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NewPages Blog :: New Books

Discover new and forthcoming books from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Book Stand.

4th Annual Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners Available for Pre-order

2021 Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners banner

Driftwood Press has announced last year’s Adrift Chapbook Contest Winners are available for pre-order on their website.

Jennifer Silverman’s Bath is set to be released in May of this year. 2021 contest judge Traci Brimhall had to say this about Silverman’s collection

Jen Silverman’s poems are baptisms of desire. They’ve traveled the world and come back to tell you the pleasure to be found there, the holes of each leaving, the way it is all “drenched in light and wine.” Economical in syntax and generous in image, Bath astonishes at every turn with its heart, its wisdom, its waters.

Melody S. Gee’s The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat is set to be released in June. Brimhall said of Gee’s collection

Melody Gee’s gorgeous poems offer both divine wounds and delicious consolations. At the intersections of the familial and the sacred, The Convert’s Heart is Good to Eat reminds us that what is created is also consumed. Beautiful, sensory, and aching, this collection reminds us that not all hungers are mortal ones.

Pre-order your copies today!

New Book :: Finalists

Finalists by Rae Armantrout book cover image

Finalists
Poetry by Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, February 2022

A double book (176pp) by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout. I mean, really, do we need to say more? How about some samples? From “Shush”: “A smart pop song / can convince a desperate person / to see herself / as a thrill seeker. // This is considered a job skill.” From “Flocks”: “As thoughts take pleasure / in forming, then break and / retreat.” From “Plague Year”: “What we share is distance: telephone poles / leaning this way and that, a wayward / crowd that staggers drunkenly / toward an empty, mauve horizon. // We can’t wait to see / who dies next.” This is not a book of poetry. It’s a collection of daily meditations to see us through. To what? Exactly.

New Book :: Subtexts

Subtexts by Dan Brady book cover image

Subtexts
Poetry by Dan Brady
Publishing Genius Press, February 2022

In an innovative form, Barrelhouse poetry editor Dan Brady plays with the methods of erasure poetry to create something entirely new. This collection of ten poems (in 88 pages) uncovers the networks of language and meaning through shifting layers of text. The poems focus on some of the greatest threats humans face in 2022—climate change, the surveillance state, America’s mental health crisis—and how our future hinges on our ability or failure to communicate.

New Book :: More or Less

More or Less by Susannah Q. Pratt book cover image

More or Less: Essays from a Year of No Buying
Creative Nonfiction by Susannah Q. Pratt
EastOver Press, February 2022

In 2018, Pratt and her family decided to buy nothing for a year: “We undertook a 365-day moratorium on the purchase of new clothes, toys, games, books, electronics, gear, furniture, housewares, and other things that fall in the general category of ‘stuff.’ For twelve months we purchased only essentials – food, toiletries, light bulbs, and a few pairs of shoes for my growing boys. We stayed out of stores and off of online shopping sites. We fixed things. We made things. We went without.” Winner of the 2021 EastOver Prize for Nonfiction, the essays in More or Less explore the degree to which we are defined, and confined, by what we own.

New Book :: Behind the Big House

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Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South
African American Studies by Jodi Skipper
University of Iowa Press, March 2022

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, all too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House is a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

New Book :: Crow Funeral

Crow Funeral by Kate Hanson Foster book cover image

Crow Funeral
Poetry by Kate Hanson Foster
EastOver Press, March 2022

Crow Funeral is the end result of intention and design gone off-script. What began as a fascination with a phenomenon of crows congregating in overwhelming numbers around one of their fallen, eventually became a collection that merges an interest in the neurological wiring of birds with a mother’s battle with postpartum depression and anxiety.

New Book :: Khabaar

Khabaar by Madhushree Ghosh book cover image

Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family
Memoir by Madhushree Ghosh
University of Iowa Press, April 2022

Khabaar is a food memoir and personal narrative that braids the global journeys of South Asian food through immigration, migration, and indenture. Focusing on chefs, home cooks, and food stall owners, the book questions what it means to belong and what belonging looks like in a new place with foods carried over from the old country. These questions are integral to the Ghosh’s own immigrant journey to America as a daughter of Indian refugees (from what’s now Bangladesh to India during the 1947 Partition of India); as a woman of color in science; as a woman who left an abusive marriage; and as a woman who keeps her parents’ memory alive through her Bengali food. Includes eleven color and three b&w photos in addition to the gorgeous cover photo.

New Book :: This World is Not Your Home

This World is Not Your Own by Matthew Vollmer book cover image

This World is Not Your Home
Essays by Matthew Vollmer
EastOver Press, March 2022

Winner of the 2021 Eastover Prize for Nonfiction, This World Is Not Your Home includes essays ranging from third-person accounts to notes, instructions, and extended meditations, representing many of the possibilities available to the writer of creative nonfiction. The title essay, written in the second person, tells of Vollmer’s growing up in rural North Carolina and catalogs the psychological pressures exerted by a little-known religion. Written using a variety of forms and points of view, these essays show Vollmer’s dexterity of the form.

New Book :: The Writing of an Hour

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The Writing of an Hour
Poetry and Prose by Brenda Coultas
Wesleyan University Press, March 2022
ISBN: 9780819580702
Hardcover, 88pp; $35

In The Writing of an Hour, New York poet and teacher Brenda Coultas considers the effort and the deliberateness that brings her to her desk each day. Despite domestic and day job demands and widespread lockdown, Coultas takes the reader on a journey in four sections; from a bedroom to an improvised desk over the North Sea, where she attempts to create an artwork inside an airplane cabin flying over Greenland’s rivers of ice.

New Book :: Horse Not Zebra

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Horse Not Zebra
Poetry by Eric Nelson
Terrapin Books, April 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947896-54-3
Paperback, 94pp; $17

This newest collection of poems from writer and Georgia Southern University emeritus Eric Nelson captures the essence of everyday life through the lens of having been there, done that, and paid close attention. The title poem begins, “When med students are learning / how to diagnose symptoms, they’re told / think horse, not zebra – the common, no the exotic.” And though the subject matter may seem common by their titles, “My Alarm,” “Mulch,” “By Campfire,” and “Parade,” Nelson is able to lift these subjects up to the scrutiny of our own experiences, shared through his own, in ways that, while perhaps not exotic, resonate a sense of wholeness and completion. And there must be a story behind why bears appear repeatedly throughout.

New Book :: You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair is in Braids

You Cannot Resist Me When My Haire is in Braid book cover image

You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair is in Braids
Creative Nonfiction by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
Wayne State University Press, March 2022
ISBN: 9780814349410
Paperback, 118pp; $18.99

From their Made in Michigan Writers Series, award-winning poet, essayist, journalist, activist, scholar focused on issues of Asian America, race, justice, and the arts Frances Kai-Hwa writes about building a new life with four children after a messy divorce. These twenty-seven lyrical essays move between personal and cultural topics from bossy aunties, unreliable suitors, and an uncertain political landscape and reflect on lessons learned from both Asian American elders and young multiracial children. Black and white photographs accompany some of the essays.

New Book :: The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore

The Neverending Quest for the Other Side by Sylvie Kande book cover image

The Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: An Epic in Three Cantos
Poetry by Sylvie Kandé
Translation by Alexander Dickow
Wesleyan University Press, February 2022
ISBN: 9780819580733
Hardcover, 176pp; $35

Sylvie Kandé’s neo-epic in three cantos is a double narrative combining today’s tales of African migration to Europe on the one hand, with the legend of Abubakar II on the other: Abubakar, emperor of 14th-Century Mali, sailed West toward the new world, never to return. Kandé’s language deftly weaves a dialogue between these two narratives and between the epic traditions of the globe. Dazzling in its scope, the poem swings between epic stylization, griot storytelling, and colloquial banter, capturing an astonishing range of human experience. Kandé makes of the migrant a new hero, a future hero whose destiny has not yet taken shape, whose stories are still waiting to be told in their fullness and grandeur: the neverending quest has only just begun. Presented in side by side translation into English from French.

New Book :: Girl as Birch

Girl as Birch by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson book cover image

Girl as Birch
Poetry by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson
Bauhan Publishing, April 2022
ISBN: 9780872333338
Paperback, 92pp; $17

In Girl as Birch, Gibson mimics the flexible (adaptable? too pliant? healthily, if secretly, resilient, then, finally, aligned) motion of a birch in strong wind, as it relates to the options seemingly available to her, growing up as a girl. The poems imitate in form the experiences they evoke. The leitmotifs of red, birches, mirrors, walls enclosing gardens, labyrinths as metaphors for constraint, recur throughout the book. Without being a manifesto, Girl as Birch explores female gender roles with both pliant and uprising imagery and action. Restriction and rebellion, silence and speech, appearance and artifice, passion and repression, the past and being present, buffet and embolden the speaker of these poems. The elastic and varied syntax, pace, music, and the use of rhetoric and wit express deft self-examination. The book moves from serial impressionistic poems of early childhood to discrete lyric poems of memory and experience and on to a sense of emotional, social, spiritual evolution, not resolution.

New Book :: All Rise

All Rise: Resistance and Rebellion in South Africa 1910-1948
Graphic History by Richard Conyngham
Catalyst Press, April 2022
ISBN: 9781946395634
Paperback, 248pp; $24.95

This collective work revives six true stories of resistance by marginalized South Africans against the country’s colonial government in the years leading up to Apartheid. In six parts—each of which is illustrated by a different South African artist—All Rise shares the long-forgotten struggles of ordinary, working-class women and men who defended the disempowered during a tumultuous period in South African history. From immigrants and miners to tram workers and washerwomen, the everyday people in these stories bore the brunt of oppression and in some cases risked their lives to bring about positive change for future generations. With artwork by Saaid Rahbeeni, The Trantraal Brothers, Liz Clarke, Dada Khanyisa, Tumi Mamabolo, and Mark Modimola.

New Book :: Imago, Dei

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Imago, Dei
Poetry by Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose
Rattle, February 2022
ISBN: 978-1-931307-50-5
Chapbook, 44pp; $6
Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

How does a daughter emerge whole from an upbringing saturated with religious fundamentalism? And if not whole, how does she piece together some kind of coherent self out of fragmented half-truths? The eighteen narrative poems in Imago, Dei bear witness to the emotional and psychological weight amassed from a girlhood fraught with vexed messages about what it means to be “good.” Narrated in third-person, lyric vignettes, these are poems about a daughter’s desire to be the son her well-meaning, but deeply damaged father thinks he needs; about an adolescent world filled with cute boys, predatory church leaders, Lakes of Fire, and broken girls who beg to be reborn; about the bad-girl specters of Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah that haunt her into adulthood and wreak havoc on her intimate relationships; about dirty dancing, Bible study, Lacanian theory, and crying after sex; and about what happens when a recovering evangelical becomes a mother to her own daughters.

New Book :: Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough

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Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough
Poetry by Kyle Tran Myhre
Featuring Art by Casper Pham
Button Poetry, March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63834-009-6
Paperback, 188pp; $18 / Signed $25

Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough is a sci-fi-flavored exploration of the role that art and artists play in resisting authoritarianism. Featuring new poems, theater elements, and Casper Pham‘s stunning visual art, the book follows two wandering poets as they make their way from village to village, across a prison colony moon full of exiled rebels, robots, and storytellers. Part post-apocalyptic road journal, part alternate universe ode to Hip Hop, and part “Letters to a Young Poet”-style toolkit for emerging poets and aspiring movement-builders, it’s also a one-of-a-kind practitioners’ take on poetry, power, and possibility.

New Book :: Halley’s Comet

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Halley’s Comet
Young Adult Fiction by Hannes Barnard
Catalyst Press, January 2022
ISBN: 9781946395559
Paperback, 320pp; $16.99

Halley’s Comet is the coming-of-age story of Pete de Lange, a white 16-year-old schoolboy, set in small-town South Africa in 1986. Pete lives a relatively sheltered life, primarily concerned with girls and rugby—until one January night changes everything. Thrust together with two complete strangers—Petrus, a black farmworker’s son, and Sarita, an Indian shopkeeper’s daughter—the trio find themselves running for their lives from the vicious Rudie, whose actions will ripple far beyond that fateful night. This era-defying friendship—sparked by a shared secret— challenges everything Pete thought he knew and believed. And when anti-Apartheid revolutionaries set their sights on the town, it will change the course of the three young people’s lives forever. Halley’s Comet is a story of friendship, love, change, taking chances, hope, a comet, and some pretty cool 80s music.

New Book :: The Loneliest Girl

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The Loneliest Girl
Poetry by Kate Gale
University of New Mexico Press, February 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6369-5
Paperback, 88pp; $18.95

Who was more alone than Medusa? Raped in Athena’s temple, transformed into a monster, and banished into a cave, Medusa may be the ultimate example of victim blaming. In The Loneliest Girl, Kate Gale creates a powerful alternative narrative for Medusa and for all women who have carried guilt and shame—for being a woman, for not being enough, for being a victim. She offers a narrative in which women are the makers of the world—in which women find their way out from the cave of the Cisthene and into a world where they determine their own destiny.

New Book :: Disruption

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Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa
Edited by Rachel Zadok, Karina Szczurek, Jason Mykl Snyman
Catalyst Press, September 2021
ISBN: 9781946395573
Paperback, 260pp; $16.95

This genre-spanning anthology explores the many ways that we grow, adapt, and survive in the face of our ever-changing global realities. In these evocative, often prescient, stories, new and emerging writers from across Africa investigate many of the pressing issues of our time: climate change, pandemics, social upheaval, surveillance, and more. Facing our shared anxieties head on, these authors scrutinize assumptions and invent worlds that combine the fantastical with the probable, the colonial with the dystopian, and the intrepid with the powerless, in stories recognizing our collective future and our disparate present. Disruption is the newest anthology from Short Story Day Africa, a non-profit organization established to develop and share the diversity of Africa’s voices through publishing and writing workshops.

New Book :: And If the Woods Carry You

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And If the Woods Carry You
Poetry by Erin Rodoni
Southern Humanities Review Press, December 2021
ISBN: 978-1-930508-51-4
Paperback, 80pp; $16.95

Winner of the 2020 Michael Waters Poetry Prize, And If the Woods Carry You takes readers on a journey to the brink of climate catastrophe; a mother grappling with her choice to bring children into an apocalyptic world sends her daughters into the woods of fairy tale as a rite of initiation. The woods carry her fears of extinction— devastating fires, rising seas, and the predatory dangers of girlhood—but also contain the transformative magic of love, interdependence, and renewal. And If the Woods Carry You roots into the wild heart of motherhood, where worry and wonder intertwine.

New Book :: Rasa

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Rasa
Poetry by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Marsh Hawk Press, May 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9969912-7-8
Paperback, 94pp; $18

Winner of the 2021 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize chosen by David Lehman, RASA is Joanne Dominique Dwyer’s second collection of poems. Lehman noted that “Joanne Dominique Dwyer is an exceptionally talented poet, whose mind in motion on every page in Rasa gives pleasure. The author writes that ‘Intimacy means profoundly interior — / countless sets of keys and cryptic codes.’ The book is intimate in this sense. The author celebrates the power of the imagination to multiply metaphors, as in ‘Tarzan Audade,’ with its striking opening lines (‘It’s never a good sign when the patron saint / of betrothed couples is also the saint of the plague.’) and ‘No Alphabet,’ orchestrated by the reiterated ‘If not’ that begins the poem. The poet’s fruitful exchanges with Freud, in such poems as ‘To Charette with a Man,’ ‘Patron of Embalmers,’ and ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does,’ delighted this reader.”

New Book :: On My Papa’s Shoulders

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On My Papa’s Shoulders
Children’s Picture Book by Niki Daly
Catalyst Press, May 2022
ISBN: 9781946395689
Hardcover, 30pp; $17.99

Whether it’s jumping in puddles with Tata in the rain, greeting the neighborhood cat on the quiet back streets with Gogo, or holding hands with Mama while rushing to make the bell, walking to school with family is the best. But nothing is better than walking to school with Papa. From high above, resting on Papa’s shoulders, all of the town is in perfect view, and Papa always says “I love you” when he says goodbye. A sweet ode to fatherhood and the special relationships children share with each member of their family, On My Papa’s Shoulders reminds readers that it’s not about where we’re going, but rather the people who walk with us along the way.

New Book :: BloodFresh

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BloodFresh
Poetry by Ebony Stewart
Button Poetry, February 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63834-008-9
Paperback, 112pp; $18 / Signed $25

In BloodFresh, a celebration of identity, Ebony Stewart reclaims her own narrative to speak against the racism and colorism she’s experienced while criticizing society’s treatment of women as sexual objects. This collection reaffirms the reader through storytelling as an open letter to retell, acknowledge, overcome, and learn new ways to use poetry as a coping technique. As BloodFresh reflects the importance of owning your own space, Stewart carves out a home for herself, her poems, and all of the readers who take refuge in her words.

New Book :: The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap

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The Cedarville Shop and the Wheelbarrow Swap
Young Adult Fiction by Bridget Krone
Catalyst Press, June 2022
ISBN: 9781946395665
Paperback, 172pp; $14.95

A lot of things can feel just out of reach in 12-year-old Boipelo Seku’s small, impoverished village of Cedarville, South Africa. The idea of one day living in a house that’s big enough for his family is just a faraway dream. But when Boi stumbles on a story about a Canadian man who traded his way from a paperclip to a house, Boi hatches his own trading plan starting with a tiny clay cow he molded from river mud. Trade by trade, Boi and his best friend Potso discover that even though Cedarville lacks so many of the things that made the paperclip trade possible, it is fuller than either of them ever imagined.

New Book :: Far Company

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Far Company
Poetry by Cindy Hunter Morgan
Wayne State University Press, May 2022
ISBN: 9780814349526
Paperback, 72pp; $16.99

In Far Company reveals Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. She offers conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman, and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan’s poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers.

New Book :: Fly High, Lolo

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Fly High, Lolo
Young Adult Fiction by Niki Daly
Catalyst Press, May 2022
ISBN: 9781946395658
Paperback, 79pp; $7.99

More fun is on the way for Lolo in Fly High, Lolo, the fourth book in Niki Daly’s Lolo series for beginning readers. Lolo is kind-hearted, creative, full of joy, and— whether it’s making homemade Christmas decorations from recycled plastics, or stepping in when the school play goes awry—she always knows just what to do to save the day! In this collection of easy-to-read stories, we meet Lolo, a girl who lives in South Africa with her mother and grandmother, Gogo. Charmingly illustrated by the author, Fly High, Lolo follows Lolo as she explores her world, and the new adventures each day brings.

New Book :: buried [a place]

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buried [a place]
Poetry by Sue Scavo
Anhinga Press, April 2022
ISBN: 978-1-934695-74-6
Paperback, 84pp, $20

Sue Scavo received her BA in English from the University of Cincinnati, her MFA from New England College and studied at Middlebury College’s Breadloaf School of English. She was awarded a writer’s residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont where she then became a staff artist for several years. She is co-editor/co-founder of deLuge Literary and Arts Journal devoted to the creative expression of dreams or inspired by dreams with Karla Van Vliet. As a teacher, Sue has taught classes on dreams and creativity; dreams and the poetic imagination; dreams, creativity and mythology.

New Book :: What Cannot Be Undone

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What Cannot Be Undone: True Stories of a Life in Medicine
Nonfiction by Walter M. Robinson
University of New Mexico Press, February 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8263-6371-8
Paperback, 176pp; $19.95

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, What Cannot Be Undone is Walter M. Robinson’s debut essay collection. In it, he shares surprising stories of illness and medicine that do not sacrifice hard truth for easy dramatics. These true stories are filled with details of difficult days and nights in the world of high-tech medical care, and they show the ongoing struggle in making critical decisions with no good answer. This collection presents the raw moments where his expertise in medical ethics and pediatrics are put to the test. He is neither saint, nor hero, nor wizard. Robinson admits that on his best days he was merely ordinary. Yet in writing down the authentic stories of his patients, Robinson discovers what led him to the practice of medicine—and how his idealism was no match for the realities he faced in modern health care.

New Book :: The History of Man

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The History of Man
Fiction by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Catalyst Press, January 2022
ISBN: 9781946395566
Paperback, 301pp; $17.99

Set in a southern African country that is never named, this powerful tale of human fallibility—told with empathy, generosity, and a light touch—is an excursion into the interiority of the colonizer. Emil Coetzee, a civil servant in his fifties, is washing blood off his hands when the ceasefire is announced. Like everyone else, he feels unmoored by the end of the conflict. War had given him his sense of purpose, his identity. But why has Emil’s life turned out so different from his parents’, who spent cheery Friday evenings flapping and flailing the Charleston or dancing the foxtrot? What happened to the Emil who used to wade through the singing elephant grass of the savannah, losing himself in it?

New Book :: The Distortions

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The Distortions
Stories by Christopher Linforth
Orison Books, March 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949039-31-3
Paperback: 194pp; $18

Winner of the 2020 Orison Fiction Prize, selected by Samrat Upadhyay, The Distortions offers a glimpse of a pageant of characters struggling to understand their lives after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Scarred by the last major war fought on European soil, the women and men of these stories question what such a violent past can mean in comfortable, capitalistic modern Europe. From London and Brooklyn and Norway, to the Blue Grotto of Biševo and the war-torn fields of Slavonia, this collection blends Yugoslavian and American stories of great emotional and geographical amplitude.

New Book :: Have I Said Too Much?

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Have I Said Too Much
Stories by Carmen Delzell
Paycock Press, December 2021
ISBN: ‎978-0-931181-94-8
Paperback, 180pp; $14.95

Carmen Delzell lives somewhere between Mexico City and Austin, Texas. She has lived in Saltillo, Coahuilla, and San Miguel de Allende since 1993 when she won a National Endowment grant and hit the road running. Her stories have aired on All Things Considered, Hearing Voices, PRX, Savvy Traveler, and This American Life. Most of the work in this first collection dates from 1980-2010.

Traveling With the Ghosts

Poetry by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Orison Books, December 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-949039-25-2
Paperback: 108pp; $16.00

In her latest collection of English-language poems, trilingual poet Stella Vinitchi Radulescu continues to explore the capabilities and limits of language itself as the nexus where thought and physicality meet. Gathering fragments of idea and image from a vast constellation of influences, Radulescu’s nimble, ever-surprising poems weave a tapestry that embodies what it feels like to be both intensely alive and knowingly transient.

Seasons of Purgatory

Fiction by Shahriar Mandanipour
Bellevue Literary Press, January 2022
ISBN: 978-1-942658955
Paperback: 208pp; $16.99

In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud

Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction
Nonfiction by Clint McCown
Press 53, December 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950413-39-3
Paperback: 162pp; $17.95

“As its title should suggest, it’s impossible to read Clint McCown’s Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud without laughing. McCown’s wit makes this the rarest of books on the craft of fiction: one that is as entertaining as it is instructive. And boy, is it instructive. It’s quite simply the wisest, most succinct, and most comprehensive overview of the ins and outs of writing fiction that I’ve ever read. How I wish it had existed when I first started writing; it could have saved me years of trial and (mostly) error.” —David Jauss

Ante Body

Ante Body by Marwa Helal cover

Poetry by Marwa Helal
Nightboat Books, May 2022
ISBN: 978-1-643621425
Paperback: 80pp; $16.95

Ante body is a poetics of [un]rest. A project that started as an exploration of how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease and grew into a critique of the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. Continuing her use of the invented poetic form, the Arabic, and integrating Fred Moten’s concept of “the ANTE,” Helal creates an elliptical reading experience in which content and form interrogate the inner workings of patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, and globalism.

February 2022 eLitPak :: New Titles from Livingston Press

Screenshot of Livingston Press' flier for the February 2022 eLitPak newsletter
click image to open PDF

Livingston Press, located within The University of West Alabama, seeks to promote literature, serve the community, and provide hands-on experience to University students. Coming soon: new titles from George H. Wolfe, Laura Secord, Judy Juanita (Tartt Award co-winner), Schuyler Dickson (Tartt Award co-winner), and Patricia Taylor. View website.

View the full February 2022 eLitPak Newsletter here.

NewPages Book Stand – January 2022

The first Book Stand of 2022 is here! Stop by and learn about this month’s featured titles below.

In Ante body, Marwa Helal explores how the psychological impacts of migration and complex traumas manifest as autoimmune disease as she critiques the ongoing unjust conditions that brought on the global pandemic. 

Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud by Clint McCown, has been called “as entertaining as it is instructive. And boy, is it instructive.”

In Shahriar Mandanipour’s Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions.

In her latest collection of English-language poems—Traveling With the Ghosts—trilingual poet Stella Vinitchi Radulescu continues to explore the capabilities and limits of language itself as the nexus where thought and physicality meet.

Your Nostalgia is Killing Me by John Weir collects eleven linked stories and questions how a gay white guy from New Jersey lived through fifty years of the twin crises of global AIDS and toxic masculinity in America.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

NewPages Book Stand – December 2021

The last Book Stand of 2021 is here! Stop by and learn about this month’s featured titles below.

In Animal Disorders, Deborah Thompson relates her own complicity in some of the disordered approaches to nonhuman animals, including such practices as pet-keeping, animal hoarding, animal sacrifice (both religious and scientific), magical thinking, and grieving.

Art Essays, edited by Alexandra Kingston-Reese, is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

In Chris Linforth’s The Distortions we glimpse a pageant of characters struggling to understand their lives after the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Through stories, secrets and memories experienced, read, heard, reimagined and remixed, Ra Malika Imhotep’s gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival, and self-possession.

Temple University Press has recently released Invisible People by Alex Tizon in paperback. This book collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

Pre-Orders Available for Ink and Main Anthologies

Covers of Books by Hippocampus anthologies Ink and Main

Books by Hippocampus has announced you can still pre-order their next two anthologies Ink and Main whose production and release has sadly been delayed.

Ink a part of The Way Things Were series which celebrates print media—magazines and newspapers—from the pre-digital age. You’ll find essays taking you from the newsroom to production. Each piece sharing a common thread of how people and publications built community, impacted change, celebrated local milestones, or mourned national tragedies. Contributors include Nancy Brewka-Clark, Richard Fellinger, Andrea Frantz, Timothy Kenny, Magin LaSov Gregg, Richard LeBlond, Nina B. Lichtenstein, Kate Meadows, Anthony J. Mohr, Judy S. Richardson, Marsh Rose, Roxanna Ross, and Laura Stanfill.

Main is also part of The Way Things Were series with a focus of celebrating small town America. It features twelve stories about the stories, services, and specialty shops that once ruled Main Street America. Contributors share how these family businesses defined and redefined themselves and how these endeavors evolved over time. Enjoy work by Lindsay Gelay-Akins, Joan Taylor Cehn, Christopher Cocca, Kimberly Ence, Nina Gaby, Linda Hansell, Melissa Hart, Kristine Kopperud, Dyann Nashton, Kelly Garriott Waite, Suzanne Samuels, and Melissa Scholes Young.

You can also purchase these anthologies in cost-saving a bundle! Get your copies here.

December 2021 eLitPak :: A Rollercoaster Ride of Suspense and Thrills!

Screenshot of Brother Mockingbird's flier for the NewPages December 2021 eLitPak Newsletter
click image to open PDF

In the new dystopian world of the Grays, you do not live past your 16th birthday before changing into a creature that is no longer human. Scout is humanity’s last hope because if she dies, the world dies with her. Black is the second book in The Firebrand Trilogy. Get the first chapter of Black FREE on our website.

View the full December 2021 eLitPak Newsletter.

NewPages Book Stand – November 2021

Get ready to add new books to your holiday wish list! Check out this month’s featured Book Stand titles.

Running Out of Words for Afterwards by David Hargreaves gives voice to cycles of desire, loss, and renewal.

Temple University Press has just released Invisible People by Alex Tizon in paperback. This book collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts.

The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant You Never Get It Back offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of main character Kate.

You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson is a queer, political, and feminist collection guided by self-reflection.

Also this month on the Book Stand, find new and forthcoming releases from Diode Editions including Dorothy Chan’s Babe, Shanta Lee Gander’s Ghettoclaustrophobia, and Kendra DeColo & Tyler Mills’ collaborative chapbook, Low Budget Movie.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

New Title :: Broadstone Books Presents New Poetry from David Hargreaves

Broadstone Books Classified Banner for Running Out of Words for AfterwardsLush and allusive, tuned to a background in translating Nepal Bhasa poetry, Running Out of Words for Afterwards gives voice to cycles of desire, loss, and renewal. Like the many rivers that flow through this book, David Hargreaves’ poems, in various turns, can be urgent, expansive, unpredictable, or calm, conveying the reader through landscapes both mystical and mundane, through illusions of selfhood, and the struggles of language to accept its own limitations. “A truly exquisite book of poems.”—Charlotte Pence

NewPages Book Stand – October 2021

No tricks this October—just some book treats! Take a look at which titles we’ve featured this month at the Book Stand.

Amanda Paradise by CAConrad is made up of memories of loved ones who died of AIDS, the daily struggle of existing through the pandemic, and the effort to arrive at a new way of falling in love with the world as it is, not as it was.

Ashanti Anderson’s Black Under layers outward perception with internal truth to offer an almost-telescopic examination of the redundancies—and incongruences—of marginalization and hypervisibility.

The short stories in Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments by Jackson Bliss are an exploration of not just mixed-race/hapa identity in Michigan (and the American Midwest), but also of the infinite ways in which stories can be told, challenged, celebrated, and subverted.

In thirteen chapters, Laura Kalpakian’s Memory into Memoir provides a lively guide for anyone looking to wrestle the unruly past onto the page.

Also this month on the Book Stand, find new and forthcoming releases from Diode Editions including Dorothy Chan’s Babe, Shanta Lee Gander’s Ghettoclaustrophobia, and Kendra DeColo & Tyler Mills’ collaborative chapbook, Low Budget Movie.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

NewPages Book Stand – September 2021

Stay cozy with your new favorite book. Look for it at the Book Stand. This month we feature three poetry titles, and two nonfiction titles.

The Breaks by Julietta Singh celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the stark binaries that shape contemporary US discourse.

Bernard Clay’s autobiographical poetry debut, English Lit, juxtaposes the roots of Black male identity against an urban and rural Kentucky landscape.

Hex & Howl by Simone Muench & Jackie K. White is collaborative writing at its most innovative, playful, and powerful.

Andrea Kayne’s Kicking Ass in a Corset maps out effective leadership that teaches readers how to tune out the external noise so that they can truly live and lead from the inside out.

In origin story, Gary Jackson outlines a family history of distant sisters, grieving mothers and daughters, and alcoholic fathers.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

NewPages Book Stand – August 2021

Summer activities seem to be wrapping up, which is great news—now there is more time for reading! At this month’s Book Stand, we have more books to add to your “to-read” list, including five featured titles.

In Daughters by Brittney Corrigan, the poet reimagines characters from mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and pop culture from the perspective of their daughters—daughters we don’t expect such individuals to have, as we don’t usually think of Bigfoot, the Mad Hatter, or Medusa as parents.

Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer could return.

New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims was edited by Kazim Ali who says: “This collection of voices ought to be symphony and cacophony at once, like the body of Muslims as they are today.”

L.E. Bowman delves into the intricate relationship between humans and nature, and how these often overlooked in What I Learned from the Trees.

Francine Rodriguez’s A Woman’s Story tells the stories of Latina women’s lives, stories that resonate on a deeply emotional level.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

NewPages Book Stand – July 2021

Are you taking advantage of summer downtime by getting some reading done?  At this month’s Book Stand, we have more books to add to your “to-read” list, including five featured titles.

The prose poems in Ariadne Awakens: Instructions for the Labyrinth by Laura Costas “rearticulate the myth of following, finding, losing and following again an invisible thread that connects body to body, body to soul, soul to soul.”

Marcela Sulak’s City of Skypapers “not only enact[s], but also celebrate[s] what it means to be alive ‘in a place where the flowers are old enough to have stories.’”

Matt Longabucco’s book-length essay M/W: An Essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain reckons with Jean Eustache’s document of political bitterness and romantic catastrophe from the standpoint of our own vexed present.

Edited by Meredith Stabel and Zachary Turpin, Radicals is a two-volume collection of writings by American women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the voices of Black, Indigenous, and Asian American women.

While the novella has existed as a distinct literary form for over four hundred years, Sharon Oard Warner’s Writing the Novella is the first craft book dedicated to creating this intermediate-length fiction.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.

NewPages Book Stand – June 2021

Spend your summer enjoying new books and let our Book Stand help you find your next read. This month we feature six new and forthcoming titles.

Chris Haven’s debut poetry collection Bone Seeker celebrates the mystery of what we take into our lives and can’t let go.

Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie’s Born in a Second Language is an exploration of African and female identity, navigating what it means to be in-between identities, languages and homes.

Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power by Judy Grahn illuminates eight dramatic stories exploring the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna’s power and relevance for contemporary queer feminist audiences.

Please Plant This Book Coast to Coast by Susan Kay Anderson gives a voice to Virginia Brautigan Aste, spouse of Richard Brautigan for a decade.

A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers edited by Kyle Schlesinger is the first collection of interviews with some of the pioneers working at the intersection of the artists book and experimental writing.

Miah Jeffra’s The Violence Almanac “is full of complex, flawed and wonderfully alive characters, written with empathy and honesty.”

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Click here to see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section.