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NewPages Blog :: New Books

Discover new and forthcoming books from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Book Stand.

New Book :: The Best American Newspaper Narratives

The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 10, Edited by Gayle Reaves, University of North Texas Press book cover image

The Best American Newspaper Narratives, Volume 10
Edited by Gayle Reaves
University of North Texas Press, September 2023

This anthology collects the ten winners of the 2022 Best American Newspaper Narrative Writing Contest at UNT’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. First place winner: Jason Fagone, “The Jessica Simulation: Love and Loss in the Age of A.I.,” about one man’s attempt to still communicate with his dead fiancée (San Francisco Chronicle). Second place: Jenna Russell, Penelope Overton, and David Abel, “The Lobster Trap” (The Boston Globe and Portland Press Herald). Third place: Jada Yuan, “Discovering Dr. Wu” (The Washington Post). Runners-up include works by Lane DeGregory, Christopher Goffard, Evan Allen, Mark Johnson, Annie Gowen, Peter Jamison, and Douglas Perry.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The JAB Anthology

The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman book cover image

The JAB Anthology edited by Johanna Drucker & Brad Freeman
University of Iowa Press, October 2023

The Journal of Artists’ Books: Selections from the Journal of Artists’ Books, 1994–2020 contains some of the best critical writing on artists’ books produced in the last quarter of a century. Driven by the editorial vision of artist Brad Freeman, JAB began as a provocative pamphlet and expanded to become a significant journal documenting artists’ books from multiple perspectives. The JAB Anthology contains contributions by many renowned figures in the field including Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Janet Zweig, Monica Carroll, Adam Dickerson, Alisa Scudamore, Mary Jo Pauly, April Sheridan, Doro Boehme, Gerrit Jan de Rook, Océane Delleaux, Brandon Graham, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Ward Tietz, Paulo Silveira, Philip Cabau, Leszek Brogowski, Lyn Ashby, Tim Mosely, Debra Parr, Pedro Moura, Levi Sherman, Catarina Figueiredo Cardoso, Isabel Baraona, and the editors.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Interior Landscape

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg book cover image

Interior Landscape by Mirta Rosenberg
Translated by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Mirta Rosenberg (1951-2019) is a key poet of the ’80s generation in Argentina. In Interior Landscape, Rosenberg explores questions of life and death, of changes experienced in one’s body through time and the resulting changes in perspective. These poems contemplate the dislocation of the self, posing questions about the relationship between subjectivity, perception, the body, and memory. Rosenberg’s voice is at once autobiographical and critical, displaying the interior landscapes of its experience as well as the complex ways that language forms a fundamental part of that experience. Originally published in Spanish in Argentina in 2012, Interior Landscape is the first book-length translation of Rosenberg’s poetry to be published in English.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Tinted Trails

cover of literary magazine Tint Journal's anthology Tinted Trails: Exploring Writers in English as a Second Language

Tinted Trails: Exploring Writings in English as a Second Language edited by Lisa Schantl, Filippo Bagnasco, Andrea Farber, and Chiara Meitz
Tint Journal, November 2023

Literary magazine Tint Journal celebrates its five-year anniversary with the release of Tinted Trails, the first ever printed anthology entirely dedicated to those who write in English as a second language (ESL). This collection offers both authors and readers the chance to meet via the medium of the English language, in a whirl of perspectives, sensibilities, and idiolects.

The book showcases fiction, nonfiction, and poetry previously published online on Tint Journal and a selection of so far unpublished texts from well-established translingual voices. The breadth and the possibilities of the English language are unlocked by the variety of cultural, geographical, and personal experiences of these writers, each adding a crucial contribution to the present and future development of multilingual literature. Topical introductions by Marjorie Agosín and Juhea Kim add weight and context to the collection, while the themed sections that bring together the various texts—Belonging, (lm)Migration, Upheaval, Identities—guide the reader through the peculiarities of this fundamental collection of ESL writings. A further layer is created through the artworks curated by Vanesa Erjavec and her own text illustrations.

With its origin in such a rich and diverse literary and cultural environment, Tinted Trails proudly joins the ever-growing landscape of global literature in English.

The anthology will be presented at a festival of the same name this November in Graz, Austria, and beyond where participants can experience the variety of ESL literature with authors from all over the globe, try translingual writing themselves at a workshop, and get involved in discussions about literature, art, and life in-between it all.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Shining

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky book cover image

The Shining by Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books, October 2023

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Lasky guides readers through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s novel or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Books October 2023

drawing of a bear reading a book while sitting on a stack of books

Welcome to the end of October! Hard to believe it is here already, isn’t it? With the ending of October comes our monthly breakdown of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received during the month. You can view the full list here.

If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

Still haven’t gone through the complete list from September yet? No worries. You can access the archive online here.

New Book :: The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll book cover image

The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty by Shiloh Carroll
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Readers love to sink into Gaiman’s medieval worlds—but what makes them “medieval”? Shiloh Carroll offers an introduction to the idea of medievalism, how the literature and culture of the Middle Ages have been reinterpreted and repurposed over the centuries, and how the layers of interpretation have impacted Gaiman’s own use of medieval material. She examines influences from Norse mythology and Beowulf to medieval romances and fairy tales in order to expand readers’ understanding and appreciation of Gaiman’s work, as well as the rest of the medievalist films, TV shows, and books that are so popular today.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Read Me

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard book cover image

Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard
Ugly Duckling Presse, September 2023

Holly Melgard’s Read Me gathers the tools necessary to make sense of contemporary problems so ubiquitous they seem too big to name. Spanning a multiplicity of genres, media, and tonal registers, this book surveys Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2023, including sound poems, essays on poetics, and books that exploit print on demand to, for example, counterfeit money. In often wildly comic turns of thought, Melgard’s work cleaves personal agency from automated defaults by mapping trauma and technocracy from the inside out. From critical talks to fictional monologues, the poet translates into language the unremarkable torments of neoliberalization in the digital age.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Book of Merlin

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett book cover image

The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett
Livingston Press, October 2023

Larry Beckett’s The Book of Merlin is the first translation of Merlin of the Wild’s complete works. How can the writings of a 6th-century poet/prophet speak to us moderns? Page after page of battles and death answer that most succinctly. This is not the Merlin with a wand that you grew up with. Translator Larry Beckett’s poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. His work Beat Poetry is a story of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. Beckett is currently working on a translation of Verlaine’s poetry.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Nadia

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans book cover image

Nadia: A Novel by Christine Evans
University of Iowa Press, September 2023

Nadia by Christine Evans moves between the competing perspectives of two survivors of the 1990s Balkan Wars who have escaped to London, only to discover that the war has followed them there. Nadia is a young refugee who just wants to forget the past—until Iggy starts temping at her London office. Afraid he may be a sniper from the war she fled, Nadia starts seeing threats everywhere, alongside unsettling visions of her lost girlfriend, Sanja. As her volatile connection with Iggy unravels, Nadia is forced to face the ethically shaky choices she made to escape the war, her survivor guilt, and her disavowed queer sexuality.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Fierce Elegy

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi book cover image

Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi
Wesleyan University Press, August 2023

Peter Gizzi has said that “the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world.” For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery, and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, “a holding open.” In Gizzi’s voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also—as it has been for centuries—a work of love.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Bjarki, Not Bjarki

Bjarki Not Bjarki by Matthew J. C. Clark book cover image

Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences by Matthew J. C. Clark
University of Iowa Press, January 2024

In Bjarki, Not Bjarki, Clark wants nothing less than to understand everything, to make the world a better place, for you and him to love each other, and to be okay. He desires all of this sincerely, desperately even, and at the same time, he proceeds with a light heart, playfully, with humor and awe. As Clark reports on the people and processes that transform the forest into your floor, he also ruminates on gift cards, crab rangoon, and Jean Claude Van Damme. He considers North American colonization, masculinity, the definition of disgusting, his own uncertain certainty. When the boards beneath our feet are so unstable, always expanding and cupping and contracting, how can we make sense of the world? What does it mean to know another person and to connect with them, especially in an increasingly polarized America?

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Furniture Music

Furniture Music by Gail Scott book cover image

Furniture Music by Gail Scott
Wave Books, October 2023

In Furniture Music, Montreal luminary Gail Scott chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism, and what it means to write now. Scott’s project is polyvocal, also resonating with the voices of a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Book

The Book by Mary Ruefle book cover image

The Book by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books, September 2023

Following the acclaimed Dunce, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes Mary Ruefle’s latest prose publication The Book. With the same curiosity found in Madness, Rack, and Honey and My Private Property, Ruefle’s prose here feels both omniscient and especially intimate. “It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there,” she writes. “Will I continue to read about all that is dusty?” In the spirit of friendship, Ruefle generously invites us to query ourselves as readers and thinkers in a world that will eventually endure without us.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: mahogany

mahogany by Erica Lewis book cover image

mahogany by Erica Lewis
Wesleyan University Press, September 2023

mahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books, it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross’ solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time, it models the daily search for joy and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Sponsored :: New Book :: If It Comes to That

cover of If It Comes to That, Poems by Marc Frazier

If It Comes to That, Poems by Marc Frazier

Kelsay Books, September 2023

If It Comes to That is a collection that thoughtfully considers the human condition. The poet shares deep reflections on the creative spirit, on the archetypes that encapsulate our behaviors, and on our relationship with the natural world. One can’t help but see the connections that emerge while reading these poems—there are big questions of how we’re connected to the people who inspire us and the ways in which we’re tied to the past. However, these poems are also filled with the people who we touch simply and softly, hand to hand, finding a way through uncertain times.
—Aaron Lelito, Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Wild Roof Journal

New Book :: No Use Pretending

No Use Pretending by Thomas A. Dodson book cover image

No Use Pretending: Stories by Thomas A. Dodson
Iowa Short Fiction Award
University of Iowa Press, October 2023

The stories in No Use Pretending by Thomas A. Dodson encompass diverse genres, from ecologically informed realism to a Kafkaesque fairy tale, from fabulist “weird fiction” to an episode from The Odyssey that becomes a meditation on what distinguishes human beings from animals. These stories invite the reader to reconsider moral and ideological certainties, to take a fresh look at such issues as fracking and drone warfare. In one story, a petroleum engineer discovers that one of his wastewater wells may be causing earthquakes, and in another, the pilot of an Air Force drone seeks to reconcile his conflicting roles as protector and executioner, husband and soldier. The scientist and the serviceman are both presented with problems that have no easy or obvious solutions, situations that force them to confront the messy, compromising complexity of being human.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: The Adorable Knife

The Adorable Knife by Jessica Prudy book cover image

The Adorable Knife: Poems by Jessica Purdy
Grey Book Press, August 2023

The Adorable Knife by Jessica Purdy is an intriguing poetry chapbook that explores the miniature crime scene creations of artist Frances Glessner Lee. In Purdy’s own words, “the poems are named after each ‘Nutshell,’ which are meticulously crafted crime scene dioramas meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. It is my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these, as well as to imagine possible ‘solutions’ by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. In some of the poems, the speaker is the victim, and in some, the speaker could be the perpetrator. In still others, it is the poet’s voice speaking.” The chapbook, at the onset, quotes Frances Glessner Lee, “The investigator must bear in mind that he has a twofold responsibility—to clear the innocent as well as to expose the guilty. He is seeking only the facts—the Truth in a Nutshell.” (Contributed by Karen Poppy)

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Sponsored :: New Book :: An Abundance of Caution

cover of An Abundance of Caution, a book by George Witte

An Abundance of Caution, Poetry by George Witte

Unbound Edition Press, May 2023

Distinguished by expert attention to image and phrase, line and sentence, rhythm and tone, George Witte’s An Abundance of Caution proves much more than a showcase of virtuoso technique. Witte’s formal skill lends voice and body to the crucial work of finding grace in a time marked by environmental crisis, global pandemic, and personal loss. His poems gain their depth and dimension from attentiveness to the lives of others, the details of the natural world, and the often-bewildering ways we live now. In lines both formal and free, these poems answer uncertainty with clarity, imagination, and compassion.

“The poet’s incredible attention to image, rhythm, and insistence upon the exact right word creates an incantatory sense of era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems.”–Kirkus Reviews

“These elegantly constructed poems about “each livid day” are definitely worth listening to.”–Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club Newsletter

“Visionary is what I would call the quality that enables these poems to know realities that exceed comprehension …”–H. L. Hix

“Witte’s poems find their way in, taking up residence in the mind and heart.”–David Yezzi

New Book :: Maximum Speed

Maximum Speed by Kevin Clouther book cover image

Maximum Speed: Stories by Kevin Clouther
Cornerstone Press, November 2023

Like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kevin Clouther’s Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in the lives of three characters is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared secret of their past.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Hated for the Gods

Hated for the Gods by Sean Patrick Mulroy book cover image

Hated for the Gods by Sean Patrick Mulroy
Button Poetry, October 2023

Plaintive and joyous, sexy and ferocious—often all at once—Hated for the Gods is as much a call to action as it is a work of literature. Gorgeously rendered and skillfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy’s poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn’t know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate. Winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Prize.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Sponsored :: New Book :: Graveyard Dogs

cover of Jason Brightwell's poetry collection Graveyard Dogs

Graveyard Dogs, Poetry by Jason Brightwell

Kelsay Books, August 2023

Graveyard Dogs is a graceful descent into the dimension of loss and grief. We witness life reduced to dirt and gravestones. We see love pushed into the shadows with nowhere to go. Jason Brightwell is a masterful shepherd whose poems guide us through the many facets of death. There is beauty and elegance in mourning and on every page in this book. He shows us that life prevails through tar, rust, and blood. We remain—the ones that are left behind—still of stars and still of purpose.

New Book :: Dirt Songs

Dirt Songs by Kari Gunter-Seymour book cover image

Dirt Songs by Kari Gunter-Seymour
EastOver Press, February 2024

Ohio Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour’s poems in Dirt Songs are full-throated, raw, deceptively simple, and rippling with candor, providing readers an insider’s lens into the larger questions surrounding the many aspects of Appalachian culture, including identity, the impact of poverty, generational afflictions, and the brunt of mainstream America’s skewed regard for the region. Throughout the book there is an overarching determination to endure, to be the last truth teller left standing, arm raised in solidarity with the land and its people. Dirt Songs does what journalists and mainstream media have failed to do: provide a uniquely intimate look at landscape and family generated from within Appalachia, recognizing that one story cannot accurately represent a region or its people.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as our Books Received monthly roundup. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Sponsored :: New Book :: Michikusa House

cover of Emily Grandy's award-winning novel Michikusa House

Michikusa House, Novel by Emily Grandy

Homebound Publications, September 2023

Winner of the Landmark Prize for Fiction

Winona Heeley spent the last year of recovery from eating disorders in rural Japan, at Michikusa House, alongside one other full-time resident: Jun Nakashima. Like Winona, Jun was a recovering addict and college dropout. While they bonded over rituals of growing their own food and preparing meals, they changed each other’s lives by reconstructing long-held beliefs about shame, identity, and renewal.

But after Winona returns to her Midwest hometown, Jun vanishes.

Two years pass and Winona, seeking revival through gardening, accepts a job as a groundskeeper at a local cemetery…and begins searching for Jun Nakashima once more.

New Book :: Strip Mall

Strip Mall by Matthew Thomas Meade book cover image

Strip Mall: Stories by Matthew Thomas Meade
Tailwinds Press, November 2024

Matthew Thomas Meade’s stories in Strip Mall are about a surreal future as much as they are about our absurd present. A young lawyer moonlights as an ersatz psychic; a woman struggles with the caregiver burden caused by her boyfriend’s satanic possession; a suburban mother reckons with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in mass-casualty form. Meade’s craft in this debut collection dissipates with shockingly deadpan ease into sensitive accounts of ordinary human relationships and resilience. With its heartfelt portraits of a magical world where late-stage capitalism has blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead, Strip Mall presents a strangely grace-filled vision of the dystopia already upon us.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Books September 2023

We receive many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. Visit New Books Received to discover new authors as well as new works by your favorites. This page is updated monthly, but subscribers to our newsletter have these featured titles and more of ‘what’s new’ at NewPages.com delivered weekly. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.

American Roulette: The Story of a Mass Shooting and Its Impact on Eight Lives :: Two Authors Share Their Insights and Experience

American Roulette book cover image

Like a page ripped from the headlines, the Sunbury Press release of American Roulette takes readers inside a mall where a mass shooting has taken place. It’s a grisly and up-close look at a wholly preventable, if common, occurrence.

The novel was written by eight authors, each of whom introduces readers to someone caught in the rampage. Two of the characters, Will Humphreys and Roger Elliot, are young, disgruntled white men who are eager to retaliate for years of familial and schoolhouse bullying, and provide a window into the minds of people driven to the edge and then given access to assault weapons.

Other characters include a minister struggling with medical debt; a young woman battling a depressive disorder; an elderly gun aficionado; a homeless mall security guard who has been living in her car; a local television personality; and a man hired by the mall’s owners to do damage control.

Two of the authors, Rev. Matthew Best and Pat LaMarche, spoke with Eleanor J. Bader in advance of the book’s October release:

Continue reading “American Roulette: The Story of a Mass Shooting and Its Impact on Eight Lives :: Two Authors Share Their Insights and Experience”

New Book :: 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages

18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages edited by Nora Gold book cover image

18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages edited by Nora Gold
Academic Studies Press, October 2023

This anthology offers readers the first collection of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in twenty-five years: a collection of eighteen stories, each translated into English from a different language: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by eminent authors, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture and are easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers but for story-lovers of all backgrounds.

Authors in the order they appear in the book: Elie Wiesel, Varda Fiszbein, S. Y. Agnon, Gábor T. Szántó, Jasminka Domaš, Augusto Segre, Lili Berger, Peter Sichrovsky, Maciej Płaza, Entela Kasi, Norman Manea, Luize Valente, Eliya Karmona, Birte Kont, Michel Fais, Irena Dousková, Mario Levi, and Isaac Babel.

New Book :: Forget I Told You This

Forget I Told You This by Hilary Zaid book cover image

Forget I Told You This: A Novel by Hilary Zaid
University of Nebraska Press, September 2023

Forget I Told You This by Hilary Zaid is the winner of the Barbara DiBernard Prize in Fiction in which Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

September 2023 eLitPak :: Fall 2023 Titles from Livingston Press

Screenshot of Livingston Press' flyer announcing Fall 2023 new book releases
click image to open PDF

Discover our latest titles including Joshua Shaw’s All We Could Have Been, winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award. Releasing this fall: Kelly Ann Jacobson’s Weaver, Trish MacEnulty’s Cinnamon Girl, Robert McKean’s Mending What is Broken, and The Book of Merlin translated by Larry Beckett. Visit our website and view our flyer to learn more about these titles.

Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.

Interested in advertising in the eLitPak? Learn more here.

New Book :: Let Our Bodies Change the Subject

Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél book cover image

Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél
University of Nebraska Press, September 2023

Let Our Bodies Change the Subject by Jared Harél is a poetry collection that dives headlong into the terrifying, wondrous, sleep-deprived existence of being a parent in twenty-first-century America. In clear, dynamic verses that disarm then strike, Harél investigates our days through the keyhole of domesticity, through personal lyrics and cultural reckonings. Whether taking a family trip to Coney Island or simply showing his son snowflakes on Inauguration morning, Harél guides us toward moments of intimacy and understanding, humor and grief. Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Let Our Bodies Change the Subject is a secular prayer. “I will try,” he admits, “to be better than myself, which is all / I’ve ever wanted and everything I need.” Hoping against hope, Harél works to reconcile feelings of luck and loss, of living for joy while fearing the worst.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Notes from the Trauma Party

Notes from the Trauma Party: A Novel by Michael Keen book cover image

Notes from the Trauma Party: A Novel by Michael Keen
Tailwinds Press, November 2023

In Notes from the Trauma Party, Michael Keen creates a post-Knausgaard fictional reality that is as devastating as it is hilarious. An idealistic social worker—with the same name as the author—counsels the mentally ill, tries to be scrupulously honest (too honest?) with his girlfriends, and earnestly lectures his fellow writers in the MFA hothouse—all while navigating the complicated administrative aspects of being, and remaining, extraordinarily high. Appropriating the time-worn tropes of an addiction memoir, Keen’s kaleidoscopic debut novel recounts a string of harrowingly awkward encounters with oversexed coworkers, narcissistic writers, self-absorbed drug dealers, estranged parents, schizophrenics, and pedophiles—each causing and reflecting one man’s pathological confusion about the workings of his inner world. In its transgressively exhilarating depiction of millennial anomie, Notes from the Trauma Party is a no-holds-barred examination of a quest for total transparency that is as awful as it is sublime.

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New Book :: The Way Land Breaks

The Way Land Breaks by Rebecca Brock book cover image

The Way Land Breaks: Poems by Rebecca Brock
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, April 2023

In The Way Land Breaks, award-winning poet Rebecca Brock uses time—human and geological—as both anchor and engine. These poems are revelation and love song to a faltering world. The Way Land Breaks travels the Idaho foothills of Brock’s childhood, the sky she takes to as a flight attendant, her relationship with her mother and her sons, and the distances between. From diabetes to earthquakes, mushrooms to Mars Rovers, Robin Hood to Vera Bradley—Brock asks questions about the landscape of home, the landscapes we seek within one other. Using tangible imagery and honest language, Brock shows us how love takes hold in the modern blur of disorder and constant change.

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New Book :: Floriography Child

Floriography Child by Lisa C. Krueger book cover image

Floriography Child: A Memoir in Poems by Lisa C. Krueger
Red Hen Press, October 2023

Lisa C. Krueger’s Floriography Child is a book about salvation: what gives people strength in the face of adversity, not just to endure, but to move through and beyond our myriad human sufferings. Through poems, micro-essays, and visual art, Floriography Child addresses fundamental questions about purpose, connection, and resilience. Written in memoir form, this book examines the mother-daughter relationship and its intimacies in the context of a daughter’s developing chronic illness. How to bear another’s suffering—how to find sustenance in a world fraught with uncertainty and pain—is addressed through the language of flowers and the natural world. Ultimately, this book asks us to consider how each of us, whatever our path, is connected.

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New Book :: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale

Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale: Poems by Stephen Gibson book cover image

Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale: Poems by Stephen Gibson
Able Muse Press, February 2024

Stephen Gibson’s Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale reimagines the iconic Mexican artist’s life and relationships by exploring Kahlo’s passions and pains through vivid persona poems. Realized entirely in a modified triolet form, the collection is essentially an ekphrastic epic inspired by the paintings, photos, and personal effects on display in a 2015 Fort Lauderdale exhibition. Gibson probes the artist’s inner world, giving voice to Kahlo’s desires, anguish, and defiant spirit. He conjures her crippling injuries from a bus accident, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera, and her affairs with Leon Trotsky and others, all filtered through her fervent art. This innovative collection brings Frida Kahlo’s singular vision to life in visceral contemporary verse.

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New Book :: What to Count

What to Count: Poems by Alise Alousi book cover image

What to Count: Poems by Alise Alousi
Wayne State University Press, August 2023

With heart and insight, the poems in Alise Alousi’s What to Count speak to what it means to come of age as an Iraqi American during the first Gulf War and its continuing aftermath, but also to the joy and complexity of motherhood, daughterhood, and what it means to live a creative life. More than a description of the world, Alousi’s poetry actively lives in and of the world. These poems explore the nuances of memory through the changes wrought by time, conflict, and distance. In “The Ocularist” and “Art,” and others, Alousi’s extraordinary verbal deftness precisely locates the still-tender pains and triumphs of collective being while trying to be an individual in the world. What to Count is a remarkable collection of contemporary poetry—both a lyrical splendor and a contemplative account of lineage, silenced history, and identity.

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New Book :: Ropes

Ropes: 10th Anniversary Edition by Derrick Harriell book cover image

Ropes: 10th Anniversary Edition by Derrick Harriell
Aquarius Press/Willow Books, August 2023

Ropes by Derrick Harriel was originally published in 2013 as a collection based on the lives of four famous boxers: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier, and Mike Tyson. This 10th-anniversary edition contains new poems and a new Introduction by Kiese Laymon. Made up of persona poems about the greatest boxers in American history, Ropes is considered a leading commentary on African American life and culture in the past 100 years. Harriell is an associate professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Mississippi and the new director of the university’s African American Studies program. He is a past winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Prize in Poetry.

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Sponsored :: New Book :: No One Is on the Line

No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed book cover image

No One Is on the Line: The Poetry of Mohsen Mohamed

Translated from the Arabic by Sherine Elbanhawy

Laertes, September 2023

These poems arose from the depths of incarceration, from the voice and intellect of Mohsen Mohamed (sentenced to five years of imprisonment after a campus protest in 2014) and went on to win Egypt’s two most significant literary prizes. They speak of dislocation and the wrenching of the heart, of a found (and forged) community, of the bare lineaments of humanity disclosed in the throes of suffering. They are works of provocative witness and searching tenderness.

“Mohsen Mohamed is an honest poet with a new dictionary, a keen eye for details and surprising twists, and a great talent.” —Amin Haddad, poet, winner of the International Cavafy Prize for poetry

New Book :: Boundless Deep

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories by Gen Del Raye book cover image

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories by Gen Del Raye
University of Nebraska Press, September 2023

Boundless Deep, and Other Stories by Gen Del Raye, winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, is a portrait of a family that holds together despite everything. At the funeral of her old boss, a grandmother confronts the legacy of the draft letters she delivered as a girl during World War II. Facing the loss of his job, a father becomes the caricature strangers have always believed him to be. A graduate student living far from home is worn down by the reality of what it takes to save even a small piece of the world. Along the way, we meet communist revolutionary Shigenobu Fusako hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, submariner and war criminal Nishina Sekio in his tortured dreams, and Edwin, a half-dolphin friend, wreaking havoc in a public pool. Written in the compressed style of Amy Hempel and Lucia Berlin, these stories examine characters whose struggles submerge them, weighing them down from every angle, until they can finally float free.

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New Book :: Rock Stars

Rock Stars by Matt Mason book cover image

Rock Stars by Matt Mason
Button Poetry, September 2023

Witty, nostalgic, rhythmic, and forlorn, Matt Mason’s poetry calls on the classic rock music that shaped him. Mason laments on his childhood in the 80s and addresses the graduating preschool class of 2023, as he takes us on the coming-of-age road trip of a lifetime. An ode and ovation to what our ears taught us before we knew what to say, Rock Stars riffs on all things music, poetry, sports, and more. Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and, through the US State Department, has run poetry programs in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council.

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New Book :: Sex Augury

Sex Augury by C. Bain book cover image

Sex Augury: Poems by C. Bain
Red Hen Press, September 2023

Sex Augury is a collection that practices divination with the symbolism of our radically changed and changeable world. Exercising trans poetics, C. Bain denormalizes the violence embedded in the most intimate strata of American life. Confrontationally queer, urgently wounded, deeply political, and metaphysically transported, these poems create their own system of meaning in an environment that is increasingly hostile to meaning of any kind. This collection spans digital culture, gender reversals, and archetypal-mythic vocabularies, alongside close observation of the surround of “ordinary” urban existence. These poems bristle with intelligence, acuity of feeling, and refusal to gloss the complexity of our moment into a false narrative of progress.

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New Book :: Asides: Occasional Essays

Asides: Occasional Essays by George Singleton book cover image

Asides: Occasional Essays by George Singleton
EastOver Press, November 2023

George Singleton’s Asides: Occasional Essays offers readers a fascinating and curious collection in which Singleton explains how he came to be a writer (he blames barbecue), why he still writes his first draft by hand (someone stole his typewriter), and what motivated him to run marathons (his father gave him beer). In eccentric world-according-to-George fashion, Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson is to blame for Singleton’s literary education, and Aristotle would’ve been a failed philosopher had he grown up in South Carolina. Singleton gets his dogs to promise they won’t use his new gardens as a Porta-Potty, learns about his not-so-famous relations, and generally charms anyone sensible enough to read this delightful book. Word of advice? Buckle up and relish this ride.

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New Book :: The Cruelties of Brooklyn

The Cruelties of Brooklyn by Paul Schaeffer book cover image

The Cruelties of Brooklyn by Paul Schaeffer
Mudfish Individual Poet Series #17
Box Turtle Press, June 2023

In The Cruelties of Brooklyn by Paul Schaeffer, each poem builds upon the next to create an unsparing vision of all the characters in the poet’s childhood and adulthood that is nevertheless suffused with a love of humanity. With almost as few words as possible, Schaeffer conveys a world of meaning and abundance of detail, telling his outrageous stories that are colorful, earthy, perceptive, empathic, and brilliant. His intense realism lifts into the visionary: “The coffin lid flew open / Her body so light / She lifted into the air / A white sheet escaping a clothesline.” He mourns Aunt Helen, “the last of the gang,” but not before he immortalizes each and every one of them.

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New Book :: Sukun

Sukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali book cover image

Sukun: New and Selected Poems by Kazim Ali
Wesleyan University Press, September 2023

Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. “Sukun” means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim’s six previous full-length collections and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali’s passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken.

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New Book :: Down Here We Come Up

Down Here We Come Up by Sara Johnson Allen book cover image

Down Here We Come Up by Sara Johnson Allen
Black Lawrence Press, August 2023

Winner of the 2022 Big Moose Prize, Down Here We Come Up by Sara Johnson Allen is about three women who have lost connection with their children, through alienation, adoption, and across a militarized border. Their lives intersect in a “safe house” for migrant workers outside of Wilmington, North Carolina in 2006. From her deathbed, con artist Jackie Jessup lures home her estranged 26-year-old daughter Kate Jessup. There, Kate meets former teacher Maribel Reyes, who is separated from her family in Ciudad Juárez. While none of these women trust each other, they do have a chance to get back what they have each lost.

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New Book :: Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer book cover image

Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton edited by David Grundy and Lauri Scheyer
Wesleyan University Press, August 2023

This volume promises to be the definitive guide to Calvin C. Hernton’s unparalleled poetic career, re-introducing readers to a major voice in American poetry. Hernton was a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop; a participant in the Black Arts Movement, R. D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall, and the Antiuniversity of London; and a teacher at Oberlin College who counted amongst his friends bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Odetta. As a pioneer in the field of Black Studies, Hernton developed a theoretical and practical pedagogy with lasting impact on generations of students. He may be best known as an anti-sexist sociologist, following in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois, but Hernton viewed himself, above all, as a poet. This volume includes a generous selection of Hernton’s previously published poems, from classics like the often anthologized “The Distant Drum” to the visionary epic The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong, reprinted in full for the first time since 1964, alongside uncollected and unpublished material from the Calvin C. Hernton papers at Ohio University, a new critical introduction by Ishmael Reed, and detailed notes, chronology, and bibliography.

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New Book :: Morpheus Dips His Oar

Morpheus Dips His Oar by Tamara Madison book cover image

Morpheus Dips His Oar: Poems by Tamara Madison
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, February 2023

In this third full-length collection of poems, Madison welcomes the reader to step into her craft for a tour that tracks the movement of a life. Among narrative, lyric, and points in between, the poems in this collection are informed by the poet’s keen eye for detail, command of language, and ear for the music of words. Poems of loss, growth, grief, pleasure, joy and snark, are presented with arresting imagery, humor, and an abiding faith in the salvation that nature offers.

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New Book :: You Were Watching from the Sand

You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories by Juliana Lamy book cover image

You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories by Juliana Lamy
Red Hen Press, September 2023

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.

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New Book :: Toy Gun

Toy Gun by Matt Coonan book cover image

Toy Gun: Poems by Matt Coonan
Button Poetry, August 2023

Through each poem in the debut collection Toy Gun, Matt Coonan fires his offbeat childhood and adolescence at the page. He enters each exit wound with sharp diction and form, extracting shards of trauma, mental health, and evolutionary violence. What readers will find in this collection is ambitious anaphora—an attempt to explain the irrationality of an obsessive mind by imitation. The result of it all? Raw candor dripped on the backdrop of New York suburbia; an intimacy that lingers from backyard barbeques to funeral homes.

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New Book :: No Last Words

No Last Words by Tara Kelly book cover image

No Last Words by Tara Kelly
EastOver Press, August 2023

Tara Kelly’s moving memoir, No Last Words, opens: “The day before Robert died was an otherwise perfect June day in Connecticut: warm but not hot, with a bit of a breeze, flawless blue sky, puffy white clouds—the sort of weather a sailor loves, and Robert was a sailor.”

Robert Willis was Tara’s husband, father of their children, restauranteur, sailor, bon vivant, and alcoholic. From an enchanted start in Manhattan to a townhouse in Brooklyn, from an island in Maine and back to rural Connecticut, in fast cars and sleek boats, Tara and Robert seemed to live a charmed life. But beneath the glittering exterior was the struggle of money, alcohol, and ultimately self-control and hard-won sobriety. When this couple seems to have reached an impasse, separation brings renewed love, and then tragedy brings new challenges. Kelly’s memoir is a clear-eyed excavation of the lives lived together and apart by two charismatic modern Americans, a story told in love and compassion for herself and others.

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