NewPages Blog :: New Books

Looking for something good to read this summer? See what’s new and forthcoming at the May Book Stand, including our six featured titles.

The poems in I Always Carry My Bones by Felicia Zamora tackle the complex ideation of home for marginalized and migrant peoples.

Peter Grandbois’s Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years was selected by Indran Amirthanayagam as the winner of the 2020 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize.

Please Plant This Book Coast to Coast by Susan Kay Anderson gives a voice to Virginia Brautigan Aste who was married to Richard Brautigan for a decade.

Post-Mortem by Heather Altfeld spans ages and species and cultures and pays tribute to the passing glory of this planet.

Tony Trigilio’s Proof Something Happened is a book of poems based on a legendary UFO encounter.

Self, Divided by John Medeiros is a memoir detailing a time in our recent history when the world had to reckon with the emergence of a seemingly undefeatable virus.

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.

If you’re always on the look-out for new books, be sure to check out our monthly updated Book Stand. This month, we featured the five titles below.

Christopher Citro in If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun “makes wildly inventive, exciting, vital poems.”

The Last Unkillable Thing by Emily Pittinos is a journey across landscapes of mourning.

In More Enduring for Having Been Broken by Gwendolyn Paradice, readers can expect stories of children abandoned, forgotten, and ignored as they survive the trauma they experience.

Saturation Project by Christine Hume is genre-defying as it “brings memoir and essay to the land of myth.”

The poems in Aaron Caycedo- Kimura’s Ubasute are detailed, elegiac meditations within a particular American family.

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.

A new Book Stand is here with great new and forthcoming fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books. Check out this month’s six featured titles below!

Joshua Cross’s debut story collection Black Bear Creek shows characters struggling to survive as they find ways to love and hope and fight in a mining town past its glory days.

Stephanie Dickinson opens a door out of Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s psyche in the poems of Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries.

In the nine stories of How Other People Make Love, Thisbe Nissen chronicles the lives and choices of people questioning the heteronormative institution of marriage.

Lily-livered by Wren Hanks “is a beautifully braided catalog of ways to live and not die.”

In her debut full-length collection of poems The Supposed Huntsman, Katie Fowley blurs the lines of gender, species, and self.

The Ways We Get By by Joe Dornich is the “bizarre, charming, darkly comic irreality of paid cuddlers and mean-spirited parents, where intimacy is commodified.”

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.

It’s that time again: a new Book Stand! Check out this month’s six featured titles, as well as other great new and forthcoming fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books.

Joe Taylor’s novel The Alleged Woman drops readers into Sumter County, Alabama where a woman’s car is found filled with ballots listing Joe Biden for President.

Set in the desert landscape of the México–U.S. border, Arsenal With Praise Song by Rodney Gómez yokes together lament and celebration, reproach and veneration across the borders of eras and nations.

Khalisa Rae’s poetry collection Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a heart-wrenching reconciliation and confrontation of the living, breathing ghosts that awaken Black women each day.

The poems in Steve Henn’s Guilty Prayer speak to the reader as Henn’s poetic voice “shifts tones, moods, and paces seamlessly between pages and between lines.”

In Mother Body, Diamond Forde’s poems explore the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother.

Young Blood by Sifiso Mzobe is a red-hot crime novel and a coming-of-age story, and it reveals the devastating violence and raw beauty of life in South Africa’s townships.

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.

Be sure to check out the first Book Stand of 2021! We start the year off with six featured titles, as well as other great new and forthcoming fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books.

Featured All the Rage by Rosamond S. King addresses everyday pleasure as well as the present condition of racism in the United States—a time marked both by recurring police violence and intense artistic creativity—from a variety of perspectives: being Black, an immigrant, a woman, and queer.

The fifth edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco is the go-to reference and guide for students, teachers, and critics filled with both common and rarely heard of forms and prosodies.

Benjamin S. Grossberg’s My Husband Would is at the crossroads of middle age, this book investigates love and family—both the families we are born into and those we create for ourselves.

The stories in Siamak Vossoughi’s A Sense of the Whole feature characters who refuse to believe that we are unconnected, refuse to not aspire to the notion of the human family across all manner of differences.

In The Shape of the Keyhole, Denise Bergman examines a community’s fear-driven silence and envisions the innocent woman’s days as she awaits her execution.

Women Speak: Volume Six edited by Kari Gunter-Seymour brings “offerings of survival and strength” of the fierce women of Appalachia.

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.

The last Book Stand of the year is here! As usual, we’ve featured five titles, and you can find other great fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books at our website.

Featured nonfiction Fragments of a Mortal Mind by Donald Anderson shows us how the disparate elements of our lives collect to construct our deepest selves and help us to make sense of it all.

Mckenzie Cassidy’s Here Lies a Father follows fifteen-year-old Ian as he uncovers the truths of his late father’s life and secret families.

The poems in Polly Buckingham’s The River People move through both dream and natural landscapes exploring connection and loss, abundance and degradation, the personal and the political.

Brian Phillip Whalen explores the loss of relationships in Semiotic Love [Stories], reminding us that for better or for worse, we’re all a little rougher with the people we love the most.

In Women in the Waiting Room, Kirun Kapur “makes an imaginative whole from Hindu mythology, confessions from a hotline for sexual abuse, meditations on a friend’s mortal illness, and the poet’s private pain.”

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.

Are you adding titles to your holiday wishlist? Find even more additions to pine for at this month’s Book Stand. Five featured titles, and books in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are waiting for you.

The Best of Brevity anthology collects 84 of the best-loved and most memorable essays from Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction with contributions by Roxane Gay, Ander Monson, Jenny Boully, and more.

Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it takes to recover from calamity and build a new life from the ashes.

The poems in Vivian Faith Prescott’s The Last Glacier at the End of the World are witnesses to the effects of climate change on Alaskan communities.

Åke Hodell tells the story of his artistic journey through the absurd, satirical, tour-de-force that is The Marathon Poet, originally published in 1981.

In A Woman, A Plan, An Outline of a Man, Sarah Kasbeer’s vivid descriptions of growing up in Illinois recall the coming-of-age memoirs of Mary Karr, but are written for the #MeToo era.

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.

A new Book Stand is here with new and forthcoming books you can order from your local indie bookstore. This month, check out six featured titles, as well as our usual selection of titles in a variety of genres.

In Ken Janjigian’s A Cerebral Offer, Harry Gnostopolos is struggling to keep his indie theater afloat. The solution? Join a subversive cabal of thieves, who have planned a heist that will rewrite history.

Larry Smith’s Mingo Town & Memories is a vivid and revealing portrait of a town and a way of life in Mid-America.

Prompt Book by Barbara Henning includes three parts to help jumpstart your poetry and fiction.

Hafizah Geter’s The Sadness of Spirits provokes strong emotions, leaving the reader with hope and admiration as the characters are awakened to the nuance and possibility melancholy can bring.

In Some of the Times, Gina Myers builds on the same base of social consciousness in previous work, while also pushing in new directions.

“The world(s) of” Vanessa Roveto’s a women “plural, adjacent, playful, shrewd, and constantly unfolding. Roveto makes fluid use of prose form.”

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.

It’s that time of month again: a new Book Stand is now up on the website. With the September update, you can find five featured titles, as well as a selection of new and forthcoming books to check out.

In the forthcoming I’ll Fly Away, Rudy Francisco’s poems savor the day-to-day, treating it as worship, turning it into an opportunity to plant new seeds of growth.

The essays in Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World by Jennifer Sinor offer a lyric exploration of language, love, and the promise inherent in the stories we tell: to remember.

Some Girls Walk into the Country They Are From is Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product.

Hafizah Geter’s debut collection, Un-American, moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration.

Joseph Harris’s interconnected narrative You’re in the Wrong Place presents characters reaching for transcendence from a place they cannot escape in a landscape suddenly devoid of work, faith, and love.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website and find them at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

Stop by and visit the August Book Stand at NewPages. This month, you can check out five featured titles, as well as a selection of new and forthcoming books to add to your to-read list.

The poems in Elsewhere, That Small by Monica Berlin are “intimate, contemplative, seeking out the smallest folds of language,” and urge readers to really listen to what they’re taking in.

The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy by James Kochalka and Sydney Lea follow the exploits of a worm who embarks on an adventure of rescue.

In The History of Our Vagrancies by Jason Irwin, readers can find “comfort, companionship, longing, and then suddenly an acute sorrow that somehow makes us want more of the whole tragic beautiful thing.”

Jon Boilard’s Junk City is set in San Francisco, following characters that roam in a shadowy world but, from time to time, find slivers of light.

The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith & Spirit edited by Leah Silvieus & Lee Herrick spotlight 62 poets of Asian descent. These poets create a varied and nuanced portrait of today’s Asian American poets and their spiritual engagements.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website and find them at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

This month’s Book Stand is now up at our website. We have five new featured titles, and plenty of new and forthcoming books to add to your to-read list.

The stories in Ancestry by Eileen O’Leary champion those who are tenacious in the face of life’s surprises.

Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle follows nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah as he navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides.

Far Villages: Welcome Essays for New and Beginner Poets is an anthology edited by Abayomi Animashaun and brings a number of established and emerging poets together to welcome new and beginner poets into the art and craft of poetry.

Deborah Jang’s Float True carries story and emotion via reflections on an immigrant family, history, metaphysical musings, and earthly perplexities.

The poems in T.R. Hummer’s In These States are haunted by precise and troubling questions: what, exactly is the condition of the body politic, and how does that condition affect us, both in large and small ways, in abstract and concrete symptoms, in dailiness and in eras?

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website and find them at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can see how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

This month’s Book Stand is now up at our website. Visit for new and forthcoming book titles, including five featured books.

I’ll Be Here For You: Diary of a Town by Robert McKean is made up of interconnected stories and takes readers to the hardscrabble western Pennsylvania mill town of Ganaego.

In Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black, Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman examine Cash’s fan communities and the individuals who comprise them, revealing new insights about music, fandom, and the United States.

Eric Pankey’s Alias: Prose Poems investigates the flexibility and possibility of the prose poem.

Demon Barber by Ruth Bardon explores the grace notes we celebrate in life, and the absences that makes those celebrations ache.

Kari Gunter-Seymour’s A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen explores beyond the boundaries of feminism, science, and spirituality, and renews a sense of understanding and discovery of today’s Appalachian woman.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Our featured titles can also be found at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can find out how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

We have a new Book Stand at NewPages. This month, find new and forthcoming book titles, including five featured books at our website.

Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems by Juditha Dowd  is an indelible portrait of an American Woman in need of rediscovery. The biography-in-poems focuses on Lucy Blackwell and John James Audubon.

Gerry LaFemina’s Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping pauses time, letting us examine the world with love and intelligence.

Back to the Wine Jug: A Comic Novel in Verse by Joe Taylor is a cross-genre title following Hades as he teleports to Birmingham, Alabama.

Frank Paino’s Obscura sheds light on the most obscure corners of history and human nature, a hagiography of unorthodox saints.

You’ve Got Something Coming by Jonathan Starke is the winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction and follows a down-and-outer and his young daughter across the country.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Our featured titles can also be found at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can find out how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

The April 2020 Book Stand is now up at NewPages! It’s important to continue supporting small and university presses, authors, and indie bookstores now by checking out new and forthcoming titles to keep you company at home. This month, we bring you five new featured titles.

Adelante by Jessica Guzman is the winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize, selected by Patricia Smith who calls collection “unerringly fresh and restless.”

Barbara Sabol won the 2019 Sheila-Na-Gig Editions Poetry Manuscript Contest with Imagine a Town, studying the concept of home and longing to belong.

Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway by Louis Kraft draws on the words and actions of those who participated in the events of the Sand Creek Massacre.

The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life by Roger Rosenblatt celebrates the art, the craft, and the soul of writing.

Danielle Vogel’s The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity creates a latticework of repair and moves in the space between the poem and the essay.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website, and find out how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

Until the End of Time. Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe By Brian Greene. Book Review, New York Times.

“In the fullness of time all that lives will die.” With this bleak truth Brian Greene, a physicist and mathematician at Columbia University, the author of best-selling books like “The Elegant Universe” and co-founder of the yearly New York celebration of science and art known as the World Science Festival, sets off in “Until the End of Time” on the ultimate journey, a meditation on how we go on doing what we do, why and how it will end badly, and why it matters anyway.

“Until the End of Time” is encyclopedic in its ambition and its erudition, often heartbreaking, stuffed with too many profundities that I wanted to quote, as well as potted descriptions of the theories of a galaxy of contemporary thinkers, from Chomsky to Hawking, and anecdotes from Greene’s own life — of which we should wish for more — that had me laughing.

How to Write Fiction When the Planet Is Falling Apart. New York Times Magazine.

Jenny Offill is the master of novels told in sly, burnished fragments. In her latest, ‘Weather,’ she uses this small form to address the climate collapse.

In 2005, the naturalist Robert Macfarlane asked, in an influential essay in The Guardian: “Where is the literature of climate change? Where are the novels, the plays, the poems, the songs, the libretti, of this massive contemporary anxiety?” How should we understand the paucity of the cultural response to climate change, he asked, compared with the body of work catalyzed by the threat of nuclear war? In recent years, however, planetary collapse has emerged as a dominant concern in contemporary fiction…

The climate crisis, Offill shows, is reshaping not just our world but also our minds. “Weather” joins other new fiction in transforming the novel of consciousness into a record of climate grief. “Sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined everything,” the heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” thinks.

Threats against the author of ‘American Dirt’ threaten us all. By Ron Charles, The Washington Post.

And in the current climate, hate quickly becomes weaponized. Gurba told Vox this week that she had received death threats after posting her review of “American Dirt.” And the ad hominem comments about Cummins flying around the Web have been brutal. From the start, too much of the discussion of this mediocre novel has been snarled up in identity politics — a poisonous tendency encouraged by the author herself. In a pleading afterword to “American Dirt,” Cummins confesses that she wished “someone slightly browner than me would write it.”

…But some detractors are determined to short-circuit such a possibility — or any discussion sparked by this novel. Fortunately, Flatiron remains committed to serious debate. Although Cummins’s bookstore tour has been canceled, the publisher has announced plans to conduct town hall meetings involving Cummins and “some of the groups who have raised objections to the book.” Let’s hope those discussions can move forward without bullying, intimidation or violence.

…The best critics of “American Dirt” are clearly motivated by a desire to defend the integrity of Mexican culture and the humanity of our most vulnerable residents. But in today’s toxic atmosphere, those valuable critiques have been drowned out by a cowardly chorus of violence.

A new Book Stand is available at NewPages! Visit for new and forthcoming titles in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, anthologies, and children’s/YA. Our New & Noteworthy section features six titles this month.

Americans Are trump by Randall G. Nichols explores the mindset of Americans who support our current president.

Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson “is part science, part lyric essay, and part research reportage.”

In HULL, Xandria Phillips “explores emotional impacts of colonialism and racism on the Black queer body and the present-day emotional impacts of enslavement in urban, rural, and international settings” in their debut collection.

Orison Books has released their fourth anthology, “an annual collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals in the preceding year.”

Someone You Love Is Still Alive by Ephraim Scott Sommers has been called “a gorgeous and dangerous book” by Jericho Brown.

Thirty-six writers share their worst reading experiences in What Could Possibly Go Wrong? edited by Richard Peabody.

You can learn more about each of these featured titles at our website. Interested in placing your book in our New & Noteworthy section? Learn more here.

“Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church” – Even as the American Christian right maintains its power and influence — despite a recent dust-up with President Trump — its children continue to abandon the fold. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that fewer Americans across the political spectrum are identifying as Christian, and the phenomenon is particularly pronounced among the young.

In “Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church,” mostly Gen X and millennial writers describe their disillusionment with the faith of their youth and their departure from their religious communities.

…But the collection’s overall framing seems to equate the bigotry and ignorance of some Christians with Christianity itself. As Schaeffer writes in his foreword, “The grim ‘witness’ of how Christians have behaved and voted is too heavy a blow for faith in magical thinking to survive.” Here his critique of the Christian right slides into an implied critique of belief (“magical thinking”). In the book’s final essay, Isaac Marion is even more explicit: “All religious belief is a game of pretend.”