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.
Akashic Books
Praise Song for the Butterflies by Bernice L. McFadden
264 pages – Akashic Books
“Abeo Kata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine-year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Katas’ idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abeo’s father, following his mother’s advice, places the girl in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abeo for the fifteen years she is held in the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again. In the tradition of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee, this novel is a contemporary story that offers an eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude in West Africa. Spanning decades and two continents, Praise Song for the Butterflies will break you heart and then heal it.” –from the Akashic Books website
Centipede Press
Masters of the Weird Tale: Robert Aickman (Limited Editions)
1,300 pages – Centipede Press
“Robert Aickman (1914-1981) has come to be recognized as among the leading writers of weird fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. His subtle, allusive tales, written in prose of impeccable precision and mellifluousness, have influenced an array of writers who followed in his wake, notably Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, and Peter Straub. The two volume collection of Aickman’s 48 stories is enclosed in a handsome slipcase with ribbon marker and a dozen full page illustrations by John Kenn Mortensen, a fine introduction by S. T. Joshi, and an essay on Aickman by T.E.D. Klein. The complete contents are shown below. The edition is limited to 300 signed and numbered copies, and the book is signed by S. T. Joshi, artist John Kenn Mortensen, with a special facsimile signature by Robert Aickman.” –from the Centipede Press website
Coffee House Press
After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel (Trans. by Rosalind Harvey)
264 pages – Coffee House Press
“In Havana, Paris, and New York City, Claudio and Cecilia succumb to our implacable movement toward love. Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.” -from the Coffee House Press website
Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love by Anna Moschovakis
224 pages – Coffee House Press
“A missing laptop, a critic, a sojourn in communal living—Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a bracingly intelligent examination of grief, autonomy, aging, desire, information overload, and the condition of being a thinking and feeling inhabitant of an often unthinkable, numbing world. Anna Moschovakis’s debut novel bristles with honesty, humor, and the hungers that propel us to revise and again revise our lives.” -from the Coffee House Press website
Counterpoint Press
Terrarium: New and Selected Stories by Valerie Trueblood
400 pages – Counterpoint Press
“Valerie Trueblood’s writing has been praised by The New York Times as “an exercise in literary restraint and extreme empathy.” Selected here are stories from her previous collections—finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award—alongside her newest collection, which lends this book its name. The new stories collected within Terrarium represent an exciting direction for the author: a condensing of narrative and, in some cases, a departure from it into another state of mind. It’s hard to describe any of Trueblood’s stories as “typical.” She does not write about people from a single class, or caste, or geographical area. She has not written a single story emblematic of her work. She does not write stories fantastical or eccentric. Ordinary life, her stories may be saying, is fantastical enough. She is more like Babel than Chekhov. In all her writing, it’s clear that Trueblood believes that the short story can carry both the lightest and heaviest of loads. Terrarium highlights the achievement of simply living, the stories within often unresolved but in a state of continuation, expansion. Trueblood’s stories aren’t merely “about” their subjects, they’re inside them.” -from the Counterpoint Press website
Dzanc Books
The Wonder That Was Ours by Alice Hatcher
304 pages – Dzanc Books
WINNER OF THE 2017 DZANC PRIZE FOR FICTION
“Wynston Cleave, a black taxi driver on a small Caribbean island, spent years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of the death of a wealthy white tourist. Finally released, he tries to piece his life together working as a bartender and reading literary classics to the unruly cockroaches infesting his taxi. On the anniversary of his arrest, Wynston picks up two white Americans just kicked off a cruise ship. The next day, the ship reports a deadly viral outbreak. As the tourist economy collapses, the island succumbs to riots and a devastating spiral of violence, and Wynston’s fate becomes entwined with that of three strangers: his American passengers and a local named Tremor, the focus of a vicious police manhunt. Narrated by the sharp-witted roaches infesting Wynston’s taxi, The Wonder That Was Ours explores deep racial and class divides through the most unlikely eyes imaginable, taking a unique perspective on prejudice, compassion, and the absurdity of the human experience.” – Dzanc Books website
Feminist Press
You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar
136 pages – Feminist Press
“Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it—and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she’s been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and rejecting diet culture’s greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.” –from the Feminist Press website
Pretty Things by Virginie Despentes (Translated Emma Ramadan)
245 pages – Feminist Press
“Claudine has always been pretty and Pauline has always been ugly. But when Claudine wants to become famous, she convinces gloomy Pauline—with her angelic voice—to pretend they’re the same person. Yet just as things take off, Claudine commits suicide. Pauline hatches a new scheme, pulling on her dead sister’s identity, inhabiting her apartment, and reading her mail. As the impersonation continues, Pauline slowly realizes that the cost of femininity is to dazzle on the outside while rotting away on the inside—and that womanhood is what ultimately killed her sister.” –from the Feminist Press website
Foundlings Press
Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford edited by Max Crinnin and Aidan Ryan
284 pages – Foundlings Press
“Following the 40th anniversary of the poet Frank Stanford’s premature passing, Foundlings Press has released Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, a landmark collection comprising verse tributes to Stanford, seminal and new critical essays, never-before-seen interviews, the first translations of Stanford into Spanish, and a diverse selection of contemporary poetry that follows in Stanford’s wake. Contributors include nationally celebrated writers C.D. Wright, Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, and Steve Stern; contemporary titans, rising stars, and editor-publishers like Terrance Hayes, Adam Clay, Noah Falck, Sophie Klahr, and Brad Trumpfheller; and pioneering Stanford academics alongside the newest voices in Stanford scholarship. The book also presents new and republished work from and many of the poet’s friends and associates, including wife Ginny Stanford and close friends R.S. Gwynn, Ralph Adamo, Father Nicholas Fuhrman, and others.” -from the Foundlings Press website
Grayson Books
Home Team: Poems About Baseball by Edwin Romond
36 pages – Grayson Books
“I read Home Team with the relish of a fan pouring over the line-up card at every home opener in the universe. From the Blue Mountain League to the House That Ruth Built, we see America’s pastime through the eyes of a child and a father, in all its majesty and nuance, anticipating a squeeze or a slide, and “whatever’s left after the final out.” —Tom Plante, Editor of Exit 13 Magazine
Soft Skull Press
Vanishing Twins: A Marriage by Leah Dieterich
304 pages – Soft Skull Press
“For as long as she can remember, Leah has had the mysterious feeling that she’s been searching for a twin—that she should be part of an intimate pair. It begins with dance partners as she studies ballet growing up; continues with her attractions to girlfriends in college; and leads her, finally, to Eric, whom she moves across the country for and marries. But her steadfast, monogamous relationship leaves her with questions about her sexuality and her identity, so she and her husband decide to try an open marriage. How does a young couple make room for their individual desires, their evolving selfhoods, and their artistic ambitions while building a life together? Can they pursue other sexual partners, even live in separate cities, and keep their original passionate bond alive? Vanishing Twins looks for answers in psychology, science, pop culture, art, architecture, Greek mythology, dance, and language to create a lucid, suspenseful portrait of a woman testing the limits and fluidities of love.” -from the Soft Skull Press website
Stalking Horse Press
City Moon by David Ohle
356 pages – Stalking Horse Press
“City Moon is David Ohle’s novelization of all 18 issues of his cult 1970s newspaper, heavily edited and re-processed. It is offered for the first time as a single-volume. The neutrodynes, the satire, the mystery cults, as well as Ohle’s dada-seance of Americana, are as vivid and intoxicating and seriously funny as ever.” -from the Stalking Horse website
Two Dollar Radio
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina
353 pages – Two Dollar Radio
“It’s 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mother’s dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success. The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their father’s affection, but soon Mae and Edie’s close relationship begins to fall apart—Edie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mother’s downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Marianne’s romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further. Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish powerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they can’t, and shouldn’t, have to themselves. In this captivating debut, Katya Apekina disquietingly crooks the lines between fact and fantasy, between escape and freedom, and between love and obsession.” -from the Two Dollar Radio website
University of New Mexico Press
No More Bingo, Comadre! by Nasario García
200 pages – University of New Mexico Press
“It takes all kinds to populate Northern New Mexico, and this book has every one: from gypsies and gamblers to ranchers and criminals. Noted author Nasario García introduces us to some of these people and the challenges they face. The title character, Adelfa, flirts with the glamour of casinos and finds herself addicted to gambling. Sam “Spam” Austin, an inmate serving a long sentence for murder, is paroled, attends medical school, and becomes a doctor. The affable grandfather in “Yo Quiero Hacer un Lie ’Way,” a hardworking and honorable rancher, stuns the proprietor of a mortuary with his request to put a coffin on layaway.” – University of New Mexico Press website
University of Notre Dame Press
Down Along the Piney: Ozark Stories by John Mort
212 pages – University of Notre Dame Press
Down Along the Piney is John Mort’s fourth short-story collection and winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. With settings in Florida, California, Mexico, Chicago, the Texas Panhandle, and, of course, the Ozarks themselves, these thirteen stories portray the unsung, amusing, brutal, forever hopeful lives of ordinary people. Mort chronicles the struggles of “flyover” people who live not just in the Midwest, but anywhere you can find a farm, small town, or river winding through forested hills. Mort, whose earlier stories have appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, and The Chicago Tribune, is the author of the award-winning Vietnam War novel Soldier in Paradise, as well as Goat Boy of the Ozarks and The Illegal. These ironic, unflaggingly honest stories will remind the reader of Jim Harrison, Sherwood Anderson, and Shirley Jackson. —University of Notre Dame Press website
University of Pittsburgh Press
The Dogs of Detroit: Stories by Brad Felver
200 pages – Amazon
Winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction
“The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.” -Amazon
