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. Amazon and Bookshop are affiliated links and qualifying sales help to sustain Entropy. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
Astrophil Press
Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend by Erika Wurth (reissue)
192 pages – University of South Dakota
Sixteen-year-old Margueritte wants out. Out of her small town, where girls get pregnant young and end up stuck, like her mom. Out of a family where her Native American mother won’t leave her white, alcoholic, abusive father. Margueritte hopes if she and her cousin Jake sell enough weed, they can at least escape to Denver one day. That’s when Mike comes to town. Like Margueritte, he loves to read, he’s funny, and he’s Indian. A coming-of-age novel about the female, urban Indian experience, Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend is not only a gritty, unexpectedly funny, page-turning novel about a girl who just wants a little bit more–it’s an instant classic.” –from the Astrophil Press website
Beatdom
Burroughs & Scotland: Dethroning the Ancients/The Commitment of Exile by Chris Kelso
144 pages – Amazon
“‘Burroughs & Scotland: Dethroning the Ancients/The Commitment of Exile‘ – an unexplored chapter in the life William S.Burroughs. Researched by award-winning, multi-translated writer and editor Chris Kelso (and fully-illustrated by Shane Swank), Burroughs & Scotland discusses the gentleman junky’s early impact on the Scottish literary landscape, his turbulent relationship with Alexander Trocchi, and his dalliance with the sinister Edinburgh Org branch of Scientology – plus many more stories of Caledonian mischief and anarchy.” –from the Beatdom website
Center for Basque Studies
Heading for Bilbao by Suzanne Ahn
114 pages – Center for Basque Studies
“In early 1937, a young Canadian journalist is disenchanted with life in Paris and accepts an assignment to go to Madrid. Friends offer advice. A Basque medical student tells him of the determined anticlericalism prevalent in Madrid; a German exile suggests he take an extra pair of glasses. In Madrid, the journalist is moved by the misery of the working classes but disturbed by the power wielded by the Communist Party. After his first air raid, he finds himself shaking at the sound of airplanes. Wounded by shrapnel, the journalist returns to Paris. Recovering, he suffers as much from shame of his fear as from the physical pain of his wounds. When faced with an unexpected request from a friend, his sympathy for the Basques’ plight challenges him to take action.” –from the Center for Basque Studies website
FC2
Horses Dream of Money by Angela Buck
196 pages – FC2
“Horses Dream of Money is a daring collection of tales, darkly humorous, that eerily channels the surreal and sinister mood of the times. Preoccupied with the fault lines between life and death, and veering often into horror, Angela Buck brings a raw energy and witty sobriety to these accounts of human life and connection with the intimacy of fireside-storytelling, gimlet-eyed revelry in bloodletting, and a masterful sleight of hand between the fantastical and the quotidian. “The Solicitor” reinvents the coming-of-age story as a romance-for-hire between a girl and her “solicitor,” a man whose services are demanded by her mother and enforced by a cruel master. “Coffin-Testament” is a fabulous futuristic account of the extinction of human life on earth written 1,667 years later by a group of lady robots channeling Sir Thomas Browne to muse on their own mortality. “The Bears at Bedtime” documents a compound of cuddly kind worker-bears and their ruthless doings. “Bisquit” imagines today’s precariat as a lovable horse who is traded from one master to another until a horse race brings his maddeningly repetitive adventures to a violent conclusion.” – from the FC2 website
KERNPUNKT Press
Thick Skin by N/A Oparah
156 pages – KERNPUNKT
“After Nneka, a young Nigerian-American, is dumped and abandoned by her partner Jacob, she undertakes a ritual of thickening her skin physically and spiritually—with mud, knives, tweezers, and a questionable form of therapy. Nneka’s healing process is as layered as the emotional abuse of her interracial relationship and embodies all the ways we hide, obsess, flail, fail, and finally carve our way toward feeling and healing. This heavily metaphorical novella, inspired by the author’s experience, mines meaning from memories and half-lived moments. Told in vignettes, from the perspective of a someone-turned-no-one, it grapples with the question: who’s responsible for the wreckage?” – from the KERNPUNKT website
We Were Called Specimens: an Oral Archive of Deity Marjorie by Jason Teal
156 pages – Bookshop
“Marjorie Cameron Parsons. Famed occultist, Thelemite, strikingly Iowan, Navy volunteer, poet, artist. This book has nothing to do with her. Or is it the key to the universe? You, reader, have summoned the Three, intertwining your fate with their own. Relationships are mutable and the world spins into another year. We Were Called Specimens is Jason Teal’s first book of flash fictions. The collection centers on a mythical, supernatural Marjorie untethered to time and space. Follow her into the bleakest, harshest storms of humanity–and flee with her from the onslaught of dreamers and villains alike.” –from the Bookshop website
Paul Dry Books
Studying with Miss Bishop: Memories from a Young Writer’s Life by Dana Gioia
184 pages – Paul Dry Books
“In Studying with Miss Bishop, Dana Gioia discusses six people who helped him become a writer and better understand what it meant to dedicate one’s life to writing. Four were famous authors―Elizabeth Bishop, John Cheever, James Dickey, and Robert Fitzgerald. Two were unknown―Gioia’s Merchant Marine uncle and Ronald Perry, a forgotten poet. Each of the six essays provides a vivid portrait; taken together they tell the story of Gioia’s own journey from working-class LA to international literary success.” –from the Paul Dry Books website
Nightboat Press
Active Reception by Noah Ross
88 pages – Nightboat Press
“Noah Ross’s Active Reception is a corporeal tapestry, a verso clench of membrane. Figuring the asshole not as absence or empty voicelessness, but as a form of the body’s narrative capability, Ross articulates gossip, disease, joy and dissolution in mucal blossom, snapped taut by typewriter ribbon. For him, the void is affective trap as much as it is a path of material discernment—a space where balances of labor, erotics and power are liquidated in the queer mingling of blood and come as much as they’re made discrete, parceled out in a series of uneasy structural relations. Both a sensuous act of objection and an art of sensing oneself as object, what Ross posits is no ascetic ideology nor wasteful orgy, but a true perversity of politics. Active Reception mirrors the slick ways in which we absorb and inhibit the violence of capitalist and carceral logics. How we love each other; an airless density, its thin ecstasy of papercut. I can’t, I gag for it.” –Trisha Low
Art in Time by Cole Swenson
136 pages – Nightboat Press
“I cannot think of another writer who writes as precisely and insightfully as Cole Swensen about humans contemplating a landscape, and the perceptions and associations implied by the use of such terms as “vastness” and “timeless.” In the 20 poem-essays (or are they encyclopedia entries?) that make up Art in Time, Swensen writes about a wide range of singular figures: Robert Smithson, Agnes Varda, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Rosa Bonheur, Chaïm Soutine, Joan Jonas, Irving Petlin, and Renee Gladman. Brimming with fresh and precise readings, full of little known details and revelations, Art in Time is that rare book. You will want to bring it with you when walking in the woods, visiting a National Park, driving in the desert, or going to a museum. In these pages, you will discover insights into artists that you thought you knew and ones that you have never heard of before. You will begin thinking about landscapes differently.” –John Yau
Seven Stories Press
The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge by Peter B. Kaufman
256 pages – Seven Stories Press
“In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely. Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police – throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated – you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped – sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry. In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises – giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors’. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse. The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution – video especially – at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news – and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. ” –from the Seven Stories Press website
Spuyten Duyvil
Ire Land (a Faery Tale) by Elisabeth Sheffield
188 pages – Spuyten Duyvil
“Elisabeth Sheffield translates the merely geographical into the intensely psychological here, transforming Ireland into Ire Land, which is to say the land of wrath, in which the parenthetical faery tale of the title in part points to the theoretical shenanigans of a certain sort of easy, essentialist, ageist feminism we found in the sixties, seventies, and eighties particularly, and post-structuralism generally. Both prose and thought throughout are ever sparky and surprising, even as they are shot through with a piercing recognition of and negotiation with growing older as a woman in ways that complicate the youthful utopian riot-grrrl clichés — the distance between, say, granny hair worn as a fashion statement by twenty somethings and the bewildering real deal of continuous cellular undoing. The result is ever smart, crisp, astute, revealing, ironic, and richly (sometimes downright brutally) honest, mischievous in form, heart-hammering in its Beckettian comic vision, and impressive in its Nabokovian command over textual and paratextual material shot through with a meticulous knowledge, understanding, and intellectual bite.” —Lance Olsen
Sublunary Editions
The Posthumous Words of Thomas Pilaster by Éric Chevillard (Trans. Chris Clarke)
182 pages – Sublunary Editions
“The literary world owes a great debt of gratitude to the executors who, charged with burning the remaining papers of their authorial charges, refuse, instead publishing them for the fanatic and meddlesome among us. Collected here are the remaining unpublished works—diaries and drafts, aphorisms and ephemera—of the late Thomas Pilaster, compiled by Marc-Antoine Marson, a longtime friend and fellow writer with whom Pilaster maintained a healthy rivalry. With rough edges and glints of genius present in equal measure, scholars and lay-readers alike will treasure these curious texts—So Many Seahorses, The Vander Sons Company, and Three Attempts at the Reintroduction of the Man-Eating Tiger Into Our Countryside, to name a few—for generations to come.” –from the Sublunary Editions website
Tin House
How to Order the Universe María José Ferrada (Trans. Elizabeth Bryer)
180 pages – Bookshop
“For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created. María José Ferrada expertly captures a vanishing way of life and a father-daughter relationship on the brink of irreversible change. At once nostalgic, dangerous, sharply funny, and full of delight and wonder, How to Order the Universe is a richly imaginative debut and a rare work of magic and originality.” –from the Tin House website
Justine by Forsyth Harmon
152 pages – Bookshop
“Summer 1999. Long Island, New York. Bored, restless, and lonely, Ali never expected her life would change as dramatically as it did the day she walked into the local Stop & Shop. But she’s never met anyone like Justine, the store’s cashier. Justine is so tall and thin she looks almost two-dimensional, and there’s a dazzling mischief in her wide smile. “Her smile lit me up and exposed me all at once,” Ali admits. “Justine was the light shining on me and the dark shadow it cast, and I wanted to stand there forever in the relief of that contrast.” Ali applies for a job on the spot, securing a place for herself in Justine’s glittering vicinity. As Justine takes Ali under her wing, Ali learns how best to bag groceries, what foods to eat (and not to eat), how to shoplift, who to admire, and who she can become outside of her cold home, where her inattentive grandmother hardly notices the changes in her. Ali becomes more and more fixated on Justine, reshaping herself in her new idol’s image, leading to a series of events that spiral from superficial to seismic.” –from the Tin House website
Trnsfr Books
The Trouble with Language by Rebecca Fishow
192 pages – Trnsfr Books
“Weaving together fabulist invention and gritty realism, Rebecca Fishow’s debut collection, The Trouble with Language, unearths stories of men and women whose traumatic experiences make way for dazzlingly cerebral lives. A young man finds a severed head at his door years after his mother takes her own life. A married couple initiates a bloody jailbreak. A woman poses nude for strangers in attempts to pay for mental health treatment, while another finds herself rapidly shrinking in a hotel room. No two of these surprising and playful fictions are alike, and each encourages us to peek behind life’s curtains to discover more bizarre, enchanting, and joyful truths. Wondrously assured, The Trouble with Language heralds the arrival of a major talent.” –from the Trnsfr Books website
Zone 3 Press
A Woman, A Plan, An Outline of a Man by Sarah Kasbeer
159 pages – SPD
Sarah Kasbeer’s vivid descriptions of growing up in Illinois recall the coming-of-age memoirs of Mary Karr, but written for the #MeToo era. As an adult living in New York during this clarifying cultural moment, she has no choice but to fully reckon with the aftermath of her own trauma. Artful and entertaining, this debut collection explores sexuality, desire, privilege, shame, and the ways we find to heal.” –from the Small Press Distribution website
