The texts in this list are curated through my personal interest and recommendations from publishing companies, authors, and publicists. Please contact me with upcoming releases. Understand that I will only include two texts per publishing company. Amazon and Bookshop are affiliated links and qualifying sales help to sustain Entropy. I can be reached at jacob@entropymag.org.
Cardboard House Press
Awaiting Major Events by Nurit Kasztelan (Trans. Maureen Shaughnessy)
44 pages – SPD
“Awaiting Major Events invites us on a trip in space and time—to other rivers, other lands, where childhood and present are “tied like a knot.” Kasztelan writes with the five senses, delicately, the way you disentangle one plant from another, and so climb into fluctuation between the domestic and multiple “theres,” between the I and the “layers of other things,” between her own writing and references to the writing of others (Elizabeth Bishop, Ricardo Molinari, Irene Gruss). We arrive at the end of the book like we arrive home from a journey, “saturated with stimuli.” “What lingers after a trip?” The real possibility of getting back, or getting back to the glimmer of certain images: the filigree of a cameo, the broken branch of an olive tree, the language—with the skillful translation of Maureen Shaughnessy—of a forest that brings together the infinite and the consciousness of limit.” —Silvina López Medin
City of Light Publishing
Those Fantastic Lives and Other Strange Stories by Bradley Sides
130 pages – IPG Book
“Prepare to be transported to the edge of the world in Bradley Sides’ affecting and haunting debut collection of magical realism short stories, Those Fantastic Lives and Other Strange Stories. In Sides’ tender, brilliantly-imagined collection, a young boy dreams of being a psychic like his grandmother, a desperate man turns to paper for a miracle, a swarm of fireflies attempts the impossible, scarecrows and ghosts collide, a mother and child navigate a forest plagued by light-craving monsters, a boy’s talking dolls aid him in conquering a burning world, and a father and mother deal with the sudden emergence of wings on their son’s back. Brimming with our deepest fears and desires, Sides’ dazzling stories examine the complexities of masculinity, home, transformation, and loss. Bradley Sides is an exciting new voice in fiction, and Those Fantastic Lives, which glows with the light of hope and possibility amidst dark uncertainties, will ignite imaginations.” –from the IPG Books website
The University of New Orleans Press
The Hubris of an Empty Hand by Mahyar A. Amouzegar
200 pages – Bookshop
“In eight ethereal stories, The Hubris of an Empty Hand encompasses the frailty and complexity of being human. When some divine gifts fall into decidedly earthly hands, the results are almost beyond reckoning for humans and gods both. Through its wide cast of characters and fascinating settings, terrestrial, divine, or somewhere in-between, Mayhar A. Amouzegar’s fourth book of fiction takes on timeless questions of love and its permanence, sacrifice, and the human desire to be remembered and known.” –from the Bookshop website
Nightboat Books
Phototaxis by Olivia Tapiero (Trans. Kit Schluter)
104 pages – Nightboat Books
“In a city mysteriously overflowing with meat, a museum is bombed, a classical piano player hooked on snuff films throws himself off a building, a charismatic but misled political organizer has disappeared, and a young immigrant navigates a crumbling continent. A dystopic work of hope, Phototaxis dismantles and rebuilds worlds with language at turns surreal, scathingly comic, poetic, and revolutionary.” –from the Nightboat Books website
Red Hen Press
From the Caves by Thea Prieto
144 pages – Red Hen Press
Red Hen Press Novella Award
Environmental catastrophe has driven four people inside the dark throat of a cave: Sky, a child coming of age; Tie, pregnant and grieving; Mark, a young man poised to assume primacy; and Teller, an elder, holder of stories. As the devastating heat of summer grows, so does the poison in Teller’s injured leg and the danger of Tie’s imminent labor, food and water dwindling while the future becomes increasingly dependent on the words Sky gleans from the dead, stories pieced together from recycled knowledge, fragmented histories, and half-buried creation myths. From the Caves presents the past, present, and future in tandem, reshaping ancient and modern ideas of death and motherhood, grief and hope, endings and beginnings.” –from the Red Hen Press website
Rescue Press
Basic Needs by Vanessa Jimenez Gabb
104 pages – Rescue Press
“I will receive money once,” begins Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Basic Needs, a candid, sensitive inquiry into “love in the time of capitalism.” Following from Gabb’s debut collection, Images of Radical Politics, Basic Needs traces the alienations, catches, and contradictions of current life and work: No cogito ergo sum but “I am because I am having,” and no direct actions but constant shivering consequences, “all of the little fires / freezing revolutions.” Nevertheless, Gabb asserts, “to love / has not been more difficult // than deciding to.” With formal fluctuation and complicated hope, the three movements of Basic Needs engage labor, love, and the lives we are able to create: “We have / our passions / and don’t / know how / it will end,” though it “cannot exist like this forever.” – from the Rescue Press website
PMS: A Journal in Verse by Dot Devota
166 pages – Rescue Press
“[O]ne / writes a journal // to create the / guise of reading / creation. // It’s all already / not there!,” writes Dot Devota in her newest collection of explosive, visionary rage-songs sung in the private-public space of a journal toward the public-private space of “community.” PMS: A Journal in Verse is a radical rejection of artistic perfection and false relationship; a record of the mind’s neon blaze, flickering light upon such underworldly irritants as brost psychosis, compulsive self-reflection, failed artistic support structures, and literary theory. This is a formidable, darkly humorous collection fueled by the intelligence of an electric, revelatory state.” –from the Rescue Press website
Sagging Meniscus
Cavanaugh by Joshua Kornreich
236 pages – Sagging Meniscus
“Cavanaugh is not Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh is not Cavanaugh. Yet when Cavanaugh, a pencil-pushing, number-crunching, “middling, middle-aged middleman,” reluctantly buys a bobblehead of the controversial Supreme Court justice for his innocent young daughter at a minor league baseball game, past traumas are retriggered, households unravel, and a mysterious inner voice reawakens, knocking Cavanaugh off the wagon and steering him headlong into the hillocky and tortuous terrain of the surreal and absurd. With a narrative that charms and intoxicates sentence-by-sentence, Cavanaugh is not only a bleak comedy of the reverberating repercussions set off by a single fraught decision, but also a darkly poignant reminder that no matter how rigorously we endeavor to seek refuge from what haunts us, memory will always find a way to creep into the din of our surroundings, forcing itself upon us against our will and, inevitably, of those we love most.” –from the Sagging Mensiscus website
Texas A&M University Press
Imagine a Death by Janice Lee
238 pages – Texas A&M
In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and struggles to finish her book. The photographer, stunted by the death of his grandmother and caretaker, struggles to take a single picture and enters into a complicated relationship with the writer. The old man, facing his past in small doses, spends his time watching television and reorganizing the objects in his apartment to stay distracted from the deterioration around him. A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time, Imagine a Death examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us, the ways in which we justify horrible things in the name of survival, all of the horrible and beautiful things we are capable of when we are hurt and broken, and the animal (and plant) companions that ground us.” –from the Texas A&M website
*Full Disclosure: Janice Lee is the founder of Entropy and didn’t ask me to include her book in the list. I did it because I want to celebrate her work and share it with you.
Tin House
What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J. A. Chancy
330 pages – Bookshop
At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster—Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, witness is given to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man.” –from the Tin House website
