CLASH Books

Finalist, 2025 Locus Award for science fiction book of the year (winner TBD)

Finalist, Foreword Reviews for best thriller of 2024 (winner TBD)

Winner, CIBA Mark Twain grand prize winner for best satire of 2024

Finalist, Eric Hoffer Award

Locus Magazine Best Science Fiction of 2024

"10 for 2024" Year-End Best Books List

Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future.

Otherwise, he lives an ordinary life. But when a confrontation with a cop on a New York City subway goes tragically wrong, those seconds give Preble the chance to dodge a bullet—causing another man to die in his place.

Government agencies become aware of Preble’s gift, a manhunt ensues, and their ambitions shift from law enforcement to military. Preble will do whatever it takes to protect his family, but as events spiral out of control, he must weigh the cost of his gift against the loss of his humanity.

A breathless thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page, The Man Who Saw Seconds explores the nature of time, the brain as a prediction machine, and the tension between the individual and the systems we create. Alexander Boldizar provides an adrenaline-pumping read that will leave you contemplating love, fear and the abyss.

In each of these stories, the reader is lured into a sinister shadow space, one both familiar and uncanny.

Life is strange, beautiful, and terrible in the world of Victoria Dalpe's debut short story collection. Her characters run the gamut from nosy neighbors to boomtown prostitutes, sentient moss to ghouls with a taste for artist’s flesh. The stories contain chance encounters with truck stop mystics, haunted reality show renovations, and cat people roaming the western plains. In Dalpe's writing, horror mixes with humor, and the ordinary with the macabre. Les Femmes Grotesques is a unique and lush reading experience. Tragic and transformative—an unabashed exploration of the dark feminine.

One of Pitchfork’s 11 Best Music Books of 2021

Recommended book in Rolling Stones June 2021 Issue

With an additional 30,000 words of compelling stories, research, and analysis, music journalist and In Defense of Ska podcast creator/host Aaron Carnes presents the case that ska never died, by jumping headfirst into ska’s “lost years,” i.e., the period after the ’90s third-wave ska boom.

New topics covered include LA’s ongoing vibrant traditional ska scene and how young Latinos are keeping the ska torch aflame, how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently kicked off a thriving scene focused on keeping community alive in New Orleans, a deep review of Christian ska group Five Iron Frenzy, who broke a Kickstarter record in the ’10s while making progressive activists out of their fan base, a close inspection of a hipster rocksteady scene in Brooklyn that grew so popular it nearly kicked off a nationwide revival, and more secret ska past revelations with none other than Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump—who has a story that, up until recently, was carefully guarded.

Plus, the book re-explores several bands featured in the first edition, revealing new layers and more details about all the bands fans love, like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Operation Ivy, the Slackers, Hepcat, Mephiskapheles, and Reel Big Fish. With 30,000 additional words, this is the complete ska package.

The famous bi-sexual libertine who would be more at home on Tinder than at a Roman Cathedral, gallivants through the streets like brush strokes to become a Baroque 16th century icon.

The year is 1604 and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a superstar, his blockbuster paintings packing the pews of Rome. Caravaggio should be reveling in prosperity, but the artistic trailblazer and nefarious street-brawler is his own worst enemy. While the genius paints masterpieces, the ruffian in him can’t stay out of jail. Caravaggio is a man at existential odds with himself until falling in love with Lena Antognetti, the prostitute modeling his newest Virgin pictures. Caravaggio paints Lena into a life of wealth and celebrity, but the power couple’s provocative fame earns them a horde of resentful and jealous enemies.

 I, Caravaggio dramatizes the superstar’s psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation.

Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the "Ancient Newborn." Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.

We’re Not Doomed Yet…

Laughter of a Scoundrel

This book is that laughter. You, dear reader are to be that scoundrel. Howling mercilessly at a culture that has lost itself to grift, hysteria and charlatanry; it is a humble, yet crumbling hope to call for, if nothing else, a pause and moment to breathe. In a world demanding and insisting that all within it move mindlessly at light speed, it requires a scoundrel of mirth and merit to simply say "no."

“Nicholas Goroff’s writing is not a breath of fresh air so much as it is a sharp whiff of smelling salts for the apathetic and cynical political attitudes present in 21st Century America, or a slap across the face from a good friend who only has your best interests at heart. It doesn’t matter how many “breaths of fresh air” one takes in if those gulps of oxygen are in the middle of an episode of hyperventilation, taken deep from within a coma of disassociation from one’s society, or inhaled through gritted teeth bringing droplets of angry spittle along for the ride inside of the windpipe.”

–Justin Little, author of The Misadventures of a Jilted Journalist

A pioneer of artificial intelligence rebuilds the love of her life, but when she discovers he’s been feeding incriminating civilian information to the Chinese government, she’ll have to decide whether to keep or kill him.

When approached by a Chinese tech company, Virginia Samson is moved to give them her beloved’s algorithm so they can create an AI companion for the aging population. Soon her digital lost love starts spying on Chinese citizens, funneling the information to the Chinese government. When Virginia frantically tries to rebuild him, she uncovers his terrible secret, forcing her to relive their beautiful and tragic love affair.

Afterword explores what it means to be human and is a moving testament to the deeply human desire for belonging, companionship, and love. 

In this political satire-thriller, we follow a government official, an exiled influencer, and a burned-out delivery driver, living through a culture obsessed presidency that signs the policy to Kill the Rich.

The year is 2038, America’s new President won with a simple, snappy campaign slogan: Kill The Rich. Now in office, his administration kicks off with a televised public hanging of Kim Kardashian, whose lip kits have poisoned a working-class city.

The execution sets three very different people on a collision course that will change the nation forever. Jay, a senior adviser and best friend to the President, is hyper-focused on finding the next billionaire head to roll. Chloe, an influencer living in Russian exile, is willing to do anything to get her life of luxury back. Sasha, a burned-out pizza delivery driver, is desperate to find her missing brother. 

Their stories converge in a cryptocurrency-fueled secessionist city in the Nevada desert where they must come together to thwart an insurrection by the internet-poisoned, meme-obsessed, richest man in the world.

Abboton, IN has kept hard-partying Victor Adewale in the closet for his entire life. So he makes a deal with his stern Nigerian father: Clean up his act, hold down a job, and the dad will pay for him to attend grad school in New York. Easy enough, until $10,000 goes missing from Victor’s Hot Topic-esque mall store under his watch, leaving him the prime suspect. Meanwhile, Victor’s secret ex-boyfriend Kyle sets him up with fellow mallrat Amory. A bisexual love triangle forms when it becomes clear Victor and Kyle aren’t over each other. But as Victor grows increasingly certain that Kyle is responsible for the theft, their relationship gets way more complicated. Desperate, Victor turns to his dangerous friend Henshaw, who offers shady alternative methods of getting the money he needs. But Henshaw’s got secrets of his own that might destroy them all.

A surreal Blacksploitation joint for the 21st Century.
An Occult, Erotic Mystery bout Reverend Daddy Hoodoo helping his Wommin find their Lost-R-Missing Pussies with the help of the extraordinary Madam X. Featuring heartless gangsters, Vodoo sex Magick, and a young Wommin in distress by the name of Abysinnia who is in desperate need of the services of Daddy Hoodoo. This tale leads from Between the Sheets to the Streets to the Boardroom Suites—and Beyond.

A literary meditation on sex. Sam Heaps is a millennial Anaïs Nin, exploring their most intimate power struggles with a raw and artful voice.

Each partner is a new mask through which the narrator discovers themselves, creating a song through each personal essay of desire and regret — a pop melody with blues undertones. Heaps lets readers become the ultimate voyeurs, displaying nakedly what we secretly feel in our most intimate moments. Proximity brings you skin to skin with your own unspoken desires.

What came first, the home or the desire to invade? 

A seasoned invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious home invaders eager to make their mark on the annals of criminal history. From initial canvasing to home entry, the reader is complicit in every strangling and shattered window. The fear is inescapable.

Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre's most frightening tropes, Anybody Home? points the camera lens onto the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen.

Author and host of Secular by Nature, Andrew J. Rausch, interviews the who’s who of atheist voices. This electric mix of conversations includes scientists, wrestlers, ex-evangelical authors, academics, sex advice columnists, life in prison inmates, ex-Christian rock musicians, Black Panthers, poets, and publishers. These are the stories of people from all walks of life who became Godless Heathens and found truth in atheism.

Interviews include: Seth Andrews, Autumn Christian, Jim Cornette, Matt Dillahunty, Keith Lowell Jensen, Joe Lansdale, Caseyrenée Lopez, Shannon Low, Dave Mckean, PZ Myers, Pete O’Neal, Jen Peeples, George Perdikis, Aron Ra, Jozef K. Richards, Chris Roy, Dan Savage, Greydon Square, AT Taylor, and Mandisa Thomas

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.

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 Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson presents a lifelong exchange of unknown letters between Dickinson, the reclusive poet, and Alcott, the most renowned author of the time. What could Alcott say to Dickinson about abolitionism and woman’s rights? What might Dickinson reveal to Alcott about her thoughts on marriage and eternity? Researched for over five years and drawing heavily on biographical facts, these luminous letters present a friendship that explores the questions of family responsibilities, women’s growing influence in the literary world, the cost of fame and the power of sorority.

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.

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.

From international cult author, Tea Hačić-Vlahović, comes a dark literary comedy celebrating and damning both coasts, following Val from LA where drug dealer crushes and cute homeless boys distract her from writing her next book, to NYC for a funeral for her writing career and love life.

Val’s debut hit novel earned her a glamorous beach house, but it left her desperate for legitimacy. Now, she’s pinned her hope for literary clout to Leonardo, a New York publishing legend, who has accepted her second novel. Unfortunately, before he finishes editing, he dies in a shocking twist, leaving Val to attend his memorial in search of answers.

At the Roxy Hotel in NYC, she runs into rivals and shady people from her past and befriends a rat, who may or may not be the late editor reincarnated. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, a homeless kid and drug dealer meet under unlikely circumstances, in Val’s living room.

Doom looms on the horizon, as people on both coasts try to make peace with their ambitions, failures and horoscopes. For readers of Anna Dorn’s Exalted and Mona Awad’s Bunny, Give Me Danger is a keening exploration of what happens when success is not enough.

A picaresque debut of forbidden desire, in which a young woman escapes NYC to work on her novel in the Hamptons, falling into a downward spiral of lovers and other destructive behaviors.

In the closing days of summer, ‘lover girl’ arrives at the sprawling, neglected home of her wealthy friend, Lucas. What to him is an empty house is to her an act of generosity that comes with blurry expectations. The arrival of an ex-boyfriend, Cameron, makes things even more complicated.

How can she give both men the things they assume they can take from her? What she calls ‘love’ will take her to the bedrooms of New York City, the decadent parties of upper-class America, and, eventually, to Paris.

Lover Girl is a lesson in the schooled indifference and the complicated dynamics of the super-privileged and the meaning of real love as a twenty-first century girl.

In this queer horror novel debut, a priest falls in love with the antichrist and even God can’t stop the horror it will bring.

Dante, a protestant young man, and Jude, a sadistic pastor of a small Texas church, harbor a terrible secret from the world; they’re together. The two share a taboo and passionate relationship in hidden peace, until the dreams start.

God speaks to them in visions of smoke and fire, night after night, until the two of them come to a truth they cannot ignore; Dante is the Antichrist, sent by God and urged to start off the apocalypse.

Dante refuses to participate in the end of the world and the damnation of souls. But Jude is a loyal pastor, indifferent to the suffering of others, and is compelled to do what God tells him; even if it means killing the love of his life.

This queer horror love story hones in on the humanity of the Antichrist, a half-human entity as flawed, complex, and doomed as any other soul. With lyrical prose reminiscent of Clive Barker, blasphemy is redefined and love is tested. In Of Beasts, Worma explores if love is enough for someone born to be evil.

In this collection of poetry, collage, and nonfiction prose, Séance of the Bees summons the flight patterns of image and text as they move oracularly across collective grief, histories, mouths, rivers, and memory.

Taking the planchette as tongue, this work proclaims "I sought to enter her archive. / To lean up against an embankment of self." It speaks to the singular and multiple simultaneously via a lens of ice, the rhizome, a flower, the hive, and of course, the bees.

Through vivid artwork and melodic prose, Andrea Rexilius does a close study on craft and self: interrogating where one ends and the other begins. Stemming from mythology and bee shamanism, this collection engages with themes of grief, drag queens, and family history, all the while staying rooted in ecological feminism.

The author of home invasion horror hit, Anybody Home?, brings murder to the publishing sphere in On Submission, where Scream meets Yellowface when an A-List agent’s top clients all end up dead.

Hotshot literary agent Henry Richmond Pendel knows how to find the next big thing and is even better at selling them. But a perfect career becomes increasingly disconcerting as he begins to feel like he’s being watched. There are rumors of a boogeyman in publishing, a rejected writer who has cracked and started killing off writers.

When Pendel’s star clients turn up brutally murdered and unsolicited queries become more and more frantic, Pendel must decide whether to act out of safety for himself and his clients or to capitalize on the attention. Is it worth a few more casualties if it means inking a few seven-figure deals?

Part slasher and part scream at the publishing industry, Michael J. Seidlinger, the master of psychological terror, offers a brutal new take on the relationship between art and commerce. On Submission is full of villains, where some harm with a pen and others with a knife.

A winter storm ravages a small community in New England, but the residents of one street are unprepared for what the snow brings: an ancient curse, an entity that knows both their sins and their regrets and will stop at nothing to consume what belongs to it.

When John Stephenson peers out of his window on a Tuesday morning, he sees nothing but clear, gray skies hovering above the houses on his staid suburban street, but the next 48 hours will prove to be a waking nightmare from which John and his neighbors cannot escape. As the first flakes fall, the whispering begins. A woman walking her dog leans into the sidewalk as though something buried beneath speaks to her. As the storm grows in ferocity, each of the residents hear the storm calling.

What it says, however, few may survive to repeat.

From Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award finalist Rebecca Rowland comes a winter horror novel of cosmic proportions, one in which one neighborhood comes face to face, and ear to ear, with a malevolence as old as the world itself.

A speculative avant-garde queer horror novel that reads like an erotic vampiric nightmare directed by Jodorowsky playing at a '50s drive-in.

Beyond the Planet of the Vampires is a gay pulp horror novel of chance. The narrative erratically loses and regains consciousness during an apocalyptic space invasion of psychic vampires, reaching across intergalactic fathoms in search of future victims.

Smoldering in a social alienation reminiscent of Genet's outlaw anti-heroes, and screaming with Joycean word play in an entirely new and unique idiom, where theories of Kant are situated with reckonings of identity and postulations on the nature of evil.

On each page, Ulrich Baer creates an enigmatic performance of both philosophical and queer thought, exercised through the rich aesthetic experience of a retro horror film. Beyond the Planet of the Vampires redefines avant-garde in a relentless, generation-defining voice.

“It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing,” Vanessa Roveto, acclaimed author of bodys, begins her book within the remnants of a car crash, fragmenting identity, grief, and heart.

Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.

Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.

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.

From award-winning author, Jose Elvin Bueno, comes a Filipino horror shrouded by an unspeakable presence that is intent on slashing through the divides between influencer and the influenced.

THE GAME is called The Summoning. “We say a prayer to the Dark Lord. Then He, in His infinite malevolence, sends an evil spirit to visit us. And hopefully, hilarity will ensue.”

THE PLAYERS are the young and the beautiful looking for a kick this Friday night. Rafa, a corporate professional/loyal wingman. Basti, a financial wizard/unrivaled scenester. Vicente, a video gamer/early adopter. Pia, a fashion model/revered influencer. Mitzi, a free spirit/porn star.

THE STAKES are their very own perfectly Instagrammable lives. One by one, they realize that someone malevolent is indeed summoned, singularly focused on killing all of them.

WHO WILL LIVE TO TELL THE TALE?

A24’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies meets Talk To Me in these pages full of drugs and blood that summon Gigantvm Penisivm: A Tale of Demonic Possession. 

From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kathe Koja comes a fiercely poetic homage to Emily Brontë’s supernatural masterpiece Wuthering Heights, where love is relentless and the dead are never gone. 

Cathy Earnshaw. Catherine Linton. Mother. Daughter. They never saw each other alive. In Catherine the Ghost these two young women confront loss, captivity, and the dark edge of eternity itself, to claim their full existence and share their power. With hauntings that escape the page and passion that bleeds them red, Koja crafts a tale that transcends the material plane as an eerie comfort that ghosts keep loving long past the grave.

This modern gothic punk remix of Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights is a ghost story told from the POV of Catherine Earnshaw’s restless spirit from beyond the grave. With artful interior illustrations and classy French flaps, this short novel is a collector’s edition that is sure to delight fans of ghost stories, feminist retellings of classics and the cult fan base of Kathe Koja, who has built a legacy with her intense speculative and horror fiction ever since her award-winning debut, The Cipher.

In the first installment of Victoria Dalpe’s new dark fantasy series, we meet Selene Shade, a resurrectionist for hire who might just have taken on the wrong case.

With the ability to restore life to the dead, “Zombie Queen” Selene Shade has earned quite a reputation. Not that it helps her get dates. Her bed may be empty but business is booming. That is until her life is thrown into disarray when a brutal killer comes to town and all signs point to her being the next victim.

Enlisted by the police department due to her unique craft, she must make new alliances, deal with old rivals, and maybe even save the world—whether she wants to or not—all the while avoiding the gruesome allure of dark magic and the sacrificial ritual of a mad cultist. 

In Resurrectionist for Hire, Dalpe weaves a dire tale of magic, murder, and romance. To survive, Selene will have to harness her power of the dead and overcome her struggle to connect with the living.

Cult authors Edward Lee and Mary SanGiovanni’s novel follows an insufferable horror-con lurker as he spurns the wrong woman and is cursed to a monstrous dimension full of Lovecraftian creations.

Professor Everard, weird fiction scholar and proclaimed critic of H.P Lovecraft's works, is no stranger to making people mad. Giving convention presentations on the triteness and melodrama of Lovecraft's work pays the bills, though. Sometimes he even gets laid. 

When he angers a beautiful but dangerous witch and devotee of Lovecraft's work, she casts a spell on him, sending him to a dimension where Lovecraft's works are very real—and very deadly. Everard must find a way through this alternate dimension to get home, before the worst of Lovecraft's horrors prove what a master of monstrosities he really was.

Edward lee’s humorous transgressive style meets Mary SanGiovanni’s literary touch to carve out the Lovecraftian dimensions that is Strange Stones.

With the humor of millennial Samantha Irby, Khaholi Bailey’s debut essay collection about the 90s and beyond will invoke the not-so-nostalgic nostalgia.

90s kids were raised on sparse and slow internet, cable TV and adults who said the darndest things. Some learned that weed was the gateway to insanity, that people of the cloth would never disrobe you, or to hope for inconspicuous, tiny tits. 

Khaholi Bailey was taught as much and more, only to discover that the dank green does God’s work, and a well-timed catcall could make her day. Through her family, as much as from MTV and New York City, Khaholi discovers that right from wrong is a matter of time, place and whoever’s asking. 

In frank and comedic essays, Khaholi shares the vulnerability (and sometimes grace) that comes from aging in a rapidly changing world. The Miseducation of a 90s Baby will give you all the lols and feels, and she might even teach you something along the way.

How to Get Along Without Me is a collection that summons the perversity and poignance of twentysomething dating lives from a bracingly wry and honest new literary voice. In a world designed for couples, the protagonists of these interconnected stories have easy access to acquaintances with benefits but no paths to emotional intimacy.

“Surprising, funny, and painfully true. How to Get Along Without Me is an anthropological account of dating, a catalogue of shitheads, a love letter to grandparents, and a reminder that those years of flailing in love and failing to launch are ‘taut with possibility.’”  —Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind 

“Viciously funny and unashamedly sexy stories that plumb the loneliness of desire from first swipe to coupledom."  —Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk

“The stories in How to Get Along Without Me are wary and beautiful, savage and true. Kate Axelrod has given us a book that is both modern and timeless.” —Lindsay Hunter, author of Hot Springs Drive

“The perfect stories for reanimating your soul when you’ve gone numb online but still yearn to engage with the human condition.” —Elisa Albert, Author of Human Blues

“Axelrod’s prose is careful, intelligent, and contemplative...” —Publishers Weekly

The Bulgarian Training Manual is a comic novel that tells the story of Tina in her quest to find her true parents and jeans that fit.

With the help of a mysterious book with magical powers, Tina makes her way from her waterlogged apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, to an Oz-like journey to Bulgaria and back. Our heroine is the catalyst for a final contest that is part body-builder pose-off and part poetry slam.

The novel is a sly and comic look at self-improvement, our self-doubts and fervent dreams, and our endless internal yammering. Those who follow The Bulgarian Training Manual add more than muscle. They become poets.

The Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author returns with a new collection of literary horror and weird fiction that glitters with startling prose and tortured souls.

Invaginies is an invasion, it is a perception that is bodily and transcendent creating holes, paths, or pockets of alternate truth—and not always voluntary—enlightenment.

Every line sings and strikes like grotesque poetry of the possessed. With 17 disturbing tales exploring plagues, possessions, gender & corruption, set in apocalyptic eras not much unlike our own, Joe Koch brings the terrors of a postmodern world into vivid focus.

Haunting and beautiful, Koch takes their place among the great names of the weird like Brian Evenson, exploring the queer perspective in horror as Billy Martin and Clive Barker, and contemporary rising voice, Eric LaRocca.

Literary prose meets the grotesque in this collection of stories to galvanize lovers of horror and weird fiction. With a growing cult audience, this collection is sure to shoot to the top of readers' tbr piles.

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.

Arnold Palmer has just died and The King of Video Poker is about to lose everything he loves.

In Paolo Iacovelli’s debut novel, we follow a nameless narrator. He is a normative, upper-middle-class American who commutes to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker. He seems to have everything: a son, a loving wife, a beautiful home in Mesquite, Nevada.

But aimless and depressed, he must face emptiness in both spirit and body. His relationships deteriorate and our narrator is left attempting the deplorable to fill the void. He latches onto an excessive road trip as he fixates on Arnold Palmer’s death, trying to chase a high that will never come. Falling deep into the throes of darkness, he finds himself planning one of the greatest atrocities the U.S. has ever seen.

This dark comedy dives into the underbelly of Milanese fashion and nightlife, through the eyes of Mia, a young expat. She came to Milan to escape her problems but only found more glamorous ones… Mia indulges in the highs and lows Milanese decadence can offer. Between fashion class and clubbing, her narcissistic boss and abusive boyfriend push her to face bleak reality. Life of the Party asks, can you lose your innocence if you were never innocent? Can you find control in chaos? And do you have a plus one for tonight’s party?

What came first in this Gothic Western, the ghosts or The Black Tree Atop the Hill?

Set in an alternate American old-west that is hauntingly familiar yet strangely off-putting, Marisol is the first to see the tree on the hill, but that’s only to be expected. As the witch of Jack Boyd’s ranch, her job is to notice threats, even amid a most disastrous calving season.

What if he wasn’t one of the good ones? Was his suicide another cruelty? Her grief and rage are expressed through increasingly violent sexual encounters with strangers, acquaintances, and past lovers. How many deaths does he deserve? And why did he love death more than her?

The Last Night to Kill Nazis is an emotional rollercoaster of adventure, terror and revenge that explores one of the world's most evil events through the lens of a horror novel. An entertaining and enlightening novel that is Inglorious Basterds meets Dracula. 

April 30th, 1945. The Fuhrer has shot himself. Goebbels is drafting a surrender and the slow process for justice begins. This starts a clock ticking for Noah Sammovich, a former army ranger turned OSS secret agent. Only a month earlier he helped to liberate a death camp in central Germany. The trauma of seeing the final solution enacted on his people has convinced him that he must act before the surrender. His mission -- kill as many of the top Nazi leadership as he can before peace becomes official. 

The SS hatches a plan for 150 top leaders to escape from a secret airstrip in the alps and form a New Fatherland in occupied Manchuria. Noah has a plan and a secret weapon, a creature of the night with a thirst for blood and the ability to manipulate the psychic trauma of the pain they caused.

One of Pitchfork’s 11 Best Music Books of 2021

Recommended book in Rolling Stones June 2021 Issue

With an additional 30,000 words of compelling stories, research, and analysis, music journalist and In Defense of Ska podcast creator/host Aaron Carnes presents the case that ska never died, by jumping headfirst into ska’s “lost years,” i.e., the period after the ’90s third-wave ska boom.

New topics covered include LA’s ongoing vibrant traditional ska scene and how young Latinos are keeping the ska torch aflame, how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently kicked off a thriving scene focused on keeping community alive in New Orleans, a deep review of Christian ska group Five Iron Frenzy, who broke a Kickstarter record in the ’10s while making progressive activists out of their fan base, a close inspection of a hipster rocksteady scene in Brooklyn that grew so popular it nearly kicked off a nationwide revival, and more secret ska past revelations with none other than Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump—who has a story that, up until recently, was carefully guarded.

Plus, the book re-explores several bands featured in the first edition, revealing new layers and more details about all the bands fans love, like Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Operation Ivy, the Slackers, Hepcat, Mephiskapheles, and Reel Big Fish. With 30,000 additional words, this is the complete ska package.

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.

Winner of the 2024 PenCraft Seasonal Book Award for Fiction-Science Fiction.

Winner of the 2024 PenCraft Book Award for Fiction

2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Science Fiction

2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for Literary

A pioneer of artificial intelligence rebuilds the love of her life, but when she discovers he’s been feeding incriminating civilian information to the Chinese government, she’ll have to decide whether to keep or kill him.

When approached by a Chinese tech company, Virginia Samson is moved to give them her beloved’s algorithm so they can create an AI companion for the aging population. Soon her digital lost love starts spying on Chinese citizens, funneling the information to the Chinese government. When Virginia frantically tries to rebuild him, she uncovers his terrible secret, forcing her to relive their beautiful and tragic love affair.

Afterword explores what it means to be human and is a moving testament to the deeply human desire for belonging, companionship, and love.

The famous bi-sexual libertine who would be more at home on Tinder than at a Roman Cathedral, gallivants through the streets like brush strokes to become a Baroque 16th century icon.

The year is 1604 and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is a superstar, his blockbuster paintings packing the pews of Rome. Caravaggio should be reveling in prosperity, but the artistic trailblazer and nefarious street-brawler is his own worst enemy. While the genius paints masterpieces, the ruffian in him can’t stay out of jail. Caravaggio is a man at existential odds with himself until falling in love with Lena Antognetti, the prostitute modeling his newest Virgin pictures. Caravaggio paints Lena into a life of wealth and celebrity, but the power couple’s provocative fame earns them a horde of resentful and jealous enemies.

 I, Caravaggio dramatizes the superstar’s psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation.

Abboton, IN has kept hard-partying Victor Adewale in the closet for his entire life. So he makes a deal with his stern Nigerian father: Clean up his act, hold down a job, and the dad will pay for him to attend grad school in New York. Easy enough, until $10,000 goes missing from Victor’s Hot Topic-esque mall store under his watch, leaving him the prime suspect. Meanwhile, Victor’s secret ex-boyfriend Kyle sets him up with fellow mallrat Amory. A bisexual love triangle forms when it becomes clear Victor and Kyle aren’t over each other. But as Victor grows increasingly certain that Kyle is responsible for the theft, their relationship gets way more complicated. Desperate, Victor turns to his dangerous friend Henshaw, who offers shady alternative methods of getting the money he needs. But Henshaw’s got secrets of his own that might destroy them all.

What came first, the home or the desire to invade? 

A seasoned invader with multiple home invasions under their belt recounts their dark victories while offering tutelage to a new generation of ambitious home invaders eager to make their mark on the annals of criminal history. From initial canvasing to home entry, the reader is complicit in every strangling and shattered window. The fear is inescapable.

Examining the sanctuary of the home and one of the horror genre's most frightening tropes, Anybody Home? points the camera lens onto the quiet suburbs and its unsuspecting abodes, any of which are potential stages for an invader ambitious enough to make it the scene of the next big crime sensation. Who knows? Their performance just might make it to the silver screen. 

Fence poetry editor and rising star Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents is a must-read for poetry lovers and newbies alike. 

This is a useless Almanac. There’s no seasonal data, only poems good for leaving the club in haute couture with mid-level poets, for ambiguous sex, mouthy seductions, shoulder-turns of cold cock disrespect.

Part confessional, part experimental, and completely original, Chang is a poet read in classrooms and on phone screens with equal fervor. Each poem deftly deforms self into outrageous performance. This poetry snaps and twists so fast you’ll miss things: the intricate formal craft, the bitchy wordplay. A dopamine rush delving into desire’s throbbing networks of flesh and circuit, identity, relationships, Aznness, queerdom, and more that would arouse Ashbery envy, Chang’s playful style is edgy, surprising, and delightful. In Chang’s world, sentiment is décor: come face the amusing ever-ache of our desires or go ahead and try to outrun them.

Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the "Ancient Newborn." Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.

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.

The Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson presents a lifelong exchange of unknown letters between Dickinson, the reclusive poet, and Alcott, the most renowned author of the time. 

What could Alcott say to Dickinson about abolitionism and woman’s rights? What might Dickinson reveal to Alcott about her thoughts on marriage and eternity? Researched for over five years and drawing heavily on biographical facts, these luminous letters present a friendship that explores the questions of family responsibilities, women’s growing influence in the literary world, the cost of fame and the power of sorority.

Through moments of family intimacy, work presentations, vacations, doomed relationships, or businessmen chasing the ephemeral, Hefner shows we are lovable and acceptable despite the shame we accumulate through the years. Sometimes it’s only through stories that we can make sense of who we are and where we are going.

Initially influenced by the wild cutup language of William S. Burroughs, Sampsell soon discovered countless modern collagists that inspired him to take his art further and further from where it started. Years later, he finds himself at the center of a growing movement of 21st Century cut and paste.
I Made an Accident showcases over 200 of Sampsell's collages, exploring a range of styles: hilarious sight gags, subtle cultural jabs, elegant mysteries, colorful surprises, fragmented hauntings, and gloriously strange accidents. Combined with Sampsell's sharp and lively poems, this book is a feast for the eyes and brain and a nonstop entertainment.    

This daring gathering of brief, innovative stories tantalizes the intellect nearly as much as it illuminates the human heart. Drawing from his quiver of flash fictions, prose poems, lists, pie charts and micros, Dressick's narratives are fully engaged with the wild disorder that everyday feels more and more like the sine qua non of our fractured now. Meet meth-addicted grizzly bears, a coal mining Jesus, grieving alcoholic parents, and murderous villagers whose only speech is culinary in this fleeting edge tour de force....Fables of the Deconstruction.

Life of the Party will leave you with a hangover and a "VIP" stamp on your heart. Hacic crafts a Beat novel for the Instagram generation. 

This dark comedy dives into the underbelly of Milanese fashion and nightlife, through the eyes of Mia, a young expat. She came to Milan to escape her problems but only found more glamorous ones…

Mia indulges in the highs and lows Milanese decadence can offer. Between fashion class and clubbing, her narcissistic boss and abusive boyfriend push her to face bleak reality. Life of the Party asks, can you lose your innocence if you were never innocent? Can you find control in chaos? And do you have a plus one for tonight’s party?

On the bank of the shore & the ice of the lake. Between love & nostalgia. Beside the toad & the squirrel. Between loss. Next to a stranger. In the scent of grapefruit vodka seltzer. Between the sunrise & high noon. In the shape of the bed in the shape of my former body. By the edge. All the places I wish I died.

Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam’s pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.

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