Like every year, there’s much to dread about 2018, and to fight against, but, fortunately there’s much to look forward to, including powerful works of art from small presses. Below you’ll find the small press books I’m most excited to see published this year. Following this, you’ll find lists from stellar writers Kate Angus, Kurt Baumeister, Alex Behr, Jeff Bursey, Lisa Chen, Tobias Carroll, Brian Evenson, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Meghan Lamb, Janice Lee, Christina Milletti, Michael Noll, David Leo Rice, Kevin Sampsell, Jason Teal, Dan Wickett, James Yeh, and Leni Zumas. Thanks to them, and thanks, too, to stellar writers Lynn Crawford, Robert Dean, Annie DeWitt, Joe Pan, Dawn Raffel, Jacob Singer, Joanna C. Valente, and Marjorie Welish for giving me the heads-up on other books.
January
Joanna C. Valente alerted me to Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus (Noemi Press), about which National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky writes: “Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus summons what cannot be said while finding a way to articulate, with ferocity and exuberance and a clear and brutal vision, the violence of misogynistic systems and cultures and the ways in which they devour and destroy their inhabitants. It’s not just that this book doesn’t waste words. It goes further than that. Each sound, line, breath is charged with an energy that is explosive. Indictus lays all its cards on the table so there are no doubts about just how high the stakes here are: ‘I didn’t mean to assemble my whole career on lies, so now I blast holes in the men.” Yet in this world of broken bodies, Eilbert’s tenacity, her sheer drive to get to the end of a thought, to get the words onto the page, conveys a demand: to be honest, to resist, to live.’
Timmy Reed’s Kill Me Now (Counterpoint), which has received praise from Madison Smartt Bell, Laura van den Berg, and Amber Sparks; and about which Kirkus Reviews writes: “Reed convincingly writes a three-dimensional teenager whose self-consciousness, emotions, and hormones threaten to crush him . . . A coming-of-age story capturing male adolescence in all its disgusting, irrational, and messy glory.”
February
I read Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum (Calamari Press) a few years ago, and I was impressed by the overwhelming sense of anomie, dread, and sadness in its pages, all expressed with a commanding economic style, which is why I’m very much looking forward to read Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press).
Barbara Browning and Sébastien Régnier’s Who the Hell Is Imre Lodbrog? (Outpost19): “A very true love story, told in counterpoint, about friendship, politics, and rock ‘n’ roll.”
March
April
Nikhil Singh’s Taty Went West (Rosarium Publishing). Billy Kahora writes: “Savvy, ultra-modern, Taty straddles the mediated realities of our own continent and the groundbreaking possibilities of our ongoing universal imaginaries.”
Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press): From the publisher: “Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.”
Eduardo Berti’s The Imagined Land (Deep Vellum), translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Coombe. From the publisher: “Evoking Calvino & Yan Lianke, Oulipo member Berti paints a classic tragic love story with sumptuous detail in pre-revolutionary China.”
Winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields (Fence Books) is “an antidote to the normalization wielded upon us by narrative,…a recursive disorientation of stories starting over and over again, without conclusion.”
May
June
Ófeigur Sigurðsson’s Öræfi’s The Wasteland (Deep Vellum), translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith. From the publisher: “An ambitious epic novel showcases the brutal elements of human nature and mother nature alike in Iceland’s most desolate region.”
July
Edward J. Delaney’s Follow the Sun (Turtle Point Press), about which Phillip Lopate writes: “In this pungent, gritty novel, hardscrabble lives are rendered with utter realism, terrific dialogue, and a slow-burning tenderness for all concerned. Delaney’s knowledge of this milieu is never in doubt, and his control of the material is masterful.”
August
September
Very much looking forward to the publication of Paula Regossy (Pressed Press), Lynn Crawford’s forthcoming innovative hybrid book, which I was lucky to have read in manuscript.
I’m a massive fan of Thalia Field’s writing, and I loved A Prank of Georges (Essay Press), her engagingly experimental collaboration with Abigail Lang, so I’m looking forward to their follow-up: Legends of Janus / Leave to Remain (Dalkey Archive), which finds Field and Lange “weav[ing] together text and image, poetry and essay, Peter Lorre and Albert Einstein, Santa Claus and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. As the titles imply, this is a book fascinated by double-ness, duplicity, doubles entendres, two-facedness, ambiguity, and ambivalence, composed by two writers whose ludic sense of language makes every page a delight.”
October
Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s White Dancing Elephants, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize. From the publisher: “In luminous, vivid, searingly honest prose, White Dancing Elephants tells stories that have not been heard before, centering on the experiences of diverse women of color, cunning, bold and resolute, who face down sexual harassment and racial violence, as well as the violence women inflict upon each other, including in intimate relationships. Combining the speculative elements and wry psychological realism beloved by readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood, Danzy Senna and Sandra Cisneros, this collection introduces Chaya Bhuvaneswar as an original and memorable new voice.”
Jeffrey Yang’s Hey, Marfa (Graywolf) is a “lyrical, anthropological investigation into history, culture, and extremity of place.”
November
Craig Morgan Teicher’s We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. From the publisher: “Teicher traces the poetic development in the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and francine j. harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged. These luminous essays are indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might offer us that rare, glittering thing—lasting work.”
Other anticipated books:
Lynn Crawford alerted me to Collected Poems of Harry Mathews (Sand Paper Press).
Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Strike a Prose: Memoirs of a Lit Diva Extraordinaire (co•im•press) first runner up for the 1913 Prize and a finalist with Noemi and FC2’s Sukenick Prize.
John King’s Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame (Beating Windward Press), which tells the story about “what happens when the goddess Ishtar interrupts an alcoholic lounge singer while he is re-enacting the epic of Gilgamesh inside a mountain in Tennessee.”
Martin Ott’s Lessons in Camouflage (C&R Press), about which Kathryn Nuernberger writes: “In Lessons in Camouflage, Marin Ott invites readers to discover much strange beauty in mundane domesticities—graffiti in an apartment complex elevator, tedious morning commutes, people in line at Starbucks, these are among his subjects. But rather than reveling in how a clever writer can defamiliarize what we think we know, Ott’s great gift in this collection is to make the familiar seen in all its depth and complexity. This book takes readers fully and vividly into the inner life of a young military recruit, and then later, a father, and beyond that, a grieving son. We may think we know these stories, but what we think we know is mere camouflage—this book helps us see through the obfuscating veils into the clarity of a beating human heart.”
Robert Dean writes: “I am always ready to see what King Shot Press, Perpetual Motion Machine, Broken River, and Hard Case Crime will put out. Generally, whatever these places release, I’ll buy it because I know it’ll be something that speaks to my tastes.”
Stalking Horse Press is publishing some of the most vital fiction and poetry, so I’m very much looking forward to the publication of Emily Corwin’s tenderling, and very curious to discover what other books they’ll be publishing this year.
Like Annie DeWitt, I’m looking forward to Soho Press’s publishing The Collected Stories of Diane Williams and The Collected Novellas of Diane Williams. I’ve actually read all of Diane Williams’s books, and I’m excited about seeing these elliptical fictions, each one a paradoxical fusion of concision and ambiguity, collected in this way.
Two books from Kelly Cherry: Fault Lines: Poems (New American Press) and Men with Something to Say: Considerations of Male Creativity, from BkMk Press.
Winter:
Leslie Pietrzyk‘s Silver Girl (Unnamed Press)
Spring:
I read Jennifer Firestone’s Gates & Fields, last year, and I loved it, so I’m looking forward to reading her next book, TEN, (BlazeVOX).
Robert Coover is one of my favorite authors, so I obviously can’t wait for The Enchanted Prince (OR Books) to be published.
Willow Books‘s publishing Roberto Carlos Garcia‘s second poetry collection, black / Maybe.
Fall:
May-Lan Tan’s Things to Make and Break (Emily Books/Coffee House Press).
Michael Martone’s The Moon Over Wapakoneta: Fictions and Science Fictions from Indiana and Beyond (FC2). A new Michael Martone book is always an event.
Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome (Dorothy).
Martin Riker’s Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return (Coffee House).
Danielle Dutton’s SPRAWL is being reissued by Wave Books.
Shelley Jackson‘s Riddance (Catapult / Black Balloon), an “illustrated novel about a fictional school founded in 1890 that teaches children with speech impediments to channel the dead.”
More anticipated books:
Marjorie Welish encouraged me to keep an eye out for books from Atelos, Omnidawn, Ugly Duckling Presse, Carcanet, and Bloodaxe.
7.13 Books:
Jenn Stroud Rossmann’s The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh
Alicia Jo Rabins’s Fruit Geode
Joe Fletcher’s The Hatch
Poems by Sheila Maldonado
Fiction by Geoff Wyss
FC2:
Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize winner, selected by Mary Caponegro: Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance.
Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest winner, selected by Elisabeth Sheffield: George Choundas’s The Making Sense of Things.
Books by Eugene Marten, Mark Leidner, Megan Boyle, Steve Anwyll, Brad Phillips, Babak Lakghomi, David Nutt, and Bud Smith
Kate Angus:
I’m really looking forward to the first books we’ll publish now that Augury Books has become an imprint of Brooklyn Arts Press. While we have not yet selected our second title, the first Augury Books/BAP title will be Fruit Geode, the second collection of poetry by Alicia Jo Rabins (her first collection won the APR/Honickman Prize and she’s also a fantastic musician—she leads the great folk rock band Girls in Trouble). This book is full of poems about motherhood and individuality, how the individual becomes subsumed in the animal body life, how the self becomes one with family, and it’s also full of witchery and goddesses, herbs and earthy magic. We’re really excited about it.
I’m excited about whatever our other Augury/BAP books will be too, but still will have to select them from our upcoming Open Reading period in January—can’t wait to read the manuscripts authors send us. (so if you know anyone with great work, I’d appreciate you passing the word along!)
I’m excited as well about the first book from Jason Phoebe Rusch, a former student of mine from Interlochen Arts Academy who is a truly talented writer and a dear friend. Their book, Two in One Flesh, will be published by Hobart’s SF/LD Books and is well worth checking out—raw honest intricate poems about the difficulties and glories of living in a body.
And I’m really looking forward to the novel Freshwater by Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist Akwaeke Emezi. This compelling debut novel revolves around ideas about the construction of identity and fractured selves.
And I’m super-excited about A. N. Devers’s book, Train, one of the Object Lesson series. The book is, of course, about trains and American’s rail system and surrounding communities, but it’s also about a writer who quits her museum world profession, buys a 30-day rail pass, and goes on a journey—a kind of quest that allows her to discover the world around her as well as the world inside the self.
Kurt Baumeister:
Michael A. Ferro’s TITLE 13: A timely investigation into the heart of a despotic government, Title 13 is a darkly comic cautionary tale of mental illness and unconventional love. The novel deftly blends satirical comedy aimed at the hot-button issues of modern society with the gut-wrenching reality of an intensely personal descent into addiction.
Timmy Reed’s KILL ME NOW: With tenderness and tenacity, Timmy Reed’s prose—described by Jessica Anya Blau as, “If George Saunders and Russell Edson had a baby, he’d probably grow up to write like Timmy Reed…”—captures the anguish and grit of adolescence, and the potential that comes with growing up. January 28, 2018 from Counterpoint Press.
Cynthia Drew’s SING FOR THE DEAD: When a 150-year-old bulto—a religious icon purportedly destroyed in in the Smithsonian’s Great Fire in 1865—turns up not once but three times in Sotheby’s auction results, Interpol contacts the FBI’s Art Crimes Unit in Washington, D.C. to find out what’s afoot. Special Agent Jacques Pearce enlists the help of Micki Jaynes, an art appraiser who specializes in icons and monstrances. From Water Street Press.
David S. Atkinson’s ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE STEALING LOOSE CHANGE FROM MY POCKETS WHILE I SLEEP: In his previous collection, Not Quite So Stories, Atkinson twisted reality with small absurdities. Roses are Red, Violets are Stealing Loose Change from my Pockets While I Sleep leaves sanity completely behind, pondering modern life through surreal humorous flash fiction involving Margaret Thatcher, jam appearing in boxers overnight, Gene Roddenberry, and more. April 2018 from Literary Wanderlust.
Andrew Furman’s GOLDENS ARE HERE: Andrew Furman’s Goldens Are Here, inspired by true events surrounding an historic Florida citrus season and the lynching of a civil rights worker in Brevard County, offering a glimpse of the sea changes bearing down upon Florida and the nation in the 1960’s through the prism of one fictional family’s negotiations with the land, their neighbors, and with each other. April 10, 2018 from Green Writers Press.
Christoph Paul’s AT LEAST I GET YOU: Rooster Republic Press.
Julia Yeager-Archer’s ALL THE GHOSTS WE’VE ALWAYS HAD: A chapbook of contemporary flash fiction. From Thirty West Publishing House.
M.E. Parker’s BORA, BORA: HINTERLAND TRILOGY BOOK 3: Parker’s Hinterland Trilogy has been described by Peter Tieryas Liu as, “Jonesbridge isn’t just a dystopia of geography, but that of the human condition, ravaged by history… M.E. Parker is a cartographer of the spirit, navigating us through his powerful prose that is unflinchingly honest…” Bora, Bora completes Parker’s sci-fi epic. From Diversion Books.
Frank Morelli’s NO SAD SONGS: A YA novel. February 20, 2018 from Fish Out of Water Books.
Gary B. France’s LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF UNITED: A soccer-related memoir. March 10, 2018 from Fish Out of Water Books
R.J. Fox’s AWAITING IDENTIFICATION: A novel set in 1999 Detroit. April 10, 2018 from Fish Out of Water Books.
Carmen Gentile’s BLINDSIDED BY THE TALIBAN: A conflict correspondent’s debut about his unusual injury while reporting in Afghanistan, previously excerpted in The Weeklings. March 20, 2018 from Skyhorse Publishing.
Ada Limón’s THE CARRYING: A new collection of poems from the National Book Award finalist. Fall 2018 from Milkweed.
Joshua Rivkin’s CHALK: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly: CHALK: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, combines biography, art criticism, interviews, and memoir in a meditation on the life and art of Cy Twombly. From Melville House.
Jonathan Evison’s LAWN BOY: From the award-winning author comes an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, overcoming cultural discrimination, and standing up for oneself. April 3, 2018 from Algonquin Books.
Pam Jones’s ANDERMATT COUNTY: TWO PARABLES: Welcome to Andermatt County. Hill country. South-central Texas. The residents walk the terrain and feel the air as if in a haze of their own self-interest. The children live in a mystical void of wonder mixed with downtrodden hopes of their lives to come. January 12, 2018 from April Gloaming Publishing.
Brandon Hobson’s WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING: Set in rural Oklahoma during the late 1980s, Where the Dead Sit Talking is a startling, authentically voiced and lyrically written Native American coming-of-age story. February 20, 2018 from Soho Press.
Rita Bullwinkel’s BELLY UP: A story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they’ve been given and what their bodies require to be sustained. Advance praise from Lorrie Moore and Jeff Vandermeer. May 8, 2018 from A Strange Object.
Julia Dixon Evans’s HOW TO SET YOURSELF ON FIRE: Threaded with wry humor and the ache of love lost or left behind, How to Set Yourself on Fire establishes Julia Dixon Evans as a rising talent in the vein of Shirley Jackson and Lindsay Hunter. May 8, 2018 from Dzanc Books.
Emily Corwin’s TENDERLING: Between the thorns of the Brothers Grimm and the labyrinthine chambers of Angela Carter, Corwin’s first full-length poetry collection promises to be red of tooth, claw, and lipstick. February 2018 from Stalking Horse Press.
Troy James Weaver’s TEMPORAL: A NOVEL: Set to a shoegaze soundtrack, Troy James Weaver’s Temporal is the story of one tumultuous summer in the lives of three teenagers in Wichita, KS. With advance praise from Scott McClanahan: “Troy James Weaver is so good he shouldn’t need any blurbs. Troy James Weaver is one monster of a writer.” March 6, 2018 from Disorder Press.
Alex Behr:
2018 indie books that look cool: Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon (Tin House Books). Gielgud by my friend Dan DeWeese (Propeller Books); I’m a huge fan of his writing. More from my publisher, 7.13 Books: Mr. Neutron, a novel by Joe Ponepinto; Like a Champion, stories by Vincent Chu; The Place You’re Supposed to Laugh, a novel by Jenn Rossmann; and Nightwolf, a novel by Willie Davis. Tomb Song by Julián Herbert and Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith (both out on Graywolf) and The Underneath by Melanie Finn (Two Dollar Radio).
Jeff Bursey:
In a rough order, here are books I’m looking forward to. I can’t say they’re from marginalized groups (one could argue that all writers are marginalized in an increasingly aliterate + illiterate environment) and, really, I’ve no interest in having my books match some hypothetical syllabus of what should be read. Had enough of that in school and university. With that in mind, here’s my list:
(1) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Red Wheel: March 1917: Node III: Book 2, and the first of two volumes of Between Two Millstones, his memoir of the West. University of Notre Dame Press, Fall 2018. TWR is an astounding mega-novel of great significance that should blow apart notions that Solzhenitsyn is conservative in his writing style. Book 1 came out November 2017 and I’m looking forward to more of Solzhenitsyn’s version of Hegel’s “the slaughter-bench of history,” as TWR is replete with blood, civil unrest, and rampant political ambitions. Check <<http://undpress.nd.edu>> for details closer to the release date.
(2) César Aira: The Linden Tree. New Directions. April 2018. <<www.ndbooks.com>> Any release of an Aira book is a positive thing. One can never tell where his books will start or end up.
(3) W.M. Spackman. On the Decay of Criticism: The Complete Essays of W.M. Spackman. Ed. Steven Moore. October 2017. <<www.fantagraphics.com>>. October 2017. Not 2018, but this book isn’t going to get much attention, so why not pay it some? Moore lavished great care on this, and Fantagraphics did as well in the packaging.
(4) Curtis White. Lacking Character. March 2018. <<www.mhpbooks.com>>. New fiction from White is a treat.
(5) Harry Mathews. The Solitary Twin. March 2018. <<www.ndbooks.com>>. Sadly, the last novel by this Oulipian master (unless a desk drawer hides something).
(6) Kjersti Skomsvold. Monsterhuman. November 2017. <<www.dalkeyarchive.com>>. Another late 2017 title, and one that looks quite promising.
(7) Wolfgang Hilbig. Old Rendering Plant. November 2017. <<www.twolinespress.com>>. A writer praised by László Krasznahorkai and compared to W.G. Sebald is someone to consider.
(8) A.J. Perry. Twelve Stories of Russia: A novel, I guess. May 2017. <<www.coweyepress.com>>. By now you may be have noticed a trend—books from 2017 not yet read. Despite the tumultuous times—yet things are quieter in Canada—the year was a good one for fiction. Cow Eye Press is a house to keep an eye on.
(9) Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead. September 2018. <<https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com>>. Tokarczuk is an amazing writer. Fitzcarraldo published her Flights in May 2017, so it’s good to see a shorter wait time before the next translation (by Antonia Lloyd-Jones).
(10) Robert Nichols: Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai. January 2018. <<www.verbivoraciouspress.org>>. This is a reprint of a neglected set of novels that originally appeared in the 1970s. The volume look fascinating.
(11) Gabriel Josipovici. The Cemetery at Barnes. March 2018. <<http://www.carcanet.co.uk >>. A new novella from Josipovici is always something to look for. This time it’s a murder mystery where three narratives intertwine.
Lisa Chen:
City of the Future by American Book Award winner Sesshu Foster (Kaya Press, Spring)
Tobias Carroll:
2018 will bring with it new editions of Samantha Hunt’s debut novel The Seas, Joy Williams’s The Changeling, and Barbara Comyns’s The Juniper Tree — all novels that, in their own way, blend realism and folklore in unexpected ways. In each of them, there’s a tension between the tactile and the folkloric; that all three are tremendous writers helps to bolster this and create an even more haunting, disconcerting reading experience.
I’m mightily excited to hear that Coffee House Press and Emily Books are releasing May-Lan Tan’s collection Things to Make and Break in the US. I picked up a copy of the UK edition a few years ago, after Tan did a few readings in NYC and friends raved about her work. It’s a stunning, innovative book, with some of the boldest stylistic choices in short fiction that I’ve seen in a while. While we’re talking about prose innovation, I’m also eager to read Harry Mathews’s final novel, The Solitary Twin. Given that no two works by Mathews resemble one another, I’m curious to read what’s in store here.
Part of 2018 involves the anticipation of new work from writers I’ve long admired. On the poetry side of things, I’m looking forward to Tommy Pico’s new collection Junk and Natalie Eilbert’s Indictus. And Colin Winnette’s The Job of the Wasp pushes a number of my buttons, from its neo-Gothic setting to its use of an unlikely ghost story.
Brian Evenson:
Before getting to the books I’m looking forward to in 2018, I want to mention two books that came out in 2017 that I felt deserved more attention. The first is Duncan Barlow’s The City, Awake (Stalking Horse Press), a kind of odd noir with one replicated seemingly amnesiac character: kind of like what might have happened if Robert Coover had been a straightedge punk musician who had written Memento. The second is Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus (Open Letter), brilliantly translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, which is a remarkable book that gathers together much of what makes me believe that Volodine is among our most interesting and original French writers…
2018: there’s a lot that’s great that’s coming out and a lot that I don’t know about yet that I’ll be incredibly excited for. But, among other things, there is:
—Colin Winnette, The Job of the Wasp (Catapult): an odd gothic tale that takes place in a school for orphaned boys;
—Lynne Tillman, Men and Apparitions (Soft Skull Press): it’s Lynne Tillman and mapcap, and that’s probably all you need to know;
—Kim Hunter, The Official Report on Human Activity (Wayne State University Press): a story collection featuring formally innovative and odd dystopic fairy tales;
—Ian Holding, What Happened to Us (Little Island Press): Zimbabwe’s answer to Cormac McCarthy;
—Roque Larraquy, Comemadre (Coffee House Press): an exceptionally odd and quite good book about the manipulation of bodies for the sake of science and art;
—Bruce Olds, This Way Slaughter (Wings Press): Olds is almost unique in his ability to synthesize and recreate a historical moment;
—Michelle de Kretser, The Life to Come (Catapult): de Kretser strikes me as an almost criminally underrated writer. Her book Springtime was one of my favorite books of 2016;
—Andres Barba, The Right Intention (Transit Books): I read my first Barba this year, Such Small Hands, and loved it;
—Forrest Gander, Be With (New Directions): I’ve seen some of the poems in this in magazines, and they’re terrific;
—Kristen Tracy, Half Hazard (Graywolf): disclaimer—I’m married to Kristen, but the fact that this book was chosen for the Emily Dickinson First Book of Poetry Prize suggests that I’m not the only one who thinks it’s worth reading;
—Ann Quin, The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments (And Other Stories Press): Quin is gradually being recognized as one of the great British writers of the 1970s.
—César Aira, The Linden Tree (New Directions): Every Aira book is eccentric, unique, and compelling, and this is sure to be no exception;
—Kathryn Scanlan, The Dominant Animal (Little Island Press): I’ve seen a lot of her stories in magazines and liked them, and am very much looking forward to this first collection
—Damien Ober, Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America (Night Shade Books): This book is absolutely bonkers, blending as it does American Revolutionary History with computer viruses, aliens, and everything else;
—Brandon Hobson, Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press): an excellent and harrowing story about a Native American kid struggling his way through foster care
—Harry Mathews, The Solitary Twin (New Directions): Mathews died early in 2017. This is his final novel.
Tim Jones-Yelvington:
Jazzercise Is a Language, Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (Operating System)
Junk, Tommy Pico (Tin House)
MEND, Kwoya Fagin Maples (University of Kentucky Press)
Self Portrait, Sade Murphy (Birds of Lace)
Meghan Lamb:
Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins– Janalyn Guo- Subito Press
A Copy of a Copy is Never As Good– Matt Rowan- Cobalt Press
Nympholepsy- Lisa Marie Basile and Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein- Inside the Castle
Noirmania– JoAnna Novak- Inside the Castle
Ruination– Katie Jean Shinkle- Spuyten Duyvil
Lunch Poems 2 – Paul Legault- Spork Press
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold– Dorothy Chan- Spork Press
Indecency– Justin Phillip Reed– Coffee House Press
The Imagined Land– Eduardo Berti- Deep Vellum
Not One Day– Anne Garréta- Deep Vellum
On Hell– Johanna Hedva– Sator Press
The Listening Room by Kathleen Rooney
Christina Milletti:
Christine Hume, experimental nonfiction: The Saturation Project (Solid Objects).
Jonah Mixon-Webster, poetry: Stereo (TYPE) (Ahsahta)
Dave Kress, experimental fiction: Fads and Fallacies (Mammoth Books)
Clarice Lispector, a new novel translation: The Chandelier (New Directions)
Samantha Hunt, fiction: The Seas (Tin House)
Shelley Jackson, novel: Riddance (Black Balloon)
Janice Lee:
Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), June 2018: This is going to be a fabulous volume.
H & G by Anna Maria Hong (Sidebrow), February 2018: This “fractured fairy tale” novella sounds amazing and I can’t wait to read it.
Attendance by Rocío Carlos and Rachel McLeod Kaminer (The Operating System), Fall 2018: I’ve been following this project and can’t wait to see this in book-form.
A Little in Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home by Genevieve Hudson (Fiction Advocate), February 2018
From #RECURRENT/Civil Coping Mechanisms:
We will be re-releasing 2 original #RECURRENT titles:
Family Album by Jason Snyder (#RECURRENT/CCM), February 2018
Crepuscule W/ Nellie by Joe Milazzo (#RECURRENT/CCM), February 2018
Also coming late 2018, we’ll be publishing a new title:
Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (#RECURRENT/CCM): This is a beautiful and phenomenal bilingual poetry collection, I’m super excited for it to be in the world soon.
Michael Noll:
Here are a couple of books from A Strange Object, a small press based in Austin:
Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel: A debut collection containing stories filled with ghosts, zombies. carnivorous churches, and girls who think they might actually be foliage. Bullwinkel was recently artist-in-residence at the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts and completed a residency at Hawthornden Castle.
The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction by (yours truly) Michael Noll. A collection of writing exercises and essays about craft based on one-page excerpts from books and stories by authors such as Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Karen Russell, and George Saunders.
And here’s a book from Transgress Press:
Tomorrow or Forever by Jack Kaulfus: With a focus on transitional queer identities struggling to find purchase, these stories offer glimpses into an unexpected worlds that pull characters out of their survival dens and into their destinies. In “The End of the Objects,” a newly deceased woman finds herself in a vaguely utilitarian afterlife and must choose a few objects that will have huge implications in her next life on earth. In another story, a young murderer undergoes a radical genetic transformation in an effort to escape her past transgressions. Transversing the mundane and the fantastic, Kaulfus deftly deconstructs the manner in which outsiders make spaces for themselves when no one else will.
David Leo Rice:
Here are some books I’m looking forward to:
The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
The Right Intention by Andres Barba
The Linden Tree by César Aira
Palaces by Simon Jacobs
Acid West by Joshua Wheeler
Kevin Sampsell:
Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan (Emily Books): So glad that May-Lan’s cinematic and moving stories will get some wider exposure in the US. She’s too damn good to be ignored.
Animals Eat Each Other by Elle Nash (Dzanc): I love novels about relationships—and this one sounds delightfully fucked up.
The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette (Soft Skull): It sounds like Winnette is about to pour the weird sauce all over the new kid at school coming-of-age novel.
And of course, the Genevieve Hudson story collection, Pretend You Live Here, from Future Tense, is going to break hearts.
Jason Teal:
2017 hurt, but friends helped me recover gradually with good book news. I’m so ready for the language-wild worlds of Joe Sacksteder and Janalyn Guo, whose books, GAME IN THE SAND and OUR COLONY BEYOND THE CITY OF THE RUINS, both won prestigious contests with Sarabande Books and Subito Press. A grad school chum, Krys Malcolm Belc, is tearing up the essay world and announced that his chapbook, IN TRANSIT, is coming out with The Cupboard (if last year’s roster is any indicator, I’m excited to have friends in high places). One of my favorite writers, Steven Dunn, is releasing his sophomore novel, water & power, with Tarpaulin Sky Press. Similarly, Denver essayist and Best American Essay contributor Jason Arment is publishing his memoir, MUSALAHEEN, with University of Hell Press, where Isobel O’Hare’s erasures of sexual misconduct apologies is releasing. Poetry editor Ally Harris has a chapbook releasing with The Song Cave alongside Mark Leidner. Simone Savannah is releasing her first chapbook LIKE KANSAS with Big Lucks. Chase Berggrun’s R E D, an erasure of Dracula, is set to release with Birds LLC next year. A former instructor, Callista Buchen, has her first book of poems, LOOK LOOK LOOK, coming out with Black Lawrence Press—don’t miss that one. Horror novel centered on the Midwestern punk scene, PALACES by Simon Jacobs, is debuting with Two Dollar Radio. Also, Nicholas Gulig’s ORIENT will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Lastly, a recent discovery, Alana I. Capria’s feminist horror fairy tale (yeah I’m stunned by that combo too), MOTHER WALKED INTO THE LAKE, was released by KERNPUNKT in December so it’s safe to say I’ll be reading and rereading it into the New Year. Oh, it’s not a book, but showrunner Nick Antosca commands respect as an indie author of multiple horror goodies—CHANNEL ZERO: BUTCHER’S BLOCK is in post for SyFy channel.
Dan Wickett:
The Lost Country by William Gay (Dzanc Books, July)
James Yeh:
Not to Read, by Alejandro Zambra (April, Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Some Trick: Thirteen Stories, by Helen DeWitt (May, New Directions)
My Struggle: Book Six, by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Fall, Archipelago)
Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman (March, Soft Skull)
The Changeling, by Joy Williams (April, Tin House)
Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. Smith (April, Graywolf)
Cat Poems, edited by Tynan Kogane (February, New Directions)
Street-Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, by Tariq Ali (March, Verso)
Scenes from a Childhood, by Jon Fosse (May, Fitzcarraldo Editions)
Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir, by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (March, New Press)
Denmark Vesey’s Garden Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, by Ethan J. Kytle and Blaine Roberts (April, New Press)
Slave Old Man, by Patrick Chamoiseau (May, New Press)
The Linden Tree, by Cesar Aira (April, New Directions)
The Emissary, by Yoko Tawada (April, New Directions)
The Beekeeper: Saving the Stolen Women of Iraq, by Dunya Mikhail (March, New Directions)
The Chandelier, by Clarice Lispector (March, New Directions)
Neon in Daylight, by Hermione Hoby (January, Catapult)
The Desert and Its Seed, by Jorge Barón Biza (April, New Directions)
The Seas, by Samantha Hunt (July, Tin House)
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, by Dorthe Nors (June, Graywolf)
Cecil and Jordan in New York, by Gabrielle Bell (reissue by Uncivilized Books)
Junk, by Tommy Pico (May, Tin House)
Armand V and T Singer, by Dag Solstad (May, New Directions)
Also, most generally speaking, whatever books Dorothy, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and New Directions are putting out.
Leni Zumas:
Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries, Counterpoint (February)
I’ve heard amazing things about this memoir. Mailhot writes about trauma, racism, mental health, and coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia.
Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier, New Directions (March) + Complete Stories, New Directions (June)
First English translation of Lispector’s second novel!!! Paper edition of the Complete Stories with three just-discovered pieces!!! Delight, doubled.
Hilary Plum, Strawberry Fields, Fence (April)
Winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Plum’s stunning Watchfires (2016) is a memoir of chronic illness, a lyric essay about the Boston Marathon bombing and American war-making, and a fractured investigation of the body’s frailties. Gorgeous sentences and flinchless inquiry. I want to read anything Plum writes.
Jennifer Firestone, TEN, BlazeVOX (Spring)
Firestone is one of my favorite contemporary poets. Her several previous collections are smart, strange, spiky, penetrating. Can’t wait for the new one.
Heather Abel, The Optimistic Decade, Algonquin (May)
Political idealism, class, and the American West. Abel’s essays and stories are wise and lovely and hilarious, and I am excited for her debut novel.
Dorthe Nors, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, Graywolf (June)
Finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. Of her own fiction, the Danish author says: “I write minimalism that is under attack from within.”
Heid E. Erdrich (ed.), New Poets of Native Nations, Graywolf (July)
An anthology of work by “21 poets whose first books were published in the 21st century and who are members/citizen or descendants with status of indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native nations.” Contributors include Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Solider.
Genevieve Hudson, Pretend We Live Here, Future Tense (Summer)
Debut fiction collection by a stellar writer I had the privilege of working with in the Portland State MFA program. Hudson also has a memoir/cultural history out in January 2018 from Fiction Advocate: A Little in Love with Everyone, about Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and queer coming-of-age narratives.