Body Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
560 pages – Bookshop
“In her twelfth year, Kirabo, a young Ugandan girl, confronts a piercing question that has haunted her childhood: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small village of Nattetta—her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts—but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Complicating these feelings of abandonment, as Kirabo comes of age she feels the emergence of a mysterious second self, a headstrong and confusing force inside her at odds with her sweet and obedient nature. Seeking answers, Kirabo begins spending afternoons with Nsuuta, a local witch, trading stories and learning not only about this force inside her, but about the woman who birthed her, who she learns is alive but not ready to meet. Nsuuta also explains that Kirabo has a streak of the “first woman”—an independent, original state that has been all but lost to women. Kirabo’s journey to reconcile her rebellious origins, alongside her desire to reconnect with her mother and to honor her family’s expectations, is rich in the folklore of Uganda and an arresting exploration of what it means to be a modern girl in a world that seems determined to silence women. Makumbi’s unforgettable novel is a sweeping testament to the true and lasting connections between history, tradition, family, friends, and the promise of a different future.” –from the Tin House website
Two Dollar Radio
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
142 pages – Two Dollar Radio/ Bookshop
“The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be. For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.” –from the Two Dollar Radio website
Two Lines Press
That Time of Year by Marie NDiaye (Trans. Jordan Stump)
128 pages – Two Lines Press/ Bookshop
“Herman’s wife and child are nowhere to be found, and the weather in the village, perfectly agreeable just days earlier, has taken a sudden turn for the worse. Tourist season is over. It’s time for the vacationing Parisians, Herman and his family included, to abandon their rural getaways and return to normal life. But where has Herman’s family gone? Concerned, he sets out into the oppressive rain and cold for news of their whereabouts. The community he encounters, however, has become alien, practically unrecognizable, and his urgent inquiry, placed in the care of local officials, quickly recedes into the background, shuffled into a deck of labyrinthine bureaucracy and local custom. As time passes, Herman, wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by communal surveillance, strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, and a hospitality that verges on mania. A literary horror story about power and assimilation, That Time of Year marks NDiaye once again as a contemporary master of the psychological novel. Working in the spirit of Leonora Carrington, Victor LaValle, and Kōbō Abe, NDiaye’s novel is a nightmarish vision of otherness, privi- lege, and social amnesia, told with potent clarity and a heady dose of the weird” -from the Two Lines Press website
West Virginia University Press
A Place Remote: Stories by Gwen Goodkin
180 pages – Bookshop
“From farm to factory, alcoholism to war wounds, friendship
to betrayal, the stories in A Place Remote take us intimately
into the hearts of people from all walks of life in a rural Ohio
town. Whether they stay in their town or leave for distant
places, these characters come to realize no one is immune to
the fictions people tell others—and themselves—to survive.
In each of these ten stories, Gwen Goodkin forces her
characters to face the dramatic events of life head-on—some
events happen in a moment, while others are the fallout of
years or decades of turning away. A boy is confronted by the
cost of the family farm, an optometrist careens toward an
explosive mental disaster, a mourning teen protects his sister,
lifelong friends have an emotional confrontation over an heirloom, and a high school student travels to Germany to find
his voice and, finally, a moment of long-awaited redemption.” –from the West Virginia University Press website
7.13 Books
Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt
180 pages – Bookshop
“Set in the American Midwest, England, and India (Mumbai, Ahmedabad, rural Gujarat) the stories in EACH OF US KILLERS are about people trying to realize their dreams and aspirations through their professions. Whether they are chasing money, power, recognition, love, or simply trying to make a decent living, their hunger is as intense as any grand love affair. Straddling the fault lines of class, caste, gender, nationality, globalization, and more, they go against sociocultural norms despite challenges and indignities until singular moments of quiet devastation turn the worlds of these characters–auto-wallah, housemaid, street vendor, journalist, architect, baker, engineer, saree shop employee, professor, yoga instructor, bartender, and more–upside down.” –from the Bookshop website
