Welcome to the sixth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we compile the past month’s small press new releases. As ever, email dennis@entropymag.org if you don’t see your press’s new releases here and would like to. Then hit the beach and start reading one (or ten!) of these brand new books.
Ampersand Books
Lucy Negro, Redux by Caroline Randall Williams
88 pages – Ampersand/Amazon
Becoming the Sound of Bees by Mark Vincenz
112 pages – Ampersand/Amazon
Big Lucks Books
Dear S by Rachel Hyman
Chapbook – Big Lucks/Amazon
Birds, LLC
From the Author’s Private Collection by Eric Amling
89 pages – Birds, LLC/Amazon
“‘Poetry, like cat urine, can ruin the integrity of a room,’ writes Eric Amling, but ‘it can also be a stealthy dominatrix.’ It is and does both in these startled, subversive poems, which churn up a disordered glee. But it’s reassuring to know that ‘All of these works will be filed in a custom matrix / Approved by third-tier analysts / In a hall of dueling national anthems.'” —John Ashbery
Boss Fight Books
Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell
140 pages – Boss Fight/Amazon
Caketrain
A Book So Red by Rachel Levy
120 pages – Caketrain/Amazon
“A Book So Red’s linguistic singularities, formal contractions, and world comprised of the existential non-sequitur coalesce into an astonishing aesthetic teratoid: the vacuum-packed denarration. The narrator’s skewed, oblique, and painful relationships teach us the only real comedy is the sound of laughter in the dark all the way down.” —Lance Olsen, author of Theories of Forgetting
Coach House Books
Bright Eyed: Insomnia and Its Cultures by RM Vaughan
136 pages – Coach House/Amazon
Chinkstar by Jon Chan Simpson
208 pages – Coach House/Amazon
Coffee House Press
Null Set by Ted Mathys
72 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far by Quintan Ana Wikswo
277 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
When love, lust, and longing have all but killed you, and Newtonian physics has become too painfully restrictive, is it possible to find freedom in another dimension? Have you lost the will to live, or have you lost the will to live as human? In these stories, characters must learn to live with unmarked edges and meanings that can no longer be defined. —From the Coffee House website
Dalkey Archive
Philosophical Toys by Susana Medina
300 pages – Columbia University Press/Amazon
Urgency and Patience by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Edward Gauvin
90 pages – Columbia University Press/Amazon
Rambling Jack by Micheal Ó Conghaile, translated by Katherine Duffy
90 pages – Columbia University Press/Amazon
Deep Vellum Publishing
The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva, translated by Carol Apollonio
264 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Dzanc Books
My Life as a Mermaid, and Other Stories by Jen Grow
216 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Gun, Needle, Spoon by Patrick O’Neil
300 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
eohippus labs
River Candy by Myriam Gurba
Tract Series #10 – eohippus
“My heart beat crazy during that makeup department scene where Joan and Miss Piggy are supposed to be selling perfume but instead they attack each other with powder puffs and draw all over each other’s faces with lipstick and eyeliner, and I was just a little girl thinking, yes, this is how I want to express my femininity. Someday, I will be so fucking feminine I will get fired for it. Joan Rivers and Miss Piggy both get told they are fired. They throw their makeup in the air and laugh ‘til they die.” —Excerpt from River Candy
Fitzcarraldo Editions
It’s No Good by Kirill Medvedev
280 pages – Fitzcarraldo/Amazon
Futurepoem
Site Cite City: Selected Prose Works 1999-2012 by David Buuck
168 pages – Futurepoem/SPD
“In David Buuck’s Site Cite City, the detective novel meets the essay meeting the poem in prose, which, somewhere along the way, has already bisected machine language and passed through the byways of psychogeography, making for a text as mysterious and entertaining as it is activist and knowledgeable. An invaluable contribution to everything.” —Renee Gladman
Gauss PDF
Selfie Music by Bryant Canelo
GPDF
L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o by Teresa Pepi
GPDF
Nite [chickadees] by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague
GPDF
Graywolf Press
The Pinch by Steve Stern
368 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
My Feelings by Nick Flynn
96 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
“Here [Flynn] is again, writing as if his life depends on it, using every trick he can find to carve the tunnel through the mountain. Words are what he uses; silence is the sound they make. Nick Flynn keeps resuscitating himself, and in doing so he refreshes and reaffirms the personal lyric as a crucial and necessary art. I read Nick Flynn’s poetry to feel alive.” —Marie Howe
Magic Helicopter Press
Fogland by Mike Krutel
Magic Helicopter
“Fogland is about making music and it’s about making noise, and it’s where the seams of music and noise and making come together. The book percusses and plumbs us as it spreads its quiver-nerves from brain to spine to hand. Full of streak and wonder-ridden, it bleats, it burns, it lights, and it lightnings. The poem resonates as it reverbs. Using Hopkins and Stein as a launch site, Krutel chooses sound over sense as his primary tool for making meaning and in the full sense of the transitive he fathoms the world as he fashions it.” —Catherine Wing
Melville House
A History of Money by Alan Pauls, translated by Ellie Robbins
208 pages Melville House/Amazon
Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library by Scott Sherman
256 pages Melville House/Amazon
The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett
320 pages Melville House/Amazon
In this important and revealing book, Jamie Bartlett takes us deep into the digital underworld and presents an extraordinary look at the internet we don’t know. Beginning with the rise of the internet and the conflicts and battles that defined its early years, Bartlett reports on trolls, pornographers, drug dealers, hackers, political extremists, Bitcoin programmers, and vigilantes—and puts a human face on those who have many reasons to stay anonymous. Rich with historical research and revelatory reporting, The Dark Net is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at a world that doesn’t want to be known. —From the Melville House website
New Directions
Moods by Yoel Hoffmann, translated by Peter Cole
160 pages – New Directions/Amazon
The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vilas-Matas, translated by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom
256 pages – New Directions/Amazon
A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vilas-Matas, translated by Thomas Bunstead and Anne McLean
128 pages – New Directions/Amazon
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short “history” of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of “portable literature.” The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico García Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O’Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe. —From the New Directions website
Open Letter Books
The One Before by Juan José Saer, translated by Roanne Kantor
134 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
Many of the characters who populate Juan José Saer’s other novels appear here, including Tomatis, Ángel Leto, and Washington Noriega (who appear in La Grande, Scars, and The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, all of which are available from Open Letter). Saer’s typical themes are on display in this collection as well, as is his idiosyncratic blend of philosophical ruminations and precise storytelling. From the story of the two characters who decide to bury a message in a bottle that simply says “MESSAGE,” to Pigeon Garay’s attempt to avoid the rising tides and escape Argentina for Europe, The One Before evocatively introduces readers to Saer’s world and gives the already indoctrinated new material about their favorite characters. —From the Open Letter Books website
OR Books
Trade is War: The West’s War Against the World by Yash Tandon
222 pages – OR/Amazon
Publishing Genius
The Three Sunrises by Edward Mullany
408 pages – PGP/SPD
Queen’s Ferry Press
Pool Party Trap Loop by Ben Segal
91 pages – Queen’s Ferry/Amazon
Restless Books
A Planet for Rent by Yoss, translated by David Frye
272 pages – Restless/Amazon
A Legend of the Future by Augustín de Rojas, translated by Nick Caistor
240 pages – Restless/Amazon
A canonical, riveting work from the patron saint of Cuban science fiction that is reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odysseyand now available to an English readership for the first time. A morally profound chamber piece, Agustín de Rojas’ A Legend of the Future takes place inside a damaged spaceship following the failure of a mission to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. The journey back to Earth forces the crew members to face their innermost fears. This mesmerizing novel is a science fiction roman à clef about the intense pressures—economic, ideological, psychological—inside Communist Cuba. —From the Restless Books website
Ricochet Editions
Featherbone by Erica Mena
56 pages – Ricochet/Amazon
“This book is truly unlike any other–it follows a different rhythm; it makes different bridges–and all of them are vertiginous and exciting. Flight and its tremendous fragility form a backdrop against which various voices play out a dramatic, vivid tension. But sound is the real subject here, and it too, takes vertiginous leaps–then it nose-dives, then it soars, yet always landing perfectly in tune and perfectly on time. A first book from a stunning and extraordinarily promising writer.” —Cole Swensen
Solar Luxuriance
Bathhouse by Hans Henny Jahnn, translated by Adam Siegel
40 pages – Solar Luxuriance
The Book is a Ghost: Thoughts & Paroxysms for Going Beyond by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, translated by Michael Tweed
100 pages – Solar Luxuriance
In considering the revolutionary spirit within the context of a mysticism (a term that is still functionally a dirty word for intellectuals), the texts gathered in this book strive to present alternative considerations of the intellectual & artistic concerns of Gilbert-Lecomte’s day—concerns which still grip us a century later: the cinema, the value of art, the metaphysics of absence, a speculative consideration of vision through the pineal gland, a refusal to posit the high and the low as binary opposites, the limiting nature of expression & representation, and the ever pervasive question of death. In his consideration of poetry & the way language can shape thought, these essays reveal that Gilbert-Lecomte predated the structuralists & post-structuralists that would rise to prominence in the second half of the 20th century. —From the Solar Luxuriance website
Soho Press
Fall by Colin McAdam
368 pages – Soho/Amazon
The Song Cave
May Double As a Whistle by Elizabeth Zuba
Chapbook – Song Cave
Sundress Publications
The Bureau by Les Kay
Sundress
Two Dollar Radio
Haints Stay by Colin Winnette
222 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
Brooke and Sugar are killers. Bird is the boy who mysteriously woke beside them while between towns. For miles, there is only desert and wilderness, and along the fringes, people. The story follows the middling bounty hunters after they’ve been chased from town, and Bird, each in pursuit of their own sense of belonging and justice. It features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, a transgender birth, a wagon train, a stampede, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger. Haints Stay is a new Acid Western in the tradition of Rudolph Wurlitzer, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man: meaning it is brutal, surreal, and possesses an unsettling humor. —From the Two Dollar Radio website
Ugly Duckling Presse
Common Place by Rob Halpern
168 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
I Mean by Kate Colby
128 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
Eunuchs by Michael Thomas Taren
Chapbook – Ugly Duckling
The Ego and Its Own by Michalis Pichler
464 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
Leaving Leaving Behind Behind by Inger Wold Lund
32 pages – Ugly Duckling
Unnamed Press
Remember the Scorpion by Isaac Goldemberg
144 pages – Unnamed/Amazon
Lima, 1970: A tremendous earthquake has just struck the Peruvian capital, and mayhem reigns throughout the city. Tensions are high, with a population both reeling from the disaster and mesmerized by the results of World Cup matches being broadcast from Mexico. Enter Detective Simon Weiss, tasked with solving two shocking and apparently unrelated murders: the crucifying and beheading of a Japanese man in a pool hall and an apparent murder-by-hanging of an elderly Jewish man. While painting a vivid snapshot of Latin American life in the 1970s, Remember the Scorpion tracks the wreckage of the Second World War—fought in the far-flung theaters of Europe and the Pacific—and reconstructs it in the conflicted psyche of a South American detective. Confronted with a pair of crimes that have their source in the horrors of World War II, Weiss must uncover the surprising relation between the perpetrators and their crimes, while searching deep within himself to conquer his own demons. —From the Unnamed Press website
Wakefield Press
Disagreeable Tales by Léon Bloy, translated by Erik Butler
200 pages – Wakefield/Amazon
The Trumpets of Jericho by Unica Zürn, translated by Christina Svendsen
80 pages – Wakefield/Amazon
This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zürn’s most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body—its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds—animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales. —From the Wakefield Press website
YesYes Books
The Anatomist by Taryn Schwilling
88 pages – YesYes
“Taryn Schwilling’s The Anatomist marks a haruspicious debut, blood-fat and splayed with ‘pearly devotion.’ Her lyrics evince the glossy precision of a medieval miniaturist, for whom the falcon, the falconer, and the falcon’s prey—indeed, every accouterment of meat-hood—come under equal scrutiny and coax from the language equal measures of carnifying delight.” —GC Waldrup
