Petrochemical Nocturne: A Novel by Amos Jasper Wright IV
Livingston Press, August 2023

The Mississippi River. HAZMAT. Boxing. Suicide by cop. New Orleans Saints football. Chemical explosions. The Angola Prison rodeo. Chlorine gas ghost ships. Through these symbols and themes, readers learn about Toussaint and his formative experiences in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “Petrochemical Nocturne” results in an indictment of what Toussasint describes as “that dystopian haunted carnival cruise line called America.” A discursive and often surreal exploration of environmental racism, southern history, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, inter-generational trauma, and climate change, Petrochemical Nocturne is both paean and eulogy for the formerly enslaved communities of Cancer Alley, the erasure of an entire people from a poisoned landscape.

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All We Could Have Been and More: Stories by Joshua Shaw
Livingston Press, July 2023

Tartt First Fiction Award winner, All We Could Have Been and More by Joshua Shaw features stories about zombie ant fungus and self-conscious crash test dummies, which surely conveys to readers the dark humor focus of this collection. The author comments, “A lot of the stuff I’m publishing these days in philosophy involves defenses of pessimism and misanthropy. I credit the last few elections for inspiring this new research line.”

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!

Secret Agent Gals by Richard Gid Powers
Livingston Press, February 2023

Called “the female version of a bromance,” Richard Gid Powers has created a world in which quick-witted Secret Agent Gals outwit bumbling Nazi assassins, boneheaded Communist spies, and slick Irish manure cart bombers, and must rescue dimwitted FBI Directors, fellow secret agents, crazy Presidents and First ladies from the dumb messes they get themselves into. Peggy Guggenheim and Baroness Hilla Rebay, both famous art collector/museum directors, are recruited by the FBI to plow through the painters the two women have been helping escape the Nazis, to see if there are any spies. That’s their start as counterspies, and how the story begins. In the end, they win the war and have lots of laughs doing it. They go through Special Agent basic training, bond with each other against their drill sergeant, learn to march, tie knots, practice jabs and jiu-jitsu, shoot John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd targets, work their Secret Decoder rings and get fitted for designer G-girl suits. The plot starts to get complicated à la Indian uprisings, revolts in the Japanese-American internment camps, and Irish terrorists. The Nazis kidnap General Eisenhower’s girlfriend, and Ike refuses to invade France until he gets her back. The G-Girls are sent to England, where they meet James Bond’s dad, Jonquil “Junk” Bond. Ike’s girlfriend is also a secret agent, in fact almost everyone in the book is a secret agent, and she has a plan to rub hair remover on Hitler’s moustache and steal his mojo. There is a supervillain, who is, by turns, a rogue FBI agent, an atomic spy, a Nazi traitor, an agitator at the Japanese-American internment camps, and finally head of a terrorist campaign by rebel FBI agents disguised as Irish manure cart bombers to kill Hoover and take over the Bureau. These Gals have seriously got their hands full, which makes for a rollicking read!

New from Livingston Press! Aftershock by George H. Wolfe is a novel about GI’s returning from WWII to about-face and enter colleges under the GI Bill. Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor by Patricia Taylor is a story collection about nursing, its joys, frustrations, and heartbreak. See flyer for more details or visit website.

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Yazoo Clay
Stories by Schuyler Dickson
Livingston Press, August 2022

Co-winner of the Tartt First Fiction Award, Yazoo Clay is a collection of character-driven deep south stories from writer and regenerative farmer Schuyler Dickson. Experimental, humorous, and thought-provoking, this is a book “about the collapsing floor of living.” Dickson earned a BA in Southern Studies from Ole Miss and his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern. Readers can find an excerpt from the book here: “Happy Birthday.”

Zero to Ten: Nursing on the Floor
Stories by Patricia Taylor
Livingston Press, July 2022

What’s your pain from zero to ten? How fast can you run on the floor, from zero to ten? How soon will you have burnout, from zero to ten? In this collection, Patricia “Tricia” Taylor takes over forty years of nursing experience in four southern states in the U.S. and weaves them into “mostly fictional” stories that move from joy to frustration to devastation. Taylor’s experiences included cancer nursing, hospice, med-surg, pediatrics, newborn nursery, and teaching psychiatric nursing in a nursing program for twenty years. Taylor then returned to med-surg, ER, quality control nursing, and finally psychiatric nursing, until her recent retirement. This collection highlights a career that was usually exhausting, sometimes tragic, frequently infuriating, occasionally funny, and consistently rewarding.