Bellevue Literary Press
Good People by Robert Lopez
192 pages – Bellevue Literary Press/Amazon
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity. –from the Bellevue Literary Press’s website
Black Lawrence Press
Blood: Stories by Matthew Cheney
Black Lawrence Press
Children play through a war-torn world; a mother seeks to communicate with a dead child; a man is drawn to a mysterious destiny in the far reaches of Maine; a historian tries to reconstruct a lost New York history; Ronald Reagan founds a religion and hides a love; a daughter tries to find her place in a family of men with guns. Blood: Stories reprints work originally published in such different venues as One Story and Weird Tales, and it includes four new stories that travel from contemporary New Hampshire to historical Prague to might-have-been Mexico to a future world where no reality stays real for long. Reality flows through these stories, even at their most surreal and lyrical, because reality is more than just what is or even what might be: reality is whatever gets beneath our skin and into our blood. –from the Black Lawrence Press website
Curbside Splendor
Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters
300 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dalkey Archive
Prancing Novelist: In Praise of Robert Firbank by Brigid Brophy
592 pages – Dalkey/Amazon
I Saw Her That Night by Drago Jančar, translated by Michael Biggins
192 pages – Dalkey/Amazon
The Bulgarian Truck: A Building Site Beneath the Open Sky by Dumitru Tsepeneag, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
224 pages – Dalkey/Amazon
At the Writing Desk: Alpine Saga / Travelogue / Acts of Vengeance by Werner Kofler, translated by Lauren Wolfe
156 pages – Dalkey/Amazon
Dodge Rose by Jack Cox
165 pages – Dalkey/Amazon
Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth. –from the Dalkey Archive website
Deep Vellum Publishing
The Pirate by Jón Gnarr, translated by Lytton Smith
256 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Dzanc Books
Triangle Ray by John Holman
192 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, the brilliant, miraculous Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just out of high school, but the marriage falls apart within a few years as time makes them strangers to each other. Twenty years later, Ray is unmarried and still searching for a lasting connection—with his friend Dexter and his wife Olivia, whose name is so beautiful Ray has to ugly it up; with his cousin Barbara, raising her child while chasing an easy way out; and with passionate, mercurial Alma, a woman with whom Ray collides at right angles, a fleeting love affair neither of them can keep alive. –from the Dzanc Books website
Goodmorning Menagerie
Semi Circle by Nurduran Duman, translated by Andrew Wessels
28 pages – Goodmorning Menagerie
Gauss PDF
Puro by Michael Decussate Capias
GPDF
Defying Gravity by Joyce S. Lee
GPDF
Experiment W Connor by Quinn Dougherty
GPDF
Graywolf Press
The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis, edited by David St. John
112 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story by Christopher Castellani
160 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship by Paul Lisicky
240 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul’s romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise’s cancer diagnosis and Paul’s impending breakup. Lisicky’s compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival—hard-won, unsentimental, authentic—proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life. –from the Graywolf Press website
Maudlin House
Joy by S. Kay
Maudlin House
Become Death or Atomic Rain on the Shoulders of Atlas by Luis Neer
60 pages – Maudlin House
Melville House
Fixers by Michael M. Thomas
400 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by André Naffis-Sahley
320 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Good On Paper by Rachel Cantor
320 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo, translated by Edward Gauvin
220 pages – Melville House/Amazon
New Directions
All the Conspirators by Christopher Isherwood
256 pages – New Directions/Amazon
The Hundred Days by Joseph Roth, translated by Richard Panchyk
224 pages – New Directions/Amazon
On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
464 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Lost Words by Nicola Gardini
224 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Other Press
Couple Mechanics by Nelly Allard, translated by Adriana Hunter
320 pages – Other Press/Amazon
The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt by Julian Borger
224 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Lay Down Your Weary Tune by W.B. Belcher
352 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Poor Claudia
Prosthesis by Ian Hatcher
Poor Claudia
Queen’s Ferry Press
Adulterous Generation by Amy L. Clark
Queen’s Ferry Press
Adulterous Generation follows young people using what they have to try to create lives for themselves in our still-new century. A teenager turns to Yeats when she is haunted by her boyfriend’s criminal father; inmates of a juvenile justice facility use contraband staples and graphic novels to make meaning of their adolescence; a marriage falls apart over a convict-made cutting board; an expectant mother has a near-sexual, almost mystical experience with a developmentally disabled man in a Laundromat; and a young woman commits a robbery that will take her further than she could have imagined. If love is owing and being owed, the obligations in Amy L. Clark’s first full-length collection endure. –from the Queen’s Ferry Press’s website
Restless Books
Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin by Oleg Kashin, translated by Will Evans
224 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories by Carlos Velázquez, translated by Achy Obejas
160 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
A fantastical literary location akin to Marquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, PopSTock! is a northern Mexican territory through which the Cowboy Bible—the protagonist of all this book’s stories—moves freely. The Cowboy Bible is alternatively the talisman of a religious fanatic/santero/luchador/DJ and painter, a reality television show in which contestants must burn pirated CDs at full speed, and the coveted leather of a pair of boots that leads a man to grant the devil a night with his wife. A mix of such otherworldly scenarios, pop culture references, and linguistic inventiveness comes remarkably together for a brazen social and political commentary on modern Mexican reality. –from the Restless Books website
Sarabande Books
Swallows and Waves by Paula Bohince
72 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Sidebrow
The Yesterday Project by Sandra and Ben Doller
193 pages – Sidebrow/SPD
Soho Press
Poor Your Soul by Mira Ptacin
320 pages – Soho Press/Amazon
At twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she embraced the idea of starting a family and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed that her child would be born with a constellation of birth defects and no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate the pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Mira’s story is paired with that of her mother, who emigrated from Poland to the United States, and who also experienced grievous loss when her only son was killed by a drunk driver. These deftly interwoven stories offer a picture of mother and daughter finding strength in themselves and each other in the face of tragedy. –from the Soho Press website
Sunnyoutside
Sex and Death by Ben Tanzer
72 pages – Sunnyoutside/SPD
tNY.Press
Studies in Hybrid Morphology by Matt Tompkins
38 pages – tNY.Press/Amazon
A man with lobster claws for hands. A woman who grows a blanket of feathers. A talking cow. A baby born from an egg. A hu-manatee. Modeled after a scientific journal, divided into articles and complete with abstracts and end-notes, Studies in Hybrid Morphology includes more than a dozen surreal stories exploring the intersections of human and animal, head and heart, science and fiction. The strange characters who populate these stories, human and non-human animals alike, seek something fundamental meaning, identity, self-worth, comfort, connection. In most cases, they come up short, or land wide of their targets. After all, how often is anything quite what we’d hoped or expected? Instead, in the space of these pages, the reader is invited to eschew expectation, revel in the joy of unforeseen discoveries, and entertain the question: what does it mean to be alive and self-aware? –from the tNY.Press website
Ugly Duckling Presse
It’s No Good: Poems/Essays/Actions by Kirill Medvedev, translated by Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, Bela Shayevich
288 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD
Unnamed Press
Seahorse by Janice Pariat
276 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim
144 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon
