Welcome to Entropy’s new “Month in Books” feature, where we highlight small press new releases at the end of every month. Each one of these books is on the (virtual) shelves, which is why we are writing at the end of January, not the beginning: instead of anticipation, you get the books themselves.
If you’re a publisher and don’t see your books on our list, email dennis@entropymag.org and we’ll be in touch about our next monthly post.
Wild Grass on the Riverbank by Hiromi Itō
Action Books
103 pages – Action Books/Amazon
“Informed by a brilliant ferality and tour-de-force grotesqueries, Wild Grass on the Riverbank plays upon elements of traditional Japanese sekkyō-bushi to explore the weird defamiliarizations and surreal transplantations of postmodern diaspora. Diaspora is infused with the organic horrors of sexual vines and seedpods, invasive spores, reanimated decomp, and naturalization means to be eaten alive by bugs and wild grasses. A challenging linguistic undertaking deftly translated by Jeffrey Angles, this is a stunningly brutal and relentlessly innovative book by Japan’s ‘shamaness of poetry.” —Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians
Many Small Fires by Charlotte Pence
Black Lawrence Press
75 pages – BLP/Amazon
“In this marvelous debut collection, Charlotte Pence provides us with all the pleasures of poetic tension. We have the pull of narrative and the flares of the lyric, the graceful rhythm of blank verse and the thrill of innovative forms, the contest for survival both between a father and a daughter and between Homo sapiens and other species within our genus. The poems explore the idea of survival, not only the survival of a speaker who transcends a precarious childhood but, for example, a ‘juvenile male bear with his head stuck in a plastic Walmart candy jar’ who ‘learned to drink by laying down in shallow streams.’ In language that is sometimes word-crunchy and dense, sometimes delightfully simple (‘In her small life, she is happier than before’), Pence’s Many Small Fires is a beautiful, necessary book. Come, warm your hands.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables
Necessary Fire by KMA Sullivan
Black Lawrence Press
91 pages – BLP/Amazon
Necessary Fire, KMA Sullivan’s debut collection and winner of the St Lawrence Book Award, opens a window into the world of a woman who is mother, partner, daughter, and lover. Surprising in the variety of moment, wrenching in detail, grounded in grief and care, this collection moves from the innocence and bravery of a young son coming out in a world set to crush him, to playing hymns so a dying mother can plan her funeral service, to witnessing the breaking of a son who had been abused and abandoned in earlier years and cradling an adopted daughter long enough for her to find her own voice, all the while experiencing the fullness and desire and ebullience that comes from loving others and being loved without limit. Necessary Fire offers a deluge of image and emotion and experience, a deluge that only a heart on fire can survive. —From the Black Lawrence Press website
Emergency Anthems by Alex Green
Brooklyn Arts Press
84 pages – BAP/Amazon
“Alex Green’s work blossoms on the page like small explosions. A surf-side Spoon River tinged with Chandler, Dali, and David Lynch. Neon sunsets, lost girls, grifting tennis instructors, and dazed surfers with bite scars shaped like lightning bolts. And through it all, the dark, swift flash of sharks. Serious and hilarious, Green’s pop culture satire lunges with the same deft surprise as those sharks.” —Tom DiCillo, director of When You’re Strange and Living In Oblivion
‘SSES” ‘SSES” “SSEY’ by Chaulky White
Calamari Press
200 pages – Calamari Press/Amazon
‘SSES” ‘SSES” “SSEY’ is a book object that is based/ extrapolates on an MFA thesis Kevin White wrote in 1990 entitled ‘SSES” ‘SSES” wherein he recapitulated Joyce’s Ulysses’ recapitulation of Homer’s Odyssey to a trip he took across Asia in search of his father (who committed suicide in 1982). ‘SSES” ‘SSES” “SSEY’ takes this recapitulation 1 step further, folding in his journals, unpublished stories + artwork he made before himself dying of a heroin overdose in 1997. The super-scripted “SSEY’ represents his brother Derek’s editorial role in compiling the book—in belatedly finishing the Telemachean pursuit, searching recursively for his brother searching in parallel for their father. Chaulky is the pen name given to their combined effort.
‘SSES” ‘SSES” “SSEY’ is also a literary work that reflexively interrogates the very transcription + curative processes used to produce it, mobilizing reflexive loops between original imagined intent + editorial deterritorialization … a «gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm»—as Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) says in Ulysses. —From the Calamari Press website
The Deep Zoo by Rikki Ducornet
Coffee House Press
126 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Within the writer’s life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early Egyptian scribe the monarch butterfly that metamorphosed into the Key of Life. Ducornet names these powers The Deep Zoo. Her essays take us from the glorious bestiary of Aloys Zötl to Abu Ghraib, from the tree of life to Sade’s Silling Castle, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to virtual reality. Says Ducornet, “To write with the irresistible ink of tigers and the uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time.” —From the Coffee House website
Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts by William H. Gass
Dalkey Archive Press
512pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
A dazzling collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers. Beginning with the personal, both past and present, the work emphasizes William H. Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and then moves to ponder the work of some of his favorite writers, among them Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust. An essential addition to the Gassian canon, Life Sentencesshowcases Gass at his best. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Kvachi by Mikheil Javakhishvili
Translated by Donald Rayfield
Dalkey Archive Press
512 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
This is, in brief, the story of a swindler, a Georgian Felix Krull, or perhaps a cynical Don Quixote, named Kvachi Kvachantiradze: womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank-robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp. Though originally denounced as pornographic, Kvachi’s tale is one of the great classics of twentieth-century Georgian literature—and a hilarious romp to boot. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Me, Margarita by Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili
Translated by Victoria Field and Natalie Bukia-Peters
Dalkey Archive Press
208 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Short stories about men and women, love and hate, sex and disappointment, cynicism and hope—perhaps unique in that none of the stories reveal the time or place in they occur: the world is too small now for it to matter. A disillusioned woman, the narrator doesn’t mince words about the imperfection of her life, her relationships, her prospects; yet what might in other hands seem discouraging is presented with such humor the reader can’t help but feel there may yet be hope . . . for most of us. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Vano and Niko by Erlom Akhvlediani
Translated by Mikheil Kakabadze
Dalkey Archive Press
120 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet or Beckett’s Mercier and Camier, Erlom Akhvlediani’sVano and Niko illustrates the human condition through the prism of masculine companionship. Akhvlediani’s minimalist prose pieces are Kafkaesque parables presenting individual experience as a quest for the other. Peter Handke, who met Akhvlediani in 1975, described these works as “exhilarating and at the same time paradoxical,” and saw them as illustrating a redemptive “third way”: that of waylessness. Written in the 1950s, Akhvlediani’s book enjoys cult status throughout present-day Georgia, and is sometimes included in the philosophy curriculum of national universities. —From the Dalkey Archive website
The Brueghel Moon by Tamaz Chiladze
Translated by Maya Kiasashvili
Dalkey Archive Press
96 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
The Brueghel Moon is narrated by a successful psychologist whose wife, as the novel opens, is leaving him for a better life, which seems to be any kind of life that will be better away from him. Realizing that her marriage is little more than a “fact/reality born out of habit,” she tells him: “We were doctor and patient rather than husband and wife.” As she prepares to make her exit, he stoutly tries to maintain his dignity, but that is soon mixed with defensiveness, poor attempts at humor, indignation, and accusations of infidelity, which appear to be true. Like many left behind in the break-up of a marriage, he becomes lost in a world of fantasy, doubt, and desperate attempts to regain his life. —From the Dalkey Archive website
If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home by Dave Housley
Dzanc Books
208 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
A KISS cover-band leader pondering a fertility-driven criminal act, a boy watching his hair-metal dad search for love on reality TV, a quiet teenage metalhead stumbling into her own voice while trailing her former roadie father—these are the characters seeking resolution, tempering expectations, and occasionally finding grace and the dignity and strength to go on. Dave Housley’s collection examines the quiet desperation and occasional triumphs of growing up and growing older through the prism of music. —From the Dzanc Books website
Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson by Charles Johnson
Dzanc Books
300 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
National Book Award winner Charles Johnson muses about a wide range of topics, from Buddhism to race relations in America to his writing habits and everything in between. This collection gives readers a candid look into the mind of one of the most celebrated voices in American literature.
Charles Johnson is a black American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Middle Passage won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1990] making him the second black American male writer to receive this prize after Ralph Ellison in 1953. Johnson’s acceptance speech was a tribute to Ellison. Johnson received a MacArthur Fellowship or “Genius Grant” in 1998. He is also the recipient of National Endowment For The Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships. —From the Dzanc Books website
UNSUB by Divya Victor
Insert Press
52 pages – Insert Press/Amazon
Recasting the forensic and everyday language of the FBI’s descriptions of unidentified subjects, from suspects to criminals to corpses, UNSUB probes what it is to be “wanted.” It explores our desire to have and to hold in contempt those subjects that threaten a society of securitization. Investigating a culture of terrorism, paranoia, and surveillance by rendering a world divided into victims and perpetrators, UNSUB plays on the differences between catching a predator and being a catch. Through ghostly descriptions of live bodies, the book scrutinizes the vicissitudes of anonymity and subjectivity, indistinction and identity. —From the Insert Press website
Coyote by Colin Winnette
Les Figues Press
96 pages – Les Figues Press/Amazon
A daughter disappears in the middle of the night. What happens in the aftermath of this tragedy—after the search is abandoned, after the TV crews move on to cover the latest horrific incident—is the story of Coyote. There is a marriage and a detective. There is a storm, a talk show host, and a roasted boar. People are murdered and things are hidden. Coyotes skulk in the woods, a man stands by the fence, and a tale emerges within this familiar landscape of the violent unknown. —From the Les Figues website
Everlasting Lane by Andrew Lovett
Melville House
368 pages – Melville House/Amazon
In a timeless coming-of-age tale as charming and haunting as the movie Stand By Me, Andrew Lovett’s Everlasting Lane tells the story of what happens when nine-year-old Peter’s father dies and his mother moves them from the city to a house in the countryside, for what seem to Peter to be mysterious reasons.
He’s soon distracted, though, by the difficulties of being the new, shy kid at school, and he befriends the other two kids who seem to be outcasts: overweight Tommie and too-smart-for-her-own-good Anna-Marie. Together they try to weather the storm of bullying teachers and fellow students, by escaping into explorations of the seemingly bucolic countryside. —From the Melville House website
The Country Road by Reginald Ullmann
Translated by Kurt Beals
New Directions
160 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Resonant of nineteenth-century village tales and of such authors as Adalbert Stifter and her contemporary Robert Walser, the stories inThe Country Road are largely set in the Swiss countryside. In these tales, the archaic and the modern collide. In one story, a young woman on an exhausting country walk recoils at a passing bicyclist but accepts a ride from a wagon, taking her seat on a trunk with a snake coiled inside. Death is everywhere in her work. As Ullmann writes, “sometimes the whole world appears to be painted on porcelain, right down to the dangerous cracks.” This delicate but fragile beauty, with its ominous undertones, gives Regina Ullmann her unique voice. —From the New Directions website
The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying by Brent Armendinger
Noemi Press
79 pages – Noemi Press/SPD
Where does one body end and another begin? In The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying, Brent Armendinger explores the relationship between ethics and desire, between what is intimate and what is public. Although grounded in lyric, these poems are ever mindful of how language falls apart in us and – perhaps more importantly – how we fall apart in language. Armendinger asks, “What ratio of news and light should a poem deliver?” This book is a continuous reckoning with that question and the ways that we inhabit each other. —From the Noemi Press website
The Volta Book of Poets edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Sidebrow
367pages – Sidebrow/Amazon
The Volta Book of Poets gathers together the work of 50 talented poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions, providing a constellation of the most exciting, innovative poetry evolving today. Named for the online poetics archive The Volta, The Volta Book of Poets navigates contrasting styles and forms to showcase poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, presenting difference as a means for inspiring a new way to think about poetry, and to inspire readership for the poetry communities and presses radiating out from the poets collected in this essential anthology —From the Sidebrow website
Morte by Robert Repino
Soho Press
368 pages – Soho Press/Amazon
The “war with no name” has begun, with human extinction as its goal. The instigator of this war is the Colony, a race of intelligent ants who, for thousands of years, have been silently building an army that would forever eradicate the destructive, oppressive humans. Under the Colony’s watchful eye, this utopia will be free of the humans’ penchant for violence, exploitation and religious superstition. The final step in the Colony’s war effort is transforming the surface animals into high-functioning two-legged beings who rise up to kill their masters.
Former housecat turned war hero, Mort(e) is famous for taking on the most dangerous missions and fighting the dreaded human bio-weapon EMSAH. But the true motivation behind his recklessness is his ongoing search for a pre-transformation friend—a dog named Sheba. When he receives a mysterious message from the dwindling human resistance claiming Sheba is alive, he begins a journey that will take him from the remaining human strongholds to the heart of the Colony, where he will discover the source of EMSAH and the ultimate fate of all of earth’s creatures. —From the Soho Press website
Arrows of Rain by Okey Ndibe
Soho Press
304 pages – Soho Press/Amazon
This debut novel from the author of the powerful, universally acclaimed Foreign Gods, Inc. looks at a woman’s drowning and the ensuing investigation in an emerging African nation.
A young prostitute runs into the sea and drowns. The last man who spoke to her, the “madman” Bukuru, is asked to account for her death. His shocking revelations land him in court. Alone and undefended, Bukuru must calculate the cost of silence in the face of rampant corruption and state-sponsored violence against women. —From the Soho Press website
Binary Star by Sarah Gerard
Two Dollar Radio
182 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity.
With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary Star is an impassioned account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road-trip circumnavigating the United States, they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they’ve found a direction.
Binary Star is an intense, fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions); a society that sells diet pills, sleeping pills, magazines that profile celebrities who lose weight or too much weight or put on weight, and books that pimp diet secrets or recipes for success. —From the Two Dollar Radio website
