This is the eighth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature, where we compile the past month’s small press new releases. Are you a press? Are you small? Don’t see yourself here, but would like to? Email your upcoming release info to jenny@entropymag.org. In the meantime: summer’s over! Go get a book, why don’tcha!
Black Lawrence Press
No Soap, Radio! by Bruce Cohen
Black Lawrence
The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers edited by Richard Thomas
Black Lawrence
Gog by Brandi George
Black Lawrence
Small Enterprise by Mary Biddinger
Black Lawrence
Boss Fight Books
Metal Gear Solid by Ashly and Anthony Burch
178 pages – Boss Fight
Before they co-created the hit web series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?, Ashly and Anthony Burch were just a brother and sister who shared a weird obsession with Solid Snake and his 3D debut, Metal Gear Solid. And why wouldn’t they? Hideo Kojima’s 1998 game featured groundbreaking stealth mechanics, a gruff and hunky leading man, a brilliantly claustrophobic setting, tons of cinematic cutscenes, shocking fourth wall breaks, and terrifying bosses. The only problem: The Burches grew up but their all-time favorite video game didn’t. After nearly two decades, Metal Gear Solid‘s once-innovative stealth mechanics seem outdated, the cutscenes have lost some of their action movie punch, and the game’s treatment of women is often out of touch. Witness a celebration/takedown of this landmark game with the combination of insight and hilarity that Ashly and Anthony have made their careers on. —from the Boss Fight website
Brooklyn Arts Press
Confidence by Seth Landman
136 pages – Brooklyn Arts/SPD
City Lights Publishers
Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky
200 pages – City Lights/Amazon
Civil Coping Mechanisms
Last Mass by Jamie Iredell
214 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms/Amazon
I am a Catholic. I was baptized Catholic as a baby, and Mom raised me as such. The priests baptized Miquel Josep Serra a Catholic, born 1713 in Petra, Mallorca. Dad converted, and became Catholic. Twenty years before Serra’s birth, the Spanish Inquisition held autos de fé in Palma, Mallorca’s capital, and Jews were burned at the stake. My brother and sister are Catholics. Four more Jews were burned in 1720, when Miquel was seven. Grandma and Grandpa were Catholics. For his Holy Orders, Miquel Josep adopted the name of Father Fray Junípero Serra, and later still he came to what we know today as California, state where I was born and raised a Catholic. In Last Mass Jamie Iredell navigates the complex history of colonial California, his own personal history as a Catholic growing up in that state, and the process of writing itself, with all its pitfalls and revelations. —from the Civil Coping Mechanisms website
Desolation of Avenues Untold by Brandon Hobson
306 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms / Amazon
Playdate by Mark Katzman
124 pages – Civil Coping Mechanisms / Amazon
Coffee House Press
Slab by Selah Saterstrom
186 pages – Coffee House/Amazon
On a slab that’s all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger—stripper, felon, best-selling author—tells us of her days dancing as Helen Keller, her grandfather’s suicide, a serial killer duo from the 18th century, and the best recipe for red velvet cake. And out of these floating anecdotes comes a portrait of a fallen biblical landscape of struggle and sin. –from the Coffee House website
Curbside Splendor
The Pulp vs. The Throne by Carrie Lorig
130 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon
Dzanc Books
The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe by Colin Fleming
184 pages – Dzanc/Amazon
Fitzcarraldo
Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard
350 pages – Fitzcarraldo
Gauss PDF
Servants of Dust by Gary Barwin
GPDF
Twentysix Gasoline Station Prices by Angela Genusa
GPDF
Graywolf Press
Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andreï Makine, translated Geoffrey Strachan
180 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
A Woman Loved by Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan
264 pages – Graywolf/Amazon
Catherine the Great’s life seems to have been made for the cinema—her rise to power, her reportedly countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades, the episodes of betrayal, revenge, and even murder—there’s no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray Catherine’s essential, emotional truth, her real life, beyond the rumors and facades. His first screenplay just barely makes it past the Soviet film board, and is assigned to a talented director, but the resulting film fails to avoid the usual clichés. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as he struggles to find a place for himself in the new order, Oleg agrees to work with an old friend on a TV series that becomes a quick success—as well as increasingly lurid, a far cry from his original vision. He continues to seek the real Catherine elsewhere… —from the Graywolf website
Inpatient Press
Troll by Dorothy Howard
24 pages – Inpatient Press
o n e by Matthew Johnston
28 pages – Inpatient Press
Kenning Editions
Ordinance 2: Minoritarian Enunciation and Global Product Culture by Julietta Cheung
Chapbook – Kenning Editions
Lazy Fascist
Where We Live and Die by Brian Keene
162 pages – Lazy Fascist/Amazon
The Art of Horrible People by John Skipp
176 pages – Lazy Fascist/Amazon
From Hollywood film studios to high-security psychiatric facilities, there is an art to being a horrible person. Splatterpunk legend John Skipp turns the mirror back on ourselves, showing us all the ways that make us the worst monsters of all. A decade in the making, The Art of Horrible People collects John Skipp’s most horrific, hilarious, and starkly honest short stories, raising horror fiction to gleefully deranged new heights. —from the Lazy Fascist website
Letter Machine
Melville House
Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality:On Care for Our Common Home by Pope Francis
192 pages – Melville House/Amazon
Milkweed Editions
The Silenced by James DeVita
448 pages – Milkweed/Amazon
New Directions
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated by Katrina Dodson
640 pages – New Directions/Amazon
Open Letter Books
Rock, Paper, Scissors By Naja Marie Aidt, translated by K.E. Semmel
387 pages – Open Letter/Amazon
OR Books
Cess: A Spokening by Gordon Lish
236 pages – OR Books/Amazon
A list. What could be more basic than a list? And a list by Lish is sure to intrigue. In this, Lish’s latest work, he delivers a characteristic exhibition of his peculiar deformities of candor, obsession, and wit, via two extended “notes” to the reader, including a pages-long list of essential but perplexing words. Amidst this stream of apparent incongruities, the alert reader will discover an accruing narrative involving the narrator’s late, beloved Aunt Adele—a medal-bedecked spy for the National Reconnaissance Office—and cryptography, love, poetry, and of course: the nature of language. —from the OR Books website
Publishing Genius
The Well-Dressed Bear Will (Never) Be Found by Jarod Roselló
210 pages – Publishing Genius/Amazon
Queen’s Ferry Press
On the Edges of Vision by Helen McClory
174 pages – Queen’s Ferry/Amazon
In On the Edges of Vision, unease sounds itself in the language of legend. Images call on memory, on the monstrous self. In Helen McClory’s daring debut collection, the skin prickles against sweeps of light or darkness, the fantastic or the frightful; deep water, dark woods, or scattered flesh in desert sand. Whether telling of a boy cyclops or a pretty dead girl, drowned sailors or the devil himself, each story draws the reader towards not bleakness but a tale half–told, a truth half–true: that the monster is human, and only wants to reach out and take you by the hand. —from the Queen’s Ferry website
Sarabande Books
Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal by Wendy S. Walters
176 pages – Sarabande/Amazon
In the manner of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Wendy S. Walters deftly explores the psyches of cities such as Chicago, Manhattan, Portsmouth, and Washington D.C. Her approach is varied, intimate, and inventive. In “Cleveland,” she interviews an African-American playwright who draws great reviews, but can’t muster an audience. An on-air telephone chat between a DJ and his listeners drives a discussion of race and nutrition in “Chicago Radio.” In “Manhattanville” the author, out for a walk with her biracial son, is mistaken for his nanny. There’s even a fable, imagining a black takeover of Norway. All of these pieces explore societal questions–how eras of immense growth can leave us unable to prosper from that growth, how places intended for safety become fraught with danger, and how race and gender bias threaten our communities. Walters’s haunting utterances are beautifully precise estimations of a place and its people. —from the Sarabande website
Semiotext(e)
Campus Sex, Campus Security by Jennifer Doyle
120 pages – Semiotext(e)/Amazon
Solar Luxuriance
Hymns by S
36 pages – Solar Luxuriance
Soho Press
Into the Valley by Ruth Galm
224 pages – Soho/Amazon
Into the Valley, Ruth Galm’s spare, poetic debut novel, opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. B. is caught between generations—unmarried at 30, she doesn’t understand the new counterculture youths, but never fit into her mother’s world either, though she liked some of its trappings, the dresses and kid gloves. B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls “the carsickness.” The only relief comes in handling the illicit checks and endless driving in the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, trying on what and whoever might make her feel better—an alcoholic professor, a hippie, a criminal admirer—B.’s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be. —from the Soho Press website
Sundress Publications
Ha Ha Ha Thump by Amorak Huey
100 pages – Sundress/Amazon
Tin House Books
The Scamp by Jennifer Pashley
416 pages – Tin House/Amazon
Ugly Duckling Presse
Intervenir/Intervene by Dolores Dorantes & Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, translated by Jen Hofer
200 pages – Ugly Duckling/SPD
Object Permanence by David B. Goldstein
32 pages – Ugly Duckling