This is the thirtieth (!) 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. Kindly send title information within the first three weeks of the new month to guarantee inclusion.
Bellevue Literary Press
Autopsy of a Father by Pascale Kramer
208 pages – Bellevue Literary Press/Amazon
When a young woman returns to her childhood home after her estranged father’s death, she begins to piece together the final years of his life. What changed him from a prominent left-wing journalist to a bitter racist who defended the murder of a defenseless African immigrant? Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, exposes a country gripped by intolerance and violence to unearth the source of a family’s fall from grace. Set in Paris and its suburbs, and inspired by the real-life scandal of a French author and intellectual, Autopsy of a Father blends sharp observations about familial dynamics with resonant political and philosophical questions, taking a scalpel to the racism and anti-immigrant sentiment spreading just beneath the skin of modern society. –from the Bellevue Literary Press website
Coffee House Press
Thousand Star Hotel by Bro Phi
112 pages – Coffee House Press/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
Ars Botanica by Tim Taranto
265 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dzanc Books
The Veneration of Monsters by Suzanne Burns
208 pages – Dzanc Books/Amazon
In The Veneration of Monsters, Suzanne Burns’ sophomore fiction collection, an array of unusual heroines search for love and acceptance, a pursuit that often takes a bizarre turn. Cherise tries to impress a man who only exists in her imagination. Violet throws away a meaningful relationship with a vampire in favor of online community. Tabitha feels she can only be loved by the doll she carries around in her purse. Lara wants to marry a man who believes every lie she tells. And in the final story, Just the Right Kind of Stranger, Irene becomes so enamored with the idea of attracting violent predators that she becomes what she seeks out. Through stories that move between reality and mysticism, Burns carries a conversation about the pitfalls of a search for love and the feeling of isolation while surrounded by a world of multitudes. This collection also features a follow-up to Tiny Ron, the most popular story in Misfits and Other Heroes, published by Dzanc in 2009. Burns’ other works include eleven poetry collections. –from the Dance Books website
Featherproof Books
Mammother by Zachary Schomburg
340 pages – Featherproof Books
From the Inside by John Henry Timmis IV
155 pages – Featherproof Books/Amazon
From the Inside is the autobiographical account of a rebellious adolescent’s run-ins with—and attempted escapes from—the law, an abusive and uninterested family, the Menninger Clinic sanitarium, budding teenage sexuality, and, among the many other expected consequences of youthful deviance, the inner-workings of one’s own medicated and shifting mind. Much like the narrators of The Outsiders and Over the Edge before him, John Henry Timmis IV recounts these experiences with an adolescent braggadocio, blurring intensely personal confessions and exaggerated fantasies, in hopes of mythologizing himself and claiming a spot in the canon of rebellious youth. The major difference is: in Timmis’s case, it all actually happened… Or did it? –from the Featherproof Books website
Fitzcarraldo
Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
240 pages – Fitzcarraldo
Futurepoem
MyOTHER TONGUE by Rosa Alcalá
104 pages – Futurepoem/Amazon
Gauss PDF
JJ’S KIDS by Joey Yearous-Algozin
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Puntos Ciegos by Rolando Hernández & Catriel Nievas
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BITCH/BITCH by Simone Alexander
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Treatise on Luck by Mark Francis Johnson
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I Read It For The Articles by Christopher Vandegrift
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Greying Ghost Press
Side Cars & Road Sides by Tyler Flynn Dorholt
Chapbook – Greying Ghost
Graywolf Press
The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story by Edwidge Danticat
200 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez
96 pages – Graywolf Press/Amazon
“What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape. –from the Graywolf Press website
Hobart
Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell
280 pages – Hobart/Amazon
Melville House
Ernesto: The Untold Story of Hemingway in Revolutionary Cuba by Andrew Feldman
384 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Dirty Wars and Polished Silver: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix by Lynda Schuster
320 pages – Melville House/Amazon
New Directions
I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff
128 pages – New Directions/Amazon
These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
In these strange and hypnotic pieces—brief in a way a razor’s slice is brief—on three writers, Fleur Jaeggy, a renowned stylist of hyperbrevity in fiction, proves herself an even more concise master of the essay form. In De Quincey’s early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits of writers: Charles Lamb “spoke of ‘Lilliputian rabbits’ when eating frog fricassee,” Henry Fuseli “ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams,” “Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers,” and “Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke.” In a book of “blue devils” and night visions, the Keats essay opens: “In 1803, the guillotine was a common child’s toy.” And when poor Marcel Schwob’s end comes as he feels “like a ‘dog cut open alive’”… “His face colored slightly, turning into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief.” Fleur Jaeggy’s essays—or are they prose poems?—smoke of necessity: the pages are on fire. –from the New Directions website
Noemi Press
You Da One by Jennif(f)er Tamayo
142 pages – Noemi Press/SPD
Open Letter Books
Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller by Guðbergur Bergsson
500 pages – Open Letter Books/Amazon
OR Books
Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty-One Short Stories from Tibet, edited by Tenzin Dickie
296 pages – OR Books
Other Press
Infinite Summer by Edoardo Nesi, translated by Alice Kilgarriff
400 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Recapitulations by Vincent Crapanzano
304 pages – Other Press/Amazon
The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy
272 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Ninni Holmqvist’s uncanny dystopian novel envisions a society in the not-so-distant future, where women over fifty and men over sixty who are unmarried and childless are sent to a retirement community called the Unit. They’re given lavish apartments set amongst beautiful gardens and state-of-the-art facilities; they’re fed elaborate gourmet meals, surrounded by others just like them. It’s an idyllic place, but there’s a catch: the residents—known as dispensables—must donate their organs, one by one, until the final donation. When Dorrit Weger arrives at the Unit, she resigns herself to this fate, seeking only peace in her final days. But she soon falls in love, and this unexpected, improbable happiness throws the future into doubt. Clinical and haunting, The Unit is a modern-day classic and a chilling cautionary tale about the value of human life. –from the Other Press website
Plays Inverse
Arcadia, Indiana by Toby Altman
62 pages – Plays Inverse/SPD
Restless Books
The End by Fernanda Torres, translated by Alison Entrekin
256 pages – Restless Book/Amazon
Sagging Meniscus Press
The Me Theme by Doug Nufer
138 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Dick Cheney in Shorts by Charles Holdefer
148 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
An Occasional History by Laura Davenport
120 pages – Sagging Meniscus Press/SPD
Laura Davenport’s poetic and harrowing An Occasional Historyinvestigates how language and a person’s place within it come to be defined in the context of an abusive relationship—one whose terrible violence is ever so gradually revealed, as layers of language and forgetting are progressively peeled away. Through five sections of differing form, in which romance novels, the OED, and etymological histories play prominent roles, we approach the core of knowledge step by step, and come to experience not merely abuse and its ramifications, but the central role in it of how language is shaped by power relations, and vice versa. –from the Sagging Meniscus website
Sarabande Books
On Imagination by Mary Ruefle
32 pages – Sarabande Books/Amazon
Sator Press
No Colony Volumes 1-3 edited by Blake Butler and Ken Baumann
Sator Press
Tin House Books
Pretend We Are Lovely by Noley Reid
312 pages – Tin House/Amazon
The Hidden Machinery: Essays by Margot Livesey
300 pages – Tin House Book/Amazon
Two Dollar Radio
Found Audio by N.J. Campbell
162 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist. On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling “City of Dreams.” Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why? Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed. –from the Two Dollar Radio website
Two Lines Press
My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump
296 pages – Two Lines Press/Amazon
Wakefield Press
The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques by Mynona, translated by W.C. Bamberger
96 pages – Wakefield Press/Amazon
My Papa and the Maid of Orléans and Other Grotesques by Mynona, translated by W.C. Bamberger
96 pages – Wakefield Press/Amazon
YesYes Books
The Rest of the Body by Jay Deshpande
32 pages – YesYes Books
In the chambers of the love poem, desire hungers endlessly. And so the poems in The Rest of the Body make a new purpose of that passion, turning eros into a vehicle to explore community, friendship, and the intimate mysteries that exist between and within us. Drawing together poems from Love the Stranger and a host of new pieces, this chapbook offers a meditation on the curious rooms of the heart and the body’s tireless calls—to be seen, to be held, and to be heeded. –from the YesYes Books website
