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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 :: STONED

Stoned by Jill Hoffman book cover image

STONED: A Novel by Jill Hoffman
Box Turtle Press, April 2023

In Jill Hoffman’s long-awaited second novel, STONED, forty-year-old mother of two Maud Diamond is getting a divorce. Having experienced the colossal disappointment of being jilted by a famous artist, she falls in love with a poor unknown artist who assuages the disappointment but leads to other ills. Maud’s son leaves home to live with his father; the daughter does phone sex from their new home, proclaiming, “I’m the only one in this house earning any money.” As Maud starts a literary journal called Wild Leek with her new boyfriend and moves downtown, their relationship spirals downward from her pot-smoking and his alcoholism. STONED is for anyone who has been in love or lost love, been married, divorced, or lonely. It is about the satisfactions and deprivations of sex and drugs.

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New Book :: Here in the Night

Here in the Night: Stories by Rebecca Turkewitz book cover image

Here in the Night: Stories by Rebecca Turkewitz
Black Lawrence Press, July 2023

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz’s debut collection, Here in the Night, are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina. At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential.

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 :: All the Ways We Lied

All the Ways We Lied: A Novel by Aida Zilelian book cover image

All the Ways We Lied: A Novel by Aida Zilelian
Keylight Books, January 2024

Set in Queens, New York, meet the Manoukians—a dysfunctional Armenian family and the fraying rope that binds them. While a father deteriorates from terminal illness, three sisters contend with one another, their self-destructive pasts, and their indomitable mother as they face the loss of the one person holding their unstable family together. Kohar, the oldest sister, is happily married, yet grapples with fertility issues and, in turn, her own self-worth. Lucine, the middle child, is trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by memories of her estranged father. Azad, the beloved youngest child, is burdened by an inescapable cycle of failed relationships. Zilelian uses humor and compassion to explore the fraught and contradictory landscape of sisterhood, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common and are bound by blood and history.

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 :: Remote Cities

Remote Cities by George Franklin book cover image

Remote Cities: Poems by George Franklin
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, September 2022

From a cathedral in Cuernavaca with its frescos of samurai and soon-to-be-martyred priests to neighborhoods in Miami at the end of lockdown, to New York City in the 1970s, or to mythic Greece, the poems in Remote Cities are conscious of history as a process happening right now. They look back at us with an urgency that demands response, not that we embrace this or that political or religious dogma but that we live our lives with a sense of their fragility and value.

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!

Books Received August 2023

NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

Poetry

Apples & Crows, Alan Basting, Kelsay Books
The Cruelties of Brooklyn, Paul Schaeffer, Box Turtle Press
Directed by Lilly Obscure, Dana Curtis, Blaze Vox
Excuse Me As I Kiss The Sky, Rudy Francisco, Button Poetry
Feast of the Ass, Jahna Khajavi, Ugly Duckling Presse
Floriography Child, Lisa C. Krueger, Red Hen Press
Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale, Stephen Gibson, Able Muse Press
Honest Sonnets, Nicole Farmer, Kelsay Books
Joan of Arkansas, Emma Wippermann, Ugly Duckling Presse
Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Jared Harel, University of Nebraska Press
MA, Ida Börjel, Ugly Duckling Presse
Morpheus Dips His Oar, Tamara Madison, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Nice Nose, Buck Downs

Continue reading “Books Received August 2023”

New Book :: The Weight of Ghosts

The Weight of Ghosts: A Memoir by Laila Halaby book cover image

The Weight of Ghosts: A Memoir by Laila Halaby
Red Hen Press, September 2023

The Weight of Ghosts is a circling of grief following the death of the author’s older son when he was twenty-one, a horror that was compounded by her younger son’s drug use, the country’s slow eruption as it dealt with its own brokenness, and reckoning the author had to do regarding her own story. The Weight of Ghosts is a lyrical reclaiming and an insistence by the author that she own the rights to her story, which is American flavored with an unreleasing elsewhere. The Weight of Ghosts is an immigrant story and a love story. While it is raw and honest and tragic, it is also a hopeful, funny, and original telling that demonstrates the strength of the human spirit, while offering a vocabulary for these most unmanageable human experiences.

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 :: The Art of Mercy

The Art of Mercy Robert L. Penick book cover image

The Art of Mercy: New & Selected Poems by Robert L. Penick
Shō Poetry Journal / Hohm Press, August 2023

Robert L. Penick’s short, masterful poems have been making appearances in small press magazines since the early 1990s. The Art of Mercy, his first full-length collection, contains excerpts from four chapbooks as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems, representing the best of a long, quiet career in the poetry trenches. This book marks the first in the Beggar Poet Series produced by Shō Poetry Journal in partnership with their parent publisher, Hohm Press. “It is named for seekers across world traditions who set out on the spiritual path with nothing but a begging bowl in hand and a driving thirst for the unnameable. Some of those beggars become poets. Just as some poets, in their sacred vocation, become beggars, standing empty before the muse and writing what is given.”

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 :: And Dogs to Chase Them

And Dogs to Chase Them by Ray Trotter book cover image

And Dogs to Chase Them by Ray Trotter
EastOver Press, August 2023

In Ray Trotter’s collection of stories, And Dogs to Chase Them, ordinary humans are pushed to do things in out-of-the-ordinary ways. Trotter has conjured a world of Southern hyper-reality: a good Christian woman who pushes a man down the staircase, “as final as flushing the commode”; a concrete deliveryman who ought to have double-checked the address before he got out of his truck; and a man who enacts his revenge on the self-declared Queen of the Post Office. Through a keen eye for detail, Trotter brings to life a world that is at once familiar and deeply odd and creates characters that stay with a reader long after the book is closed.

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 :: Joan of Arkansas

Joan of Arkansas by Emma Wippermann book cover image

Joan of Arkansas by Emma Wippermann
Ugly Duckling Presse, June 2023

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama, Emma Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

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 :: Silent Bob

Silent Bob by Joe Taylor book cover image

Silent Bob by Joe Taylor
Nat 1 Publishing, July 2023

In Joy Taylor’s satirical fiction Silent Bob, BJ and Rainey are two misfits from a rural town in Kentucky living their everyday lives, until they stumble upon a shocking secret: humanity is controlled by invisible creatures called the viziers who manipulate through pheromones and telepathic suggestion. Delving deeper, they uncover a bizarre world where laughter and tears are commodities and are forced to strive to be more than just “syrup units” providing the viziers with all the tragi-comic emotion they can eat. Silent Bob is a thought-provoking dark comedic exploration of the human condition, exposing the absurdity and vulnerability of our lives. With subtle humor and unexpected twists, Taylor’s craft will leave readers questioning the true nature of their emotions and the forces shaping their lives.

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 :: Snow After Fire

Snow After Fire by Kandi Maxwell book cover image

Snow After Fire: A Memoir of the Paradise Camp Fire & its Aftermath by Kandi Maxwell
Legacy Book Press, June 2023

In November 2018, Kandi, already struggling with anxiety and chronic fatigue, faces her family’s unthinkable losses after the Paradise Camp Fire. Her two sons and two granddaughters are immediately displaced when their homes are demolished, and they come to live with Kandi and her husband in their small cabin. As Kandi’s solitude-seeking husband moves out and her energy wanes, she wonders how much of herself she can and should give up for her family. When her family can finally move into temporary FEMA housing, hope flourishes, but as the months go by, Kandi faces illness, more fires, the COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of her parents, housing issues for herself and her family, and the prospect of being torn from her most cherished refuge—the forests and the wild lands she called home.

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 :: Lies About Black People

Lies about Black People by Omekongo Dibinga book cover image

Lies about Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why It Matters by Omekongo Dibinga
Prometheus Books, July 2023

From the Black Lives Matter movement to the health and economic disparities exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans have been forced to reckon with our country’s fraught history – and present – of racial bias and inequality. Now that we have scratched the surface of courageous conversations about race, many are wondering: what is the next step toward healing and justice? Lies About Black People: How to Combat Racist Stereotypes and Why it Matters is designed for anyone who wants to examine their own biases and behaviors with a deeper critical lens in order to take action, make change, and engage positively in the fight for racial equality.

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 :: Dear Beloved Humans

Dear Beloved Humans by Grzegorz Wróblewski book cover image

Dear Beloved Humans: Selected Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski
Translated by Piotr Gwiazda
Lavender Ink, May 2023

Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Dear Beloved Humans offers a representative selection of poems by a Polish writer and visual artist based in Copenhagen for the last thirty-five years. A third volume of Wróblewski’s poetry translated into English by Piotr Gwiazda, it shows its remarkable scope and variety, from the early 1980s poems, with their motifs of existential anxiety and radical estrangement, to those written in the last decade, with their satirical insights on nationalism and capitalism, among other topics. The collection crystallizes the nature of his lifelong project: an attempt to portray, through something theoretically as simple and unassuming as poetry, what it means to be alive at this moment in the planet’s history.

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 :: Feast of the Ass

Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi book cover image

Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi
Ugly Duckling Press, June 2023

Feast of the Ass by Jahan Khajavi draws extensively on Iranian poetic traditions and the history of their reception in English translation, presenting a series of verses that play in the fields of love poetry’s address. Khajavi irreverently ruffles the “classical grandeur & quiet dignity” of inherited forms in order to consider the poet’s relationship to death, literature, race, religion, and sexuality, his “queer shoulder / set not to the wheel—so long, Solon!—but turned on to some bolder / axon.”

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New Book :: Match Point!

Match Point! by Maddie Gallegos book cover image

Match Point! by Maddie Gallegos
First Second, September 2023

In this debut middle-grade graphic novel by Maddie Gallegos is about two girls: one who hates racquetball and another who loves it. Rosie Vo is at odds with her dad. He pushes his racquetball hobby to the point that she dreads ever spending time with him. Thankfully, new kid Blair moves to town and becomes fast friends with Rosie. She’s cool, a great listener, and even better, the best distraction from the tension Rosie feels at home. Rosie’s convinced Blair is the answer to all her dad-problems. If only Blair could be the racquetball genius Rosie’s dad has always wanted! But Blair disagrees, hoping to show her that with a friend by her side, Rosie can face both her dad and racquetball.

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 :: The Teller’s Cage

The Teller's Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies by John Philip Drury book cover image

The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies by John Philip Drury
Able Muse Press, January 2024

The poems in John Philip Drury’s The Teller’s Cage swell the heart and the imagination through their cinematic storytelling. The collection opens with baseball and culminates with persona poems starring the poet’s mother, along the way unraveling factual and fantastical chronicles in enchanting locales. Drury’s formal prowess is on display throughout this versified blockbuster. Drury earned degrees from Stony Brook University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of four previous books of poetry.

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New Book :: The Ledger of Mistakes

The Ledger of Mistakes by Kathy Nelson book cover image

The Ledger of Mistakes by Kathy Nelson
Terrapin Books, August 2023

The poems in Kathy Nelson’s The Ledger of Mistakes explore the complexities of mother-daughter love in the context of a mother’s Alzheimer’s decline and death. Old, unresolved conflicts, the daughter’s recognition of her own mortality, the lifelong desire for an unattainable closeness—these are the pressures that exert their clarifying power in these poems. While the work is rooted in personal experience, it achieves, not journalistic autobiography, but the emotional truth that can arise from poetry. The poems range widely in form: there are sonnets, a pantoum, a villanelle, a rondelet, a triolet, a prose poem as well as more unconventional forms. Kathy Nelson is the 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Award and an MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

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New Book :: Weave Me a Crooked Basket

Weave Me a Crooked Basket: A Novel by Charles Goodrich book cover image

Weave Me a Crooked Basket: A Novel by Charles Goodrich
University of Nevada Press, October 2023

It’s the summer of 2008, in Charles Goodrich’s novel Weave Me a Crooked Basket. Thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, on the heels of a bad marriage and abandoned career, moved home to the family farm for a fresh start and to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm, but Bodie and his idealistic wife are committed to farming. Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the farm. Fates change each of their futures as Ursula leaves only to return again to help save the farm from bankruptcy and preserve a way of life.

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New Book :: Take Creek, For Example

Take Creek, For Example by Chris Rugeley book cover image

Take Creek, For Example by Chris Rugeley
7.13 Books, October 2023

In Chris Rugeley’s forthcoming novel, Take Creek is one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States. An unnamed photography major attends to study under Salter, a famous and perhaps out-of-his-mind professor whose works rival that of Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. When Salter asks his protégé to surveil Manning, the new transfer, as his final project, what follows is a wild, unpredictable last year of college full of drugs, nudity, shifting viewpoints, and the occasional making of art. “I drew a lot of inspiration from other classics in the genre,” says Rugeley, “novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Don DeLillo, Donna Tartt, Tobias Wolff, Elif Batuman, And Elisabeth Thomas.”

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 :: Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso book cover image

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso
The Ohio State University Press, September 2023

Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing by Esra Mirze Santesso offers the first major study of comics by and about Muslim people. Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East—from blockbusters like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to more local efforts such as Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi—Santesso explores why the graphic form has become a popular and useful medium for articulating Muslim subjectivities. Further, she shows how Muslim comics “bear witness” to a range of faith-based positions that complicate discussions of global ummah or community, contest monolithic depictions of Muslims, and question the Islamist valorization of the shaheed, the “martyr” figure regarded as the ideal religious witness.

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 :: Fig Season

Fig Season: Poems by Joan E. Bauer book cover image

Fig Season: Poems by Joan E. Bauer
Turning Point, May 2023

In Fig Season, the poet Joan E. Bauer explores what it has meant to her to be Italian-American. She mingles stories about her own quirky family with portraits of Fellini, Frank Zappa, Diane di Prima, Pasolini, Enrico Fermi, Anna Magnani, John Fante, Elsa Schiaparelli, and more. In writing about history, culture, and family, Bauer also shares what, over time, she has learned about love and vanity, courage, and forgiveness.

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 :: Optometry

Optometry by Xiang Yata book cover image

Optometry by Xiang Yata
Driftwood Press, November 2023

Optometry by Xiang Yata is a 250-page, full-color graphic novel that follows the story of a woman who is transported to an experimental kaleidoscopic world during a visit to the optometrist. As the eye doctor calibrates the optometry machine to investigate the faults and fractures in her eyes, the protagonist is transported to a new world, a place full of overlapping images, dots, curves, houses, and light reflections. As she struggles to navigate these various unique planes, she must confront the endless versions of herself to avoid becoming forever lost in a daze. Artist Xiang Yata guides readers through multiple art forms, combining elements of traditional comics, animation, and illustration, to investigate the myriad ways we perceive ourselves. A Kickstarter campaign to help bring Optometry to life launches on July 31, 2023.

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 :: Ma

MA by Ida Börjel book cover image

MA by Ida Börjel
Translated by Jennifer Hayashida
Ugly Duckling Presse, June 2023

MA is Ida Börjel’s award-winning abecedarian, a maelstrom of voices cast in the underwater shadows and nuclear light of the Anthropocene. MA is a refraction of Inger Christensen’s seminal Alphabet, published in 1981, and speaks a furious incantation in the past tense, a grammar of loss, from the vantage point of a disintegrating here and now. Appearing for the first time in English in Jennifer Hayashida’s luminous translation, MA is less a curative than a testimonial, speaking simultaneously for the one and the many, the solitary mother and the insurgent multitude.

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New Book :: Dreaming in Cantera

Dreaming in Cantera / Sueños en Cantera: Poems by Bonnie Wolkenstein book cover image

Dreaming in Cantera / Sueños en Cantera: Poems by Bonnie Wolkenstein
WordTech Editions, February 2023

In 2019, the author set out to journey—abroad and within. Although she planned to experience several countries, the pandemic created a unique opportunity to deepen her knowledge and exploration within the limits of one place, one person, and the overlap between them. The place was Guanajuato, Mexico, a 500-year-old city with secrets and success, conquests and divides, myths, legends, the ghosts of past inhabitants and the bustling energy of those who currently call it their home, all set against a blaze of color, winding stone alleyways, and an arid semidesert surrounded by low mountains. The result is this collection of poems, which mirror the author’s exploration of the unknown and the universal, the cyclical flow of any journey, from leaving, to what we seek and what we find, our return home, and if we’re fortunate enough, our preparation for the next frontier, inner or geographical. Some poems came first in English; others originated in Spanish. Every poem has been translated, creating a rich melding of language and place, offering the reader the chance to feel what it is like to dwell in a new self in a new land, to remember past explorations, and to spark the next longed–for journey.

New Book :: The Legible Element

The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden book cover image

The Legible Element: Essays by Ralph Sneeden
EastOver Press, July 2023

The Legible Element by Ralph Sneeden is a lyrical memoir of a life lived in and out of the water. In his first book of essays, award-winning author Ralph Sneeden combines poetry, prose, and narrative in a search for the origins of his passion for buoyancy and immersion. The collection’s narratives about surfing, sailing, fishing, scuba diving, and swimming are earthly dispatches from an ongoing voyage fueled by joy, longing, loss, and humor.

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New Book :: Saving Sunshine

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi; illustrated by Shazleen Khan book cover image

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi; illustrated by Shazleen Khan
First Second, September 2023

In Saving Sunshine, written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan, it’s hard enough for twins Zara and Zeeshan to get through a day without being teased for a funny-sounding name or wearing a hijab, but the two really can’t even stand each other. During a family trip to Florida, when the bickering, shoving, and insults reach new heights of chaos, their parents sentence them to the worst possible fate—each other’s company! But when the siblings find an ailing turtle, it presents a rare opportunity for teamwork—if the two can put their differences aside at last.

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 :: Restless

Restless by Joseph Kai book cover image

Restless by Joseph Kai
Street Noise Books, September 2023

Restless by Joseph Kai is a graphic novel Set in Beirut, Lebanon, 30 years after the end of the civil war, and a few months before the disastrous explosion of August 2020. Samar, a young queer comic book artist, wanders between anguished dreams, childhood memories, sexual experiences, and Beirut’s alternative communities. This abstractly autobiographical story tells of the author’s anxiety over living in a complex city of changing colors and moods. Three powerful themes: art, sex, and political uprising, are interwoven in a compelling narrative and an otherwordly color palette

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 :: Boomtown Girl

Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder book cover image

Boomtown Girl: A Collection of Short Stories by Shubha Sunder
Black Lawrence Press, April 2023

Winner of the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder is set entirely in the Bangalore region of South India and explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city. A rebellious teenager and her workaholic father confront their mutual distrust while dining at a newly opened Pizza Hut; a tailor nostalgic for his past glory in the employ of an Englishman grows obsessed with an American customer; a techie, his fiancée having broken off their engagement, takes a young, eager intern into his confidence. These stories trace Bangalore’s warp-speed transformation from a leafy backwater into India’s Silicon Valley—a place where Digital Age values clash with tradition, where British colonialism casts its strong shadow, and where visions are inspired and distorted by the forces of globalization.

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 :: Paper Cuts

Paper Cuts: Lighter Verse by Gail White book cover image

Paper Cuts: Lighter Verse by Gail White
Kelsay Books, May 2023

Gail White’s first new chapbook in seven years shows no abatement in her trademark formalist cynicism as she takes on cats, gators, Edna Millay’s goldfish, and God. She expresses sympathy for the snails found mating inside her garbage can “because on Friday nights / I look ridiculous myself.” If the heat is getting you down, some iced light verse is highly recommended. Gail White was born in Florida but has disowned it for political reasons. She currently lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where Cajun food is available at all hours. Her other books, Asperity Street and Catechism, are available on Amazon.

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 :: World Too Loud to Hear

World Too Loud to Hear: Poems by Stephen Kampa book cover image

World Too Loud to Hear: Poems by Stephen Kampa
Able Muse Press, November 2023

The poems in Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear confront today’s zeitgeist of dark social norms online or off. Our litany of individual and collective shortcomings is laid bare or castigated—as, for instance, with obligations we abhor, avoid, and “can’t wait / to pass down to the upstart generations.” The delivery ranges from straight or subtle to rants and execrations, while the settings range from historic and current affairs to the imaginary, dystopian, sci-fi, or surrealistic. This sui generis collection is fearless in hope, with a sobering take on our acceleratingly fearful national and global trajectory.

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New Book :: The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side

The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns into a Tunnel of Love: Poems by Kimo RedeR book cover image

The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns into a Tunnel of Love: Poems by Kimo RedeR
CW Books, January 2023

As its steeplechase of a title suggests, The Tower of Babel Tipped on Its Side Turns Into a Tunnel of Love is a book of oral and acoustic wordplay pressed to a precarious brink. These poetic experiments use alliteration, assonance, and related sound-devices to twist the tongue and tickle the eardrum while exploring matters of grammar, logic, and semantics. “Kimo RedeR’s writing explores the neuroscience of literacy, sensory overlaps between verbal meaning and oral flavor, occult aspects of the alphabet, and ecstatic, visionary states of language-use like graphomania and glossolalia.”

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New Book :: Excisions

Excisions by Hilary Plum book cover image

Excisions by Hilary Plum
Black Lawrence Press, April 2023

Excisions by Hilary Plum investigates the feeling—the problem and the syntax—of being on a threshold. If you don’t know what will happen next, you can’t yet say what has happened. These poems arise from states of precise unknowing, desperate imagination, inchoate emotion, encounters with mortality and power when they’re closing in but haven’t caught you yet. What is choice, given the terms of an ill body, survival in a grotesque empire? Tenderly and acutely, these poems examine the life of before and after: when something is excised from you, it was you, and you are what remains.

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New Book :: Broken Metronome

Broken Metronome: Poems by Connie Post book cover image

Broken Metronome: Poems by Connie Post
Glass Lyre Press, May 2023

Connie Post’s chapbook poetry collection, Broken Metronome, is about her brother’s journey and eventual death from Parkinson’s disease. These poems explore the difficult realities of the disease and its end stage. The work examines the closeness of siblings and how that bond is not broken, even when illness strikes. The poems delve into the many corners of the long goodbye and its aftermath. Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California from 2005 to 2009 and hosted a popular reading series in the San Francisco Bay Area in Crockett, California. She has published numerous collections as well as individual works that have received a variety of awards and recognitions beyond publication. Her collection Between Twilight was released in February 2023 by New York Quarterly Books.

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New Book :: Unaccompanied

Unaccompanied by Tracy White book cover image

Unaccompanied: Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum by Tracy White
Street Noise Books, June 2023

Unaccompanied: Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum, a graphic novel by Tracy White, tells the true stories of five brave teens fleeing their home countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guinea, on their own, traveling through unknown and unfriendly places, and ultimately crossing into the US to find refuge and seek asylum. Based on extensive interviews with teen refugees, lawyers, caseworkers, and activists, this book shines a light on five individual kids from among the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who enter the US each year. In stark black and white illustrations, she helps us understand why some young people would literally risk their lives to seek safety in the US. Each one of them has been backed into a corner where emigration to the US seems like their only hope.

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New Book :: The Strength of the Illusion

The Strength of the Illusion by Jared Moore book cover image

The Strength of the Illusion by Jared Moore
Ergal Press, September 2023

The Strength of the Illusion comes to readers from Jared Moore, lecturer at the University of Washing School of Computer Science, who has created a course on the philosophy of AI and regularly teaches ethics and technical artificial intelligence courses. In this debut satirical novel, the AI researcher, Ty, has discovered how to teach a machine to write. He joins a start-up, Opel, eager to bring on-demand literature to millions. As Opel makes overbold claims about how its writing machine with automate human connection, Ty is increasingly drawn to the fiery connection with his activist partner, Zora. As each flees from their own past, Ty and Zora enjoy passionate debates about how to create a future together. When Zora urges Ty to join her protest against big tech, Ty is forced to decide what he really values. Caught between worlds, Ty loses himself in the advice of his writing machine.

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New Book :: The Book of Redacted Paintings

The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian book cover image

The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian
Black Lawrence Press, May 2023

In The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian, the narrative arc follows a boy in search of his father’s painting, but it is unclear whether the painting exists or not. The book, a poetry collection, is also populated by a series of paintings. Some are real, incomplete, and/or missing, while most are redacted from reality. The withdrawn paintings concept is the emotional arc of the book, a combination of wishing one could paint the pieces he/she/they envision and the feeling of something torn out of a person due to a traumatic upbringing. A sort of erasure ekphrasis, to foresee artwork that was never painted. A Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series selection.

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New Book :: Hammer of the Dogs

Hammer of the Dogs: A Novel by Jarret Keene book cover image

Hammer of the Dogs: A Novel by Jarret Keene
University of Nevada Press, September 2023

Hammer of the Dogs: A Novel by Jarret Keene is a literary dystopian adventure set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas and filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley’s survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she’ll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school’s most powerful opponents.

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Books Received July 2023

NewPages receives many wonderful book titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these by clicking on “New Books” under the NewPages Blog or Books tab on the menu. If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!

Poetry

54 Poems, John Levy, Shearsman Books
Alone, J.R. Solonche, David Robert Books
American Scapegoat, Enzo Silon Surin, Black Lawrence Press
the book of redacted paintings, Arthur Kayzakian, Black Lawrence Press
Dear Beloved Humans: Selected Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski, trans. Piotr Gwiazda, Lavender Ink/Dialogos Books
Its Shadow Rakes the Grass, Bill Christophersen, Kelsay Books
The Ledger of Mistakes, Kathy Nelson, Terrapin Books
The Teller’s Cage, John Philip Drury, Able Muse Press

Fiction

All the Ways We Lived, Aida Zileian, Keylight Books
And Dogs to Chase Them, Ray Trotter, EastOver Press
The Black Hole Pastrami, Jeffrey Feingold, Meat for Tea Press
Black Licorice, Elaina Battista-Parsons
The Books Of Clash Volume 2: Legendary Legends Of Legendarious Achievery by Gene Luen Yang; illustrated by Les McClaine and Alison Acton, First Second Books
Doña Quixote: Rise of the Knight by Rey Terciero; illustrated by Monica M. Magaña, Henry Holt Books

Continue reading “Books Received July 2023”

New Book :: What Drifted Here

What Drifted Here: Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson book cover image

What Drifted Here: Poems by Barbara Siegel Carlson
Cherry Grove Collections, December 2022

What Drifted Here by Barabara Siegel Carlson is a book of intensely lyrical meditations that dwells in the silent, often overlooked or seemingly ordinary places where the mysterious and miraculous abide, and where amidst love and grief, we draw ever closer to the heart of the spiritual. The poems, some in prose form and dramatic monologue, take dreamlike leaps into worlds both personal and historical, glimpsing through the cracks something we can never wholly know but which leaves us changed.

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!

July 2023 eLitPak :: Now Available: The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee

Screenshot of Temple University Press flyer announcing release of The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee
click image to open PDF

The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee is the first volume to feature the author’s complete short fiction. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey unearthed seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee’s unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer’s Workshop M.F.A. thesis, “The Shattered Mirror,” and two tales from 2008. It is essential for readers familiar with Mukherjee’s work and new to her groundbreaking fiction. View flyer to learn more.

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New Book :: American Scapegoat

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin book cover image

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin
Black Lawrence Press, May 2023

American Scapegoat by Enzo Silon Surin is a book of painstakingly honest and chilling poems about America’s neglectful relationship with its own history. At the core of this reluctance to frame the past in its proper context is the fraudulent and fraught mythology that Black people are what America needs to be protected from. This extremely damaging narrative has been prominently embedded within the socio-political framework of American culture and continues to play an inescapably significant role in the Black experience in America. This timely collection looks both to the past and the future and fosters a deeply essential conversation about what it means to be Black and American in a democracy at war with itself and its humanity.

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 :: Layers

Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu; translated by Montana Kane book cover image

Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu; translated by Montana Kane
First Second, October 2023

When Pénélope Bagieu dusted off her old diaries, she found layer upon layer of cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking stories begging to be drawn. (Yes, seriously – this book is based on her actual diaries.) While she never thought she’d published a graphic memoir, Bagieu reflects on her childhood and teen years with her characteristic wit and unflinching honesty. The result is fifteen short stories about friendship, love, grief, and those awkward first steps toward adulthood.

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 :: The Last Gay Man on Earth

The Last Gay Man on Earth: A Photo Comic by Ype Driessen book cover image

The Last Gay Man on Earth: A Photo Comic by Ype Driessen
Street Noise Books, June 2023

In the photo comic The Last Gay Man on Earth, author Ype Driessen is a gay man living in Amsterdam with his boyfriend Nico. When asked by Nico to accompany him on a work trip to America, Ype must confront his deep fear of flying. While doing so, Ype finds he also has to come to terms with his social and sexual anxieties, his neurotic nature, and a serious case of imposter syndrome. What follows is a moving and deeply personal story, filled with humor as well as drama —surprising, honest, and unforgettable. Ype embarks on an adventure that leads him to his ultimate fantasy: being the last person on earth. Encouraged by a sentient robot vacuum cleaner called Chupi, he finds out what it really means to be true to yourself.

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 :: EtC

EtC by Laura Mullen book cover image

EtC by Laura Mullen
Solid Objects, November 2023

EtC by Laura Mullen explores contemporary American selfhood, socially mediated and economically motivated, within a system where we learn to see and represent ourselves as one marketable image among many, where “brand” displaces character, and the corporal and corporate intersect. Elsie is both a collection of tropes for femininity (her embodied history leaning heavily into illness and inadequacy when not floating on fantasies of power) and also a symptom of her country’s illness. Almost constantly laughing, she is – obviously – unreliable. But EtC blends persona into hyper-confessionalism to open a space for honesty – the hope is that the spectacle of Elsie exercising her fraught and limited freedoms in the context of cultural, social, and environmental disasters might provide a point of critique, in order to readjust the values shaping our experience so as to move toward ways of being in the world that might be wiser, kinder, more sane, and more real.

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 :: The Prumont Method

The Prumont Method by Trevor J. Houser book cover image

The Prumont Method by Trevor J. Houser
Unsolicited Press, August 2023

Staring down the barrel of a crumbling career and imploding marriage, “math hobbyist” Roger Prumont, unwittingly creates a formula that might predict when and where the next mass shooting occurs. He hits the road (where he’s joined by his unimpressed daughter) to test whether the Method could actually save lives. Except what if mass shootings are so ubiquitous now that his predictions are merely dumb luck? And what if he’s risking his own life to find out?

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 :: Dread Space Volume 2

Dread Space Volume 2 edited by Erick Fomley book cover image

Dread Space Volume 2 ed. by Eric Fomley
Shacklebound Books, May 2023

Dread Space Volume 2 edited by Eric Fomley is an anthology of dark military science fiction stories. Within these pages are soldiers doing their best to stay alive against otherworldly odds and unimaginable terrors. Twenty-two dark flash fiction stories from Wendy Nikel, Robert Bagnall, Liam Hogan, Dawn Vogel, Jonathan Ficke & many others. Shacklebound Books is a small press that publishes anthologies and collections in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Most of what they publish has “a darker bend to it.” Readers can sign up for their newsletter to stay up to date on new releases, submissions, and receive two free stories every month.

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 :: This Morning the Mountain

This Morning the Mountain: Poems by Judy Rowe Michaels book cover image

This Morning the Mountain: Poems by Judy Rowe Michaels
Cherry Grove Collections, March 2023

Judy Rowe Michaels’ sixth bout of cancer coincided with a deeper grief: her husband’s sudden death, the end of a forty-four-year marriage. Yet the poems in This Morning the Mountain, in their various turnings, reveal unexpected moments of comfort, resilience, even laughter: the pet cat’s growling capture of a broiled shrimp, “like the fierce hunter he was meant to be”; an arresting improvisation by a favorite jazz pianist; a prisoner’s empathic insight about a poem—“I guess cancer could be a prison too.” Ranging from villanelle to prose poem to irregular stanzas that surge, stumble, or sprawl across a page, these poems find the music to explore not only our natural fears of loneliness, insufficiency, heartbreak, and death but the celebration of love.

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 :: Ellie is Cool Now

Ellie is Cool Now by Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren book cover image

Ellie is Cool Now by Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren
Forever, March 2023

Ellie is Cool Now is the result of Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren ‘plopping’ an adult romcom chapter onto Wattpad, which resulted in a favorable readership and a Watty Award. The story follows TV writer Ellie Jenkins, who worked her butt off to put her nerdy, outcast teen years behind her. The irony being that she now works for a hit show about popular high school kids when she was So. Not. Cool. And she’s been offered the promotion of a lifetime—if she attends her reunion. But Ellie’s memory of High School Hell isn’t nearly as traumatic as the reality. No one at the reunion is what Ellie expected. Not her ex-best friend and not her secret crush. The only way she’s going to survive this whole weird ordeal is by fixing her bad high school karma, kissing the one who got away, and getting the hell out of Ohio for good. But Ellie’s discovering that in real life, she can’t just rewrite the script.

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 :: Things in the Basement

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke book cover image

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke
First Second, August 2023

In Ben Hatke’s graphic novel Things in the Basement, Milo is sent by his mother to fetch an errant sock from the basement of the historic home they’ve just moved into. It was supposed to just be a normal basement—some storage boxes, dust—the usual basement stuff. But when Milo finds a door in the back that he’s never seen before, it turns out that the basement of his house is enormous. In fact, there is a whole world down there. As Milo travels ever deeper into the Basement World, he meets the many Things that live in the shadows and gloom, and he learns that to face his fears he must approach even the strangest creatures with kindness.

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New Book :: Bert Meyers

Bert Meyers The Unsung Masters Series book cover image

Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master
Ed. Dana Leven and Adele Elise Williams
The Unsung Masters Series, June 2023

Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master is the fourteenth volume in the Unsung Masters Series and includes both a large selection of his very best poems and appreciations from José Angel Araguz, Jim Bogen, Victoria Chang, Amy Gerstler, Garrett Hongo, Daniel Meyers, Barry Sanders, Ari Sherman, Maria Simon, Sean Singer, and others. Edited by Dana Leven and Adele Elise Williams and published with financial support by the Nancy Luton Fund and the University of Houston English Department in collaboration with Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades.

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!