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Discover news from independent publishers and university presses including new titles, events, and more.

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!

Book Review :: A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa

A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

A Practical Guide to Levitation brings together thirty of José Eduardo Aguaulusa’s short stories, some written just last year and some so old he doesn’t remember writing them. Naturally, there is a real variety to be found here; “The President’s Madness,” in which the president of the United States awakes from a coma speaking only Portuguese, has a postmodern flavor, and would not seem out of place in a Donald Barthelme collection. “Elevator Philosophy” and “The Tree That Swallowed Time,” however, are more akin to the light-hearted, acutely sad narratives of Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Agualusa is of Portuguese and Brazillian descent, hailing from Nova Lisboa, Portuguese Angola. Magical Realism is a clear influence on his writing. In fact, Agualusa’s literary idols pop us as characters; In the opening story, Jorge Luis Borges finds himself ambling around in the afterlife. Unfortunately for him, it is not the heavenly Library of Babel he was banking on, but an infinite plantation of banana trees. The grand cosmic surveyor has made a clerical error; Borges has been mistaken for Gabriel Garcia Marquez and finds himself in the latters’ heaven. The final image is of Borges eating banana after banana in hell (he finds no more appropriate name for another man’s paradise) with a wry grin on his face; Garcia Marquez must be in the heaven meant for Borges, and thus in his own sort of down below. A nod to Borges’ famously polemic takes on certain Latin American writers, perhaps. (Roberto Arlt, for example, was described as “an imbecile… extraordinarily uneducated” by his fellow countryman.)

The stories compiled here are brought together by abstract and metaphysical topics, with the backdrop of colonization and civil war an everpresent.

A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn. Archipelago Press, August 2023.

Reviewer Bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.

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.”

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!

Book Review :: Black on Black by Daniel Black

Black on Black by Daniel Black book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In his collection of essays Black on Black, Daniel Black takes a different approach to Blackness than many contemporary writers. Rather than focusing on the systemic racism so prevalent in American society, he takes that reality for granted, then turns his attention to a celebration of Blackness. He celebrates Black female directors, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the Black church, and activists and writers ranging from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison. Most of all, he centers his essays around self-love in the Black community, as he wants to spotlight the resilience and brilliance of that community, as his subtitle shows. He goes even further and celebrates LGBTQ+ Black resilience, as they battle AIDS, as well as those within and outside of their race. However, his book is not just unvarnished praise, as he also questions the institutions of power, especially the church and HBCUs, wanting them to be better. A superficial reading makes Daniel Black sound like Booker T. Washington—especially when he argues about the failure of integration—but a closer reading shows him to be more Malcolm X. He wants those who are White or straight or cisgender to see the beauty of Blackness and queerness, but he also wants his community to build on their brilliance, to grow even more beautiful.

Black on Black by Daniel Black. Hanover Square Press, January 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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.

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 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.

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!

Book Review :: Flatback Sally Country by Rachel Custer

Flatback Sally Country by Rachel Custer book cover image

Guest Post by Mary Beth Hines

Rachel Custer’s new poetry collection, Flatback Sally Country, tells emotionally resonant stories of people who inhabit a hard-scrabble, left-behind, middle-American community. Through a combination of blunt and lyrical language, employing well-crafted formal and free-verse, these poems reliably deliver both pleasure and gut-punch. Custer’s linguistic alchemy draws the reader in from the start: “All day the sky is a closed fist [. . . ] All day the pregnant air [. . . ] It’s the kind of day that crouches low / behind your fear.” From there, each poem is as solid and satisfying as the next. Flatback Sally Country’s characters and sensibility are reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s novels, particularly Lila. Like Robinson, Custer shares glimpses into the lives of people born into overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. Yet, despite violence and hardship, the book flickers with redemptive moments, with love. Custer’s writing of this place and its people is a testament to survival, and to what matters. Its stunning closing, “As for me and my house, we will” is a praise song and a fitting conclusion to this review:

“praise the Lord of porkfat and Flatback Sally. [. . . ] praise hurt [. . . ] the same sin again and again. [. . . ] praise heat [. . . ] praise good killing one’s own dinner and the skin / tearing free from muscle at our hands / praise desperate land”

Flatback Sally Country by Rachel Custer. Terrapin Books, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Mary Beth Hines writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Her work appears in Bracken, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso, and elsewhere. Kelsay Books published her poetry collection Winter at a Summer House in 2021. Visit her at www.marybethhines.com

Shop Local – Indie Bookstores

Ballyhoo! Books & Brew storefront photo

NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a great resource for finding local independent bookstores both in your own area and as you travel around. There is no better way to get to know a city than to check in with their local indie bookstore(s). For authors and publishers, our list is a great resource to find sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books.

NewPages.com currently lists only brick-and-mortar stores (no online-only, pop-up, mobile, comics-only shops, or shops with books as a side business). We offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help booksellers connect with book lovers, so you can find a lot of info for many of the stores.

If we’re missing any stores you know about, drop us a quick note!

[Thanks to our friends at Ballyhoo! Books & Brew for the lovely storefront photo!]

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.

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 :: 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!

Book Review :: Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Take What You Need by Idra Novey book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Novey’s novel alternates between Jean and Leah’s narration of their relationship, following Leah’s trip to Jean’s house now that she has died. Jean was Leah’s stepmother before she left Leah’s father, and he forbade any interaction between the two. They only saw each other once in the intervening years, and that meeting didn’t go well. Jean has been welding sculptures in her living room with the help of Elliott, a young man who lived next door for a time, taking inspiration from two twentieth-century female sculptors. She finds a freedom and solace in her art that eluded her for most of her life. Leah works as a translator in New York City and looks on her childhood home in rural New York with skepticism, especially when Donald Trump begins his campaign for president. The novel explores the divide between the small towns that have deteriorated over the past years and the larger cities that have thrived. Leah is suspicious of Elliott due to that divide, and the misunderstanding that takes place during Leah and Jean’s meeting is complicated because of the broader political climate. This work, though, also holds up the power of art—especially art from overlooked female creators. Leah’s final narration imagines a scenario that might exist, but might not. Leah says that, for the sake of the tale she’s telling, a number of events happen (which lead to Jean’s artworks ultimately ending up in a museum), even, possibly, one other woman who sees the sculpture (that might be in a museum, but might not be) and finds inspiration to create her own art.

Take What You Need by Idra Novey. Viking, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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!

Book Review :: Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy by Francesca Nesi

Imagine by Francesca Nesi book cover image

Guest Post by Eleanor J. Bader

Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy, Francesca Nesi’s first novel, is a paean to chosen family. But the sweeping, multi-layered saga is also much more than this. Seminal moments in world history – the late 19th and early 20th century anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe; the opening of the first Nazi concentration camp in 1933; the US civil rights movement of the 1960s; and 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, among them – form a vibrant backdrop for a story that probes what it means to live ethically.

Central to the tale are Emma Roth, a bisexual Gen X art historian turned Manhattan gallery owner; Curtis Mayland, an older lesbian who works as a realtor; and Catherine Kroeger, a straight 20-something heiress whose billionaire dad bears a striking resemblance to Donald J. Trump.

The three are brought together by Tom Aldridge, a sadistic, misogynist hedge fund manager. As they collaborate on a plan to avenge his predatory behavior, the story takes numerous turns that force them, and consequently, us, to imagine a world without sexual or political violence. It’s heady stuff. And while the novel contains a few improbable threads, all told, Imagine is an inspiring ode to creativity, community, sisterhood, and social justice.

Imagine: A Tale of Love, Art, and Anarchy, by Francesca Nesi. Chelsea Books, January 2023.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

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!

Book Review :: Hooked by Michael Moss

Hooked: Food, Free Will, And How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss may cause skepticism for his claim that the major manufacturers of processed food design their products to addict consumers, his book just might convince them otherwise. He spends a few chapters early in the work to set up that idea, pulling from research into drug and alcohol addiction, but also from the tobacco industry. The food product manufacturers often ended up owning tobacco companies, in fact. Moss also digs into evolutionary biology to explain why people have such difficulty resisting processed foods, especially those that include artificial sweeteners, which our bodies haven’t adapted to. He draws on a wide range of research and experts to support his argument, yet he makes that necessary science easily accessible to the general reader. Ultimately, he points out that we can be smarter than the food product manufacturers, and that we can use our knowledge of their tricks to make wiser choices when it comes to what we eat. While he’s clear that those manufacturers are interested in nothing but making more and more money, he provides readers with ways to see through their claims, allowing people to make healthier choices for their lives.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss. Random House, March 2021.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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.

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!

Book Review :: Wordly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs

Wordly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Worldly Things, Michael Kleber-Diggs offers readers the opportunity to tune to his point of view as a middle-class Black American: “this is what I witness; / I want you to notice it, too.” Kleber-Diggs shows up to the page with a direct address and his “full humanity,” allowing the reader to come to know him as a generous poet, an ethical person, a family man, and community-minded soul, seeking and contributing to a socially just world. His poems recount the great suffering caused by “circumstances / marginalized, disenfranchised, and unheard”—the zeitgeist of his time and ours. Because he “wanted it different,” through his poems, he offers “aid.” As Kleber-Diggs’s lungs “take in / send out—oxygen/words,” his poems help us “know how twisted up our roots / are,” and dreams that “we might make vast shelter together—” Selected by Henri Cole as winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Michael Kleber-Diggs’s haze-clearing, solace-offering, and love-illuminated debut Worldly Things expands the gamut, “the entirety of it”!

Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs. Milkweed Editions, July 2021.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

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.

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 :: 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!

Book Review :: Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi

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

Saving Sunshine, written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan, examines the complexity of familial and cultural identities in relationship to the various roles of each character. While the story is premised on saving a loggerhead turtle nicknamed “Sunshine,” that act seems secondary to everything else going on here. Pre-teen/teen twins Zara and Zeeshan Aziz are at that age where they constantly annoy one another, and parents Bilal and Rasheeda, both doctors, have hit their limits with the bickering. On a conference trip where Dr. Rasheeda is being recognized for her work in pediatrics, the twins have their phones taken away as punishment and must not separate when their parents are off conferencing. Pure torture! But the youths find activities to occupy themselves, ways to tolerate one another, and in the end, support and encourage one another’s interests. Layers are added to the story with flashbacks, represented in sepia-toned imagery, filling in details that help explain why the characters behave the way they do, and peeling back judgments even the reader may have made before fully understanding the whole picture. This work offers a treasure trove of topics for discussion with an overarching message of the difficult but important act of standing up and standing firm – both for oneself as well as for others.

Saving Sunshine written by Saadia Faruqi and illustrated by Shazleen Khan. First Second, July 2023.

Reviewer bio: Denise Hill is Editor of NewPages.com and reviews books she chooses based on her own personal interests.

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!

Book Review :: Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

Ephemera, by Sierra DeMulder, offers readers a “camaraderie among / women and death, ” acknowledging “the ecstatic briefness of it all.” In the first two sections of the collection, the poet focuses on her origins and roots, offering faceted responses to where she comes from: “the body / is a body for such little time.” The first section attends predominantly to “the women in my family,” especially the poet’s grandmother, who “waits for death.” The second section traces the progression of love the poet has known, from first love to queer love to lasting love, asking: “Who would sign up to love something / so impermanent.” The second-half of the collection focuses primarily on pregnancy—wanting and trying to become pregnant, ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and a viable pregnancy, and “waiting for our daughter.” These poems acknowledge “a thousand unrewindable moments” of grief “where all unfinished things dwell.” As these poems “leave… space for death,” they also offer “a blessing for each stitch.” In spite of or rather because DeMulder “give[s] thanks / for the loss,” recognizing life has “a levy on the road to” everything, she arrives triumphantly at the realization of an “intoxicating” and ephemeral “impermanence of enjoyment… everywhere.” Read these poems and “wake up back at the starting line, salvaged and full of hope.”

Ephemera by Sierra DeMulder. Button Poetry, June 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

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.

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!

Book Review :: We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White book cover image

Tyriek White’s novel We Are a Haunting follows three generations as they live in Brooklyn public housing. White shows the struggles of the family and the community, both in terms of the limited choices they have and the pressures that lead them to make some of those choices bad ones. However, he also portrays the joy so many of the characters find in the people who surround and support them, as they forgive old wrongs and work to make their neighborhood and themselves better. White also uses magic realism to explore whether his characters are fated for ill ends, as all three family members—Audrey, Key, and Colly—have the ability to see ghosts. Key crosses time, in fact, to speak to her son Colly well after she has died and he is still living, and she explains one of the family’s greatest problems: “Guess all of it stays with us. We’re a family of ghosts, of half-living.” Yet, by the end of the novel, Colly is learning how to make a life in a land that doesn’t seem to want him to have one, that views his and his family’s bodies as “reminders of toil and burden.” He’s learning how he can be more than a haunting to the place he loves.

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White. Astra House, April 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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.”

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 :: 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.

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!

Book Review :: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore book cover image

Plot is not the point in Lorrie Moore’s latest novel, If I Am Homeless This is Not My Home. Some people die, while some people live, and some of the living people have conversations with the people who have died. And not all the ghosts in the novel are those who have died, though some certainly are. Moore wants to explore what it means to be alive, to have a life, while also digging into mourning and grief and death, primarily through Finn, the main character. Finn’s ex-girlfriend, Lily, has struggled with mental illness as long as he has known her, and she has tried to commit suicide numerous times. Finn’s brother, Max, is dying of cancer. Finn doesn’t deal well with either of these situations, often refusing to face the reality of their mortality, but also ignoring the truths about their relationships. There are also interspersed chapters from letters written by Elizabeth, a woman who ran an inn in the post-Civil War South, a minor storyline that ultimately connects both literally and thematically to Finn’s story by the end of the novel. Lest this description sound rather bleak, Moore is as humorous as she always is, though more clever than funny. Still, she acknowledges the joy and laughter we must continue to find, even when—perhaps especially when—life and the end of it becomes miserable.

I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. Alfred A. Knopf, June 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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.

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!

Book Review :: Maths by Joel Chace

Maths by Joel Chace book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

In Joel Chace’s Maths, each page is “serving as a threshold” between the author’s “original writing” and “mathematical commentary.” There is a sense that by combining these two lexicons the author is solving for something akin to inclusivity and unity. Or, are the combined poetic and mathematical vibrations an assertion against whoever, whatever keeps languages separate? The focus of each page is complement and connection between components, creating a collaged page aesthetic that elicits engagement with the visual and the written. Each page is a “structural oddity,” a disordered space “the contents / of which entirely depend upon where / I take my stand” or, where a reader takes hers. Upon engaging the pages of Maths, I was confronted with a feeling of trauma being enacted, an “awful math” of catastrophic accident and “the odds” of irreparable destruction: “Less than one minute to tear open so many years.” There is something being made of the predictability of humans and numbers, of humans as numbers—a unifying treatment of discrete and continuous variables. Chace’s is a book “dedicated to solving / the riddle of its own existence.” In the end, “everything falls into place, each / beautiful number and function.”

Maths by Joel Chace. Chax Press, 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

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.

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 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.

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!

Book Review :: Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard

Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The central figure of Emily Stoddard’s Divination with a Human Heart Attached is a daughter who is sometimes the poet interested in story and belief, and at others, she is Petronilla, the spiritual daughter of Peter. Peter, as it is told, trapped Petronilla either by paralyzing her or by locking her in a tower to prevent her from being beguiled by suitors taken with her beauty: “which part of my body most worried him, was it the eyes.” The main concerns of these poems are father-daughter relationships, gendered power structures, and venustraphobia: “has there ever been a body / like that / that hasn’t been dangerous.” The poems also foreground trials of faith and tests of will: “how optimistically / some people use the word faith.” The daughter writing the poems struggles with relationships to God, to family, and to her husband. As the poems confront deaths of family members and loss of marital innocence—“proportions of grief”—they seem to ask who/what is divine, “looking for a God / to attach to it.” While God seems not to appear, Magpie does, conjuring the 16th-century nursery rhyme “One for Sorrow,” which suggests the number of birds seen tells of good or bad fortune. Also, as it is told, Magpie stayed outside the ark during the Flood’s rising waters and did not offer Jesus comfort at the crucifixion. These acts of divination, independence, and defiance seem to be what inspires the daughter in these poems. Through her, the poems arrive at two declarations: “I want more passion, less resurrection” and “Grief is the thing / that says the world is real.” If an “elegy is trying to tell the future,” then reading Emily Stoddard’s “gold-star” debut may well foretell yours.

Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard. Game Over Books, February 2023.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear. More at https://jamimacarty.com/

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.

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 :: 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.

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 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!

Book Review :: Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra

Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra book cover image

Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra’s first novel feels like it is over before it has even begun. I read it this morning over two coffees. By the time I finished it, I had eight, largely monosyllabic notes scrawled across the front-end paper; more often than not, my comments will spill over onto the half-title page. That is not to say that there is little noteworthy in Zambra’s book. Moreso, it is indicative of a well-crafted, engrossing story, a story in which narrative takes absolute precedent.

I find myself falling into Zambra’s stories without the teething problems that even the most ardent reader sometimes confronts in the opening few pages of a book. There is a mediopassive effect to Zambra’s prose. I think this ease stems from his self-contained, self-referential narratives; we are made to know from the off that we need only dedicate our attention to once-lovers Julio and Emilia, and that the periphery characters exist here only insofar as they reveal our protagonists. Those others could be fleshed out; they all have their favorite books, their ambitions, and secrets; they all go on dates and fall in love, but these details are not of any concern to the story being told. The narrative itself stands over the world like something tangible; when characters move on from Julio and Emilia, they move away from the story that is being told. In this self-contained narrative, this distance is equivalent to dropping out of the world.

Bonsai: A Novel by Alejandro Zambra; translated by Megan McDowell. Penguin Books, August 2022.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.

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!

Book Review :: When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar book cover image

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Fatimah Asghar’s novel, When We Were Sisters, tells the story of three sisters who are orphaned, as was Asghar. Their uncle, who remains unnamed throughout the work, takes them in, not to actually care for them, but to use the money from their father’s death to fund his get-rich schemes that never work. The girls fend for themselves, often going hungry for days or weeks, living in squalorous conditions. They also have to work through their emotional struggles on their own, leading to trauma and suffering, especially for Kausar, the youngest sister and primary narrator of the novel. She portrays the sisters as watching out for one another, referring to them as sister-brothers or sister-mothers periodically in an attempt to show their toughness and their ability to nurture one another; however, Kausar realizes late in the novel that her perception has not been accurate. Asghar is a poet—this is her first novel—and her short sections feel almost like prose poems, at times; she even intersperses more poetic sections from the point of view of “him” and “her,” the sisters’ dead parents. Given their childhood, readers should be amazed at how well the sisters are able to manage largely on their own, but readers will also spend the novel wondering about the misogyny and greed that leads to their having to.

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar. One World, October 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

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.

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