After a one month hiatus (thank you for bearing with us), this is the twenty-fourth installment of Entropy’s small press new releases feature. If you are a small press and would like to see your upcoming titles listed here in the future, please email jenny@entropymag.org with the information you see included for the titles below. Books like the ones one this list are proof that the literary world will not be silenced during these strange, strange times. Write, read, stay strong.
Bellevue Literary Press
Sleeping Mask by Peter LaSalle
256 pages – Bellevue Literary Press/Amazon
Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca by John McWhorter
192 pages – Bellevue Literary Press/Amazon
It has now been almost fifty years since linguistic experts began studying Black English as a legitimate speech variety, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound “black.” In his first book devoted solely to the form, structure, and development of Black English, John McWhorter clearly explains its fundamentals and rich history, while carefully examining the cultural, educational, and political issues that have undermined recognition of this transformative, empowering dialect. Talking Back, Talking Black takes us on a fascinating tour of a nuanced and complex language that has moved beyond America’s borders to become a dynamic force for today’s youth culture around the world. –from the Bellevue Literary Press website
Boss Fight Books
Soft & Cuddly by Jarrett Kobek
192 pages – Boss Fight Books/Amazon
Brooklyn Arts Press
Infinite Record: Archive, Memory, Performance, edited by Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann and Karmenlara Ely
202 pages – Brooklyn Arts Press/SPD
Curbside Splendor
Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Quraysh Ali Lansana and Sandra Jackson-Opoku
200 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dzanc Books
Settright Road by Jon Boilard
176 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
Heritage of Smoke by Josip Novakivich
240 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
Short story writer, novelist, and essayist Josip Novakovich returns with his first collection of stories since being named a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. In Heritage of Smoke, he explores the major themes of emigration and culture clash, war and exile, and religiosity and existentialism that have defined his fiction and earned him the American Book Award and Whiting Writer’s Award, as well as praise from Kirkus Reviews as “one of the best short-story writers of the decade.” With dry humor and world-weary wisdom, Novakovich explores the sorrows and absurdities of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, constructing a bravely intelligent mosaic of what it means to be torn from one’s country and one’s self. –from the Dzanc Books website
Flood Editions
Skeleton Coast by Elizabeth Arnold
120 pages – Flood Editions/SPD
Greying Ghost Press
Pretend You’ll Do It Again by Josh Russell
Chapbook – Greying Ghost Press
Graywolf Press
The Adventures of Form and Content by Albert Goldbarth
224 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Albert Goldbarth’s first book of essays in a decade, The Adventures of Form and Content, is about the mysteries of dualities, the selves we all carry inside, the multiverses that we are. This collection takes its shape from the ACE Doubles format of the 1950s: turn this book one way, and read about the checkered history of those sci-fi and pulp fictions, or about the erotic poetry of Catullus and the gravelly songs of Springsteen, or about the high gods and the low-down blues, a city of the holy and of the sinful; turn this book the other way, and read about prehistoric cave artists and NASA astronauts, or about illness and health, or about the discovery of planets and the discovery of oneself inside an essay, or about soul ships and space ships, the dead and the living; or turn the book any way you want, and this book becomes an adventure of author and reader, form and content. –from the Graywolf Press website
Melville House
Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Martin Luther King, Jr.
144 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Glaxo by Hernán Ronsino, translated by Samuel Rutter
96 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Culture as Weapon: The Art of the Influence in Everyday Life by Nato Thompson
288 pages – Melville House/Amazon
What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America, edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians
244 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Short, powerful essays on what we can do now to cope with Trump’s election, and how, moving forward, we can protect our values, our politics, and our country. Contributors include Cornell William Brooks, Dave Eggers, Bill McKibben, Bernie Sanders, Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Warren, and more. –from the Melville House website
OR Books
The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto by Sue Coe
122 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Other Press
Nicotine by Gregor Hens, translated by Jen Calleja
160 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Is It All In Your Head?: True Stories of Imaginary Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan
352 pages – Other Press/Amazon
The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels by Anka Muhlstein, translated by Adriana Hunter
224 pages – Other Press/Amazon
With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library, Anka Muhlstein’s Pen and Brush revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th– and 20th-century writers: Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant, through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists’ techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein’s deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century’s tight-knit artistic community, where Cézanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire. –from the Other Press website
Restless Books
The Old King in His Exhile by Arno Geiger, translated by Stefan Tobler
224 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
The Israeli Republic by Jalal Al-e Ahmed, translated by Samuel Thrope
144 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
Sarabande Books
The Brand New Catastrophe by Mike Scalise
260 pages – Sarabande Books/Amazon
After a ruptured pituitary tumor leaves Mike Scalise with the hormone disorder acromegaly at age 24, he must navigate a new, alien world of illness maintenance. His mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, serves as a complicated model. A moving, funny exploration of how we define ourselves by the stories we choose to tell. –from the Sarabande Books website
Soho Press
Savage Theories by Paula Oloixarac
304 pages – Soho Press/Amazon
Two Dollar Radio
Sirens by Joshua Mohr
208 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
Apart by Catherine Taylor
160 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse
Apart grew out of Taylor’s memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother’s involvement in early anti-apartheid women’s groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, Apart navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief. The second edition of Apart includes extensive citations missing from the first edition. Here, 85 footnotes offer complete references for the historical, archival, and literary research included in the text. Back in print after selling out its first edition, Apart is as relevant now as when it was first published, as Hyperallergic noted: “After it is over, after the shooting stops, after the blood bath, after things change, after democracy, after reconciliation, after redistribution, after understanding, maybe then it will begin.” –from the Ugly Duckling Presse website
Unnamed Press
West Virginia by Joe Halstead
186 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
Wakefield Press
Spells by Michel de Ghelderode, translated by George MacLennan
240 pages – Wakefield Press/Amazon
Hitherto unavailable in English, Spells, by the Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode, ranks among the twentieth century’s most noteworthy collections of fantastic tales. Like Ghelderode’s plays, the stories are marked by a powerful imagination and a keen sense of the grotesque. Written at a time of illness and isolation, it was Ghelderode’s last major creative work, and he claimed it as his most personal and deeply felt one: a set of written spells through which his fears, paranoia, and nostalgia found concrete form. By turns mystical, macabre and whimsically humorous, and set in the unsettled atmosphere of Brussels, Ostend, Bruges, and London, the stories embody a uniquely strange vision of the world, and bear witness to Ghelderode’s belief that life is saturated with the mysterious and that the present is perpetually haunted by the past. Spells conjures up an uncanny realm of angels, demons, masks, effigies, apparitions, dreams, and enigmas, a twilit, oppressed world of diseased gardens, dusty wax mannequins, sinister relics, and an all-consuming fog where, in the words of Baudelaire, “ghosts accost the passerby.” –from the Wakefield Press website
