This is the thirteenth installment of Entropy’s “Month in Books” feature. As always, if you are a small press and would like to have your upcoming releases represented, email Jenny ( jenny@entropymag.org ). But for now: support an earthling, read a book. (One of these!)

Bellevue Literary Press

Good People by Robert Lopez

192 pages – Bellevue Literary Press/Amazon

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez’s unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life’s unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez’s stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity. –from the Bellevue Literary Press’s website

Black Lawrence Press

Blood: Stories by Matthew Cheney

Black Lawrence Press

Children play through a war-torn world; a mother seeks to communicate with a dead child; a man is drawn to a mysterious destiny in the far reaches of Maine; a historian tries to reconstruct a lost New York history; Ronald Reagan founds a religion and hides a love; a daughter tries to find her place in a family of men with guns. Blood: Stories reprints work originally published in such different venues as One Story and Weird Tales, and it includes four new stories that travel from contemporary New Hampshire to historical Prague to might-have-been Mexico to a future world where no reality stays real for long. Reality flows through these stories, even at their most surreal and lyrical, because reality is more than just what is or even what might be: reality is whatever gets beneath our skin and into our blood. –from the Black Lawrence Press website

Curbside Splendor

Paper Tigers by Damien Angelica Walters

300 pages – Curbside Splendor/Amazon

Dalkey Archive

Prancing Novelist: In Praise of Robert Firbank by Brigid Brophy

592 pages – Dalkey/Amazon

I Saw Her That Night by Drago Jančar, translated by Michael Biggins

192 pages – Dalkey/Amazon

The Bulgarian Truck: A Building Site Beneath the Open Sky by Dumitru Tsepeneag, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

224 pages – Dalkey/Amazon

At the Writing Desk: Alpine Saga / Travelogue / Acts of Vengeance by Werner Kofler, translated by Lauren Wolfe

156 pages – Dalkey/Amazon

Dodge Rose by Jack Cox

165 pages – Dalkey/Amazon

Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth. –from the Dalkey Archive website

Deep Vellum Publishing

The Pirate by Jón Gnarr, translated by Lytton Smith

256 pages – Deep Vellum/Amazon

Dzanc Books

Triangle Ray by John Holman

192 pages – Dzanc/Amazon

Triangle Ray is a collection of short stories linked by the character of Ray Fielding, introduced first as a young black man coming of age in the 1980s and infatuated with his schoolmate, the brilliant, miraculous Marie. Against the wishes of their families, the two marry just out of high school, but the marriage falls apart within a few years as time makes them strangers to each other. Twenty years later, Ray is unmarried and still searching for a lasting connection—with his friend Dexter and his wife Olivia, whose name is so beautiful Ray has to ugly it up; with his cousin Barbara, raising her child while chasing an easy way out; and with passionate, mercurial Alma, a woman with whom Ray collides at right angles, a fleeting love affair neither of them can keep alive. –from the Dzanc Books website

Goodmorning Menagerie



Semi Circle by Nurduran Duman, translated by Andrew Wessels

28 pages – Goodmorning Menagerie

Gauss PDF

Puro by Michael Decussate Capias

GPDF

Defying Gravity by Joyce S. Lee

GPDF

Experiment W Connor by Quinn Dougherty

GPDF

Graywolf Press

The Darkening Trapeze by Larry Levis, edited by David St. John

112 pages – Graywolf/Amazon

The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story by Christopher Castellani

160 pages – Graywolf/Amazon

The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship by Paul Lisicky

240 pages – Graywolf/Amazon

In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul’s romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise’s cancer diagnosis and Paul’s impending breakup. Lisicky’s compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival—hard-won, unsentimental, authentic—proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life. –from the Graywolf Press website

Maudlin House



Joy by S. Kay

Maudlin House

Become Death or Atomic Rain on the Shoulders of Atlas by Luis Neer

60 pages – Maudlin House

Melville House

Fixers by Michael M. Thomas

400 pages – Melville House/Amazon

The Happy Marriage by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by André Naffis-Sahley

320 pages – Melville House/Amazon

Good On Paper by Rachel Cantor

320 pages – Melville House/Amazon

The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo, translated by Edward Gauvin

220 pages – Melville House/Amazon

New Directions

All the Conspirators by Christopher Isherwood

256 pages – New Directions/Amazon

The Hundred Days by Joseph Roth, translated by Richard Panchyk

224 pages – New Directions/Amazon

On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

464 pages – New Directions/Amazon

Lost Words by Nicola Gardini

224 pages – New Directions/Amazon

Other Press

Couple Mechanics by Nelly Allard, translated by Adriana Hunter

320 pages – Other Press/Amazon

The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt by Julian Borger

224 pages – Other Press/Amazon

Lay Down Your Weary Tune by W.B. Belcher

352 pages – Other Press/Amazon

Poor Claudia

Prosthesis by Ian Hatcher

Poor Claudia

Queen’s Ferry Press

Adulterous Generation by Amy L. Clark

Queen’s Ferry Press

Adulterous Generation follows young people using what they have to try to create lives for themselves in our still-new century. A teenager turns to Yeats when she is haunted by her boyfriend’s criminal father; inmates of a juvenile justice facility use contraband staples and graphic novels to make meaning of their adolescence; a marriage falls apart over a convict-made cutting board; an expectant mother has a near-sexual, almost mystical experience with a developmentally disabled man in a Laundromat; and a young woman commits a robbery that will take her further than she could have imagined. If love is owing and being owed, the obligations in Amy L. Clark’s first full-length collection endure. –from the Queen’s Ferry Press’s website

Restless Books

Fardwor, Russia! A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin by Oleg Kashin, translated by Will Evans

224 pages – Restless Books/Amazon

The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories by Carlos Velázquez, translated by Achy Obejas

160 pages – Restless Books/Amazon

A fantastical literary location akin to Marquez’s Macondo or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, PopSTock! is a northern Mexican territory through which the Cowboy Bible—the protagonist of all this book’s stories—moves freely. The Cowboy Bible is alternatively the talisman of a religious fanatic/santero/luchador/DJ and painter, a reality television show in which contestants must burn pirated CDs at full speed, and the coveted leather of a pair of boots that leads a man to grant the devil a night with his wife. A mix of such otherworldly scenarios, pop culture references, and linguistic inventiveness comes remarkably together for a brazen social and political commentary on modern Mexican reality. –from the Restless Books website

Sarabande Books

Swallows and Waves by Paula Bohince

72 pages – Sarabande/Amazon

Sidebrow

The Yesterday Project by Sandra and Ben Doller

193 pages – Sidebrow/SPD

Soho Press

Poor Your Soul by Mira Ptacin

320 pages – Soho Press/Amazon

At twenty-eight, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she embraced the idea of starting a family and became engaged to Andrew, the father. Five months later, an ultrasound revealed that her child would be born with a constellation of birth defects and no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate the pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Mira’s story is paired with that of her mother, who emigrated from Poland to the United States, and who also experienced grievous loss when her only son was killed by a drunk driver. These deftly interwoven stories offer a picture of mother and daughter finding strength in themselves and each other in the face of tragedy. –from the Soho Press website

Sunnyoutside

Sex and Death by Ben Tanzer

72 pages – Sunnyoutside/SPD

tNY.Press

Studies in Hybrid Morphology by Matt Tompkins

38 pages – tNY.Press/Amazon

A man with lobster claws for hands. A woman who grows a blanket of feathers. A talking cow. A baby born from an egg. A hu-manatee. Modeled after a scientific journal, divided into articles and complete with abstracts and end-notes, Studies in Hybrid Morphology includes more than a dozen surreal stories exploring the intersections of human and animal, head and heart, science and fiction. The strange characters who populate these stories, human and non-human animals alike, seek something fundamental meaning, identity, self-worth, comfort, connection. In most cases, they come up short, or land wide of their targets. After all, how often is anything quite what we’d hoped or expected? Instead, in the space of these pages, the reader is invited to eschew expectation, revel in the joy of unforeseen discoveries, and entertain the question: what does it mean to be alive and self-aware? –from the tNY.Press website

Ugly Duckling Presse

It’s No Good: Poems/Essays/Actions by Kirill Medvedev, translated by Keith Gessen, Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, Bela Shayevich

288 pages – Ugly Duckling Presse/SPD

Unnamed Press

Seahorse by Janice Pariat

276 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon

Age of Blight by Kristine Ong Muslim

144 pages – Unnamed Press/Amazon