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
Mouths Don’t Speak by Katia D. Ulysse
224 pages – Akashic Books/ Amazon
“No one was prepared for the massive earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, taking over a quarter-million lives, and leaving millions of others homeless. Three thousand miles away, Jacqueline Florestant mourns the presumed death of her parents, while her husband, a former US Marine and combat veteran, cares for their three-year-old daughter as he fights his own battles with acute PTSD. Horrified and guilt-ridden, Jacqueline returns to Haiti in search of the proverbial ‘closure.’ Unfortunately, the Haiti she left as a child twenty-five years earlier has disappeared. Her quest turns into a tornado of deception, desperation, and more death. So Jacqueline holds tightly to her daughter—the only one who must not die.” –from the Akashic Books website
Anti-Oedipus Press
The Song My Enemies Sing by James Reich
236 pages – Anti-Oedipus Press/ Amazon
“Set against a haunting Martian landscape, The Song My Enemies Sing is a surreal, disquieting science fiction vision of murder, revolution, manipulation and mystery. Ray Spector’s search for meaning leads him to a teenage Black Panther named Eli Jones, the missionary Philipé Olmos, sometime television star Richard Parish, and Ingrid Auer, who dreams of becoming a terrorist. Under the shimmering Grid drawn by the swarm satellites encircling the planet, with fading memories of an apocalyptic California, the Australian outback, and the jungles of Mexico, their obsessions form strange patterns, dangerous relationships, and alliances across time and species. Science fiction legend Barry N. Malzberg, the first recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, describes James Reich’s fifth novel “as a history of science fiction form, origin and development, and merciless in its refusal to pander to the easier implications of its material.” In the lineage of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, William Burroughs’ Nova trilogy, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, these distant episodes will possess you.” -from the Anti-Oedipus Press website
Black Lawrence Press
Tornado Season by Courtney Cragget
200 pages – Black Lawrence Press
“Tornado Season arrives as a storm is raging. Yet its stories urge us not to seek shelter, but to leave it. To walk out of our inner place of hiding and face the whirlwind. To recognize it. To acknowledge it and fight it. Ethnicity and culture alongside the U.S.-Mexico border; deportation and immigration; life in the U.S. foster care system—of these tumultuous subjects Courtney Craggett writes with honesty, a big heart, and a complete lack of sentimentality. She shows us ordinary people who suffer, dream, hope, and strive for something just a little bit better. And by doing so, she elevates these stories from the realm of the timely into that of the timeless. Long after the storm has passed, the stories in Tornado Season will ring true and dear for they sing of the innermost yearning of the human heart for freedom, justice, and love.” —Miroslav Penkov
Wasp Queen by Claudia Cortese
90 pages – Black Lawrence Press
“Claudia Cortese has given to Lucy what Anne Carson has given to Geryon: a life as desperate and fraught as our own, which is to say, a human rendition of the poetic potential. Here, memory is a potent point of inner excavation, where the threshold of danger and love are often one beam, a beam in which Cortese navigates with harrowingly deft eyes and ears, where Lucy, like so many of us citizens of earth and flesh, “shines like a gun.” Wasp Queen possesses something permanent and searing at its core: the will to live, even thrive, despite the shackles of childhood, despite even oneself. I finished this book only to read it all over again, finding and losing myself, gladly, at every turn.”—Ocean Vuong
Black Spot Press
The Absolved by Matthew Binder
290 pages – Black Spot Books / Amazon
“It’s 2036. Henri is a wealthy physician, husband, father, and serial philanderer. He is also one of the relatively few people to still have a job. Automation and other technological advances have led to unemployment so severe that many people are no longer expected to work and are now known as ‘The Absolved.’ Meanwhile, it’s election season, and a candidate from a radical fringe party called the Luddites is calling for an end to the ‘Divine Rights of Machines.’ After Henri is displaced from his job, two Luddite sympathizers—whom Henri has befriended at his local bar—frame him for an anti-technology terrorist act. The prospect of Henri’s salvation comes at the cost of foregoing his guiding principles in life. This new vision for the world, after all, just might prove better than the technological advancements that, paradoxically, have ‘left humanity out in the cold.'” -from the Black Spot Books website
Coffee House Press
An Orphanage of Dreams by Sam Savage
160 pages – Coffee House Press/ Amazon
“Sam Savage’s final book is a collection of stripped down visitations, flash fictions of smoke breaks and long drives and friends who finally stop showing up. The acidic tang of disappointment is here, and sparks of biting insight, in portraits of people and animals, in all our absurdity and failed attempts at meaning. As Sam says, ‘What a life.'” -from the Coffee House Press website
Deep Vellum Publishing
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name by Pablo Martín Sánchez (trans. Jeffrey Diteman)
600 pages – Deep Vellum Publishing/ Amazon
“When author Pablo Martín Sánchez decides to search himself on the internet, he discovers that he shares his name with an anarchist who, in November 1924, was part of an attempt to overthrow Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. Intrigued, Martín Sánchez sets out to learn more about the life of the man who shares his namesake. What he uncovers is the fascinating account of an unintentional revolutionary, swept up in a campaign he isn’t sure he believes in—one that leads, ultimately, to a tragic fate. The Anarchist Who Shared My Name is an elegantly written exploration of a dark time in Spanish history, blending key elements of historical fact with richly imaginative fiction as Martín Sánchez reconstructs the occurrences that led his protagonist to his untimely outcome. Through references to figures such as Miguel de Unamuno and Victor Blasco Ibañez, and landmark events such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Battle of Verdun, Martín Sánchez takes us on an odyssey through the anarchist’s childhood and exile from Spain, to his life as a typesetter in Paris and his eventual involvement in revolt against a tyrannical government.” -from the Deep Vellum Publishing website
Dzanc Books
Horse Latitudes by Morris Collins
312 pages – Dzanc Books/ Amazon
“Haunted by guilt and reeling from his shattered marriage, New York photographer Ethan flees south to a Central American country on the brink of revolution. Ethan doesn’t know if he’s seeking redemption or punishment, but—one bad choice after another—he finds himself indebted to Yolanda, who gives him a chance, if anything she’s saying is true, to find both. Yolanda’s sister is deep in the country’s interior, waiting for a man named Soto—a slave trafficker posing as a migrant guide. The journey to find her plunges Ethan into a feverish world of demented expatriates, intelligence officers, mystics and lunatics, where loyalties are uncertain and ghosts unshakable. A harrowing examination of post-colonial blight, Horse Latitudes is a lushly written tropical gothic—part thriller, part nightmarish journey into the corruption at the heart of US intervention in Central America.” -from the Dzanc Books website
Katz or Cats: or, How Jesus Became My Rival in Love by Curt Leviant
350 pages – Dzanc Books/ Amazon
“Katz or Cats, or How Jesus Became My Rival in Love follows John, a book editor who meets an enigmatic man named Katz on his daily commute into New York. True to form, Katz has a book to pitch—not his own, but his brother’s, also named Katz. The novel begins with another meeting on another train: brother Katz chances on a woman named Maria, who carries a pocket Bible and is missing the top digit of her ring finger. The two embark on a whirlwind affair, alternately driven together and apart by their passion for each other and Maria’s religious fervor. But the story seems to change as soon as Katz tells it, and Katz himself has a great confession to make. As the lies that bind the tale together grow to new proportion, John comes to doubt the line between truth and fiction, as well as everything he thinks he knows about the man beside him on the train. With the lyrical joy and lighthearted wordplay that have won him critical acclaim, Curt Leviant’s latest novel explores the very fabric of storytelling and whether life, like fiction, can be in constant flux.” -from the Dzanc Books website
Feminist Press
Fade Into You by Nikki Darling
224 pages – Feminist Press/ Amazon
“A portrait of a young girl in the glorious wasteland of 1990s Los Angeles, Fade Into You recalls the hormonal haze and urgency of adolescence. High school junior Nikki Darling alternates between cutting class and getting high, flirting with drugs, crushes, and counterculture to figure out how she fits into the world. Running increasingly wild with other angst-ridden outcasts, she pushes herself to the edge only to find herself trapped in the cyclical violence of growing up female. Written in dreamy, subterranean prose, this novel captures the reckless defiance and fragility of girlhood.” -from the Feminist Press website
Graywolf Press
Milkman: A Novel by Anna Burns
360 pages – Graywolf/ Amazon
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize
“In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him—and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend—rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.” -from the Graywolf Press website
Melville House
Death and Other Holidays by Marci Vogel
112 pages – Melville House/ Amazon
The 2018 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize winner
“Funny, tender, and wholly original, Death & Other Holidays is a year in the life of a young woman coming to terms with the death of her beloved stepfather, while attempting to find love in LA. We are introduced to her friends and family, as she struggles to launch herself out into the world, to take the risks of love – the one constancy in all the change. Told with a great good humor and underlying affection for all its characters, Death and Other Holidays announces a brilliant and assured new voice in American fiction.” -from the Melville House website
Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra (Trans. Achy Obejas)
208 pages – Melville Books/ Amazon
“Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion — assuming she’s an informant for the Castro regime. To Cleo’s surprise, that suspicion follows her home to Cuba, where she finds herself under constant surveillance by the government. When she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker, she discovers her family is not who she thought they were… and neither is the filmmaker.” -from the Melville Books website.
Noemi Press
UNMANNED by Jessica Rae Bergamino
92 pages – Noemi Press/ Amazon
“Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of UNMANNED, winner of Noemi Press’ 2017 Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks The Desiring Object or Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering of the Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them (Sundress Publications), The Mermaid, Singing (dancing girl press), and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story (dancing girl publications). Individual poems have appeared in publications such as Third Coast, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, and Gulf Coast. She is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and lives in Seattle, WA.” -from the Noemi Press website
Stalking Horse Press
If Any Gods Lived: Poems by Michael J. Wilson
102 pages – Stalking Horse Press/ Amazon
It is an attempt at reconciling growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis with the realities of PrEP and 21st Century LGBTQ+ culture. It is about finding personal balance in the face of the limits of gender and sexuality. This is a book for anyone who has felt out of sync with mainstream cultures, queer or not. —Michael J. Wilson
Michael J. Wilson warns us “F*cking is unsafe” —as is love, as are public expressions of love in a homophobic world. The poems in ‘If Any Gods Lived’ deliver to us the brutal complexities and emotional realities of intimacy and AIDS. Elegiac and life-affirming, Unflinching, graphic, and utterly beautiful. —Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
Tor Publishing
Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor
208 pages – Tor Publishing/ Amazon
“Binti has returned to her home planet, believing that the violence of the Meduse has been left behind. Unfortunately, although her people are peaceful on the whole, the same cannot be said for the Khoush, who fan the flames of their ancient rivalry with the Meduse. Far from her village when the conflicts start, Binti hurries home, but anger and resentment has already claimed the lives of many close to her. Once again it is up to Binti, and her intriguing new friend Mwinyi, to intervene–though the elders of her people do not entirely trust her motives–and try to prevent a war that could wipe out her people, once and for all. Don’t miss this essential concluding volume in the Binti trilogy. The concluding part of the highly-acclaimed science fiction trilogy that began with Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning Binti.” –from the Tor Publishing website
Two Lines Press
The Females by Wolfgang Hilbig (trans. Isabel Fargo Cole)
136 pages – Two Lines Press /Amazon
“Already acclaimed for providing unique insight into some of history’s greatest wrongs—and today’s issues of mass surveillance, neo-fascism, and the individual’s role in society—what does Wolfgang Hilbig have to add to contemporary questions about gender? A lot it turns out. Acclaimed as one of Hilbig’s major works, The Females finds the lauded and legendarily irascible author focusing his labyrinthine, mercurial mind on how unequal societies can pervert sexuality and destroy a healthy, productive understanding of gender. It begins with a factory laborer who ogles women in secret on the job. When those same women mysteriously vanish from their small town, the worker sets out on a hallucinatory journey to find them. Powerful and at times disturbing, The Females leaves us with some of the most challenging, radical, and enduring insights of any novel from the GDR.” -from the Two Lines Press website
