February 2012
January 2012
Recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf, Glaciers portrays how the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life.
Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.
October 2011
“In an age of soulless, cookie-cutter computer illustrations, Matt Kish's intense and obsessive drawings, paintings, and montages are a riotous delight. Kish's artwork renews our age-old love of expressive handmade imagery. He humanizes his material in a way that has all but disappeared from the design scene. It's great to see that passion again.”
—Paula Scher, Pentagram
Matt Kish has illustrated Herman Melville’s classic, Moby-Dick, creating an image a day based on text selected from every page of the 552-page Signet Classics edition. Kish refused to set any boundaries for the artwork and employed a deliberately low-tech approach. He used found pages torn from old, discarded books, as well as a variety of mediums, including ballpoint pen, marker, paint, crayon, ink, and watercolor. By layering images on top of existing words and images, Kish has crafted a visual masterpiece that echoes the layers of meaning in Melville’s narrative.
September 2011
In the tradition of Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Miller, John Franc's masterful novel explores sexual obsession, as a group of male friends delve further and further into the world of brothels under the gleaming surface of their cosmopolitan city. Told through an anonymous collective point of view, the narrative names no character or location, implying that these men speak for all men.
August 2011
"Stories—subtly disturbing, ruthlessly brilliant—by eighteen top-of-the-trend writers."
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Meet the daughters of Franz Kafka, Mary Shelley, the Brothers Grimm, and Angela Carter. Fantastic Women assembles the work of eighteen inventive, insightful women authors who steep their narratives in a heady potion of surrealism and macabre black comedy. The results are wildly creative stories that capture the truth about human nature far more than much of the fiction (or, for that matter, the nonfiction) being written today.
June 2011
"In the tradition of the great noir novels, Wire to Wire, is really something. Like being in a stolen car with no brakes in a world of train hopping, sex, violence, and drugs. It’s all edge from start to finish."
—Willy Vlautin, author of The Motel Life
Wire to Wire assembles a cast of train-hopping, drug-dealing, glue-huffing lowlifes, in a stunning homage to one of our most popular enduring genres—the American crime novel.
May 2011
"In Bright Before Us, Katie Arnold-Ratliff writes sentences that are as luminous and candid as X-rays, laser-traceries of the human heart. Young Francis is a fascinating and exquisitely drawn character, and the urgency of his story left me breathless."
—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Facing the prospect of fatherhood, disillusioned by his fledgling teaching career, and mourning the loss of a former relationship, Francis Mason is a prisoner of his past mistakes. When his second-grade class discovers a dead body during a field trip to a San Francisco beach, Francis spirals into unbearable grief and all-consuming paranoia.
April 2011
"A seriously strange, funny and affecting novel about imagining another life while being stuck in this one."
—Kirkus Reviews
Toward You completes Jim Krusoe's bittersweet trilogy about the relationship between this world and the next. Bob has spent several years trying to build a machine that will communicate with the dead. He's gotten more or less nowhere. Then two surprising things happen: he receives an important message from a dog, and a former girlfriend, Yvonne, reenters his life. These events make Bob even more determined to perfect the Communicator, as he calls his invention, in the belief that it will change his friendless, humdrum life for the better.
March 2011
"Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason makes you laugh out loud, and at the same time it inspires wonder. . .Mike Sacks is not just a sensational comic writer, but a sensational writer—period."
—David Sedaris
Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason collects Mike Sacks’s unique humor pieces into one handsome, convenient volume. Originally published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, among other venerable publications, Sacks’s writing is original and sharp, yet broadly funny. Whether it’s a groom tweeting his wedding and honeymoon in real time, or a publisher offering editorial suggestions for The Diary of Anne Frank, Sacks’s work tangles contemporary social satire with his absurdist sensibilities.
May 2010
“I was immediately mesmerized . . . Its beauty matches its depth and her achievement is as brilliant as it is haunting.”
—Toni Morrison
Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique, forty-year relationship between Milla, a sixty-seven-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene van Niekerk creates a story about love and loyalty.
April 2010
"Morris has enough guts to reveal all of his character's insecurities, but enough empathy to never revel in them."
—Time Out Chicago
In this stunning story collection inhabited by dreams and disappointments, good intentions and small triumphs, Keith Lee Morris chronicles the lives of men lost in the liminal spaces between adolescence and adulthood.
February 2010
"Hot Springs is a road trip layered with desire and mistake and the impossibility of keeping a secret from rising through the years."
—Ron Carlson, author of The Signal
November 2010
"Utterly charming—I love this little general and the strange and wondrous and precise world he lives in."
—Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures
What magical message is a giant snowflake trying to bring to a little general, and to the world? In a time of violent military solutions to global problems, this illustrated allegory by leading poet Matthea Harvey has a powerful resonance.
September 2009
"...these stories are about alienation and displacement...at least some Russians are still reading—not only themselves but their classics—as they write themselves out of cultural amnesia."
—Maxim D. Shrayer, The Globe and Mail
Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present twenty-two depictions of the new Russia from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time.
August 2009
"...rich language...splendid characters...Heyns' story goes beyond Simon's coming-of-age and broaches something much bigger: society's own struggles with coming-of-age."
—Amy Wallen, The Los Angeles Times
A tender chronicle of a boy's coming of age in South Africa during the apartheid years of the sixties.
June 2009
“Smart and funny...Krusoe is an engaging writer and an acute observer of his own brand of quotidian strangeness.”
—John Haskell,The New York Times Book Review
Abandonment, life, death, and, oddly, Cleveland are explored in the hilarious second installment of Jim Krusoe's trilogy about resurrection.
May 2009
“Potent, fragile and tender, When I Forgot is really the story of ‘When I Remembered,’ of a woman summoning the courage to unlock her memories and share them, and feeling the relief of exhaling breath held too long.”
—Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
An astonishingly assured and compelling debut, When I Forgot explores the relationship between a sister and her brother, the past that they share, and the memories that shape their lives forever.
February 2009
"Jan Elizabeth Watson's debut, Asta in the Wings, follows two mavens of make-believe—seven-year-old Asta and her nine-year-old brother, Orion—as they reckon with the brutal realities of the adult world in the wilds of rural Maine."
—BookForum
A poignant and darkly funny story narrated by Asta Hewitt, a resourceful seven-year-old growing up in an isolated house in Maine. Shut off from the outside world and restricted to the company of a delusional mother and a bookish older brother, Asta is content to be part of a "society of three."
November 2008
The Village Voice declared that Tin House "may very well represent the future of literary magazines."
Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House celebrates Tin House magazine's commitment to publishing innovative contemporary poetry by both established and emerging poets.
November 2009
"Adam Braver's November 22, 1963 focuses on the singular event of President Kennedy's assassination, fusing fiction and fact from eyewitnesses and other sources to make for a blazingly original, brilliantly concretized historical novel from the author of Mr. Lincoln's War."
—ELLE
November 22, 1963 chronicles the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination and explores the intersection of stories and memories and how they represent and mythologize that defining moment in history.
October 2008
"Morris is heir to the Richard Ford of Rock Springs."
—The Believer
An intriguing tale of darts, drugs, and death. Russell Harmon is the self-proclaimed king of his small-town Idaho dart league, but all is not well in his kingdom.
June 2008
"What a fantastic novel. Salvation is an absolute knockout. I read it without stopping and fell in love by the end of the day."
—Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
Sometimes funny, sometimes eerie, Salvation is the story of the coming of age of Crane Cavanaugh, born into a family of three former charlatan preachers and two older siblings living in poverty in rural Iowa. A budding scientist, Crane narrates her life from the moment of birth, with a rich awareness of the natural world and her own precarious spot in it.
May 2008
"This book is not just funny—it's eerie, and vivid, and strangely sad, too. His work is full of the most curious urgency: I love to keep reading, and I don't know what I'm waiting for, exactly, but I know whatever I find will hover in my peripheral vision for awhile after I'm done, and that's exactly what happened here."
—Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Things don’t always work out the way they ought to—or do they?—in this unsettling darkly comic novel. Girl Factory is an exploration of memory, desire, and the nature of storytelling, all set against the backdrop of a frozen yogurt shop's underbelly.
December 2007
"Literature—creative literature—unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable."
—Gertrude Stein
Do Me goes all the way with the funniest, boldest, hottest, and most richly imagined explorations of sex by some the finest contemporary writers.
August 2007
"These short stories are as smart as pinpricks, magic tricks. They go off like a string of firecrackers."
—Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners
Lucy Corin’s daring debut story collection leads the reader through a world where characters behave normally in the most extreme situations and bizarrely with almost no provocation at all. Unpredictable and playful, Corin brilliantly dissects time, people, places, and things, truly rendering how it feels to be human.
September 2007
“Ovenman is a welcome addition to the literature of the lovably hapless by a young writer with talent to burn.”
—George Saunders, author of Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation
Skateboarder, restaurant worker, and punk rocker wannabe, the antihero of Jeff Parker’s uproariously funny debut novel adds a new twist to the classic coming-of-age story. When Thinfinger, a ne’er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold, relies on Post-it notes to help him make sense of the chaos and momentum of his life: a girlfriend who dreams he murders her, a long lost Biodad who writes letters filled with lies, a televised war that is over before it has even begun, and a robbery he can’t remember committing.
May 2007
“Mary Otis sees things from the odd angle, which is the literary one. It makes her stories true-to-life, funny, brave, and amazing.”
—Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America
Poignant and sharply rendered, Mary Otis’s debut collection seeks answers to the questions of whom we love and why, how we search for love, lose it, or find it—sometimes at the last moment and in the most unlikely places.
April 2007
“Here is a talented writer at the bright edge of his career.”
—Ron Carlson, author of A Kind of Flying
In his debut short story collection, award-winning writer Josh Goldfaden limns the magical, witty, and touching world of these singular characters and their hidden compulsions and idiosyncrasies.
December 2006
"Zak Smith, with uninhibited bravado and exactly the right kind of insanity, has done something remarkable in [Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow] : created a series of images that approach the richness of their source. He draws a lurid and intoxicating netherworld, complete in its own right and, at the same time, an illuminating companion to the novel."
—Emily Barton, Los Angeles Times
Artist Zak Smith has created more than 750 pages of drawings, paintings, and photos—each derived from a page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Smith aimed to be “as literal as possible,” but his images are as imaginative and powerful as the prose they honor.
December 2006
“Mathson’s voice is dead-on, fresh, and completely winning. Michele Matheson is a find.”
—Jim Krusoe, author of Iceland
It’s Christmastime in Los Angeles and Max is lying on the beach, attempting to survive one day without heroin. Her failure to do so inspires the adventures of a lifetime—a tour of the bizarre that inhabits the underbelly of LA glitz.
September 2006
“Broken and brilliant, protean and written in blood . . . Mosquito introduces a thrilling new voice in American poetry.” —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Lyrical and explosive, Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way.
June 2006
“A convincing and haunting book."
—Antonya Nelson
Set in Wisconsin, Girls in Peril is a novella about the special bonds between young women on the verge of adulthood. Karen Lee Boren weaves issues of sexuality, identity, and class into a magical and unforgettable web.
May 2006
“Here you will find complicated, deep portraits of the human that sing of worth and hope and endurance.”
—Dorothy Allison, from the foreword
From the award-winning literary magazine comes another dazzling collection of stories by contemporary masters of the form.
May 2011
"Krusoe's sure and subtle imaginings of characters--yearning, isolated and finally enigmatic--place him among the foremost creators of surreal Americana."
-The New York Times Book Review
All three books of Jim Krusoe's critically acclaimed Resurrection Trilogy: Girl Factory, Erased, and Toward You.