$700k and another small press round-up
August 23, 2024 12:48 PM Subscribe
The Hawthornden Foundation has distributed $700,000 to literary magazines, presses and nonprofits this month, many of them presses affected by the SPD shutdown (previously). Under the fold: a roundup of forty-four 2024 titles by former SPD presses!
Roundup:
1. After the Holocene: Planetary Politics For Commoners by Gene Ray (29 Apr 2024, Autonomedia): Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Alternatives exist, but the capitalist classes are blocking them. This book argues that one such alternative, commoning, offers first steps on a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. (AK Distribution)
2. After We Drowned by Jill Yonit Goldberg (Anvil Press): After an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, everything in fifteen-year-old Jesse’s life deep in rural Louisiana is derailed. When he sets in motion a chain of events that leads his family into danger, Jesse must finally decide if he can save his loved ones by being true to his gentle nature, or if proving himself means adopting the cruelty of his father and his surroundings. (Asterism)
3. Alibi by Elsa Morante, trans. Anthony Barnett (1 May 2024, Allardyce, Barnett Publishers): Alibi, with posthumous appendix Narcissus, is translated into English for the first time. One of Italy's great twentieth-century novelists, her works include Arturo's Island, History, and Lies and Sorcery. (Amazon.co.uk; no US distro)
4. Alice Through the Working Class by Steve McCaffery, ill. Clelia Scala (15 Jan 2024, BlazeVOX [books]): Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched, Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg. Throughout McCaffery is faithful to Carroll’s own style, syntax, and vocabulary; the three can be sensed palimpsestically as can the original illustrations by John Tenniel in Clelia Scala’s forty-two delightful and at times mordantly witty visual collages. (Amazon; Asterism)
5. All the Parts You Haven’t Lost by Erica Hoffmeister (26 July 2024, ELJ Editions): A hybrid collection of poetry and lyrical prose that navigates a violent nosedive into early motherhood, exploring the depths of identity loss and self-perception outside of what a “good mother” is permitted to discuss. (Itasca Books Distribution)
6. And Yet: A Novel About Sex and Shyness and Society by Jeff Alessandrelli (16 Apr 2024, Future Tense Books): With its nameless protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his daunting interiority, And Yet’s form morphs, cracks, and continuously tries to repair itself while becoming a nuanced story of our times. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
7. Are We All Hyperactive? by Patrick Landman, trans. Peter Gillespie & David Jacobson (18 Jan 2024, Agincourt Press): Since ADHD was first classified as a disorder in the 1980s we have seen a startling increase in diagnoses for children, adolescents and, most recently, even adults across all demographic categories along with its standard medical regimen of nervous-system stimulants. How to account for the sudden appearance and rapid proliferation of this astonishing epidemic? How to evaluate the persistent claims of a biological cause based on inconsistent correlational studies? And how to rethink psychoanalytic theory and practice to better address the subjective instability that this “disorder” describes? (Amazon)
8. Atlantica and the Rustic by María Baranda, trans. Lara Crystal-Ornelas (19 Aug 2024, SplitLevel Texts): A luminous collection of verses documenting the earth in all its radiant, ravaged particularity. (Asterism)
9. Autobiography of a Book as told by Glenn Ingersoll (2 Apr 2024, AC Books): Those who fear the novel is dead or dying can rest easy. Between the pages of this revelatory revenant--the art form revivified with heart, humor, and layered perception--is a bildungsroman of a book, literally. (Amazon; Itaska)
10. Being Work ed. by Dorothy Dubrule (30 Jan 2024, Insert Press): A collection of essays by dance and theater artists that offer access to varied experiences of performing in live exhibitions. Contributors include: Mireya Lucio writing on being the work of Marina Abramović, Casey Brown on Maria Hassabi, Jessica Emmanuel on Xu Zhen, Kestrel Leah on Julien Previéux, Allie Hankins on Gordon Hall, effie bowen on Narcissister, Paul Hamilton on Bruce Nauman and Dorothy Dubrule on Tino Sehgal. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
11. Black Fire This Time, Volume 2 ed. By Derrick Harriell (Apr 2024, Aquarius Press): In this follow-up volume in the Black Fire This Time series, over 75 poets and writers come together on the ongoing theme of “Black is Beautiful, Black is Powerful, Black is Home.” (Amazon; Bookshop)
12. Bridges / Puentes by Alicia Genovese, trans. Daniel Coudriet (4 June 2024, Cardboard House Press): Bridges is a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events. (Asterism)
13. Brother Nervosa by Ronald Palmer (15 Apr 2024, Barrow Street Press): Palmer asks: What is the sound of my gender? Indeed, such questions of gender, sexuality, and queerness form the backbone of this new collection. (Amazon)
14. Complete Theatre: Oscar Mandel: twenty plays, forty-three fables (30 Jan 2024, Insert Press): 766-page volume of the final versions of Oscar Mandel's twenty plays, produced and published over sixty years. This volume also includes the forty-three mini-dramas of Mandel's much-loved Kukkurrik Fables. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
15. Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether by Maria Hardin (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): The hallucinatory debut by a member of Hekseskolen (“The Witch School”), Hardin draws on the twin fascinations of magic and visual art to craft sick sonnets as powerful as spells. Infected, inflamed, and gorging on language, this Anthropo-scenic collection manages to be both Baroque and utterly contemporary, ornate and slangy, a clutch of contagious eco-shockers guaranteed to make you weep. (Asterism)
16. Daily Life in China by Brenda Iijima (30 Jan 2024, Elis Press): Free verse and one-liners shuffle together in a dreamy dialogue. Or as one character puts it, “Meanings multiply when I cling to hope's slippery surface.” Very strange bedfellows are made in a process Iijima describes as using “kaleidoscopic time as a tool of feminist revision inside history's contingencies.” (Amazon)
17. Delphinium Gospel by Denzel Scott (May 2024, ELJ Editions): A triptych-structured poetry collection that explores the blessing of creation as a manifesting interplay between horrific grief and desperate longing in the aftermath of murder. (Itasca Books Distribution)
18. Don't Thank God, Thank The Crash Test Dummies That Came Before You by Frank Allison (13 Aug 2024, Game Over Books): Poetry that sinks the reader into the mythos surrounding the highest league of motorsport, Formula 1 racing. (Asterism)
19. Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal by Sarah Rose Nordgren (1 Feb 2024, Essay Press): Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. (Asterism)
20. From Here to There and Back: Three Short Stories and a Poem by Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz by (8 July 2024, Aztlan Libre Press): Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz (Red Feather) is an Esto’k Gna/Carrizo Comecrudo Indian from the Texas Panhandle city of Plainview. As a young child raised by his grandparents (his grandfather was a vaquero and his grandmother was a revered medicine woman and midwife), he learned the value of hard work by toiling in the cotton fields of North Texas. In 1966, when he was 18 years old, he joined the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, and was a fire-team leader responsible for the battlefield performance of a six-man unit in Vietnam. There’s a ray of hope in these writings. They are a cry against war. A cry for a true justicia y libertad for all. (only from the publisher)
21. The Ginny Suite by Stacy Skolnik (31 May 2024, Montez Press): A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress. (Amazon; Asterism)
22. High Priestess of the Apocalypse by Christy Tending (June 2024, ELJ Editions): Part memoir, part direct action primer, part love letter to the new world we’re collectively fighting to create. (Itasca Books Distribution)
23. Homeland of Swarms by Oriette D'Angelo, trans. Lupita Eyde-Tucker (8 Mar 2024, co-im-press): A searingly sociopolitical English-language poetry from an award-winning Venezuelan poet. (Amazon; should be available soon on Asterism)
24. Keep A'Livin' by Kathya Alexander (2 Apr 2024, Aunt Lute Books): Kathya Alexander’s debut historical fiction novel-in-verse follows the fiercely passionate, dedicated, and cheeky Mandy as she comes of age during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. (Amazon; Bookshop)
25. Leopold's Labyrinth by Mike Corrao (1 Feb 2024, Astrophil Press): You are a recluse residing in the digitally-constructed environments of the future—the cybergothic landscape of the 2020s. It is Sunday evening and you have begun your pilgrimage into a holy labyrinth, in the hopes that you will come upon new artifacts that radiate a simultaneously corporeal and astral aura. You are a miner. You mine this place for its meaning. (Asterism)
26. The Madrona Project: The Empty Bowl Cookbook edited by Michael Daley & Georgia Johnson (1 Jan 2024, Empty Bowl): A banquet of writers and artists addresses the ways our species sustains itself with ancestral foods and recipes, adheres to earth’s cycles, and protects our habitat of food sources. (Asterism)
27. midnight minutes by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, trans. Katherine M. Hedeen (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning anti-nationalist salvo. 2000-plus lines that opt for the night as homeland, resisting all manner of borders. (Asterism)
28. The Missing by the Emmy-award-winning author of Upstate (A/B) and Orphans (A/B), Ben Tanzer (21 Mar 2024, 7.13 Books): Gabriel and Hannah's daughter Christa is missing. Has she run away with her older boyfriend or has something worse happened to her? As Gabriel and Hannah wait for the police to find her, they're forced to confront the fissures in their marriage and who they've become as parents and individuals. (Amazon; Bookshop)
29. Oriental Cyborg by Aditi Kini (15 Feb 2024, Essay Press): Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. (Asterism)
30. The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton (1 Aug 2024, Delete Press): “About halfway through first reading The Real Ethereal, I discovered myself whispering. The words had moved from my mind to my mouth unbidden, for these poems, their serious music, their urgent address, demand to live in the air.” -Julie Carr (Asterism)
31. Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson (1 July 2024, Apogee Press): Poets Dyckman and Robinson invite the reader into the worlds of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin and Kiki Smith. Dyckman and Robinson bring a radical collaborative approach to this gathering: through their shared vision, contemplation, and creation, each artist's works are encountered as unique presences coming alive in fresh and unexpected ways. (Amazon; Asterism)
32. Season Unleashed by Anna Odessa Linzer (9 Apr 2024, Empty Bowl): American Book Award-winning novelist and poet Anna Odessa Linzer’s new collection of poems evokes the dramatic and subtle beauty of her native Salish Sea in intimate detail. (Asterism)
33. A Shape We've Yet to Name by Mya Matteo Alexice (12 Mar 2024, Game Over Books): Refusing to be embodied the way others expect, they transgress, shapeshifting into realms of the celestial, the ancient, and beyond in order to find “personhood unmoored from x & y”. (Asterism)
34. Sleeping with Bashō by David Trinidad (15 Feb 2024, BlazeVOX [books]): “You’ll see Bashō’s fireflies anew, this time as they shine on a toy Lite-Brite. Simply brilliant!”-Denise Duhamel (Amazon; Asterism)
35. Slow Render by Jess Yuan (Apr 2024, Airlie Press): These poems wrestle with images of spatial order and disorder within the city, the planet, the home, and the body. (Asterism)
36. SNOW by Lara Glenum (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): With singular bravura, Lara Glenum retells the Brothers Grimm Snow White as a rollicking exploration of a mother-daughter relationship that waxes murderous. In this darkly funny chamber opera, a teenaged Snow White and an Evil Kween trade deadly ripostes, locked in a brutal struggle for survival. Only one of them can be “the fairest of them all” and command the blessing of patriarchy and the legitimacy of the throne. The Janus-faced mirror ensorcels, Prince Harming starts riots, and the Dwarves are a cyber-militia on the payroll of the crown. (Asterism)
37. Substrata by Erik Smith (1 May 2024, Counterpath Press): The first monograph by Berlin-based, US American artist Erik Smith presents six seminal projects from the past decade of working in locations as diverse as Berlin, Miami, Denver, Krems, and Palermo, and offers critical insights into the nature of his site-focused, interdisciplinary practice. (Asterism)
38. Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu (23 Feb 2024, Host Publications): Full of lament and wonder in equal measure, these poems are maps that guide us to a place of intimate attention where we can hold what is most vulnerable and tender on this planet. (Amazon; Asterism)
39. Transit by Claudina Domingo (7 Feb 2024, Eulalia Books): Winner of Mexico’s Carlos Pellicer prize, a kaleidoscopic collection of twenty-four poems intricately entangled with the landscape, language, and history of what we now call Mexico City. (Asterism)
40. The Unquiet Country by Patrick Milian (12 Mar 2024, Entre Ríos Books): In this hybrid debut, Patrick Milian explores the lives of Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), arguably the most important composition pedagogue of the twentieth century, and her sister Lili Boulanger (1893 –1918), a brilliant composer who died young. Revealing his status as HIV+, he eruditely considers camp, the femme fragile, and the transformative nature of illness as the lives of these remarkable sisters and their music intertwine with his own history and voice. (Asterism)
41. variations in the dream of X by Ken Taylor (1 Jun 2024, Black Square Editions): a meta-theatrical project — a play within a play within poems. (Asterism)
42. War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY PsyOps by Jason Rodgers (7 May 2024, Autonomedia): It isn’t important to reach the masses, instead we want a growing lunatic fringe, schizoid anarchs who are uncontrollable and irresistible. (AK Distribution)
43. What Blooms in the Dark by Audrey T. Carroll (June 2024, ELJ Editions): These stories imagine worlds where nature is magic, queer love transcends universes, and relationships pulse with the fear of inevitable grief. (Itasca Books Distribution)
44. Wrong Heaven Again by Ryan Eckes (17 Sept 2024, Birds, LLC): Wrong Heaven Again, says the rabbit to the real estate. The poem won’t go away. You drive the car to work for an earth of its excrement. When the boss says “flexibility,” the grave keeps singing. The grave keeps singing, who built this city, that city? Who speaks for you when you speak? The latest apple ad says “let loose.” Okay. Light is a capital blown apart. No spoilers. You write your name down on the envelope and it disappears. (Asterism)
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Where I say “publisher only” I couldn’t find them on Amazon, Asterism or Bookshop, so these are likely presses that haven’t found distribution yet; note that Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links that benefit MetaFilter and Asterism links are not.
Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads), 7 (writing craft books), and 8 (SPD update).
*
Bonus! Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books of Fall 2024.
Roundup:
1. After the Holocene: Planetary Politics For Commoners by Gene Ray (29 Apr 2024, Autonomedia): Business-as-usual is leading to hothouse earth and mass extinction, but how to pull the emergency brake on the extraction and techno-acceleration regime? Alternatives exist, but the capitalist classes are blocking them. This book argues that one such alternative, commoning, offers first steps on a pathway to metabolic sanity and collective self-rescue. (AK Distribution)
2. After We Drowned by Jill Yonit Goldberg (Anvil Press): After an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico explodes, everything in fifteen-year-old Jesse’s life deep in rural Louisiana is derailed. When he sets in motion a chain of events that leads his family into danger, Jesse must finally decide if he can save his loved ones by being true to his gentle nature, or if proving himself means adopting the cruelty of his father and his surroundings. (Asterism)
3. Alibi by Elsa Morante, trans. Anthony Barnett (1 May 2024, Allardyce, Barnett Publishers): Alibi, with posthumous appendix Narcissus, is translated into English for the first time. One of Italy's great twentieth-century novelists, her works include Arturo's Island, History, and Lies and Sorcery. (Amazon.co.uk; no US distro)
4. Alice Through the Working Class by Steve McCaffery, ill. Clelia Scala (15 Jan 2024, BlazeVOX [books]): Witty, acerbic at times, and magisterially researched, Alice through the Working Class introduces its readers to a new cast of characters and encounters including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel Castro, Tsar Nicholas II and such historic figures as Prince Kropotkin and Emma Goldberg. Throughout McCaffery is faithful to Carroll’s own style, syntax, and vocabulary; the three can be sensed palimpsestically as can the original illustrations by John Tenniel in Clelia Scala’s forty-two delightful and at times mordantly witty visual collages. (Amazon; Asterism)
5. All the Parts You Haven’t Lost by Erica Hoffmeister (26 July 2024, ELJ Editions): A hybrid collection of poetry and lyrical prose that navigates a violent nosedive into early motherhood, exploring the depths of identity loss and self-perception outside of what a “good mother” is permitted to discuss. (Itasca Books Distribution)
6. And Yet: A Novel About Sex and Shyness and Society by Jeff Alessandrelli (16 Apr 2024, Future Tense Books): With its nameless protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his daunting interiority, And Yet’s form morphs, cracks, and continuously tries to repair itself while becoming a nuanced story of our times. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
7. Are We All Hyperactive? by Patrick Landman, trans. Peter Gillespie & David Jacobson (18 Jan 2024, Agincourt Press): Since ADHD was first classified as a disorder in the 1980s we have seen a startling increase in diagnoses for children, adolescents and, most recently, even adults across all demographic categories along with its standard medical regimen of nervous-system stimulants. How to account for the sudden appearance and rapid proliferation of this astonishing epidemic? How to evaluate the persistent claims of a biological cause based on inconsistent correlational studies? And how to rethink psychoanalytic theory and practice to better address the subjective instability that this “disorder” describes? (Amazon)
8. Atlantica and the Rustic by María Baranda, trans. Lara Crystal-Ornelas (19 Aug 2024, SplitLevel Texts): A luminous collection of verses documenting the earth in all its radiant, ravaged particularity. (Asterism)
9. Autobiography of a Book as told by Glenn Ingersoll (2 Apr 2024, AC Books): Those who fear the novel is dead or dying can rest easy. Between the pages of this revelatory revenant--the art form revivified with heart, humor, and layered perception--is a bildungsroman of a book, literally. (Amazon; Itaska)
10. Being Work ed. by Dorothy Dubrule (30 Jan 2024, Insert Press): A collection of essays by dance and theater artists that offer access to varied experiences of performing in live exhibitions. Contributors include: Mireya Lucio writing on being the work of Marina Abramović, Casey Brown on Maria Hassabi, Jessica Emmanuel on Xu Zhen, Kestrel Leah on Julien Previéux, Allie Hankins on Gordon Hall, effie bowen on Narcissister, Paul Hamilton on Bruce Nauman and Dorothy Dubrule on Tino Sehgal. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
11. Black Fire This Time, Volume 2 ed. By Derrick Harriell (Apr 2024, Aquarius Press): In this follow-up volume in the Black Fire This Time series, over 75 poets and writers come together on the ongoing theme of “Black is Beautiful, Black is Powerful, Black is Home.” (Amazon; Bookshop)
12. Bridges / Puentes by Alicia Genovese, trans. Daniel Coudriet (4 June 2024, Cardboard House Press): Bridges is a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events. (Asterism)
13. Brother Nervosa by Ronald Palmer (15 Apr 2024, Barrow Street Press): Palmer asks: What is the sound of my gender? Indeed, such questions of gender, sexuality, and queerness form the backbone of this new collection. (Amazon)
14. Complete Theatre: Oscar Mandel: twenty plays, forty-three fables (30 Jan 2024, Insert Press): 766-page volume of the final versions of Oscar Mandel's twenty plays, produced and published over sixty years. This volume also includes the forty-three mini-dramas of Mandel's much-loved Kukkurrik Fables. (Amazon; Asterism; Bookshop)
15. Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether by Maria Hardin (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): The hallucinatory debut by a member of Hekseskolen (“The Witch School”), Hardin draws on the twin fascinations of magic and visual art to craft sick sonnets as powerful as spells. Infected, inflamed, and gorging on language, this Anthropo-scenic collection manages to be both Baroque and utterly contemporary, ornate and slangy, a clutch of contagious eco-shockers guaranteed to make you weep. (Asterism)
16. Daily Life in China by Brenda Iijima (30 Jan 2024, Elis Press): Free verse and one-liners shuffle together in a dreamy dialogue. Or as one character puts it, “Meanings multiply when I cling to hope's slippery surface.” Very strange bedfellows are made in a process Iijima describes as using “kaleidoscopic time as a tool of feminist revision inside history's contingencies.” (Amazon)
17. Delphinium Gospel by Denzel Scott (May 2024, ELJ Editions): A triptych-structured poetry collection that explores the blessing of creation as a manifesting interplay between horrific grief and desperate longing in the aftermath of murder. (Itasca Books Distribution)
18. Don't Thank God, Thank The Crash Test Dummies That Came Before You by Frank Allison (13 Aug 2024, Game Over Books): Poetry that sinks the reader into the mythos surrounding the highest league of motorsport, Formula 1 racing. (Asterism)
19. Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal by Sarah Rose Nordgren (1 Feb 2024, Essay Press): Designed as a turn of the century women’s magazine that combines memoir, history, theory, poetry, and image, Feathers explores women’s complex relationship with birds through the history of feather fashion. (Asterism)
20. From Here to There and Back: Three Short Stories and a Poem by Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz by (8 July 2024, Aztlan Libre Press): Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz (Red Feather) is an Esto’k Gna/Carrizo Comecrudo Indian from the Texas Panhandle city of Plainview. As a young child raised by his grandparents (his grandfather was a vaquero and his grandmother was a revered medicine woman and midwife), he learned the value of hard work by toiling in the cotton fields of North Texas. In 1966, when he was 18 years old, he joined the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, and was a fire-team leader responsible for the battlefield performance of a six-man unit in Vietnam. There’s a ray of hope in these writings. They are a cry against war. A cry for a true justicia y libertad for all. (only from the publisher)
21. The Ginny Suite by Stacy Skolnik (31 May 2024, Montez Press): A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress. (Amazon; Asterism)
22. High Priestess of the Apocalypse by Christy Tending (June 2024, ELJ Editions): Part memoir, part direct action primer, part love letter to the new world we’re collectively fighting to create. (Itasca Books Distribution)
23. Homeland of Swarms by Oriette D'Angelo, trans. Lupita Eyde-Tucker (8 Mar 2024, co-im-press): A searingly sociopolitical English-language poetry from an award-winning Venezuelan poet. (Amazon; should be available soon on Asterism)
24. Keep A'Livin' by Kathya Alexander (2 Apr 2024, Aunt Lute Books): Kathya Alexander’s debut historical fiction novel-in-verse follows the fiercely passionate, dedicated, and cheeky Mandy as she comes of age during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. (Amazon; Bookshop)
25. Leopold's Labyrinth by Mike Corrao (1 Feb 2024, Astrophil Press): You are a recluse residing in the digitally-constructed environments of the future—the cybergothic landscape of the 2020s. It is Sunday evening and you have begun your pilgrimage into a holy labyrinth, in the hopes that you will come upon new artifacts that radiate a simultaneously corporeal and astral aura. You are a miner. You mine this place for its meaning. (Asterism)
26. The Madrona Project: The Empty Bowl Cookbook edited by Michael Daley & Georgia Johnson (1 Jan 2024, Empty Bowl): A banquet of writers and artists addresses the ways our species sustains itself with ancestral foods and recipes, adheres to earth’s cycles, and protects our habitat of food sources. (Asterism)
27. midnight minutes by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, trans. Katherine M. Hedeen (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s prize-winning anti-nationalist salvo. 2000-plus lines that opt for the night as homeland, resisting all manner of borders. (Asterism)
28. The Missing by the Emmy-award-winning author of Upstate (A/B) and Orphans (A/B), Ben Tanzer (21 Mar 2024, 7.13 Books): Gabriel and Hannah's daughter Christa is missing. Has she run away with her older boyfriend or has something worse happened to her? As Gabriel and Hannah wait for the police to find her, they're forced to confront the fissures in their marriage and who they've become as parents and individuals. (Amazon; Bookshop)
29. Oriental Cyborg by Aditi Kini (15 Feb 2024, Essay Press): Who is the Oriental Cyborg? asks Aditi Kini in this collection of notes, jokes, and queries into the provenance of a creature designed for labor, 3-D printed in the technoscientific post-colonies, modeled on old automata. (Asterism)
30. The Real Ethereal by Katie Naughton (1 Aug 2024, Delete Press): “About halfway through first reading The Real Ethereal, I discovered myself whispering. The words had moved from my mind to my mouth unbidden, for these poems, their serious music, their urgent address, demand to live in the air.” -Julie Carr (Asterism)
31. Rendered Paradise by Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson (1 July 2024, Apogee Press): Poets Dyckman and Robinson invite the reader into the worlds of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin and Kiki Smith. Dyckman and Robinson bring a radical collaborative approach to this gathering: through their shared vision, contemplation, and creation, each artist's works are encountered as unique presences coming alive in fresh and unexpected ways. (Amazon; Asterism)
32. Season Unleashed by Anna Odessa Linzer (9 Apr 2024, Empty Bowl): American Book Award-winning novelist and poet Anna Odessa Linzer’s new collection of poems evokes the dramatic and subtle beauty of her native Salish Sea in intimate detail. (Asterism)
33. A Shape We've Yet to Name by Mya Matteo Alexice (12 Mar 2024, Game Over Books): Refusing to be embodied the way others expect, they transgress, shapeshifting into realms of the celestial, the ancient, and beyond in order to find “personhood unmoored from x & y”. (Asterism)
34. Sleeping with Bashō by David Trinidad (15 Feb 2024, BlazeVOX [books]): “You’ll see Bashō’s fireflies anew, this time as they shine on a toy Lite-Brite. Simply brilliant!”-Denise Duhamel (Amazon; Asterism)
35. Slow Render by Jess Yuan (Apr 2024, Airlie Press): These poems wrestle with images of spatial order and disorder within the city, the planet, the home, and the body. (Asterism)
36. SNOW by Lara Glenum (15 Apr 2024, Action Books): With singular bravura, Lara Glenum retells the Brothers Grimm Snow White as a rollicking exploration of a mother-daughter relationship that waxes murderous. In this darkly funny chamber opera, a teenaged Snow White and an Evil Kween trade deadly ripostes, locked in a brutal struggle for survival. Only one of them can be “the fairest of them all” and command the blessing of patriarchy and the legitimacy of the throne. The Janus-faced mirror ensorcels, Prince Harming starts riots, and the Dwarves are a cyber-militia on the payroll of the crown. (Asterism)
37. Substrata by Erik Smith (1 May 2024, Counterpath Press): The first monograph by Berlin-based, US American artist Erik Smith presents six seminal projects from the past decade of working in locations as diverse as Berlin, Miami, Denver, Krems, and Palermo, and offers critical insights into the nature of his site-focused, interdisciplinary practice. (Asterism)
38. Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu (23 Feb 2024, Host Publications): Full of lament and wonder in equal measure, these poems are maps that guide us to a place of intimate attention where we can hold what is most vulnerable and tender on this planet. (Amazon; Asterism)
39. Transit by Claudina Domingo (7 Feb 2024, Eulalia Books): Winner of Mexico’s Carlos Pellicer prize, a kaleidoscopic collection of twenty-four poems intricately entangled with the landscape, language, and history of what we now call Mexico City. (Asterism)
40. The Unquiet Country by Patrick Milian (12 Mar 2024, Entre Ríos Books): In this hybrid debut, Patrick Milian explores the lives of Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), arguably the most important composition pedagogue of the twentieth century, and her sister Lili Boulanger (1893 –1918), a brilliant composer who died young. Revealing his status as HIV+, he eruditely considers camp, the femme fragile, and the transformative nature of illness as the lives of these remarkable sisters and their music intertwine with his own history and voice. (Asterism)
41. variations in the dream of X by Ken Taylor (1 Jun 2024, Black Square Editions): a meta-theatrical project — a play within a play within poems. (Asterism)
42. War of Dreams: A Field Guide to DIY PsyOps by Jason Rodgers (7 May 2024, Autonomedia): It isn’t important to reach the masses, instead we want a growing lunatic fringe, schizoid anarchs who are uncontrollable and irresistible. (AK Distribution)
43. What Blooms in the Dark by Audrey T. Carroll (June 2024, ELJ Editions): These stories imagine worlds where nature is magic, queer love transcends universes, and relationships pulse with the fear of inevitable grief. (Itasca Books Distribution)
44. Wrong Heaven Again by Ryan Eckes (17 Sept 2024, Birds, LLC): Wrong Heaven Again, says the rabbit to the real estate. The poem won’t go away. You drive the car to work for an earth of its excrement. When the boss says “flexibility,” the grave keeps singing. The grave keeps singing, who built this city, that city? Who speaks for you when you speak? The latest apple ad says “let loose.” Okay. Light is a capital blown apart. No spoilers. You write your name down on the envelope and it disappears. (Asterism)
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Where I say “publisher only” I couldn’t find them on Amazon, Asterism or Bookshop, so these are likely presses that haven’t found distribution yet; note that Amazon and Bookshop are affiliate links that benefit MetaFilter and Asterism links are not.
Previous roundups: 1 (no theme), 2 (challenging work), 3 (no theme), 4 (Pride), 5 (Juneteenth), 6 (beach reads), 7 (writing craft books), and 8 (SPD update).
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Bonus! Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books of Fall 2024.
Congratulations, rabbitbookworm!
posted by joannemerriam at 1:22 PM on August 23
posted by joannemerriam at 1:22 PM on August 23
Rabbitbookworm, that is fantastic news!
Also, if anyone is down for an Elsa Morante "Alibi" book club (I loved Lies & Sorcery) I'm here for it!
posted by thivaia at 2:01 PM on August 23 [1 favorite]
Also, if anyone is down for an Elsa Morante "Alibi" book club (I loved Lies & Sorcery) I'm here for it!
posted by thivaia at 2:01 PM on August 23 [1 favorite]
I've been trying to read more books that don't have pictures, and many of these options sound just incredible!
posted by rhizome at 1:26 AM on August 24 [1 favorite]
posted by rhizome at 1:26 AM on August 24 [1 favorite]
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posted by rabbitbookworm at 1:12 PM on August 23 [5 favorites]