Category Archives: Backlist
The Cry of the Sloth
A Novel by Sam Savage Illustrated by Michael Mikolowski The four-month odyssey of a literary lowlife. Set in middle America during the economic hard times of the Nixon era, this tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicles everything Andrew Whittaker—literary journal editor, negligent …
The Abyss of Human Illusion
“The writing here is alive—words dance emphatically like the lusty, jazz-spun youngsters who populate Sorrentino’s early fiction. Ultimately, there’s solace to be found in the book’s near-perfect sentences, even when the author is dwelling on the futility of writing sentences.” —Time Out New York
Ray of the Star
“Here is a pyrotechnical novel that, with the arrival of the bloody-lipped horrors, propels its protagonist, Harry, through a concatenation of immense, sensuous sentences, on a tour of our modern world that escalates to an unimaginable velocity, among a clutter of clauses that refuse ordinary subordination and so becomes a lens for the meticulous exploration of the sublimity of the banal. Like The Impossibly, The Exquisite, and Indiana, Indiana before it, Ray of the Star is pure, wonderful writing.” —Samuel R. Delany
Handling Destiny
Poems by Adrian Castro “Castro is a Whitman, not of America, but of all the Americas.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution Enchanting both the ear and the soul, this collection is the third in Adrian Castro’s series on the diasporic triangle of Africa, …
Catch Light
“The refined subtly of these poems contains an epic energy that shivers like atomic orbitals just beneath the surface and results in eventual flashbulb blow outs. . . . O’Brien depicts a world in which we’re all going blind to see; where we collect damaged data in order to overwhelm it, to reconstruct our vision.” —Jacket
Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century
“If you want to know what the ’60s really were about, you’ll find out between [these] covers.” —Kansas City Star
Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War
“In Sanders’ poetry we find … one of the clearest and most necessary bodies of work still being written today.” —Poetry Project Newsletter
Entrepôt
Poems by Mark McMorris Missives from the entrepôt—or port city—where civilization trades in art, love, and war. “McMorris writes masterfully, is a master, a classicist at heart, a Modernist after all . . . a striver after the main chance, …
Fugue State
“Brian Evenson is one of my favorite writers. The stories in this collection will thrill, unsettle, and captivate. Like lanterns in dark rooms, paper boats carried down on subterranean waters, they lead the reader into mysterious and perilous territory. Read at your own risk.” —Kelly Link
All Fall Down
“Mary Caponegro’s headlong tales chronicle our generation’s internal trajectories; she’s robust, crude, drop-dead funny, tender, and heartbreaking as she navigates the tragicomedy of our middle age. She goes straight to the bottom of sex, love, romance, and all their travesties. The way David Foster Wallace used and claimed and forever changed footnotes, Caponegro has branded parentheses. She charts the ‘oldly-wed game’ of the long married using ‘not a laugh but a cry-track.’ Playful, but never shirking, Caponegro’s stories are a deep balm.” —Mona Simpson
Portrait and Dream
“I’d like to thank Bill Berkson for: epitomizing objectivity & subjectivity; amusedly living in the cerulean blue, alizarin crimson mixed with titanium white, & burnt sienna world we’ve got; & writing for us.” —Bernadette Mayer
The Spoils
“[Mathys] is a bit like the mid-century poets of the New York School of poetry (which counts John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara among its members), only with the whimsy replaced by a menacing sense of claustrophobia. You find he can go from high culture to low in one stomach-churning swoop . . . . wonderfully, disturbingly, upsettingly real. Reading Mathys, one remembers that poetry isn’t a dalliance, but a way of sorting through life-or-death situations.” —Los Angeles Times
The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air
“This is an unabashed joyride of a novel, at turns hilarious and bittersweet. It’s a wholly original take on adolescence with a wild Jewish Lolita at its warm heart, a creature at once a thing of the spirit and the irresistible flesh. Pure exhilaration.” —Steve Stern
Coal Mountain Elementary
“Coal Mountain Elementary is an imaginative and shocking reminder of what it means, in the most human and poignant terms, to be a miner, whether in this country or in China, or for that matter anywhere in the industrial world. It is also a tribute to miners and working people everywhere. It manages, in photos and in words, to portray an entire culture. And it is a stunning educational tool.” —Howard Zinn
