This is the seventh installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we compile the past month’s small press new releases. Email jenny@entropymag.org if you are a press and you’d like to have upcoming releases listed on the page. We hope you’ll find some books here to help get you through the rest of the summer–while you’ve been sweatin’, July’s books’ve been poppin’!
Birds, LLC
Tender Data by Monica McClure
145 pages – Birds, LLC/SPD
In Tender Data Monica McClure breaks down and breaks into various identities, each of them hashtagged in the discourses of their time and place, whether macha or chiflada, couture or fast fashion, acephale or technocrat: “I want to be so skinny people ask if I’m dying.” Down the blood-red lanes of gender-making, class warfare, and vexed relationships goes the unstable subject, hailed yet hailing back. Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show–booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn’t there. She’s in character. She’s “cut off the head to let the humors hose through. —From the Birds, LLC website
City Lights Publishers
The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski
308 pages – City Lights/SPD
Coffee House Press
Genoa By Paul Metcalf
264 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos
220 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
Dime Stories by Tony Fitzpatrick
175 pages – Curbside Spendor/Amazon
Dalkey Archive
Newspaper by Edouard Levé, translated by Jan Steyn
160 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
The Floating Opera by John Barth
240 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
21 Days of a Neurasthenic by Octave Mirbeau, translated by Justin Vicari
330 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Octave Mirbeau, author of The Torture Garden and Diary of a Chambermaid, wrote this scathing novel on the cusp of the twentieth century. Driven mad by modern life, Georges Vasseur leaves for a rest cure, where he encounters corrupt politicians, amnesiac coquettes, cheerfully sadistic killers, imperialist generals, and quack psychiatrists. Hypocrites are eternal, and not much has changed since Mirbeau wrote this acid portrait of his era. —From the Dalkey Archive website
Deep Vellum Publishing
The Journey by Sergio Pitol, translated by George Hensen
192 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Dzanc Books
The Castaway Lounge by Jon Boilard
280 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Set in a busted Massachusetts mill town circa 1986, The Castaway Lounge is the story of Jackson “Applejack” Woods. Cocaine peddler, womanizer, and tough-guy-for-hire, Applejack is weary of the wrong life and trying to put it in his rearview mirror. But all bets are off when a pole dancer ends up dead during an after-hours party with a local businessman and politician. Applejack finds himself inextricably linked to the murder and must risk going to prison or worse by setting in motion a plan to bring the killers to justice. Along the way, Applejack’s fiancée gets abducted by a flying saucer, a bible-thumping arsonist burns down the local titty bar, and a disturbing love triangle forms when a washedup guitar player seduces his teenage son’s girlfriend… —from the Dzanc Books website
Gauss PDF
Learning the Radiotelegrapher’s Song by Joe Milutis, featuring Amber Cortes
GPDF
Gold Line Press/Ricochet Editions
Bindle by Elisabeth Frost and Dianne Kornberg
56 pages – GLP
Graywolf Press
Turning into Dwelling by Christopher Gilbert
208 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Black Cat Bone by John Burnside
80 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Hobart
Baseball Handbook edited by Aaron Burch and Jensen Beach
160 pages – Hobart
The Heavy Contortionists
Beach Story by Brian Warfield
126 pages – Heavy Contortionists
Les Figues
The Book of Feral Flora by Amanda Ackerman
196 pages – Les Figues/SPD
Amanda Ackerman’s The Book of Feral Flora collapses distinctions between narrative, poetry, and prose. Grafting stories to stones and written poems to plant rewrites generated via sensory-electronic technology, The Book of Feral Flora attempts to write the language of plants. From a tale of two sisters in the belly of a whale to the training of a young healer and texts written by the plants themselves, entire stories repeat, differences spread, and regrowth becomes inevitable. The result is an alchemical transformation of pastoral and romantic traditions in favor of the feral: a process of freeing, imaging in, and recovering human and non-human subjects. —From the Les Figues website
Melville House
Future Days: Kroutrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music by David Stubbs
512 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Next Level: A Story of Rap, Friendship, and Almost Giving Up by Leon Neyfakh
192 pages – Melville House/Amazon
In his multi-hyphenate ambitions, the musician who calls himself Juiceboxxx couldn’t be more modern—you might call him a punk rock-rapper-DJ-record executive-energy drink-magnate. Journalist Leon Neyfakh has been something more than a fan of Juiceboxxx’s since he was a teenager, when he booked a show for the artist in a church basement in his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. Juiceboxxx went on to the tireless, lonely, possibly hopeless pursuit of success on his own terms—no club was too dank, no futon too grubby, if it helped him get to the next, next level. And, for years, Neyfakh remained haunted from afar: was art really worth all the sacrifices? If it was, how did you know you’d made it? And what was the difference, anyway, between a person like Juiceboxxx—who devoted his life to being an artist—and a person like Neyfakh, who elected instead to pursue a stable career and a comfortable, middle-class existence? Much more than a brilliant portrait of a charismatic musician always on the verge of something big, The Next Next Level is a wholly contemporary story of art, obsession, fame, ambition, and friendship—as well as viral videos, rap-rock, and the particulars of life on the margins of culture. —From the Melville House website
New Directions
Mirages of the Mind by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi
576 pages – New Directions Press/Amazon
Oreo by Fran Ross
240 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering a mythic journey of self-discovery like no other. —From the New Directions website
Open Letter Books
Traces of Time by Lucio Mariana, translated by Anthony Molino
159 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
OR Books
Clint: The Life and Legend by Patrick McGilligan
468 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Shell Shocked: On the Ground Under Israel’s Gaza Assault by Mohammed Omer
304 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Operation Protective Edge, launched in early July 2014, was the third major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in six years. It was also the most deadly. By the conclusion of hostilities some seven weeks later, 2,200 of Gaza’s population had been killed, and more than 10,000 injured. In these pages, journalist Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza who lived through the terror of those days with his wife and then three-month-old son, provides a first-hand account of life on-the-ground during Israel’s assault. The images he records in this extraordinary chronicle are a literary equivalent of Goya’s “Disasters of War”…Throughout this carnage, Omer maintains the cool detachment of the professional journalist, determined to create a precise record of what is occurring in front of him. But between his lines the outrage boils, and we are left to wonder how a society such as Israel, widely-praised in the West as democratic and civilized, can visit such monstrosities on a trapped and helpless population. —from the OR Books website
Other Press
The Exchange of Princesses by Chantal Thomas, Translated by John Cullen
336 pages – Other Press/Amazon
Platypus Press
Miyoko and Other Stories by Michelle Tudor
72 pages – Platypus Press/Amazon
Porkbelly Press
My Heart in Aspic by Sonya Vatomsky
Chapbook – Porkbelly Press
Queen’s Ferry Press
Inland Empire by George McCormick
188 pages – Queen’s Ferry/Amazon
Like the smog that forms the subject of an acclaimed photographic exhibition, Inland Empire is what it isn’t. The novel isn’t about a young landscape photographer who leaves the concrete vistas of his California suburb for a community college teaching post in Oklahoma. It is a spiritual journey into place and time, guided by grain elevator signifiers and horizon lines. The American West. Religion. Skateboarding. War. Masculinity. Loss. The indelible image. A deeply evocative tableaux, Inland Empire does what only the best art can: it resists classification. —From the Queen’s Ferry Press’s website
Sarabande Books
Chord by Rick Barot
72 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Sunnyoutside
Lot Boy by Greg Shemkovitz
272 pages – Sunnyoutside/SPD
Eddie Lanning has grown up with the run of his father’s Ford dealership, but lack of ambition and an immature attitude leave him trapped as the “lot boy” who covers the most menial and unskilled tasks and errands. Eager to escape both snowy Buffalo and his family legacy, Eddie allows a habit of petty theft to escalate into warranty fraud as he is drawn by fellow employee Spanky into a dangerous parts-selling scheme. This sensitive portrayal of both inchoate youthful rebellion and the invisible bonds of family and home effectively emphasizes the difficulty of Eddie’s final choice. —from the SPD website
Tin House Books
A Hanging at Cinder Bottom by Glenn Taylor
400 pages – Tin House/Amazon
Wondering Who You Are by Sonya Lea
336 pages – Tin House/Amazon
In the twenty-third year of their marriage, Sonya Lea’s husband, Richard, went in for surgery to treat a rare appendix cancer. When he came out, he had no recollection of their life together: how they met, their wedding day, the births of their two children…Wondering Who You Are braids the story of Sonya and Richard’s relationship, those memories that he could no longer conjure, with those fateful days in the hospital—the internal bleeding and resultant lack of oxygen, the near-death experience and eventual traumatic brain injury. It follows the couple through his recovery as they struggle with his treatment, and through a marriage no longer grounded on decades of shared experience. As they build a fresh life together, as Richard develops a new personality, Sonya is forced to question her own assumptions and desires, her place in the marriage and her way of being in the world… —from the Tin House website
Ugly Duckling Presse
Tells of the Crackling by Hoa Nguyen
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
Uniformbooks
Sonorama: Listening to View From the Train by Claudia Molitor
88 pages – Uniformbooks
