We hope you’ll enjoy the ninth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we highlight small presses and their latest releases. If you are a press and you’d like to see your books represented, email jenny@entropymag.org. For now, we suggest you go pick up one of these books to enjoy alongside that seasonal pumpkin thing you are probably eating right now. Let’s meet back up in a month!
Belladonna*
A Swarm of Bees in High Court by Tonya M. Foster
140 pages – Belladonna*/SPD
Black Lawrence Press
Where You Want to Be: New and Selected Poems by Kevin Pilkington
Black Lawrence
Four Cities by Hala Alyan
102 pages – Black Lawrence/SPD
Sad Boy/Detective by Sam Sax
29 pages – Black Lawrence/SPD
“Sam Sax’s sad boy/detective uses the unholy sonnet in ways that would make Jarman marvel and sigh. The entirety of this volume destabilizes our ideas of what it means to write the coming of age novel, what it means to be undetectable. And Sax is forever fighting the fight of a poet who is made aware of his separation from the world by the fact that he is—in sorrow, sex, danger, or celebration—moored to all he sees because his seeing is a searchlight.” —Jericho Brown
Calamari Press
No Moon by Julie Reverb
110 pages – Calamari/Amazon
City Lights Publishers
Notes on the Assemblage by Juan Felipe Herrera
104 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals by John Wieners, edited by Michael Seth Stewart
248 pages – City Lights/SPD
Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America
by Tim Wise
360 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Shock Treatment: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition by Karen Finley
176 pages – City Lights/Amazon
No other artist captures the drama and fragility of the AIDS era as Karen Finley does in her 1990 classic book Shock Treatment. “The Black Sheep,” “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” “I Was Never Expected to Be Talented,”—these are some of the seminal works which excoriated homophobia and misogyny at a time when artists and writers were under attack for challenging the status quo. This twenty-fifth anniversary expanded edition features a new introduction in which Finley reflects on publishing her first book as she became internationally known for being denied an NEA grant because of perceived obscenity in her work. She traces her journey from art school to burlesque gigs to the San Francisco North Beach literary scene. A new poem reminds us of Finley’s disarming ability to respond to the era’s most challenging issues with grace and humor. –from the City Lights website
Coffee House Press
The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli
192 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Cat is Art Spelled Wrong edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, and Sarah Schultz
208 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
Curbside Splendor
Fake Fruit Factory by Patrick Wensink
350 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dalkey Archive
November by Christopher Woodall
848 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories by Dermot Healy
288 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Fighting with Shadows by Dermot Healy
400 pages – Dalkey Archive/Amazon
Deep Vellum Publishing
Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Roland Glasser
224 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon
Two friends, one a budding writer home from abroad, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the only nightclub, the Tram 83, in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village. With an introduction by Man Booker International-nominated author Alain Mabanckou. –from the Deep Vellum website
Dikembe Press
Cloud 9 by Jesse Nathan
Chapbook – Dikembe
Land by Julie Kantor
Chapbook – Dikembe
Dzanc Books
The Suicide of Claire Bishop by Carmiel Banasky
392 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Little Sister Death by William Gay
232 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
The Long Home by William Gay
232 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
FC2
Silence and Song by Melanie Rae Thon
160 pages – FC2/Amazon
Featherproof Books
See You in the Morning by Mairead Case
120 pages – Featherproof/Amazon
See You In the Morning is a book about three seventeen-year-olds, Rosie, John, and the book’s unnamed narrator, who take care of each other one summer in a small Midwestern town. Rosie is a mystic romantic whose dad earned so much money writing screenplays that she doesn’t need an after-school job. John, Rosie’s ex, works at the roller rink in a rabbit costume and takes care of his mom when she’s tired after her days spent cutting hair. The narrator works at a bookstore and sometimes focuses so hard on their reading that they see polka dots take over the room. John is the narrator’s best and oldest friend, so now the two of them must be in love, right? Told in paragraph-shaped poems, and in the narrator’s angry, tender, colorful voice, See You In the Morning asks, what is love and how does it work? —from the Featherproof website
Flood Editions
Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus, translated by John Tipton
96 pages – Flood Editions/SPD
Futurepoem
Site Cite City by David Buuck
168 pages – Futurepoem/Amazon
Gauss PDF
Shucked in Laurelhurst by Marc Matchak
GPDF
don’t you love my gardening styles? by Nadia John
GPDF
Airport Novel by Michael Nordone
GPDF
First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 by Tom Comitta
GPDF
ENERGY & PRIVACY by Alex Hampshire
GPDF
Greying Ghost Press
Tender Industrial Fabric by Toby Altman
Chapbook – Greying Ghost
Graywolf Press
The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth
382 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Application for Release from the Dream by Tony Hoagland
96 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Half Inch of Water by Percival Everett
176 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
A deaf Native American girl wanders off into the desert and is found untouched in a den of rattlesnakes. A young boy copes with the death of his sister by angling for an unnaturally large trout in the creek where she drowned. An old woman rides her horse into a mountain snowstorm and sees a beloved dog that had died years before. For the plainspoken men and women of these stories—fathers and daughters, sheriffs and veterinarians—small events trigger sudden shifts in which the ordinary becomes unfamiliar. A harmless comment about how to ride a horse changes the course of a relationship, a snakebite gives rise to hallucinations, and the hunt for a missing man reveals his uncanny resemblance to an actor. Half an Inch of Water tears through the fabric of the everyday to examine what lies beneath the surface of these lives. In the hands of master storyteller Percival Everett, the act of questioning leads to vistas more strange and unsettling than could ever have been expected. —from the Graywolf Press website
H_NGM_N
Manning Up by JoAnna Novak
Chapbook – H_NGM_N
Imipolex
Get Exited Motherfucker by Owen Merth
46 pages – Imipolex
Oft-Neglected Wars by Hieronymus Atchley
54 pages – Imipolex
Melville House
The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken
240 pages – Melville House/Amazon
The Dog Walker: An Anarchist’s Encounters With the Good, the Bad, and the Canine by Joshua Stephens
256 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Not on Fire, But Burning by Greg Hrbek
272 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Twenty-year-old Skyler saw it from the window: a metallic object that descended from the sky at terrific speed, slowed above the Golden Gate Bridge, and then severed the bridge’s suspension cables before a toxic mushroom cloud lifted above San Francisco . . . Flash-forward to a future America, where no one knows who was responsible for the explosion in San Francisco—or even what that explosion was, exactly—but Muslims have nonetheless been herded onto the old Indian reservations in the west. In suburban New York, Skyler’s little brother Dorian is twelve and dreaming about killing Muslims . . . when his next-door neighbor adopts a Muslim orphan from the territories. That simple act of benevolence will set off a series of increasingly terrifying incidents that force an entire community to reckon with their most deeply held beliefs, and—for Dorian—will lead to either tragedy or redemption. —from the Melville House website
Milkweed Editions
Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón
128 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy
96 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse by Faith Sullivan
456 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
Of Bonobos and Men: A Journey into the Congo by Deni Ellis Béchard
368 pages – Milkweed Editions/Amazon
New Directions
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
256 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Death in Midsummer by Yukio Mishima
181 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Shards: Fragments of Verses by Lorenzo Chiera, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
64 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker
384 pages – New Directions/Amazon
The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “Communists,” followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule. Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. . . . Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature. —from the New Directions website
Noemi Press
The Reveal by Chloe Garcia Roberts
62 pages – Noemi Press/SPD
Open Letter Books
The Things We Don’t Do by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
190 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, translated by Martha Tennent
150 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
Considered by many to be the grand achievement of her later period, Death in Spring is one of Mercè Rodoreda’s most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood—through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society. —from the Open Letter website
OR Books
Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture, edited by Elissa Shevinsky
252 pages – OR Books/Amazon
True False by Miles Klee
264 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Love in the Anthropocene by Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam
218 pages – OR Books/Amazon
Penny-Ante Editions
Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you by Janice Lee
96 pages – Penny-Ante/Amazon
Abigail Adams by Alex Chaves
168 pages – Penny-Ante/Amazon
Queen’s Ferry Press
My Brooklyn Writer Friend by Greg Gerke
134 pages – Queen’s Ferry Press/Amazon
Restless Books
Between Clay and Dust by Musharraf Ali Farooqi
192 pages – Restless Books/Amazon
Sarabande Books
Keeper of Limits: The Mrs. Cavendish Poems by Stephen Dunn
40 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
Semiotext(e)
The Well-Dressed Wound by Derek McCormack
72 pages – Semiotext(e)/Amazon
The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack’s play script “séance”: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka “King Faggot”). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS. —from the Semiotext(e) website
Soho Press
Scrapper by Matt Bell
320 pages – Soho/Amazon
The Song Cave
Honest James by Christian Schlegel
80 pages – Song Cave/SPD
Tin House Books
Dryland by Sara Jaffe
220 pages – Tin House/Amazon
Two Dollar Radio
The Glacier by Jeff Wood
162 pages – Two Dollar Radio/Amazon
The Glacier is a spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the masses lining up for an Event on the horizon, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse and a requiem for the passing of one world into another. –from the Two Dollar Radio website
Tyrant Books
Bad Sex by Clancy Martin
180 pages – Tyrant Books/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum by Callie Garnett
32 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum is an old rag bearing new news. Taking its title from Al Jolson’s Depression-era musical about a “happy hobo” occupying Central Park, this collection sends his tin-pan patter clattering into wholly novel regions of our current evening. –from the Ugly Duckling Presse website
Uniformbooks
The Regional Book by David Matless
64 pages – Uniformbooks/Amazon
Unshelfmarked: Reconceiving the artists’ book by Michael Hampton
176 pages – Uniformbooks/Amazon
Reading (Story of) O by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
208 pages – Uniformbooks/Amazon
Unnamed Press
The Revelator by Robert Kloss
256 pages – Unnamed/Amazon
Wave Books
Illocality by Joseph Massey
120 pages – Wave Books/SPD
One Morning– by Rebecca Wolff
176 pages – Wave Books/SPD
To Drink Boiled Snow by Caroline Knox
96 pages – Wave Books/SPD
Write Bloody Publishing
The Pocketknife Bible by Anis Mojgani
110 pages – Write Bloody/Amazon
Like much of Anis Mojgani’s work, The Pocketknife Bible asks the reader to align one-self with rediscovering wonder. For the first time, Mojgani has given us a collection which combines his poems with his illustrations, at times using them to infuse and inform one another. The poems and pictures of The Pocketknife Bible climb through the child-like heart of its author to bring stories from the well that are enhanced by the imagery. This book is a celebration of childhood and family, or rather the mythology of what that entails, exploring the intersection of how we may have once seen the world and how we remember how we saw it. This is an almost-children’s book for those who might no longer be young, but could use a map to find their way back to that world. –from the Write Bloody website
