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A Black nerd coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Boston about a boy who struggles to learn the truth behind his mother’s claims of otherworldly origins in the smoldering aftermath of the Civil Rights era and COINTELPRO's dying breaths.

Sean’s mother, Sojourner, consistently claims otherworldly origins—Saturn, specifically. A story he’s heard his entire life and never considered that it might be true until strange men intrude on his family’s lives. Complicating matters, his father, David, and his mother, were part of a Civil Rights era Black power group that captured the attention of the FBI.

A literal bombing put an exclamation point to the end of the organization. But as soon as Sean could read on his own, he immersed himself in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books, while largely ignoring the history of his people. That ignorance morphs into a disturbing proposition and learning the truth of his parents’ pasts could prove deadly.

Sean’s exploration introduces him to music, girls, delusions of privilege, and the thrills of revolution, all while becoming an adult. The Queen of Saturn and the Prince in Exile marries golden age sci-fi with the nostalgia of roller skates, funk, and first love.

The Smallest of Bones guides those on an intimate journey of body acceptance, with sparse words dedicated to peeling back skin and diving bone-deep into the self. Raw, honest, and powerful, this collection is an offering to those struggling to find power in the darkness.

In sixteen essays published over the past decade, acclaimed novelist Elisa Albert considers everything from the creative process to reproductive justice, ambition to Ani DiFranco, Judaism to the ethos of punk, all in the midst of making a home in the strange city of Albany, New York.

With wit and wariness, skepticism and surrender, this collection offers a first-of-its-kind window into the life and mind of an author Shalom Auslander once called “Bukowski with a vagina and a motherf*cker of a hangover.”

Whether writing about doula training, struggling to embroider local community, art vs commerce, antisemitism, or growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, Albert is heartfelt, rigorous, and delightfully self-aware.

In sixteen essays published over the past decade, acclaimed novelist Elisa Albert considers everything from the creative process to reproductive justice, ambition to Ani DiFranco, Judaism to the ethos of punk, all in the midst of making a home in the strange city of Albany, New York.

With wit and wariness, skepticism and surrender, this collection offers a first-of-its-kind window into the life and mind of an author Shalom Auslander once called “Bukowski with a vagina and a motherf*cker of a hangover.”

Whether writing about doula training, struggling to embroider local community, art vs commerce, antisemitism, or growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, Albert is heartfelt, rigorous, and delightfully self-aware.

Inextricably woven into these investigations of various types of grief is the question of what gendered and socioeconomic statuses we bring with us when we choose poetry as a method of recording the intimacies of a life.

"Reminiscent of a modern William Faulkner." -Lloyd Kaufman, President of Troma Entertainment and creator of The Toxic Avenger

An eclectic collection of Crime, Horror, Bizarro, Science Fiction, Ninja Action, Noir, Mythos, and Literary Fiction stories, that gives tribute to one of the best Hip-Hop groups of all time.

Featuring:

Gabino Iglesias: BIG GHETTO BOYS

Charles Austin Muir: THE RAEKWONOMICON

Joshua Chaplinsky: SUPREME MATHEMATICS: A CIPHER

Mame Bougouma Diene: BEATS, BONES, & BRISKET

Jeremy Thompson: WU-TANGIBLE

J.C. Carter: ABBOT OF THE WHITE LOTUS

Loren Kleinman: SUNSHINE

Robert Dean: THE WORLD FELL BENEATH THE BROKEN CONCRETE

Andy Rausch: THE NIGHT OL’ DIRTY BASTARD CAME TO HOBOKEN

Tom Leins: INCARCERATED SCARFACES

Laura Lee Bahr: THE ONE WHO SWALLOWS THE SEA

David Osborne: PCP & METH & MOLLY & ALCOHOL, & NO SLEEP

S.L. Dixon: THE RIGHTEOUS HUNT

Aaron Besson: HELLRZA

Sergio Hernandez: LINX

The results are almost always (unintentionally) laughable. Kaleita doesn't need to go undercover to report from the front lines, though. She's been living there her entire life. There's a raw authenticity to her voice. Her writing is unpretentious yet inventive, riddled with a healthy dose of black humor...If I were her manager, I would fire her on the spot after reading this book. Not because she's a lawsuit waiting to happen--she might be--but because This Book Is Brought To You By My Student Loans makes it clear the job she's most qualified for is being a writer. -- Andrew Shaffer, author of Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery

Seriously! This is an extremely important book and if you do not bring this book back, you risk letting out a chaos magick spell that will destroy the world, as beasts bring destruction to life itself. That includes bunnies. Do you really want to face killer bunnies, and don't think Charlize Theron will save you. She won’t! So read this extremely important horror book and then bring it back, and also don’t look at Internet porn at your local library, it’s rude and attracts succubi! Sincerely, CLASH Books Librarian

Within the soundstage of a Brooklyn television studio on E 14th St., a young girl believes her acting career is all bright lights and playing dress up, but her messy reality is in stark juxtaposition to the glittering world of the tv cameras. Capshaw takes an unflinching look at growing up inside the three walls where life begins, ends, and lingers for the cameras, while real life with all its troubles keeps on going.

Confronted with the challenges of fitting in, defining identity, and enduring the tragic loss of her real life father, Three Walled World unravels the ghosts that remain—those around us and the ones within.

When you bring home a cat, and that cat turns out to be a tiger, what do you do? Well, you find that tiger a job, that's what.

With best friend Max at his side, a tiger named Tiger embarks on the hunt for his dream job, but finds more trouble than employment.

This hilarious and empowering tale by comedian Keith Lowell Jensen is a celebration of individuality and friendship with a fun and friendly cast of diverse characters.

Don't give up. There's a place for you, and you'll find it, no matter what stripes you wear. Join Max and Tiger for a rollicking tale of two best friends looking for a place to belong.

Writers are the channels of these spirits & if that sounds like witchcraft that's because it is. These stories gave me chills. Sylvia Plath & Lana Del Rey course through the veins of these dark, sexy, mind-bending, fantastical, romantic, & haunting tales. Authors from different genres came together in their love & passion for these muses.

Try Not to Think Bad Thoughts collects over 150 pieces of absurdist collage, watercolor, and ink, imbued with humor, horror, sex, heart, and surreal love.

A debut collection of stories from author Daisuke Shen, wherein divine beings and humans alike must rely on omens to navigate the unpredictable lives they find themselves inhabiting.

A couple employs exact clones of their partners, but then slowly begin losing their memories. Four boys with cruel intentions come across a field of statuesque women, unaware of the vengeance that awaits them. Paranoia leads a brilliant engineer into creating a language-processing machine that will tell her the truth of others' emotions.

Vague Predictions and Prophecies explores the myriad ways in which desire structures (and destroys) the self, language, and love, questioning the very nature of human connection. Through beautifully written prose, Shen invokes the surreal to create gigantic worlds packed inside deceptively small packages, emphasizing a resounding truth: that our fractured understandings of each other may yet be enough.

A debut collection of stories from author Daisuke Shen, wherein divine beings and humans alike must rely on omens to navigate the unpredictable lives they find themselves inhabiting.

A couple employs exact clones of their partners, but then slowly begin losing their memories. Four boys with cruel intentions come across a field of statuesque women, unaware of the vengeance that awaits them. Paranoia leads a brilliant engineer into creating a language-processing machine that will tell her the truth of others' emotions.

Vague Predictions and Prophecies explores the myriad ways in which desire structures (and destroys) the self, language, and love, questioning the very nature of human connection. Through beautifully written prose, Shen invokes the surreal to create gigantic worlds packed inside deceptively small packages, emphasizing a resounding truth: that our fractured understandings of each other may yet be enough.

Meet the greatest vampire hunter of all time's great-grandson, Jefferson Van Helsing, as he faces horrifying monsters and even more terrifying first dates in Portland, Oregon.

Polite conversation is quite limited when you’re a descendant of the man who hunted Dracula, and it makes going on nice dinner dates damn near impossible. But Jeff, Portland's local monster hunter, revels in the gore of his not-quite-day job.

In this guidebook, Jeff teaches the reader how to face an encounter with the most evil creatures of darkness, be they an 800-year-old blood-sucking fiend or a finance major who only has "coffee!!!" listed as their interest. He may still be learning the ins and outs of romantic etiquette, but killing monsters is in his blood.

Van Helsing’s Guide to Monsters and Dating is an illustrated monster/dating companion where readers will learn how to identify and fight ghouls, ghosts, vampires and more. In this harrowing debut by Ben Crew, Jeff stumbles into true love, discovers the importance of bro-time, and accidentally triggers a century-old prophecy all in a good-natured attempt to better the world by bettering himself.

While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.

VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.

While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.

VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.

A talented array of writers, coming from the genres of Noir, Horror, Metafiction, Mythos, Crime, Weird and Bizarro Fiction, were all inspired by the existential themes from the first season of True Detective. Clash Books is very proud to present this collection of powerful and evocative stories about the humanity and inhumanity of modern man in an ever-shifting moral and cosmic landscape.

Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet’s work— a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, Hồ Xuân Hương to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat Afreen— and alters its DNA, infusing it with an other idiolect. This is an idiolect of pleasure (the wordplay, puns, and cadence of the Vietnamese language) and of pain (the long shadow of the Vietnam war in the lives of those who survived, barely survived, and became refugees). Like any possessing spirit, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER speaks in tongues: using others’ words to articulate a personal pain. Shorn of their original context and content, the poems in this collection— mutant-hybrids who retain a trace of their skeleton while dressed in entirely other clothes— become a play of voices that call into question notions of authenticity and self in poetic production, a postmodern twist for the classical craft.

Through the eyes of Nereid, daughter of this angry sea god, we witness the evolution of this primal waterfall into a powerful symbol of beauty, danger, and sacrifice. Through Nereid, we witness the stories of women and girls who commit suicide by waterfall, beginning with Nereid herself, and the waterfall otherworld into which they awaken. Unfolding in spiral rather than linear fashion, this bible of shifting realities and portals between life and death shines light and dark into a world never before imagined. An afterlife which is neither heaven or hell, it is as uncertain as it is beautiful. Intertwined with the tales of Nereid and others in her world is the commonality of the Waterfall, whose elemental/diselemental voice adds its own layers to Nereid's bible. When the Waterfall speaks, we taste the purity of the first waterfall, we catch the scent of primal element, we are enchanted by the face of magnificent beauty, and we feel the very heartbeat of water as we drown in the roar of the falls. From Nereid's lifetime of water, through the hidden pools and passages of her watery world, Waterfall Girls is but a small sampling of legends inspired by waterfalls, woven into the heartbreak of suicide.

Through the eyes of Nereid, daughter of this angry sea god, we witness the evolution of this primal waterfall into a powerful symbol of beauty, danger, and sacrifice. Through Nereid, we witness the stories of women and girls who commit suicide by waterfall, beginning with Nereid herself, and the waterfall otherworld into which they awaken. Unfolding in spiral rather than linear fashion, this bible of shifting realities and portals between life and death shines light and dark into a world never before imagined. An afterlife which is neither heaven or hell, it is as uncertain as it is beautiful. Intertwined with the tales of Nereid and others in her world is the commonality of the Waterfall, whose elemental/diselemental voice adds its own layers to Nereid's bible. When the Waterfall speaks, we taste the purity of the first waterfall, we catch the scent of primal element, we are enchanted by the face of magnificent beauty, and we feel the very heartbeat of water as we drown in the roar of the falls. From Nereid's lifetime of water, through the hidden pools and passages of her watery world, Waterfall Girls is but a small sampling of legends inspired by waterfalls, woven into the heartbreak of suicide.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of La Belle Ajar, brings you a horror death themed collection with mortality, murder, and muerte oozing from every one of these terrifying verses.

Inspired by NightWorms, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties & Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, get ready to be haunted by serial killers, fatal femmes, poisoners, as these premeditated murderesses that slay you in terrifying poems. One step inside these grave inspired verses, you will want to re-experience We Are the Ones until the very end.

Embrace the terror and prepare to be Possessed, Cepeda’s poems will mesmerize you with his bone-chilling death rhymes from the other side.

 Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back.

EXCERPT

“You exist in an endless series of iterations. You keep spinning out and out and out. Sometimes you take the form of a person and people, but you don’t stop there.

You are the places where people go to enact every hidden, silent fantasy—the cruelty and the beauty too—and you are the fantasies themselves, and the economies that shape and regulate them.

In my dreams I never fly, but I do breathe underwater.”

 Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive love affair with the universe. Her understanding of power, desire, and complicity must be transformed again and again. Addressed to an amorphous you, Lerman wrestles with the forces of birth and death, creation and destruction—going deep into the subterranean strata of consciousness and back.