Sports is Hell
Ben Passmore | Koyama Press | 9781927668757 | February 2020
“[Passmore] uses America’s obsession with football to explore themes of racism, resistance, white supremacy, allyship, identity, and alienation to do this, and he manages to do it in just sixty pages, which is a phenomenal feat to accomplish.”—The Comics Beat
“Sports Is Hell is a distorted funhouse-mirror look at contemporary American socio-political and cultural divisions that uses the hyper-violent capitalist spectacle that is the Super Bowl as both a metaphorical and literal case study of, essentially, every damn thing that’s wrong with our body politic today.”—Solrad
Read
Me, Los Angeles
Katie Orphan | Prospect Park Books | 9781945551680 | March 2020
“The book is a chatty guide to literary tourism in the city, but it has
surprising depth. . . . While Read Me is a light romp, it has the potential
to open new doors to familiar territory— namely the city itself.”—Alta Journal
of California
Two
Blankets, Three Sheets
Rodaan Al Galidi, trans. Jonathan Reeder | World Editions |
9781642860450 | January 2020
“At once funny and bleak, this novel by the Iraq-born Dutch novelist
draws on his personal experiences to expose the cruel and often absurd procedural
challenges that immigrants must endure . . . an engrossing and exasperating
novel. Two Blankets, Three Sheets is a tale of belonging and what it
means to be human in a world that deems people less important than government
protocols.”—Words Without Borders
Roxy
Esther Gerritsen, trans. Michele Hutchison | World Editions | 9781642860405 |
March 2020
“Introspective as it traces Roxy’s tragic fall, the novel is
arresting (…) Rich and a little bitter, Roxy is powered by the monumental
weight of Esther Gerritsen’s intense and insatiable prose, which is beautifully
translated by Michele Hutchison. Consume it with coffee, dark chocolate, or red
wine.”—Foreword Reviews
Beautiful Aliens
Steve Abbott, edit. Jamie Townsend | Nightboat Books | 9781643620152 | December
2019
“A reader is the ideal format for Abbott’s
sprawling work. Just as Abbott was capable of moving between many different
communities, his relation with genre is similarly porous… Townsend’s editing
work on Beautiful Aliens makes it possible to see Abbott’s development in these
different genres, together with thoughtful contrasts that variously clarify and
complicate Abbott’s developing sensibility over the years.”—The Poetry
Project Newsletter
Wonder: The Art and Practice of Beatrice Blue
Beatrice Blue | 3dtotal Publishing | 9780955153099 | January 2020
“There’s a lot to see in this book, and there’s plenty of commentary with Beatrice talking about her inspiration, career, how she makes her own paint, digital vs traditional, and her creative process. . . . This is a beautiful artbook I can recommend to those who like picture book illustrations, or who are fans of Beatrice Blue. Highly recommended.”—Parka Blogs
Alisoun Sings
Caroline Bergvall | Nightboat Books | 9781643620015 | November 2019
“Bergvall turns ‘illegibility’ on its head: she insists on a poetics that is neither merely read nor impossible to read. Instead, Bergvall attempts to offer another way of being, necessarily multiple. This affords space for unknowing, for the unrecognizable, where political vision and perhaps even political intimacy and solidarity does not require immediate recognition within our normative configurations of the sensible and knowable.” —The Poetry Project Newsletter