Products - - Items tagged as "Male protagonist"
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A History of My Brief Body
a collection of essays by
Billy-Ray Belcourt
A Best Book of 2020
Lambda Literary Award Finalist"[Belcourt] ably balances poetic, philosophical, and political insights throughout this unique book... An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
A History of My Brief Body
a collection of essays by
Billy-Ray Belcourt
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 15.99* A Best Book of 2020 —Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy.
"In sharp pieces infused with a yearning for decolonized love and freedom, Belcourt, of the Driftpile Cree Nation, ably balances poetic, philosophical, and political insights throughout this unique book... An urgently needed, unyielding book of theoretical and intimate strength."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewThe youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.
Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place.
Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
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A Questionable Shape New Classics Edition
a novel by
Bennett Sims
A Best Book of 2013
"[A Questionable Shape] is more than just a novel. It is literature. It is life."
Winner: Bard Fiction Prize
The Believer Book Award Finalist
—Susan Hazen-Hammond, The Millions
A calculated postmodern zombie novel by one of America's brightest literary talents.
The Two Dollar Radio - The New Classics edition features an original introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.A Questionable Shape New Classics Edition
a novel by
Bennett Sims
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
*Bard Fiction Prize 2014
*The Believer Book Award Finalist
*One of the Best Books of 2013 —Complex Magazine, Book Riot, Slate, The L Magazine, NPR's 'On Point', SalonMazoch discovers an unreturned movie envelope, smashed windows, and a pool of blood in his father’s house: the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father’s haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.
However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch’s father.
Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.
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Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
a novel by
David Connerley Nahm
A Best Book of 2014
"It's impossible to stop reading until you've gone through each beautiful line." —NPR
A mysterious, lyric exploration of childhood, loss, and ghost stories. Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
a novel by
David Connerley Nahm
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99(ALL AUTHOR PROCEEDS, MATCHED BY TWO DOLLAR RADIO, WILL BE DONATED TO IRC).
*One of the Best Books of 2014 —NPR, Flavorwire
*A Top-10 Independently-Published Title Overlooked by the National Book Foundation —Electric LiteratureLeah’s little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears and the stories told to quell them.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.
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Backlist Bangers
Choose 12 select backlist titles for $100!
For many backlist titles, after the initial enthusiasm and support, we're left with copies. Rather than sitting in boxes, we want the books out in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers! Rather than sitting in boxes in storage, we want the books out there in the world, being discovered, shared, and enjoyed by readers! -
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Crapalachia New Classics Edition
a memoir by
Scott McClanahan
A Best Book of 2013
"[McClanahan] aims to
lasso the moon."
—New York Times Book Review
An endearing and haunting coming-of-age story that announces McClanahan as a resounding talent. Crapalachia New Classics Edition
a memoir by
Scott McClanahan
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 10.00*One of the Best Books of 2013 —The Millions, Flavorwire, Dazed & Confused, The L Magazine, Time Out Chicago
"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. [McClanahan] aims to lasso the moon... He is not a writer of half-measures. The man has purpose. This is his symphony, every note designed to resonate, to linger."
—Allison Glock, New York Times Book ReviewSynopsis
Crapalachia is a portrait of Scott McClanahan’s formative years, coming of age in rural West Virginia, during a stretch of time where he was deeply influenced by his Grandma Ruby and Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.
Beyond the artistry, there is an optimism, a genuine love for people and the past and memories. Even more, there is a grasp to bridge the disconnect between reader and writer, for McClanahan’s stories to bind us closer to one another. -
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Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere
a memoir by
Robert Lopez
A Best Book of 2023
"Original and fearless... This is a sharply written, incisive, and extremely engaging meditation on assimilation that will strike a painful chord with many who have suffered from the same erasure of their culture in this country."
—Daniel A. Olivas, Latino Book Review
Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from his grandfather’s remembered traits, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.
Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere
a memoir by
Robert Lopez
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"A masterpiece clear and honest and alive to the world and its contradictions. Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere will hit you where you live."
—Justin Torres, author of We the AnimalsRobert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.
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Flats / Quake
a novel (2 in 1!) by
Rudolph Wurlitzer
"A post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling
has been blown to bits."
—Los Angeles Times
Two classic novels in one "69ed" edition. Flats / Quake
a novel (2 in 1!) by
Rudolph Wurlitzer
$ 12.75$ 17.00Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.
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Found Audio
a novel by
N.J. Campbell
A Best Book of 2017
"Amid the static of contemporary literature can be heard blips of fiction-future in N.J. Campbell’s defiantly bold Found Audio."
—Steve Erickson
For the first time ever, Found Audio presents a complete transcription of the unsettling audio recordings of a mysterious unnamed adventure journalist and his decades-long pursuit of the Borgesian "City of Dreams," alongside analysis from audio expert, Amrapali Anna Singh. Found Audio
a novel by
N.J. Campbell
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99* A Best Book of 2017 —Writer's Bone
"[A] mysterious work of metafiction... dizzying, arresting and defiantly bold."
—Chicago TribuneAmrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.
On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?
Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.
Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis.
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Frequencies Volume 1
a collection of essays by
Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, Tracy Rose Keaton, & more!
"Heavy with literary weight."
—New Pages
The first installment of our journal of artful essays. Frequencies Volume 1
a collection of essays by
Blake Butler, Joshua Cohen, Tracy Rose Keaton, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
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Frequencies Volume 2
a collection of essays by
Sara Finnerty, Roxane Gay, Kate Zambreno, & more!
"Some of the smartest essays." —Flavorwire
Essays on issues of belonging in Black America, gay sex tourism in Thailand, Barbara Loden, and more! Frequencies Volume 2
a collection of essays by
Sara Finnerty, Roxane Gay, Kate Zambreno, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
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Frequencies Volume 3
a collection of essays by
Antonia Crane, D. Foy, Lawrence Shainberg,
& more!
"The world needs more endeavors like this." —Flavorwire
Find out who taught Ernest Hemingway to thumb-wrestle, and more! Frequencies Volume 3
a collection of essays by
Antonia Crane, D. Foy, Lawrence Shainberg,
& more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
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Frequencies Volume 4
a collection of essays by
Colin Asher, Nathan Knapp, Joshua Mohr, & more!
"It's like The Believer just up and said 'fuck it.'" —Brooklyn Based
Coming of age in the heady days of dial-up, family strife, plus a satirical interview with Shia LaBeouf. Frequencies Volume 4
a collection of essays by
Colin Asher, Nathan Knapp, Joshua Mohr, & more!
$ 7.50View full product details →$ 10.00 -
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I Will Die in a Foreign Land
a novel by
Kalani Pickhart
A Best Book of 2021
Winner: 2022 Young Lions Fiction Award"Since 1991, Ukraine has experienced three revolutions, and Pickhart elegantly captures how these events build up inside a person, giving many Ukrainians an acute awareness of the self as both agent and consequence of history."
—Sonya Bilocerkowycz, The Los Angeles Review of Books
An especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious and intimate portrait of human perseverance and empathy following four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land
a novel by
Kalani Pickhart
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"Kalani Pickhart's I Will Die in a Foreign Land is of the best kind of protest novels: one that makes you cry, and then makes you mad as hell. It is so far the best artistic treatment of the Euromaidan and Crimean situation, at turns tense, melancholy, and over-abundantly compassionate. This book is both the napalm and the bandages in one."
—Conor Hultman, Square Books (Oxford, MS)In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris. The work so perplexed audiences that a riot broke out. “Only a Russian could do that,” says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”
A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is a Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death from radiation sickness; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.
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I'm Not Patrick
a film by
Eric Obenauf
"This film is punk as hell."
—Heavy Feather Review
A dark comedy about the importance of individuality, I'm Not Patrick follows Seth, whose twin brother, Patrick, has just committed suicide. Seth doesn't know what to feel, but everyone is eager to suggest typical reactions to monozygotic suicide. I'm Not Patrick
a film by
Eric Obenauf
$ 11.99Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.
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I'm Trying to Reach You
a novel by
Barbara Browning
A Best Book of 2012
The Believer Book Award Finalist.
First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Is someone killing famous dancers? A witty and seductive mystery. I'm Trying to Reach You
a novel by
Barbara Browning
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*The Believer Book Award Finalist
* Winner of the 2013 IPPY Award for GAY/LESBIAN/BI/TRANS FICTION“I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’”
First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham.
Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.)
I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how we love and communicate with one another.
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Kentucky Colonels: J.D. Wilkes and Gary Lovely
Two Kentucky Colonels, Gary Lovely and J.D. Wilkes, in discussion.
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Made to Break
a novel by
D. Foy
A Best Book of 2014
"Reads like what we’d imagine a Stanley Kubrick rewrite of a script by Denis Johnson might look like." —Flavorwire
A melancholic and savage look at friendship. Made to Break
a novel by
D. Foy
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*One of the best books of 2014 —Flavorwire, Entropy Magazine
"Made to Break, D. Foy’s debut novel, snaps. Literary, cinematic... [Foy] is a writing school of one, and Made to Break ushers his literary energies into categorical existence."
—The Daily BeastTwo days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They’ve been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.
After a car accident leaves one friend sick and dying, and severe weather traps them at the cabin, there is nowhere to go, forcing them to finally and ultimately take stock and confront their past transgressions, considering what they mean to one another and themselves.
With some of the most luminous and purple prose flexed in recent memory, D. Foy is an incendiary new voice and Made to Break, a grand, episodic debut, redolent of the stark conscience of Denis Johnson and the spellbinding vision of Roberto Bolaño.
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Mira Corpora
a novel by
Jeff Jackson
A Best Book of 2013
"A piercing howl of a book."
L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist
—Slate
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Nog
a novel by
Rudolph Wurlitzer
"The Novel of Bullshit is Dead."
—Thomas Pynchon
A man adrift in the American West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere. Nog
a novel by
Rudolph Wurlitzer
$ 15.50Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.
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Other Minds and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
November 2023!
“[Sims is] kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock and Brian Evenson raised a baby with David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. Sims should be a household name in horror.”
—Carmen Maria Machado, LitHub
From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection. Other Minds and Other Stories
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99From the award-winning author of A Questionable Shape and White Dialogues, a brilliant, anxious, and hilarious new collection.
A man lends his phone to a stranger in the mall, setting off an uncanny series of Unknown calls that come to haunt his relationship with jealousy and dread. A well-meaning locavore tries to butcher his backyard chickens humanely, only to find himself absorbed into the absurd violence of the pecking order. A student applying for a philosophy fellowship struggles to project himself into the thoughts of his hypothetical judges, becoming increasingly possessed and overpowered by the problem of other minds. And in “The Postcard,” a private detective is hired to investigate a posthumous message that a widower has seemingly received from his dead wife, leading him into a foggy landscape of lost memories, shifting identities, and strange doublings.
Cerebral and eerie, captivating and profound, these thirteen stories expertly guide us through the paranoia and obsession of everyday horrors, not least the horrors of overthinking what other people might be thinking. With all of Sims’s trademark virtuosity, innovation, and wit, Other Minds and Other Stories continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary fiction. -
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Pages of Mourning
a novel by
Diego Gerard Morrison
May 2024!
"Very funny and very sad and very, very smart. Unafraid to make his fiction work on and around questions of unambiguous gravity, Morrison never forgets the importance, indeed the power, in the endeavor of play."
—Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie
Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
Pages of Mourning
a novel by
Diego Gerard Morrison
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99A daring, captivating, darkly funny novel that grapples with uncertainty and loss in a land of violence and superstition, while questioning whether Magical Realism as a genre is capable of confronting the brutal dissonance of a country that awaits the return of the missing while not wholly acknowledging their death.
Pages of Mourning is a stunning achievement, a pioneering and inventive novel that confronts family history, creativity, Magical Realism, and the impact of violence from Mexico’s drug war, by a magnificent new talent in Diego Gerard Morrison.
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Palaces
a novel by
Simon Jacobs
Starred reviews: Publishers Weekly, Foreword Reviews
"Palaces is robust, both current and clairvoyant, and answers the question of what happens when our deepest fantasies become reality.—Foreword Reviews, starred review
While exercising precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue. Palaces
a novel by
Simon Jacobs
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them.
Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners' strange and sudden disappearance, they're also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past.
With incisive precision and a cool detachment, Simon Jacobs has crafted a surreal and spellbinding first novel of horror and intrigue. -
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Savage Gods
a book by
Paul Kingsnorth
A Best Book of 2019
"A beautiful, intelligent, extremely poetic book about a writer dissecting his thoughts and feelings on the page without the protective layer of fiction."
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
Informed by Kingsnorth's experiences interacting with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods seeks nothing less than to dismantle modern civilization. Savage Gods
a book by
Paul Kingsnorth
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Savage Gods is a beautiful, intelligent, extremely poetic book about a writer dissecting his thoughts and feelings on the page without the protective layer of fiction."
—Gabino Iglesias, NPRAfter moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought — to nest, to find home — after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.
Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world — or are they part of the great lie which is killing it? -
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Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now
a collection of essays by
Andre Perry
A Best Book of 2019
"Beautiful, brilliant, bold... These are songs of identity and sexuality and expectations the world has of African American males."
—Christopher John Stephens, PopMatters
The essays in Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now take the form of personal reflection, multiple choice questions, screenplays, and imagined talk-show conversations, while traversing the daily minefield of a childhood schoolyard to dimly-lit late nights in Midwestern bars. The impression of Perry’s personal journey is arresting and beguiling, while announcing the author’s arrival as a formidable American voice. Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now
a collection of essays by
Andre Perry
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99*A Best Book of 2019 —Pop Matters
*A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 —LitReactor, The A.V. Club, Big Other"A complete, deep, satisfying read... The variety of structures, formats, and rhythms Perry uses in Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now is extraordinary... These essays shine with broken humanity and announce the arrival of a new voice in contemporary nonfiction, but they do so with heaps of melancholia and frustration instead of answers. That Perry can hurt us and keep us asking for more is a testament to his talent as a storyteller."
—Gabino Iglesias, NPRWith luminous insight and fervent prose, Andre Perry’s debut collection of personal essays travels from Washington DC to Iowa City to Hong Kong in search of both individual and national identity. While displaying tenderness and a disarming honesty, Perry catalogues racial degradations committed on the campuses of elite universities to liberal bastions like San Francisco while coming of age in America.
The essays in Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now take the form of personal reflection, multiple choice questions, screenplays, and imagined talk-show conversations, while traversing the daily minefield of a childhood schoolyard to dimly-lit late nights in Midwestern bars. The impression of Perry’s personal journey is arresting and beguiling, while announcing the author’s arrival as a formidable and ferocious American voice.
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Square Wave
a novel by
Mark de Silva
"Compelling and horrifying."
—Chicago Tribune
A grand novel of ideas and compelling crime mystery, about security states past and present, weather modification, and imperial influences. Square Wave
a novel by
Mark de Silva
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99Carl Stagg, a writer researching imperial power struggles in 17th century Sri Lanka, ekes out a living as a watchman in a factionalized America where confidence in democracy has eroded. Along his nightly patrol, Stagg finds a beaten prostitute, one in a series of monstrous attacks. Suspicious of his supervisor’s intentions, Stagg seeks the truth with a fellow part-time watchman, Ravan, who hails from a family developing storm-dispersal technologies jointly funded by the Indian and American governments.
The watchmen’s discoveries put a troubling complexion on Stagg’s research, giving it new shape and impetus, just as the weather modification project begins to appear less about dispersing storms than weaponizing them.
By gracefully weaving a study of the psychological effects of a militarized state upon its citizenry with topics as diverse as microtonal music and cloud physics, Square Wave signals the triumphant arrival of a young writer certain to be considered one of the most ambitious and intelligent of his generation.
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Tariq Shah visits Page 158 Books
A virtual author event with Tariq Shah, Whiteout Conditions, with Dave Lucey, co-owner of Page 158 Books.
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The Correspondence Artist
a novel by
Barbara Browning
Winner: Lambda Literary Award
"A deft look at modern life that's both witty and devastating."
—Nylon
Sure to delight fans of Chris Krause and Charlie Kaufman. The Correspondence Artist
a novel by
Barbara Browning
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Lambda Literary Award Winner
In The Correspondence Artist, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally recognized artist, largely via e-mail. To protect her paramour's identity, she creates a series of correspondent, alternative lovers in a self-destructing roman à clef.
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The Drop Edge of Yonder
a novel by
Rudolph Wurlitzer
A Best Book of 2008
"The most hallucinogenic western you'll ever catch in the movie house of your mind's eye."
Winner: Foreword Reviews Gold Medal for Literary Fiction
—Bookforum
Rudolph Wurlitzer’s first novel in nearly 25 years is an epic adventure that explores the truth and temptations of the American myth. -
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The Glacier
a novel by
Jeff Wood
"One of the most indelible and visionary movies you've ever seen." —Jon Raymond
A brilliant and visceral cinematic novel about authenticity and the American condition. The Glacier
a novel by
Jeff Wood
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99The Glacier is a spellbinding work in the spirit of Tarkovsky or Jodorowsky that reimagines the American frontier at the turn of the millennium, a time when suburban development was metastasizing and the Social was about to implode. Following a caterer at a convention center, a surveyor residing in a storage unit, and the masses lining up for an Event on the horizon, The Glacier is a poetic rendering of the pre-apocalypse and a requiem for the passing of one world into another.
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The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos
a novel by
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
"There’s a warmth and solemnity to Gregorio’s voice, as he reflects on death and strain, and the almost inarticulable woe of being an immigrant in the States post-2016. Restrepo Montoya, with poignancy, precision, and subtle force, explores the choices that lead us to the places we end up, and what we carry with us in memory and in action."
—Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
Entrancing and sentimental, told with wit and sharp insight, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos examines the joys and traumas of the Latinx American experience through the lens of a young man awakening to the nuances of identity, love, colonization, and home.
The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos
a novel by
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99"Prescient and timeless, dealing with the inseparability of life and decay, this story, through it all, allowed me to sit deeply with love, family, and forgiveness. Pay attention, a refreshingly honest and singular voice has arrived."
—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood HeatEntrancing and sentimental, told with wit and sharp insight, The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos examines the joys and traumas of the Latinx American experience through the lens of a young man awakening to the nuances of identity, love, colonization, and home.
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The Incantations of Daniel Johnston
a graphic novel by
Ricardo Cavolo & Scott McClanahan
"Something wholly unexpected, grotesque, and poignant."
—The FADER
Renowned artist Ricardo Cavolo and Scott McClanahan combine talents in a dazzling, eye-popping biography of musician and artist Daniel Johnston. The Incantations of Daniel Johnston
a graphic novel by
Ricardo Cavolo & Scott McClanahan
$ 16.99$ 17.50Sorry! This is being reordered and will be back in stock soon.
View full product details →"[The Incantations of Daniel Johnston] captures Johnston's visions—both artistic and hallucinatory—in an intensely colorful cartoonish style and vivid recurring images: frogs, cascades of pills, volcanoes, eyeballs of many varieties."
—John Williams, New York Times Book ReviewThe Incantations of Daniel Johnston is a spirited, eye-popping collaborationg between New York Times-bestselling Spanish artist Ricardo Cavolo and award-winning author Scott McClanahan.
Long a fan of Daniel Johnston, the man and his music, Cavolo illustrates Johnston's colorful life, from his humble beginnings as a carnival employee to folk musician in Austin, to his rise to MTV popularity and persistent struggle with personal demons.
In addition to being visually very striking, with astoundingly economical prose McClanahan manages to deal with powerful and complex issues, such as how we as a society mythologize troubled artists, while continuing his ongoing exploration of human relationships, and the pliable interaction between reader and writer. -
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The Reactive
a novel by
Masande Ntshanga
A Best Book of 2016
"A searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa."
—Poets & Writers
Heralded in the author's native South Africa as "the hottest novel of the year," The Reactive is a clear-eyed and compassionate depiction of a young HIV+ man grappling with the sudden death of his younger brother. -
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The Red-Headed Pilgrim
a novel by
Kevin Maloney
A Best Book of 2023
"Somewhere between the hysterical realism of Zadie Smith and the sexy, witty misfits of a Tom Robbins novel."
—Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books
Provocative, poignant, and resoundingly hilarious, The Red-Headed Pilgrim is the tragicomic tale of an anxious red-head and his sordid pursuit of enlightenment and pleasure (not necessarily in that order).
The Red-Headed Pilgrim
a novel by
Kevin Maloney
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99"The Red-Headed Pilgrim is a revelation that achieves starry dynamo-level energy from the jump. Maloney's prose is sharp and vivid, full of trippy precision, and his story is funny, wild, painful and wise."
—Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark and The AskThe Red-Headed Pilgrim is an irresistible novel of misadventure and new beginnings, of wanderlust and maybe bad decisions, of parenthood and divorce, and of the heartfelt truths we unearth when we least expect it.
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The Vine That Ate the South
a novel by
J.D. Wilkes
"It's a relentlessly fun novel, the literary equivalent of a country-punk album that grabs you and refuses to let go... undeniably one of the smartest, most original Southern Gothic novels to come along in years."
—NPR
The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D. Wilkes as an accomplished storyteller on a surreal, Homeric voyage that strikes at the very heart of American mythology. The Vine That Ate the South
a novel by
J.D. Wilkes
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99With the energy, wit, and singularity of vision that have earned him a reputation as a celebrated and charismatic musician, The Vine That Ate the South announces J.D. Wilkes as an accomplished storyteller on a surreal, Homeric voyage that strikes at the very heart of American mythology.
In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening," where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice—the one and only, Carver Canute—set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine. Their quest leads them face to face with albino panthers, Great Dane-riding girls, protective property owners, and just about every American folk-demon ever, while forcing the protagonist to finally take stock of his relationship with his father and the man's mysterious disappearance.
The Vine That Ate the South is a mesmerizing fantasia where Wilkes ambitiously grapples with the contradictions of the contemporary American South while subversively considering how well we know our own family and friends.
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
a collection of essays by
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hardcover: Nov 2022!
A Best Book of 2017
"Funny, painful, precise, desperate, and loving throughout. Not a day has sounded the same since I read him."
—Greil Marcus, Village Voice
In this collection of essays, Hanif Abdurraqib, acclaimed poet and cultural critic, grapples with a storm cloud of confounding emotions with prose that is immediate, personal, poetic, sometimes funny and always deeply touching. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
a collection of essays by
Hanif Abdurraqib
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Best Books of 2017 —NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily
*American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads'
*Midwest Indie BestsellerIn an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—along with original, previously unreleased essays—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.
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What We Tried to Bury Grows Here
a novel by
Julian Zabalbeascoa
November 2024!
“What We Tried to Bury Grows Here is a startling book, beautiful and horrific, that navigates the complexities of Basque Country during the Spanish Civil War, in which fascism and communism, regionalism and nationalism, and faith and skepticism do battle across a brilliantly evoked, suffering landscape."
—Phil Klay, author of Redeployment and Missionaries
A masterly crafted and haunting tale of survival, longing, and empathy, set during the Spanish Civil War. What We Tried to Bury Grows Here
a novel by
Julian Zabalbeascoa
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99Julian Zabalbeascoa is a fierce and assured new talent, and <i>What We Tried to Bury Grows Here</i> is a remarkable feat of research and imagination, as well as a transcendent literary accomplishment.
In late 1936, eighteen-year-old Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque village in Northern Spain, spurred to join the fight to preserve his country’s democracy from the insurrectionists by the rousing words of a political essayist. Months earlier, Spanish generals launched a military coup to overthrow Spain’s newly elected left-wing government. They assumed the population would welcome the coup, but throughout the country people like Isidro remained loyal to the ideals of democracy, and the Spanish Civil War began in bloody earnest.
In Bilbao, Mariana raises her two young children while, with her writing, she decries the fascist-backed coup and their German and Italian allies, imploring the world to support democracy. As the Nationalist forces assault the country, Mariana and Isidro’s lives intersect fleetingly, yet in meaningful and lasting ways.
Through a chorus of voices—a female soldier in an all-male battalion, a reluctant conscript recently emigrated from Cuba, a young girl whose parents have abandoned her in order to fight against the fascists, among others—we follow Isidro and Mariana as they struggle to maintain their humanity in a country determined to tear itself apart. -
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White Dialogues
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
A Best Book of 2017
“Anyone who admires such pyrotechnics of language will find 21st-century echoes of Edgar Allan Poe in Sims’s portraits of paranoia and delusion, with their zodiacal narrowing and the maddening tungsten spin of their narratives.”
Winner: The Rome Prize for Literature
—New York Times Book Review
The debut collection of phantasmagorical stories from award-winning novelist, Bennett Sims. White Dialogues
a collection of stories by
Bennett Sims
$ 8.99View full product details →$ 9.99*Winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19
With all the brilliance, bravado, and wit of his award-winning debut, A Questionable Shape, Bennett Sims returns with an equally ambitious and wide-ranging collection of stories.
A house-sitter alone in a cabin in the woods comes to suspect that the cabin may need to be “unghosted.” A raconteur watches as his personal story is rewritten on an episode of This American Life. And in the collection’s title story, a Hitchcock scholar sitting in on a Vertigo lecture is gradually driven mad by his own theory of cinema.
In these eleven stories, Sims moves from slow-burn psychological horror to playful comedy, bringing us into the minds of people who are haunted by their environments, obsessions, and doubts. Told in electric, insightful prose, White Dialogues is a profound exploration of the way we uncover meaning in a complex, and sometimes terrifying, world. It showcases Sims’s rare talent and confirms his reputation as one of the most exciting young writers at work today. -
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Whiteout Conditions
a novel by
Tariq Shah
BuzzFeed 'Most Highly Anticipated Books Of 2020'
"A dazzling narrative about loss, coping mechanisms, and vengeance." —Ruth Minah Buchwald, Electric Literature
With a poet’s sensibility, Shah navigates the murky responsibilities of adulthood, grief, toxic masculinity, and the tragedy of revenge in this haunting Midwestern noir. Whiteout Conditions
a novel by
Tariq Shah
$ 9.99View full product details →$ 10.99BuzzFeed "Most Highly Anticipated Books Of 2020"
Ant is back in Chicago for a funeral, and he typically enjoys funerals. Since most of his family has passed away, he finds himself strangely attracted to their endearing qualities: the hyperbolic language, the stoner altar boy, seeing friends in suits for the first time. That is, until the tragic death of Ray—Ant’s childhood friend, Vince’s teenage cousin. Ray was the younger third-wheel that Ant and Victor were stuck babysitting while in high school, and his sudden death makes national news.
In the depths of a brutal Midwest winter, Ant rides with Vince through the falling snow to Ray’s funeral, an event that has been accruing a sense of consequence. With a poet’s sensibility, Shah navigates the murky responsibilities of adulthood, grief, toxic masculinity, and the tragedy of revenge in this haunting Midwestern noir.