Welcome to the fourteenth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature. Are you a small press? Have some new books? Email Jenny (jenny@entropymag.org) with your upcoming releases to be featured on our future lists. Meanwhile, enjoy the right-now with these books from the last month!
Action Books
Cheer Up, Femme Fatale by Kim Yideum, translated by Ji Yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson
80 pages – Action Books/Amazon
Ahsahta Press
The Market of Wonders by Susan Briante
128 pages – Ahsahta Press
Stereo. Island. Mosaic. by Vincent Toro
112 pages – Ahsahta Press/SPD
Black Lawrence Press
Radio Silence by Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney
98 pages – Black Lawrence Press/SPD
“In these collaborative emergency poems, Philip Schaefer and Jeff Whitney remind us that silence doesn’t need to be disconcerting, even ‘in the chop of a storm/only the future saw coming.’ But Radio Silence doesn’t fill in the gaps in transmission. Instead it attends to what emerges from those gaps when one really listens: Silence becomes noise; noise becomes music; music becomes a message—an old friend saying the perfect next thing. ‘There is the giving and the taking and the taking/back,’ but what’s more there is what’s left over in the wake of disappearance, the afterglow of vanishment, the haunted present moment. These poems crackle with the notion that we are never alone, if we can only allow ourselves to pay attention (and participate!) with imagination and faith, in awe of the darkness and light that surrounds us.” –Matt Hart, author of Debacle Debacle and Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless
Black Ocean
The Absence of Knowing by Matthew Henriksen
96 pages – Black Ocean/SPD
Coffee House Press
Father of Lies by Brian Evenson
216 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Last Days by Brian Evenson
240 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Open Curtain by Brian Evenson
270 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson
270 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby, Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive, and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In these stories, Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. –from the Coffee House Press’s website
Dalkey Archive
The Great Latin American Novel by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Brendan Riley
416 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Enigmas of Spring by João Almino, translated by Rhett McNeil
176 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
A Room by Youval Shimoni, translated by Michael Sharp
656 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Translation as Innovation: Bridging the Sciences and the Humanities edited by Patricia Phillips-Batoma and Florence Zhang
400 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Eleven Prague Corpses by Kirill Kobrin, translated by Veronika Lakotova
168 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature by Hugh Kenner
302 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Deep Vellum Publishing
Seeing Red by Lina Meruane, translated by Megan McDowell
170 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Dzanc Books
Kafka’s Son by Curt Leviant
504 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
eohippus
Annealing 8 pp. Scuffle by J. Gordon Faylor
Tract Series Pamphlet – eohippus
Fitzcarraldo
Pretentiousness: Why it Matters by Dan Fox
176 pages – Fitzcarraldo
What is pretentiousness? Why do we despise it? And more controversially: why is it vital to a thriving culture? In this brilliant, passionate essay, Dan Fox argues that it has always been an essential mechanism of the arts, from the most wildly successful pop music and fashion through to the most recondite avenues of literature and the visual arts. Pretentiousness: Why it Matters unpacks the uses and abuses of the term, tracing its connections to theatre, politics and class. From method acting to vogueing balls in Harlem, from Brian Eno to normcore, Fox draws on a wide range of references in advocating critical imagination and open-mindedness over knee-jerk accusations of elitism or simple fear of the new and the different. Drawing on his own experiences growing up and working at the more radical edges of the arts, this book is a timely defence of pretentiousness as a necessity for innovation and diversity in our culture. –from the Fitzcarraldo website
Gauss PDF
Diana Hamilton’s Dreams by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford
GPDF
Files I Have Known: Data Reminiscences by Daniel Wilson
GPDF
Graywolf Press
Window Left Open by Jennifer Grotz
64 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Almost Everything Very Fast by Christopher Kloeble, translated by Aaron Kerner
320 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka
176 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Fearlessly riding the line between imagination and experience, fact and fiction, the linked stories in Sara Majka’s debut collection offer intimate glimpses of a young New England woman whose life must begin afresh after a divorce. Traveling the roads of Maine and the train tracks of Grand Central Station, moving from vast shorelines to the unmade beds of strangers, these fourteen stories circle the dreams of a narrator who finds herself turning to storytelling as a means of working through the world and of understanding herself. A book that upends our ideas of love and belonging, and which asks how much of ourselves we leave behind with each departure we make, Cities I’ve Never Lived In exposes, with great sadness and great humor, the ways in which we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot stay. –from the Graywolf Press’s website
Horse Less Press
High Life by Phil Estes
93 pages – Horse Less Press/SPD
Inpatient Press
How to Become a Lesbian by Laura Warman
Inpatient Press
Melville House
The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
384 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain by James P. Lenfestey
217 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Stranger by Adam Clay
96 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
New Directions
All the Poems by Stevie Smith
704 pages – New Directions/Amazon
End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky
320 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there….A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century. –from the New Directions website
Open Letter Books
Party Headquarters by Giorgi Tenev, translated by Angela Rodel
123 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
OR Books
My Turn: Hilary Clinton Targets the Presidency by Doug Henwood
200 pages – OR Books/Amazon
What’s Yours is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee
212 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Other Press
Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson, translated by Sarah Death
208 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World by Baz Dreisinger
336 pages – Other Press/Amazon
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman, translated by Marlaine Delargy
208 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Poor Claudia
Prothesis by Ian Hatcher
145 pages – Poor Claudia
Semiotext(e)
Surveys by Natasha Stagg
176 pages – Semiotext(e)/Amazon
Siglio Press
My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight by Marcel Broodthaers, translated by Elizabeth Zuba and Broodthaers
160 pages – Siglio/Amazon
This intimate and gorgeously produced book pairs Belgian artist-poet Marcel Broodthaers’s earliest collections of poetry My Ogre Book (1957) and Midnight (1960)—both previously unpublished in English—with an eighty-image projection work Shadow Theater (1973-74) made toward the end of his too brief life. Together these works reveal a dizzyingly prodigious interplay between the images and texts—particularly illuminating Broodthaers’s use of the oblique and dark fairytale framework within (and against) which he plays with reflections and reproductions, inversions and fictions, body and shadow, decor and violence. –from the Siglio Press’s website
The Song Cave
In Any Map by Emily Sieu Liebowitz
Chapbook – The Song Cave
Sundress Publications
In the Voice of a Minor Saint by Sarah J. Sloat
Chapbook – Sundress
Tin House Books
The Coyote’s Bicycle by Kimball Taylor
400 pages – Tin House/Amazon
Two Dollar Radio
Square Wave by Mark de Silva
384 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
arl Stagg, a writer researching imperial power struggles in 17th century Sri Lanka, ekes out a living as a watchman in a factionalized America where confidence in democracy has eroded. Along his nightly patrol, Stagg finds a beaten prostitute, one in a series of monstrous attacks. Suspicious of his supervisor’s intentions, Stagg seeks the truth with a fellow part-time watchman, Ravan, who hails from a family developing storm-dispersal technologies jointly funded by the Indian and American governments. The watchmen’s discoveries put a troubling complexion on Stagg’s research, giving it new shape and impetus, just as the weather modification project begins to appear less about dispersing storms than weaponizing them. –from the Two Dollar Radio’s website
Unnamed Press
Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow by Fabienne Josaphat
256 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
We Heard You Like Books
I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek
288 pages – We Heard You Like Books/Amazon
