The Future in the Guise of a Catalog
The new Soft Skull catalog is now available for download. By way of whetting your whistle herewith my "Dear Reader" letter...
Dear Reader,
The catalog contains multiple blows to three conventional wisdoms:
1. The Farm Team Theory. We’re putting the lie to the theory that authors leave the independent press. Notwithstanding the tremendous success of Matthew Sharpe’s TODAY Show Book Club selection The Sleeping Father, he’s back with us for his tragicomic, dystopic, visceral political-farce-cum-love-story Jamestown. Former NBCC finalist
Wayne Koestenbaum returns with Hotel Theory, David Ohle concludes his epic trilogy with The Pisstown Chaos, Daphne Gottlieb follows her 2003 Audre Lorde Award with Kissing Dead Girls and we get to reissue Lydia Millet’s 2002 PEN-USA Award-winning My Happy Life.
2. The No More Translations Theory. No fewer than five of the Spring list are works of translation, and they include two of the fifty writers selected by the French book magazine Lire as the writers to watch in the 21st century—Asli Erdogan (Turkey) with a stunning fictional evocation of Rio de Janeiro, and Alain Mabanckou (Congo Republic), recently honored with the 2006 Prix Renaudot, with African Pyscho. Then, from Japan, Mari Akasaka’s Vibrator, from France Camille de Toledo’s thrilling takedown of the Establishment Left, and from Germany a quietly devastating fictional account of a Guantanamo prisoner.
3. The Stick To Your Niche Theory. We have a memoir of a man who tried and failed to save the American typesetting industry, a progressive relationships/dating book, a progressive pro-free trade book, a fictional biography of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marmoset, gang literature, an amputee’s guide to sex (that is in fact a poetry book), a novel—laid-out like a ransom note—characterized as a work of genius both by the Times of London and Absolutely Fabulous’s Joanna Lumley, water politics, politics in art, historietas, histrionics, hysterics, and an Orthodox Jewish performance poet’s young adult novel, Candy in Action.
And now, our candy, for you...
All the best,
Richard