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 Ocean
Druids by Tomaž Šalamun (Trans. Sonja Kravanja)
112 pages – Black Ocean/ Amazon
“Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) is hailed as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, renowned for his impact on the Eastern European avant-garde movement. He authored over forty collections of poetry in Slovenian and English, and this collection exemplifies the best of what he is known for in its experiments with surrealism, polyphony, and absurdism. It’s the world we know made completely anew, where “City buses / resemble / quiet polite / people.” Šalamun’s unique voice will linger on for years to come in the influence it has left with artists, writers, and readers.” -from the Black Ocean website
BlazeVOX
Sunsphere by Andrew Farkas
232 pages – BlazeVOX/ Amazon
The Sunsphere is a 266-foot-tall green truss structure topped by a gold glass sphere that was built as the symbol of the 1982 World’s Fair (also known as the Knoxville International Energy Exposition). Actually, the Sunsphere stands 6,520 feet tall and is composed of a black, cylindrical base capped by a miniature neutron star. Well, the Sunsphere Shot Tower, made entirely of brick, manufactures shot for shotguns. But then, the Sunsphere is 1,000 feet tall and composed of a green tower and a pulsing orb of blue lightning. Really, the Sunsphere is dilapidated, covered in tarps, and likely to be torn down soon. Or maybe, Sunsphere Ziggurat is a massive conceptual art installation constructed by an underground organization called the KnoxVillains. Certainly, Sunsphere, a collection of nine formally innovative fictions, focuses on characters obsessed with ideas of energy and entropy, focuses on characters who are trying to figure out how to continue on in a world that is falling apart, who are trying to learn how to act in a world that is constantly changing. In the face of social collapse, some characters find solace in the logic of puzzles, in the conventions of art, in outdated ideas of empire and romance, in the lure of pop culture, in academia and politics. But at the core of this collection is a search for humanity, even when the very atmosphere appears to demand the inhumane.” –from the BlazeVOX website
Civil Coping Mechanisms
Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil
274 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/ Amazon
“Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.” –from the Accomplices website
Psychopomps by Alex DiFrancesco
146 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/ Amazon
“In 2010, Alex DiFrancesco had a different name and was a missing person. Alone in a mental hospital, they began to have fantasies of running away permanently, changing their name, growing a beard. In their journey to coming out as transgender, DiFrancesco moved from New York City to the Midwest. Psychopomps follows them on the search for family, marriage, relationships with other trans people, attempts to build community, and for the elusive link to ancient beliefs about the special spiritual role of the trans individual in society.” –from the Accomplices website
Coffee House Press
Savage Conversations by Leanne Howe
144 pages – Coffee House Press/ Amazon
“The 1862 mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota nightly haunts Mary Todd Lincoln, institutionalized and alone with her ghosts. May 1875: Mary Todd Lincoln is addicted to opiates and tried in a Chicago court on charges of insanity. Entered into evidence is Ms. Lincoln’s claim that every night a Savage Indian enters her bedroom and slashes her face and scalp. She is swiftly committed to Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Her hauntings may be a reminder that in 1862, President Lincoln ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas in the largest mass execution in United States history. No one has ever linked the two events—until now. Savage Conversations is a daring account of a former first lady and the ghosts that tormented her for the contradictions and crimes on which this nation is founded.” -from the Coffee House Press website
Counterpoint Press
A Boy of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews
X pages – Counterpoint Press/ Amazon
Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award
“Life in Winnipeg didn’t go as planned for Knute and her daughter. But living back in Algren with her parents and working for the longtime mayor, Hosea Funk, has its own challenges: Knute finds herself mixed up with Hosea’s attempts to achieve his dream of meeting the Prime Minister—even if that means keeping the town’s population at an even 1500. Bringing to life small-town Canada and all its larger-than-life characters, A Boy of Good Breeding is a big-hearted, hilarious novel about finding out where you belong.” -from the Counterpoint Press website
Cow Eye
99 Practical Methods of Utilizing Boiled Beef
132 pages – Cow Eye Press/ Amazon
Originally published in 1893 as a cookbook for the American housewife, 99 Practical Methods of Utilizing Boiled Beef: With a new Preface from the Publisher has been revised, adapted, and reissued as a new work of fiction celebrating the principles of independent publishing. ‘Personally, I think no more than five people will read this,’ said Alex Strinney, Intern.” –from the Cow Eye Press website
FC2
Girl Zoo by Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess
170 pages – FC2/ Amazon
“Girl Zoo is an enthralling and sometimes unsettling collection of short stories that examines how women in society are confined by the limitations and expectations of pop culture, politics, advertising, fashion, myth, and romance. In each story, a woman or girl is literally confined or held captive, and we can only watch as they are transformed into objects of terror and desire, plotting their escape from their cultural cages. Taken as a whole, this experimental speculative fiction invites parallels to social justice movements focused on sexuality and gender, as well as cautionary tales for our precarious political movement. Parkison and Guess offer no solutions to their characters’ captivity. Instead, they challenge their audience to read against the grain of conventional feminist dystopian narratives by inviting them inside the ‘Girl Zoo’ itself. Take a step inside the zoo and see for yourself. We dare you. Behind the bars, a world of wonder awaits.” –from the FC2 website
Once into the Night by Aurelie Sheehan
148 pages – FC2/ Amazon
“Aurelie Sheehan’s Once into the Night is a collection of 57 brief stories—a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs. What is the difference between fiction and a lie? These stories dwell in a netherworld between memory and the imagination, exploring the nature of truthtelling. Here the inner life is granted pride of place with authenticity found in misremembered childhood notebooks, invisible tattoos, and the love life of icemen. Radical in its conception of story, this collection blurs the line between fiction, poetry, and essay, reconceiving contemporary autofiction in its own witty, poignant vernacular. The stories intersect with and deviate from a “provable” life—a twin distinction that becomes the source of their power.” –from the FC2 website
Feminist Press
Living on the Boarderlines by Melissa Michal
250 pages – Feminist Press/ Amazon
“Living on the Borderlines is a hauntingly beautiful collection of stories of contemporary women and girls who live in the spaces between the reservations and traditional Indigenous territories and rural and urban communities stretching across western New York to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and beyond, to the island of Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia. Despite the family choices, personal losses, intergenerational and historical traumas that separate Melissa Michal’s characters across time and space, both they and their stories are woven together by their ancestral bloodlines, spirits and voices that dance and dream, spelunk and sing them from the past, through the present, and into a resurgent future. Michal’s debut is a stunning achievement.” —Nikki Dragone
Litmus Press
The Paper Camera by Youmna Chlala
80 pages – Litmus Press
“Youmna Chlala shows us that a book taking place in one location—be that a language, a city, between a certain set of pages—is always also unfolding some place else (in another language, a different city, in a photograph rather than a book), and it’s this double-occurring of sight and reach and render that most closely approximates what we have inherited and what we have passed on in this life of violence and remembering. The Paper Camera is a conductive force, flaring and deeply moving.” -Renee Gladman
SIR by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
185 pages – Litmus Press/ Amazon
“Sir is based upon the conceptual premise of a name that undefines the defined. Hinkle meditates on historical perceptions of the black male body and its contextualizing geographies in relationship to her brother, an African-American man born in 1980 named Sir. SIR interrogates naming in the African Diaspora to examine collective historical trauma, transgressive perceptions of the black male body, forms of gendering, and familial modes of survival within a hostile geography.” –from Litmus Press
McPherson & Company
Times Up! A Memoir of the American Century by Robert Cabot
320 pages – McPherson & Company/ Amazon
“Blending history, essay, travelogue, and autobiography, Time’s Up! is a personal and political saga: luminous, probing, and absorbing. At constant odds with his Boston Brahmin lineage and upbringing, Robert Cabot confronts white privilege, rejects the conventional trappings of wealth and fame, and critiques our American heritage of colonialism, imperialist yearnings, and penchant for perpetual war. In alternating chapters we witness his life and the nation’s, from the sepia-toned ’twenties through the color-drained Great Depression, from World War Two through the disquieting cold war, the rise of the counter-culture, and the decades after. In particular, he tells of his search across fifty years for a place in the world. “It was my century too,” he writes. “I return to it, to my memories of my world and my life, the swirls of attitudes and events and people around a long, privileged, and wildly varied American life.” Whether as a State Department official, co-founder of an intentional community, citizen-ambassador, philanthropist, conservationist, or self-exiled novelist, he recounts his adventures around the world—in Kabul, Kunjerab, Moscow, Andalucia, Peshawar, Chaing Mai, Algiers, L’Île Rousse, Naples, Tuscany, Bastia, Rome, Bésançon, Paris, Thailand, Cambodia, Ceylon, Taiwan, Laos, and many other places—and introduces us to a large and equally diverse cast of characters. Time’s Up! is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait, and a devastating examination of our nation in slow but almost certain decline. Cabot’s expansive literary gifts are on full display, whether delivering vital strikes against American “exceptionalism” and hypocrisy, or gratefully embracing “whatever beauty and love life has given us.”
Kenning Editions
Stage Fright: Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater by Kevin Killian
360 pages – Kenning Editions/ Amazon
“Here are the selected plays of Kevin Killian, who has for decades won laurels for his novels, his poetry, and his work in the poets theater of the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, this is the first representative selection of Killian’s plays. Once describing his productions as a form of ‘blanket permission,’ Killian added, ‘I think people might come away thinking, I could do that! Isn’t that the best kind of work, something generative? Action painting was sort of like that…’ This is a book to read, where reading means catching some action.” –from the Kenning Edition Website
King Shot Press
Nasty by Tiffany Scandal (editor)
X pages – King Shot Press/ Amazon
“A second collection of bold essays and recollections by fierce women who are not ashamed of who they are or what they do. Featuring Leza Cantoral, Autumn Christian, Constance Ann Fitzgerald, Larissa Glasser, Devora Gray, Jessa Jordan, Violet LeVoit, Eve Luchs, Rios de la Luz, Jennifer Manalili, Melissa Moralez, Thursday Simpson, Lydia Xythali . . .50% of proceeds will go to benefit SMYRC (Sexual and Gender Minority Youth Resource Center). “SMYRC provides a safe, supervised, harassment-free space for sexual and gender minority youth ages 13-23 who participate in positive activities like art, music, community organizing, open mic nights, drag shows, and support groups and receive services including case management, counseling, education, and more. With the goals of increasing academic success and access to jobs, reducing poverty and school drop-out, SMYRC honors, empowers, and supports LGBTQ youth to be their best selves and become leaders in their communities.”
Scarstruck by Violet Levoit
260 pages – King Shot Press/ Amazon
“What Hollywood he-man’s got a secret yen for slim young boys and cigarette burns? What hot-to-trot starlet’s got a red-hot Commie past? And what Mexican bellboy gets mixed up in their whole swinging triangle while their Tinseltown down-low crashes like Sputnik? ADULTS ONLY can savor all the juicy AC/DC details of their ‘three-way’ collision in this kinky sin-pit noir—a no-man’s land romance for tenderhearted perverts everywhere.” –from the King Shot Press website
Paul Dry Books
Still Life with Monkey by Katherine Weber
275 pages – Paul Dry Books/ Amazon
“Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn’t sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become ‘a broken series of unsuccessful gestures.’ Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan’s will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey—a tufted capuchin named Ottoline—to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan’s life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?” -from the Paul Dry website
Stalking Horse Press
Gristle: Weird Tales by Jordan Rothacker
129 pages – Stalking Horse Press
“Gristle is alchemical theatre, a collection of weird tales, twelve fingers on the steering wheel, with D.H.Lawrence and Sylvia Plath asleep across the back seat, Chekov shivering on the hard shoulder…Gristle is a post-beat riddle, a comedy, a nightmare…Gristle is Salinger descending from his eyrie with a bottle of Thunderbird. Jordan A. Rothacker hasstolen a dream car…The road doubles back upon itself, but the riders are still lost. Sincerity and foolishness glow from the map. Follow, follow, the Moon is over the blacktop and the canny ghosts and story serpents are coming out…” -from the Stalking Horse Press website
Two Dollar Radio
The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews
284 pages – Two Dollar Radio/ Amazon
“This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics.” –from the Two Dollar Radio website
Two Lines Press
Lord by João Gilberto Noll (Trans. Edgar Garbelotto)
120 pages – Two Lines Press/ Amazon
“As Lord begins, a Brazilian author is arriving at London’s Heathrow airport for reasons he doesn’t fully understand. Only aware that he has been invited to take part in a mysterious mission, the Brazilian starts to churn with anxiety. Torn between returning home and continuing boldly forward, he becomes absorbed by fears: What if the Englishman who invited him here proves malign? Maybe he won’t show up? Or maybe he’ll leave the Brazilian lost and adrift in London, with no money or place to stay? Ever more confused and enmeshed in a reality of his own making, the Brazilian wanders more and more through London’s immigrant Hackney neighborhood, losing his memory, adopting strange behaviors, experiencing surreal sexual encounters, and developing a powerful fear of ever seeing himself reflected in a mirror. A novel about the unsettling space between identities, and a disturbing portrait of dementia from the inside out, Lord constructs an altogether original story out of the ways we search for new versions of ourselves. With jaw-dropping scenes and sensual, at times grotesque images, renowned Brazilian author João Gilberto Noll grants us stunning new visions of our own personalities and the profound transformations that overtake us throughout life.” –from the Two Lines Press website
7.13 Books
Not Everyone is Special by Josh Denslow
160 pages – 7.13 Books/ Amazon
“A teen who can teleport just wants to make his mom happy. A midget working as an elf in a year-round Christmas-themed amusement park battles his archrival: a condescending Santa. You’ve heard of Fight Club, but have you been to the Underground Punch Market? Like the work of George Saunders crossed with Richard Linklater, NOT EVERYONE IS SPECIAL is a collection of slacker fabulist stories that are at once speculative, hilarious, and poignant.” –from the 7.13 Books website
Portrait of Sebastian Khan by Aatif Rashid
263 pages – 7.13 Books/ Amazon
“Sebastian Khan is 380 days away from the end of college. An art history major with a fondness for the Pre-Raphaelites and a dislike of long-term commitments (romantic and otherwise), Sebastian starts dating Fatima, who’s determined to transition smoothly from campus life to a stable white-collar professional career. Sebastian’s membership in Model United Nations, though, takes him to colleges across North America, foisting upon him all manner of temptations and testing his commitment to Fatima and his readiness for adulthood. Part satire of college life circa 2011 and part serious exploration of art’s fundamental unreality, Portrait of Sebastian Khan is a humorous coming-of-age novel about a charismatic but emotionally stunted Muslim American Don Draper, who wins as many hearts as he breaks.” –from 7.13 Books
