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

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

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

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

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!