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.
Akashic Books
Death of a Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery by Laurie Loewenstein
314 pages – Akashic Books
“When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch-blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff Temple Jennings shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl. The killing only magnifies Temple’s ongoing troubles: a formidable opponent in the upcoming election, the repugnant burden of enforcing farm foreclosures, and his wife’s lingering grief over the loss of their eight-year-old son. As the sheriff and his young deputy investigate the murder, their suspicions focus on a teenager, Carmine, serving with the Civilian Conservation Corps. The deputy, himself a former CCCer, struggles with remaining loyal to the corps while pursuing his own aspirations as a lawman. When the investigation closes in on Carmine, Temple’s wife, Etha, quickly becomes convinced of his innocence and sets out to prove it. But Etha’s own probe soon reveals a darker web of secrets, which imperil Temple’s chances of reelection and cause the husband and wife to confront their long-standing differences about the nature of grief.” –from the Akashic Books website
Black Ocean
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert
184 pages – Black Ocean
“In The Word Pretty Elisa Gabbert brings together her unique humor and observational intelligence to create a roving and curious series of lyrical essays, which combine elements of criticism, meditation, and personal essay reminiscent of the work of Wayne Koestenbaum, Sven Birkerts, and Maggie Nelson. Here you will find works on crying, dreams, and notebooking alongside critical engagements with aphorism, the art of the paragraph, the difference between poetry and prose, and the appeal of translator’s notes, as well as a discussion of John Berger, reflecting on beauty and the male gaze.” -from the Black Ocean website
Bull City Press
Four Stories about the Human Face by Ryan Napier
73 pages – Bull City Press
“A man in search of a rare pink dolphin, a social media assistant for a pasta sauce company, a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, and too-proud parents of a new baby all have one thing in common: social media and modern technology have them questioning their reality. Ryan Napier makes us consider the repercussions and anxieties that result from a world that revolves around image.” -from the Bull City Press website
Center for Literary Publishing
The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter by Gillian Cummings
79 pages – Center for Literary Publishing
“Selected by John Yau for the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, Gillian Cummings’s second book, gives voice to her version of Ophelia, a young woman shattered by unbearable losses, and questions what makes a mind unwind till the outcome is deemed a suicide. Ophelia’s story, spoken quietly, lyrically, in prose poems whose tone is unapologetically feminine, is bracketed by short, whittled-down once-sonnets featuring other Ophelias, nameless “she” and “you” characters who address the question of madness and its aftermath. These women and girls want to know, what is God when the soul is at its nadir of suffering, and how can one have faith when living with a mind that wants to destroy itself?” -from the Center for Literary Publishing
Coffee House Press
Since When: A Memoir in Pieces by Bill Berkson
280 pages – Coffee House Press
“Bill Berkson was a poet, art critic, and joyful participant in the best of postwar and bohemian American culture. Since When gathers the ephemera of a life well lived, a collage of bold-face names, parties, exhibitions, and literary history from a man who could write “of [Truman Capote’s Black and White] ball, which I attended as my mother’s escort, I have little recollection” and reminisce about imagining himself as a character from Tolstoy while tripping on acid at Woodstock. Gentle, witty, and eternally generous, this is Bill, and a particular moment in American history, at its best.” -from the Coffee House Press website
Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan
224 pages – Coffee House Press
“These eleven short fictions evoke the microcosmic worlds every human relationship contains. A woman is captivated by the stories her boyfriend tells about his exes. A faltering artist goes on a date with a married couple. Twin brothers work out their rivalry via the girl next door. In every one of these tales, we meet indelibly real and unforgettable people, a cast of rebels and dreamers trying to transform themselves, forge new destinies, or simply make the moment last.” -from the Coffee House Press website
Dzanc Books
Everything Lost is Found Again by Will McGrath
224 pages – Dzanc Books
“Funny and heartfelt, this blend of memoir and essay collection tells the story of nearly two years the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, welcomed by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who—with sweetest face—drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.” -from the Dzanc Books website
White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
208 pages – Dzanc Books
“In luminous, vivid, searingly honest prose, the stories in White Dancing Elephants center on the experiences of diverse women of color—cunning, bold, and resolute—facing sexual harassment and racial violence, as well as the violence women inflict upon each other. One woman’s miscarriage is juxtaposed against the story of the Buddha’s birth. Another cheats with her best friend’s husband, only to discover it’s her friend she most yearns for. In three different stories, three artists struggle to push courageous works into the world, while a woman with an incurable disease competes with her engineer husband’s beautiful android. Combining the speculative elements and wry psychological realism beloved by readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood, Danzy Senna and Sandra Cisneros, this collection introduces Chaya Bhuvaneswar as an original and memorable new voice. White Dancing Elephants is the winner of the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize.” -from the Dzanc Books website
Feminist Press Books
Maggie Terry: A Novel by Sarah Schulman
272 pages – Feminist Press Books
“Post-rehab, Maggie Terry is single-mindedly trying to keep her head down in New York City. There’s a madman in the White House, the subways are constantly delayed, summer is relentless, and neighborhoods all seem to blend together. Against this absurd backdrop, Maggie wants nothing more than to slowly rebuild her life in hopes of being reunited with her daughter. But her first day on the job as a private investigator lands her in the middle of a sensational new case: actress strangled. If Maggie is going to solve this mystery, she’ll have to shake the ghosts—dead NYPD partner, vindictive ex, steadfast drug habit—that have long ruled her life.” -from the Feminist Press Books website
Fiction Advocate
How to Write Stunning Sentences by Nina Schuyler
160 pages – Fiction Advocate
“You’ve got a great story, but do you have great sentences? Stylish sentences have their own powerful energy that mesmerizes and even rearranges a reader’s world. Think of this book as a private lesson with Nina Schuyler—award-winning author and professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco—featuring guest appearances by the masters, including James Baldwin, Grace Paley, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison. They’ve arrived to show you the mechanics of their magic. Featuring 25 essays and over 100 writing prompts, How to Write Stunning Sentencesis the best way to practice writing sentences with style.” -from the Fiction Advocate website
(Full disclosure, Jacob Singer studied with Nina Schuyler at the University of San Francisco.)
Fish Out of Water Books
Peach by Wayne Barton
320 Page – Amazon
“Following the untimely passing of a close friend, British songwriter and producer, Freddie Ward, arrives in Bliss, Idaho to work on a comeback album with beloved singer-songwriter, Hal Granger. Adrift and bereft, Freddie is looking to gain a sense of perspective after a series of bad decisions—decisions that cost him his relationship and life as he knows it. However, almost as soon as Freddie arrives in Idaho, Hal drops an unexpected and devastating bombshell.
Far from the hustle and bustle of his life in England, out in the stark isolation of the northwestern U.S., with time to think, to reflect, Freddie slowly begins to rebuild his life, haunted both by the events of the recent past and his reactions to them. Through words of wisdom from Hal and a series of meandering, existential, and profound conversations, PEACH explores themes such as love, loss, loyalty, and friendship; second chances and redemption; how to make the most of your time; and, last but not least, the meaning of home.” -from the Fish Out of Water website
Kenning Editions
The Dirty Text by Soleida Rios (Trans. Barbara Jamison and Olivia Lott)
278 pages – Small Press Distribution
“Soleida Ríos (b. 1950) is an acclaimed Cuban poet whose work draws from Afro-Cuban traditions as well as writers as diverse as Juan Rulfo and Aimé Cesaire. She has published fourteen books from 1977 to the present, and The Dirty Text (El Texto Sucio) is her first book to appear in English. Written in the 1990s in Cuba, it is a book of poems, a book of stories and, most vividly, a book of dreams. As poet Rosa Alcalá writes, Ríos’ writings are “indescribable manifestations of a poetics unfastened to mode, genre, or category.” In this book, human eyes appear beneath other human eyes, snakes materialize with three heads, and the bodies of loved ones duplicate, disintegrate or speak to ghosts and Gods. It is a book about the possibilities of language and literature to articulate our relationship to the communities we occupy and the communities we imagine, a book that disentangles the lines between our conscious lives and our unconscious lives, what we imagine and what we experience. Ríos writes of the island’s east and west cities of Havana and Santiago, but she looks off the island as well, to Mexico, to South America, to Europe, at once evoking and defying the broader, international traditions of surrealist and hallucinatory writing.” -from the Kenning Editions website
KERNPUNKT Press
Fabulations by José de Piérola
113 pages – KERNPUNKT Press
“Encompassing thousands of years, Fabulations is composed of minimalist short stories that straddle history and fiction, fact and imagination to tell stories as varied as the early effects of human civilization on our planet or the strange relationship between machines, chess and the human mind. These fabulations, intimate and panoramic, are imaginative periscopes that reveal part of our shared human experience from fresh, new angles.” -from the KERNPUNKT Press website
Rescue Press
Clap For Me That’s Not Me by Paola Capó-García
88 pages – Rescue Press
“What you’re reading is poetría plain and very simple,” declares Paola Capó-García’s Clap For Me That’s Not Me, a collection that revels in assured complication. Through montage and ever-startling switchbacks, Clap For Me That’s Not Me splices slapstick and dead seriousness, power poses and TV sex scenes, mystic contemplation and glitter shit, the self on a time-out and the self trotted out, and smack talk en inglés and shock and awe in Spanish, into one “lavish lengua,” “making something out of everything, the All,” making something totally its own. An unrelenting exercise in messiness and identity, Capó-García assures us, “It’s not that I don’t like this thing it’s just that this other thing is way more tricked out.” -from the Rescue Press website
Spain by Caren Beilin
144 pages – Rescue Press
“‘Here we are, in Spain.’ Caren Beilin’s travelogue lays out a new path for the genre. Spain is sly cultural criticism (Blanchot to The Shining), feminist wink, post-breakup corrective, and portrait of the artist as a young mansplained woman. Our narrator finds herself, skeptically, at an artist residency in Spain, rendering her life into vivid fragments that pop and sting. With acerbic flair, Beilin swings an axe into the stuff of memoir. ‘I don’t care to dine with anyone,’ she proclaims. Reader, pull up a chair.” -from the Rescue Press website
Soft Skull Press
Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou (trans. Helen Stevenson)
176 pages – Soft Skull Press
“In Republic of the Congo, in the town of Trois-Cents, in a bar called Credit Gone West, a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass drinks red wine and records the stories of the bar and its regulars, including Stubborn Snail, the owner, who must battle church people, ex-alcoholics, tribal leaders, and thugs set on destroying him and his business; the Printer, who had his respectable life in France ruined by a white woman, his wife; Robinette, who could outdrink and outpiss any man until a skinny-legged stranger challenged her reign; and Broken Glass himself, whose own tale involves as much heartbreak, squalor, disappointment, and delusion. A brand-new edition of an irreverent, allusive, scatalogical, tragicomic masterpiece from one of our greatest living Francophone writers.” -from the Soft Skull Press website
Spurl Editions
One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello (trans. William Weaver)
218 pages – Spurl Editions
“Luigi Pirandello’s extraordinary final novel begins when Vitangelo Moscarda’s wife remarks that Vitangelo’s nose tilts to the right. This commonplace interaction spurs the novel’s unemployed, wealthy narrator to examine himself, the way he perceives others, and the ways that others perceive him. At first he only notices small differences in how he sees himself and how others do; but his self-examination quickly becomes relentless, dizzying, leading to often darkly comic results as Vitangelo decides that he must demolish that version of himself that others see. Pirandello said of his 1926 novel that it ‘deals with the disintegration of the personality. It arrives at the most extreme conclusions, the farthest consequences.’ Indeed, its unnerving humor and existential dissection of modern identity find counterparts in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy trilogy and the works of Thomas Bernhard and Vladimir Nabokov.”
Two Lines Press
Mina by Kim Sagwa (trans. Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton)
280 pages – Two Lines Press
“Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She’s also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her non-stop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn’t talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina’s brother, whom she’s developing a serious crush on. And Crystal’s starting to lose her grip. In this shocking English debut, award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist–at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax.” -from the Two Lines Press website
Waxing Press
Passing Away by Tom LeClair
157 pages – Waxing Press
“Passing Away by Tom LeClair is a novel in three long stories about men near death: a contemporary middle-aged Vermont policeman, a disgraced Calvin Coolidge after his presidency, and Frederic Tudor, the 79-year-old “Ice King” of nineteenth-century America. Passing Away is a novel because all the stories are written by Michael Keever, the former basketball player, protagonist, and narrator of Passing Off, Passing On, and Passing Through. Like Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, Passing Away is both a stand-alone work and a tetralogy’s final book, a three-headed encounter with finality. While personal and intimate, the stories also present the passing away of places and eras: the mid-century small town, rural Vermont of the late nineteenth century, Boston before the Civil War. Narrated in the first person, each story has a distinctive style: Keever’s sport-inflected vernacular, unexpected stream of consciousness from Coolidge, and Tudor’s aristocratic formality. And like the preceding Passing novels, Passing Away may well be unreliable as its narrators—and Keever, its putative author–struggle to write the truth about the past in the face of death. With his vivid characters in particularized histories, Tom LeClair gives readers imaginative and affecting responses to mortality, what Henry James called “the real distinguished thing.” -from the Waxing Press website
WTAW Press
Hungry Ghost Theater: A Novel by Sarah Stone
316 pages – WTAW Press
“An inventive, funny, sometimes heart-breaking exploration of the connections between art and hunger, duty and desire, and loss and survival. Brother and sister Robert and Julia Zamarin are trying to awaken the world to its peril with their tiny political theater company, while their sister Eva, a neuroscientist, searches for the biological roots of empathy. As Julia attempts to break free of Robert’s influence, Robert, as lost without her as she is without him, takes on dark material and drives away members of their company. Meanwhile, the whole family contends with the ongoing troubles of Eva’s youngest daughter, Arielle, as she struggles with addiction. Finally, after a family catastrophe, Julia and Robert reunite to create a new piece in a possibly haunted theater institute. When Arielle shows up after her latest relapse, they all have to find a new way of living in—and with—a world out of balance.” -from the WTAW Press release
Unnatural Habitats & Other Stories by Angela Mitchell
190 pages – WTAW Press
“From a newly divorced woman employed by a front for illegal drugs, to a man who seeks revenge when the farm he loves is invaded by meth producers, to a shady Arkansas businessman wrestling with his own wildness (and that of his teen son) as he attempts to return a domesticated bobcat to its native habitat, the characters in Unnatural Habitats and Other Stories explore the conflict between what is instinct and what is learned, as well as what it means to belong to a place and to a people. Set in the rural landscape of the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri, the stories turn on a growing crime culture
in a place that had previously felt untouched by the world outside, forcing characters who live there to reevaluate their sense of right and wrong.” –from the WTAW Press release
7.13 Books
This Place You’re Supposed to Laugh by Jenn Stroud Rossmann
330 pages – 7.13 Books
“It’s 2002 in Silicon Valley. 9/11’s still fresh, the dot-com bubble has burst, and holy calamity is raining down on 14-year-old Chad Loudermilk. His father is about to lose his job, his mother isn’t the same since Chad’s grandma died, and as one of the few black kids at tony Palo Alto High School, Chad’s starting to wonder about his birth parents. Next door lives dot-com mogul Scot MacAvoy, with his luxury SUV and his gardeners and his beautiful wife and his time to play video games with Chad, all making the Loudermilk family’s struggle to stay afloat seem that much harder. It’s going to be a tough year for the Loudermilks. The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh is a wise and witty suburban drama that follows the tribulations of the working class, blended Loudermilk family as they tackle issues of race and inequality in the post-bubble Silicon Valley. This novel will appeal to fans of Tom Perrotta, Emma Straub, and Lorrie Moore.” -from 7.13 Books
