Category Archives: Nonfiction
House Blend
Be the first to have hot-off-the-press titles from Coffee House Press. With our subscription series you don’t need to look for new books–we’ll ship them right to your door, or to the recipient of your gift, as soon as they’re …
Half in Shade
“Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at the same time insistently complex. Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of see- ing, and finally for me, a beautifully sus- tained meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book’s potent, unsentimental emotive power gathers.” —Stuart Dybek
Dear Sandy, Hello
“This volume vividly preserves young love through Ted’s letters to Sandy while she was institutionalized—packed with rage, frustration, and thoughts about writing . . . ‘It’s time for less warm tears and more cold fury,’ writes Ted, transporting the reader to a time when a passionate and impulsive young woman could be committed for behavior contrary to social norms. Even those unfamiliar with Ted’s poetry will be fascinated by the drama inherent in this collection. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Beats at Naropa
“At Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, there has long been an illuminating, dynamic, ongoing exchange of ideas about the history and legacy of the Beat Generation—an exchange fortunately that has been carefully archived and preserved. This valuable anthology does not further embalm the ‘legend’ of the Beats. Instead it allows its readers to hear authentic voices—Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Diane di Prima, Philip Whalen, etc.—as well as introducing the thoughtful and responsible work of leading Beat scholars.” —Joyce Johnson
The Latehomecomer
“This is the best account of the Hmong experience I’ve ever read—powerful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.”—Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Minnesota State Fair
“A joyful book for us fair lovers—it brings to mind the joys of the fair itself and those Twelve Thrilling Days and Fun-Filled Nights.” —Garrison Keillor
From Baghdad to Brooklyn
A stirring portrait of personal and artistic awakening in midcentury New York’s Arabic-speaking Jewish community.
Crossing Three Wildernesses
Death by execution, death by disease, and death by starvation are the three wildernesses Cambodians were forced to traverse during the Khmer Rouge regime. In a harrowing but ultimately triumphant affirmation of the human spirit, celebrated Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur narrates his incredible life story, testifies to the horrors of genocide, and shares his fervent prayers for peace and freedom through the process of democracy.
Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard
“Joe Brainard was an innovative artist who gradually stopped working altogether, a stutterer who gave masterful readings, someone insecure about his lack of education who wrote I Remember, a book of lasting importance. His lifelong friend, the poet Ron Padgett, has given us a limpid memoir of Brainard that captures his saintly gentleness, overwhelming generosity and deep originality. This is a precious portrait of one of the key figures of the New York art scene during its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s.” —Edmund White
Distance and Direction
“These lovely pieces flow like reveries (as, indeed, quite a few of them are) and reveal in virtually every case Kitchen’s capacious heart. Like thoughts, the essays do not always end where they began and often establish surprising connections and uncover buried treasure. . . . ‘Some books are better than others,’ she declares. This is one of the former.” —Kirkus Reviews
Vow to Poetry
A stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, essays on poetics, Buddhism, Naropa, politics, and more, this book reveals a life possessed by the muse. You’ve seen the “safe” versions, now listen to some straight talk from an inveterate hipster in this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive “how-to” book about writing: “I’ve always been on the track of a wizened hag’s voice, the tough tongue of the crone free of vanity and conditioning. She’s terrifying, liberating at the same instant. She’s exhausted her hope and fear.”
My Own Alphabet
“If more writers were writing like Bobbie Louise Hawkins—economically and truly about the only human things that interest us in prose: the past, the family, love, hate, duty, forgiveness—then maybe a few more thousand Americans would be reading narrative fiction and nourishing themselves on the oldest of all safe and enduring pleasures: new and fun and consolation.” —Reynolds Price
Comrade Past & Mister Present
“This perpetual outsider offers ample evidence that even as his life grows more settled, he continues to push at his own outer limits…. [Codrescu] shifts effortlessly from comic surrealist to naturalist, philosopher to saint to madman, but he is always the seeker after transcendence, in thrall to the unknown” —The New York Times Book Review
