LoginSPD aftermath & another small press round-up
According to Publishers Weekly, three months after Small Press Distribution's failure (previously), only about a quarter of affected presses have moved to new distributors, though the Poetry Foundation has given out $130,000 in aid of a $150,000 bridge fund for poetry presses, and 21 presses in New York State have received $500-1,000 grants from the NYSCA-CLMP Forward Fund.
Distributor Asterism Books, which signed 80 former SPD presses, will have a book sale open to the public July 27-28 in Seattle. * Here's a roundup of 2024 titles that caught my eye and I haven't yet mentioned: Annals and Indices by Gordon Lish (Bard Books, 26 June 2024): Like Picasso and the Beatles, Gordon Lish sees art as always striving for re-creation—every motion a bold reach beyond what was. At the age of ninety, Lish is breaking into new territory again. Annals and Indices is a work of fiction that gives amplitude to stages and moods in prose so exhilarating and daring it belies both the age of its author and the limitations of the American novel. The big themes here are life and death, need, love and friction—and our Everyman agon: how to create one's being through language, the medium with which the self conceives. Redemption? Only in the form of friends and memory. (Asterism) becoming sam by Samodh Porawagamage (Burnside Review Press, 11 Jun 2024): Porawagamage's first book was selected by Jaswinder Bolina as the winner of the 2022 Burnside Review Press Book Award. He writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, and colonial and imperial atrocities. (Asterism) The Berlin Wall by David Leo Rice (Whiskey Tit, 14 May 2024): Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria, David Leo Rice's new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism, liberalism, and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Border Abolition Now eds. Sara Riva, Simon Campbell, Brian Whitener and Kathryn Medien (Pluto Press, July 2024): Introduction to the theory and praxis of Border Abolition, drawing on the perspectives of migrants and those resisting in detention, camps and asylum regimes. (Amazon; Bookshop) A Bouquet Brought Back from Space by Kevin Spenst (Anvil Press, Apr 2024): This fourth book of poetry by Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. (Amazon; Asterism) A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories by Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross & Ali Smith (Catapult Books, 4 June 2024): What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? (Amazon; Bookshop) Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable by Sarah Gerard (Zando, 9 July 2024): Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as "nuanced and subtly intimate" (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State. (Amazon; Bookshop) Carrion by Wes Jamison (Red Hen Press, 4 Jun 2024): Just as Odin's ravens, named Huginn and Muninn (translated to Thought and Memory), would whisper everything he couldn't see, so too do these and other mythical ravens—of Athena, the Biblical Eve and Noah, Coronis, and others—function in Jamison's essay collection: they are tools to interpret and make meaning of their world, rent as it is between the rural and urban, the romantic and abusive, where language is both surfeit and dearth. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 9 July 2024): A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind. (Amazon; Bookshop) Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (Tin House, 2 July 2024): Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God. (Amazon; Bookshop) Creve Coeur by Robert Fitterman (Winter Editions, Sept 2024): Fitterman's most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams's postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape. (publisher only) Dark Property by Brian Evenson (Black Square Editions, June 2024): She reposed herself alone at some distance from the roadway, the rucksack shucked from her back. Removing the stones from her pockets, she stacked them beside the rucksack. She wrapped her arms around her knees, stared out, gauged the decline of the light. Below the sun the lower sky was split in twain by a bleared thread of smoke, a false horizon. She watched the split-line bleed, spread, spartle. (Amazon; Asterism) even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper (Airlie Press, Sept 2024): A poetry collection bound by pulse and impulse, bent on giving body to the amorphic, and buoyed by the insistent beauty of a damaged planet. (Asterism; read the title poem here) Farm: Lot 23 by Tonya Lailey (Gaspereau Press, May 2024): Poems that explore the complex relationship we have with land, particularly as it relates to agriculture, in one of Gaspereau's beautiful books. (Amazon) Fog & Car by Eugene Lim (Coffee House, 16 July 2024): Long out of print, Eugene Lim's wry and haunting debut novel returns to shelves with a new introduction from Renee Gladman and a fresh, reversible cover. (Amazon; Bookshop) Gore-Geous: Personal Essays on Beauty and Horror by Alexandra West (Astrophil Press, 1 May 2024): Film criticism on Cat People (1942), The Witches (1990), Carrie (1976), Black Swan (2010), Audition (1999), Under the Skin (2013), American Psycho (2000) and Ready or Not (2019) among others. (Asterism) How to Disappear and Why by Kyle Minor (Sarabande, 27 Aug 2024): From acclaimed fiction writer Kyle Minor emerges a collection of essays all about disappearing. (Amazon; Bookshop) Just Like by Lee Sumyeong, trans. Colin Leemarshall (Black Ocean, 7 May 2024): Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left by Boris Kagarlitsky, trans. Renfrey Clarke (Pluto Press, May 2024): An intellectual tour-de-force by one of Russia's most prominent dissidents. (Amazon; Bookshop) Love Sick Century by Elly Bookman (42 Miles/Wolfson, 2024): The sinister shadow of the late capitalist war machine falls on everything in Bookman's debut poetry collection. (publisher only) Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It ed. Paul Rogers (Pluto Press, Aug 2024): Peace activists uncover the truth of the most destructive business in the world. (Amazon; Bookshop) Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Tin House, 6 Aug 2024): From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us. (Amazon; Bookshop) Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life by Sofia Samatar (Soft Skull, 13 Aug 2024): Wish I had come across this before my last roundup! Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing. (Amazon; Bookshop) Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistence by Victoria Blanco (Coach House Press, 11 June 2024): The Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, make up one of the largest Indigenous tribes of North America. Based on more than a decade of oral history and participatory field work, Out of the Sierra paints a vivid and vital portrait of Rarámuri displacement. When drought leaves the Gutiérrez family with nothing to eat, they are faced with the choice many Rarámuris must make: remain and hope for rain and aid, or leave their sacred homeland behind. Luis, Martina, and their children choose to journey from their home in the Sierra Madre mountains toward a new and uncertain future in a government-funded Indigenous settlement. (Amazon; Bookshop) Planes Flying Over a Monster: Essays by Daniel Saldaña París, trans. Christina Macsweeney & Philip K. Zimmerman (Catapult, 20 Aug 2024): From one of Mexico's most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves. (Amazon; Bookshop) Rocks: What Are They Doing by Christine Sajecki and Michael Make (Publishing Genius,): This is Publishing Genius's first children's book! It's a bright, full color, hardcover book, chock full of paintings of rocks and affectionate jokes. It's sweet for kids and adults too, a welcoming call to pay attention to even the simplest things that are all around, because these things are for you. And the more you look at the paintings of rocks, the deeper and richer they become. (Asterism) Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (Grove Atlantic, 16 July 2024): An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, trans. Frank Wynne (Grove Atlantic, 16 July 2024): From the author of Animalia, winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Best Translated Book Award, a blazing new novel exploring nature, family, and violence, set on a hostile and glorious mountainside haunted by transgressions of the past. (Amazon; Bookshop) Special Topics in Being a Parent: A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I've Learned About Parenting, Mostly the Hard Way by S. Bear Bergman, ill. Saul Freedman-Lawson (Arsenal Pulp, 30 July 2024): An illustrated guide of practical parenting advice informed by queer experiences for anyone doing the work of parenting (Amazon; Bookshop) The Tenants by Pat Dobie (Anvil, 15 July 2024): 45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest Winner. Scott is single-minded in his goal of buying a house, leading to too-long work hours and an oppressive budgeting system. Dave hides artisanal beard products in the trunk of his car and tries to prioritize his comfort in the rental he's happily lived in for years. For Maeve, their new "neighbour" in the tweed suit, her goals are much more simple: safety, shelter, and attempting to live peacefully with the local raccoons. For all the things these folks lack — communication, shared goals, a home address — their differing motivations form an uneasy picture of the reality of living in a city that is inhospitable to many of its citizens. Stark, observational, darkly comic, and deeply human, The Tenants is a view inside the homes of some of Vancouver's most vulnerable inhabitants as their lives intersect and diverge atop its shifting soil. (Amazon.ca; Asterism) The Thing I Was Trying to Tell You by Joseph Young (Publishing Genius Press, 25 Jun 2024): A collection of 62 very short pieces, mostly fiction, some found prose, and an unreasonably short play. The pieces range from the character driven, to the abstract and conceptual, the absurd, the metaphysical, the corporeal. Language adjusts-as it will: lean and clean, poetic or memetic. You wonder, who is the character? A pill bug, a sweet brain-damaged boy, The Misfit of O'Connor. You say, how do we know what we know? How do we tell it to each other? This is unclear. The world is large and lovely, so sweetly broken. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Ultratheatre Volume 1 by Logan Berry (11:11, 6 Jun 2024): Four plays: The Sarcoma Cycle, comprised of Nanoblade 1998 (set in the Cook County Hospital during a technological overhaul in medical practice), Spring Break 2020 (a multimedia grand guignol set during the Covid lockdowns), and The Mourning Light 2050 (set in River City, Chicago, in the distant future, about the family of a tech CEO who's invented program to communicate with the dead in Virtual Reality), plus Nasim Bleeds Green (a workout opera in Hell). (Asterism; Bookshop) The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones (Beacon, 20 Aug 2024): Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the Post WWII South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal. (Amazon; Bookshop) The World is Neither Stacked For You nor Against You: Selected Stories by Corey Mesler (Livingston Press, 15 July 2024): A book of disparate parts, a sort of Frankenstein monster of a collection. And indeed, there is a monster story, as well as a ghost story, an angel story, a mystical religious story, and a mystical secular story. Some of the work is experimental, some of it is outlandish, and some of it is as simple and comforting as a home-baked pie. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Where We Stand by Djamila Ribeiro, trans. Padma Viswanathan (Yale UP, 27 Aug 2024): The instant bestseller from Djamila Ribeiro that sparked a major Black feminist movement in Brazil. Foreword by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Amazon; Bookshop) You Are the Snake: Stories by Juliet Escoria (Soft Skull Press, 18 Jun 2024): From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg. (Amazon; Bookshop) Yr Dead by Sam Sax (McSweeney's, 6 Aug 2024): In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. (Amazon; Bookshop) * Where I say "publisher only" I couldn't find them on Amazon, Asterism or Bookshop, so these are likely presses that haven't found distribution yet; note that Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links that benefit MetaFilter and Asterism links are not. Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads) and 7 (writing craft books).
Distributor Asterism Books, which signed 80 former SPD presses, will have a book sale open to the public July 27-28 in Seattle. * Here's a roundup of 2024 titles that caught my eye and I haven't yet mentioned: Annals and Indices by Gordon Lish (Bard Books, 26 June 2024): Like Picasso and the Beatles, Gordon Lish sees art as always striving for re-creation—every motion a bold reach beyond what was. At the age of ninety, Lish is breaking into new territory again. Annals and Indices is a work of fiction that gives amplitude to stages and moods in prose so exhilarating and daring it belies both the age of its author and the limitations of the American novel. The big themes here are life and death, need, love and friction—and our Everyman agon: how to create one's being through language, the medium with which the self conceives. Redemption? Only in the form of friends and memory. (Asterism) becoming sam by Samodh Porawagamage (Burnside Review Press, 11 Jun 2024): Porawagamage's first book was selected by Jaswinder Bolina as the winner of the 2022 Burnside Review Press Book Award. He writes about the 2004 tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty and underdevelopment, and colonial and imperial atrocities. (Asterism) The Berlin Wall by David Leo Rice (Whiskey Tit, 14 May 2024): Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria, David Leo Rice's new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism, liberalism, and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Border Abolition Now eds. Sara Riva, Simon Campbell, Brian Whitener and Kathryn Medien (Pluto Press, July 2024): Introduction to the theory and praxis of Border Abolition, drawing on the perspectives of migrants and those resisting in detention, camps and asylum regimes. (Amazon; Bookshop) A Bouquet Brought Back from Space by Kevin Spenst (Anvil Press, Apr 2024): This fourth book of poetry by Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. (Amazon; Asterism) A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories by Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross & Ali Smith (Catapult Books, 4 June 2024): What happens when Kafka's idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? (Amazon; Bookshop) Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable by Sarah Gerard (Zando, 9 July 2024): Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as "nuanced and subtly intimate" (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State. (Amazon; Bookshop) Carrion by Wes Jamison (Red Hen Press, 4 Jun 2024): Just as Odin's ravens, named Huginn and Muninn (translated to Thought and Memory), would whisper everything he couldn't see, so too do these and other mythical ravens—of Athena, the Biblical Eve and Noah, Coronis, and others—function in Jamison's essay collection: they are tools to interpret and make meaning of their world, rent as it is between the rural and urban, the romantic and abusive, where language is both surfeit and dearth. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 9 July 2024): A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind. (Amazon; Bookshop) Concerning the Future of Souls by Joy Williams (Tin House, 2 July 2024): Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God. (Amazon; Bookshop) Creve Coeur by Robert Fitterman (Winter Editions, Sept 2024): Fitterman's most ambitious book transposes William Carlos Williams's postwar long poem Paterson onto the segregated suburbs of late twentieth-century St. Louis to track the collapse of the American urban landscape. (publisher only) Dark Property by Brian Evenson (Black Square Editions, June 2024): She reposed herself alone at some distance from the roadway, the rucksack shucked from her back. Removing the stones from her pockets, she stacked them beside the rucksack. She wrapped her arms around her knees, stared out, gauged the decline of the light. Below the sun the lower sky was split in twain by a bleared thread of smoke, a false horizon. She watched the split-line bleed, spread, spartle. (Amazon; Asterism) even my dreams are over the constant state of anxiety by Irene Cooper (Airlie Press, Sept 2024): A poetry collection bound by pulse and impulse, bent on giving body to the amorphic, and buoyed by the insistent beauty of a damaged planet. (Asterism; read the title poem here) Farm: Lot 23 by Tonya Lailey (Gaspereau Press, May 2024): Poems that explore the complex relationship we have with land, particularly as it relates to agriculture, in one of Gaspereau's beautiful books. (Amazon) Fog & Car by Eugene Lim (Coffee House, 16 July 2024): Long out of print, Eugene Lim's wry and haunting debut novel returns to shelves with a new introduction from Renee Gladman and a fresh, reversible cover. (Amazon; Bookshop) Gore-Geous: Personal Essays on Beauty and Horror by Alexandra West (Astrophil Press, 1 May 2024): Film criticism on Cat People (1942), The Witches (1990), Carrie (1976), Black Swan (2010), Audition (1999), Under the Skin (2013), American Psycho (2000) and Ready or Not (2019) among others. (Asterism) How to Disappear and Why by Kyle Minor (Sarabande, 27 Aug 2024): From acclaimed fiction writer Kyle Minor emerges a collection of essays all about disappearing. (Amazon; Bookshop) Just Like by Lee Sumyeong, trans. Colin Leemarshall (Black Ocean, 7 May 2024): Poems that break with traditional syntax and disrupt our perceptions of how language works in this first collection in English of poems by one of South Korea's most established contemporary poets and critics. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left by Boris Kagarlitsky, trans. Renfrey Clarke (Pluto Press, May 2024): An intellectual tour-de-force by one of Russia's most prominent dissidents. (Amazon; Bookshop) Love Sick Century by Elly Bookman (42 Miles/Wolfson, 2024): The sinister shadow of the late capitalist war machine falls on everything in Bookman's debut poetry collection. (publisher only) Monstrous Anger of the Guns: How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It ed. Paul Rogers (Pluto Press, Aug 2024): Peace activists uncover the truth of the most destructive business in the world. (Amazon; Bookshop) Mystery Lights by Lena Valencia (Tin House, 6 Aug 2024): From the all-too-real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister transformed by cave-dwelling creatures, Mystery Lights grapples with terrors both familiar and fantastic, introducing an electrifying new voice in contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us. (Amazon; Bookshop) Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life by Sofia Samatar (Soft Skull, 13 Aug 2024): Wish I had come across this before my last roundup! Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar's attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing. (Amazon; Bookshop) Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistence by Victoria Blanco (Coach House Press, 11 June 2024): The Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, make up one of the largest Indigenous tribes of North America. Based on more than a decade of oral history and participatory field work, Out of the Sierra paints a vivid and vital portrait of Rarámuri displacement. When drought leaves the Gutiérrez family with nothing to eat, they are faced with the choice many Rarámuris must make: remain and hope for rain and aid, or leave their sacred homeland behind. Luis, Martina, and their children choose to journey from their home in the Sierra Madre mountains toward a new and uncertain future in a government-funded Indigenous settlement. (Amazon; Bookshop) Planes Flying Over a Monster: Essays by Daniel Saldaña París, trans. Christina Macsweeney & Philip K. Zimmerman (Catapult, 20 Aug 2024): From one of Mexico's most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves. (Amazon; Bookshop) Rocks: What Are They Doing by Christine Sajecki and Michael Make (Publishing Genius,): This is Publishing Genius's first children's book! It's a bright, full color, hardcover book, chock full of paintings of rocks and affectionate jokes. It's sweet for kids and adults too, a welcoming call to pay attention to even the simplest things that are all around, because these things are for you. And the more you look at the paintings of rocks, the deeper and richer they become. (Asterism) Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (Grove Atlantic, 16 July 2024): An exhilarating and expansive new novel about fathers and sons, faith and friendship from National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Costa First Novel Award winning author Caleb Azumah Nelson. (Amazon; Bookshop) The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, trans. Frank Wynne (Grove Atlantic, 16 July 2024): From the author of Animalia, winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Best Translated Book Award, a blazing new novel exploring nature, family, and violence, set on a hostile and glorious mountainside haunted by transgressions of the past. (Amazon; Bookshop) Special Topics in Being a Parent: A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I've Learned About Parenting, Mostly the Hard Way by S. Bear Bergman, ill. Saul Freedman-Lawson (Arsenal Pulp, 30 July 2024): An illustrated guide of practical parenting advice informed by queer experiences for anyone doing the work of parenting (Amazon; Bookshop) The Tenants by Pat Dobie (Anvil, 15 July 2024): 45th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest Winner. Scott is single-minded in his goal of buying a house, leading to too-long work hours and an oppressive budgeting system. Dave hides artisanal beard products in the trunk of his car and tries to prioritize his comfort in the rental he's happily lived in for years. For Maeve, their new "neighbour" in the tweed suit, her goals are much more simple: safety, shelter, and attempting to live peacefully with the local raccoons. For all the things these folks lack — communication, shared goals, a home address — their differing motivations form an uneasy picture of the reality of living in a city that is inhospitable to many of its citizens. Stark, observational, darkly comic, and deeply human, The Tenants is a view inside the homes of some of Vancouver's most vulnerable inhabitants as their lives intersect and diverge atop its shifting soil. (Amazon.ca; Asterism) The Thing I Was Trying to Tell You by Joseph Young (Publishing Genius Press, 25 Jun 2024): A collection of 62 very short pieces, mostly fiction, some found prose, and an unreasonably short play. The pieces range from the character driven, to the abstract and conceptual, the absurd, the metaphysical, the corporeal. Language adjusts-as it will: lean and clean, poetic or memetic. You wonder, who is the character? A pill bug, a sweet brain-damaged boy, The Misfit of O'Connor. You say, how do we know what we know? How do we tell it to each other? This is unclear. The world is large and lovely, so sweetly broken. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Ultratheatre Volume 1 by Logan Berry (11:11, 6 Jun 2024): Four plays: The Sarcoma Cycle, comprised of Nanoblade 1998 (set in the Cook County Hospital during a technological overhaul in medical practice), Spring Break 2020 (a multimedia grand guignol set during the Covid lockdowns), and The Mourning Light 2050 (set in River City, Chicago, in the distant future, about the family of a tech CEO who's invented program to communicate with the dead in Virtual Reality), plus Nasim Bleeds Green (a workout opera in Hell). (Asterism; Bookshop) The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones (Beacon, 20 Aug 2024): Marking a dramatic new direction for Jones, a riveting tale set in the Post WWII South, narrated by a Black soldier who returns to Jim Crow and searches for a mythical ideal. (Amazon; Bookshop) The World is Neither Stacked For You nor Against You: Selected Stories by Corey Mesler (Livingston Press, 15 July 2024): A book of disparate parts, a sort of Frankenstein monster of a collection. And indeed, there is a monster story, as well as a ghost story, an angel story, a mystical religious story, and a mystical secular story. Some of the work is experimental, some of it is outlandish, and some of it is as simple and comforting as a home-baked pie. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop) Where We Stand by Djamila Ribeiro, trans. Padma Viswanathan (Yale UP, 27 Aug 2024): The instant bestseller from Djamila Ribeiro that sparked a major Black feminist movement in Brazil. Foreword by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Amazon; Bookshop) You Are the Snake: Stories by Juliet Escoria (Soft Skull Press, 18 Jun 2024): From the celebrated author of Juliet the Maniac comes a collection of previously unpublished stories concerned with girlhood, family, and urge, reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Laura van den Berg. (Amazon; Bookshop) Yr Dead by Sam Sax (McSweeney's, 6 Aug 2024): In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezra's ever loved, every place they've felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. (Amazon; Bookshop) * Where I say "publisher only" I couldn't find them on Amazon, Asterism or Bookshop, so these are likely presses that haven't found distribution yet; note that Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links that benefit MetaFilter and Asterism links are not. Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads) and 7 (writing craft books).
