FICTION AND DRAMA Thom Vernon THE DRIFTS 978-1-55245-228-8, $17.95, paper, 280 pp.
Lewis Warsh A PLACE IN THE SUN 978-1-933132-71-6, $16, paper, 260 pp.
COACH HOUSE BOOKS 2010
SPUYTEN DUYVIL 2010
Fiction. Night is falling, and so is the snow. As the blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes, and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made. Julie’s two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to be famous when she suddenly finds herself, at forty-six, unexpectedly expectant. She’s not sure she can bear to be a mother again. And her husband, Charlie, won’t come home to talk it over with her. Charlie wants another child more than anything, but he doesn’t know how to deal with Julie. His affair with Wilson, his best friend, is over, but he’s found a different and unusual kind of intimacy. Wilson works in the Singer factory that keeps the town alive. She wants more than anything to be loved, but she knows that Charlie wasn’t the way to get there. She’s in love with Dol. Dol is a transsexual, a divorced father of two children, who can’t afford the transition that would make his body make sense—although the doctors visiting from Atlanta might change that. Their very different voices converge as the blizzard gathers force, their stories violently mapping in the snow the ways that memory, gender, and history carve themselves upon our bodies. THE DRIFTS is dexterously told, a cacophony of four affecting voices melding into one exquisite chord.
Fiction. “A deeply engrossing book, I couldn’t put it down. And now that I’ve finished reading it, I can’t put it away, for how it furthers my thinking of the genre itself. A PLACE IN THE SUN beautifully combines the high action and salaciousness of page-turners, with the self-reflection and risk-taking of postmodern fiction. It’s a must-read and a must-study”—Renee Gladman. “A PLACE IN THE SUN is a beautifully rendered and expertly deconstructed novel. Warsh’s stunningly effective use of multiple narratives, provided in exquisitely detailed lines, conveys an elastic and powerful emotional honesty. This is a sensual and desperate story from a writer with formidable powers of invention”—Donald Breckenridge.
Richard Vetere BAROQUE 978-1-59954-008-5, $18, paper, 316 pp. BORDIGHERA PRESS 2009
Fiction. BAROQUE is the true story of the young painter Mario Minitti and several others who lived in and loved in Rome at the turn of the century in 1600. They came to Rome to find fame and fortune, Fillide Meladrone, Archbishop Pietero Aldrobondini, Ranuccio Tomassoni, Nunzio Pulzone. The story follows their lives as they intersect and fall in love with one another and share a common bond that they were painted by the great Caravaggio. Kathleen Wakefield SNAKETOWN 978-1-880834-85-5, $9.95, paper, 159 pp. CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY POETRY CENTER 2010
Fiction. Winner of the 2007 Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Contest Selected by Steve Lattimore. SNAKETOWN tells of a place that captivates and holds hostage, a place hermitic and congenital like the families that populate it. It tells the story of heredity and tragedy; how evil can magnetize as mightily as beauty, how a family, nostalgic for past times—devastating times— can revise damaging, damning memory; how the familiar should never be trusted.
Jess Webster THE SECRET STEALER 978-1-921479-39-7, $14.95, paper, 232 pp. INTERACTIVE PUBLICATIONS 2010
Young Adult Fiction. Winner of the 2009 Interactive Publications Picks Best First Book. THE SECRET STEALER is a creative and well-crafted fantasy story for young adults, and takes the reader on an entertaining ride as it looks at magic curses, good and evil, and the challenges of dealing with the adult world. An exceptionally wellwritten, engrossing, compelling and easy to read novel. Jessica Webster’s characters are believable and fully developed, and the storyline is absorbing and exciting. Humor flows throughout the piece, quirky and always clever, and invests the story with liveliness, originality and charm. David Wirthlin HOUNDSTOOTH 978-1-933132-54-9, $14, paper, 120 pp. SPUYTEN DUYVIL 2009
Fiction. “A Molotov cocktail flies through the air, rotating end over end as it moves forward, graceful in its slow motion revolutions. It stops mid-air, suspended. A drum beat plays lightly in the background. Boom boom pop, ba boom boom pop, boom boom pop, ba boom boom pop. Like that. The bottle, the gasoline inside, the air surrounding it, almost everything is motionless. Only the flame still burns, still continues to devour the rag. The bottle is clear glass, and the sky behind it is cloudless.” Karen Tei Yamashita I HOTEL 978-1-56689-239-1, $19.95, paper, 640 pp. COFFEE HOUSE PRESS 2010
Fiction. Asian American Studies. California Studies. Illustrated by Leland Wong and Sina Grace. Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I HOTEL begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned. As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement— their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION · order@spdbooks.org · edi orders via pubnet.org (san #106-6617) · 800-869-7553 · Fall 2010
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