Bøger udgivet af Coffee House Press

Padgett's witty poems ache to save the world surpassing moral superiority and infusing light, energy, and humor into everyday life.

Glorious, expansive, and urgent, this is the first significant epic poem of the new millennium.

';Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary.'The New York Times';Sorrentino's ear for dialects and metaphor is perfect: his creations, however brief their presence, are vivid, and much of his writing is very funny and clever, piled with allusions.'The Washington Post Book WorldBearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans 35 years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories.In these grimly comic, unsentimental tales, the always-memorable characters dive headlong into the wasteland of urban culture, seeking out banal perversions, confusing art with the art scene, mistaking lust for love, and letting petty aspirations get the best of them. This is a world where the American dream is embodied in the moonlit cocktail hour and innocence passes at a breakneck speed, swiftly becoming a nostalgia-ridden clich. As Sorrentino says in the title story, ';art cannot rescue anybody from anything,' but his stories do offer some salvation to each of us by locating hope, humor, and beauty amidst a prevailing wind of cynical despair.Gilbert Sorrentino has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry, including the classic Mulligan Stew and his latest novel, Little Casino, which was shortlisted for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. After two decades on the faculty at Stanford University, he recently returned to his native Brooklyn.

Literary Latin American FLATLINERS: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.

Intricate, intimate, difficult, and confrontational poems that push at the boundaries of selfhood, skin, culture, sexuality, and blood.

Girlhood, selfhood, and the fragility of safety in tender poems that examine and then mourn micro- and macroscopic violence.

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is a burlesque of comic-strip adventures and apocalyptic portents that stretches familiar truths to their logical extreme in a future world that is just recognizable enough to be frightening. In the Author's Note,"e; Karen Tei Yamashita writes that her book is like a Brazilian soap opera called a novela: "e;the novela's story is completely changeable according to the whims of the public psyche and approval, although most likely, the unhappy find happiness; the bad are punished; true love reigns; a popular actor is saved from death ... an idyll striking innocence, boundless nostalgia and terrible ruthlessness."e; The stage is a vast, mysterious field of impenetrable plastic in the Brazilian rain forest set against a backdrop of rampant environmental destruction, commercialization, poverty, and religious rapture. Through the Arc of the Rainforest is narrated by a small satellite hovering permanently around the head of an innocent character named Kazumasa. Through no fault of his own, Kazumasa seems to draw strange and significant people into his orbit and to find himself at the center of cataclysmic events that involve carrier pigeons, religious pilgrims, industrial espionage, magic feathers, big money, miracles, epidemics, true love, and the virtual end of the world. This book is simultaneously entertaining and depressing, with all the rollicking pessimism you'd expect of a good soap opera or a good political satire."e;- Kirsten Backstrom, 500 Great Books by Women

What does it mean to nature for us to live in our heads, to destroy the world for our happiness?

Gurba grows up queer, chicana, and take no prisoners. Her story is a revelation, a delight, and an eye-opener.

An apocalypse of race, class, and culture, fanned by the media and the harsh L.A. sun.

Cultural criticism for people who grew up with television as the primary background noise.

Walter De Maria's "e;Lightning Field"e; is 400 stainless steel poles, positioned 220 feet apart, in the desert of central New Mexico. Over the course of several visits, it becomes, for Raicovich, a site for confounding and revealing perceptions of time, space, duration, and light; how changeable they are, while staying the same.

A sometimes funny, sometimes catastrophically sad story of performance art, ukuleles, dance, and our attempts and failures to make contact.

Praise for Greg Hewett:2010 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry2003 Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry WinnerIn poems that are full of wit, touching, and introspective, as well as formally inventive, we find the poet losing his sight, becoming a parent, and occupying middle age with a sense of calm and inevitability.From "e;Skyglow"e;:we spin filaments of light into profiles,drawing each otherthrough something resembling time and space and dark.Let's call this something something vague and mythicas the ether. Let's say we're ethereal.

Three childhood friends reunite to transform Ecuador only find their idealism has succumbed to the cynicism of their fathers.

Null Set collects the slightly obsessive possibilities that rise when we give them the spaceodd jobs, trouble-making, and farm boy rambling, all in dialogue with mathematics, or William Faulkner, or other poets.From "e;Hypotenuse"e;:HYPOTENUSEI write three, erase it, blow rubbershavings from the desk. Write its notation,erase it, blow shavings. Then three 3serased, shavings blown, persistfor the nonce, three of nothing, nowhereattending to discrete objects for counting,themselves objects at any rate. To kiss,sleep, and focus we know to closeour eyes, imagine. I do, see nothing.

On a slab that's all Katrina left of her Mississippi home, Tiger tells her story, and it is as American as Horatio Alger, Schwab's Pharmacy, and a tent revival. She was a stripper, but is she now a performance artist and best-selling author, and it is really Barbara Walters she's narrating this tale to? We're too dazzled to know more than that this is about how a girl ends up in the backwash of decadence and sin and how out of the flotsam and jetsam she might construct a story of herself and the South to carry her to salvation.Serial killers, preachers, and prison flower-arranging classes. Bikers, bad boyfriends, and a stripper who performed as a Trans Am. Tiger has seen it all and as she sits on her slab, identifying anecdotes as they go by, we witness Selah Saterstrom at her greatestfunny, bawdy, and steeped in the landscape and all the devastation it has created and absorbed.Selah Saterstrom is the author of the novels The Pink Institution, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and Slab, all published by Coffee House Press. She is also the author of Tiger Goes to the Dogs, a limited edition letterpress project published by Nor By Press. Her prose, poetry, and interviews can be found in publications such as The Black Warrior Review, Postroad, Tarpaulin Sky, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She is the director of the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver and teaches and lectures throughout the United States.

Praise for Bill Berkson:"e;A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous."e;Publishers WeeklyWide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed.Dress TropeCritics should wearwhite jackets likelab technicians;curators, zookeepers' caps;and art historians,lead apronsto protect them fromimpendingradiant fact.Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

A memoir of Melena, five-times married, mother, burlesque dancer, and "the hardest-assed woman to ever eat wood and bite nails."

A Time Out New York Best Book of the Year. ';[Bernheimer is] one of literature's foremost champions of the fairy tale.' Nylon Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer's latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer's girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone. ';Deftly blends gloomy fairy tales with existential manifestos. Nine nimble stories confront a spectrum of suffering; loneliness, addiction, poverty, and death lay exposed with open language for all to interpret.' Entrophy ';[Bernheimer], an impassioned advocate for the relevancy of the fairy-tale genre, fills the whole strange, lovely book with such gems, reinventing traditional, timeless tales for new readers.' Time Out New York ';With dinosaurs and pink sisters, shadows and talking dolls, librarians and totems, Bernheimer presents haunting looks at mothers and daughters, the magic of childhood, and the power of illusion, fantasy, and dreams.' San Francisco Book Review ';I'll read anything [Kate Bernheimer] writes, and I'll undoubtedly learn more about myself and my own writing than from 100 other books. Truth is, I hope every young writer is lucky enough to discover a particular writer who speaks to her more than any other, a writer whose words reach out through the pages and touch her heart, the way Kate Bernheimer has done for me.' Electric Literature ';Bernheimer manages to tickle the cerebrum without sacrificing surface pleasures.' Minneapolis Star-Tribune

';A unique baseball book, one that cleverly explores the history of the sport through cultural and political lenses.' Largehearted Boy The Devil's Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal and political, it twines Japanese internment camps with the Yankees; Walmart with the Kansas City Royals; and facial hair patterns with militarism, Guantanamo, and the modern security state. An essay, a miscellany, and a passionate unsettling of Josh Ostergaard's relationship with our national pastime, it allows for both the clover of a childhood outfield and the persistence of the game's service to those in power. America and baseball are both hard to love or leave in this, by turns coruscating and heartfelt, debut. ';The Devil's Snake Curvewill receive a particularly warm welcome from those who love the game but resist easy analogies comparing its slow, idiosyncratic progress to the slow idiosyncratic progress of the American experiment. Its young author, Josh Ostergaard, emerges from an ironic generation that tends to regard hero worship as faintly ridiculous, meaning that individual legends from any given era are less interesting to him than whatever social, cultural, or political forces might have combined to prop those legends up.'New York Times ';Expansive and inventive... A challenging reconsideration of a game that used to be called the national pastime.' Star Tribune ';One of the most fascinating books ever written about baseball.' The Cultural Weekly

An exploration of folklore, visionary states, surrealism, hybrid forms, and the political implications of their confluence.

Angel leaves Manila for snowy Chicago, taking a tradition of protest-and some old family hurts-with her.

From West Africa to NYC, the oral tradition comes alive through collaborative storytelling of Holman and legendary griot Papa Susso.

';An ambitious, poignant and sharp-tongued novel filled with secrets and ghosts, jealousy and love.' Publishers Weekly Sheldon and Eloise Schell are twins, orphans, and the estranged college companions of the rich, scandalous, celebrated Roman Stone. Now Roman is dead, murdered with a pair of scissors in his living room, and Eloise and Sheldon must separately tease out the secretsa burning house, a murdered girlthat were the one story they could never tell. Moving between the muffled plush of wintry Chicago, the fogbound darkness of a Lake Superior island, and the even darker precincts of memory, Let the Dark Flower Blossom is a book about the pull of the closed door. It is about the small pleasure of being right, the tremendous thrill of doing wrong, and the lengths writers will go tolie, steal, killto get the perfect story. ';As rewarding as it is challenging, this book is a great alternative to a beach read for those who love literary mysteries... Recommended for those who thought that even Gone Girl didnt have enough troubled characters and unforeseen twists.' Library Journal ';[A] puzzle of a book, [Let the Dark Flower Blossom] engages one's attention through staccato prose and a number of interrelated and compelling characters. [T]his ';existential murder mystery'... will reward attentive readers.' Booklist ';A splendid, leisurely meditation on the meaning of fame, identity, and love.' Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Winner of 2013 Wheatley Book Award in PoetryFinalist for 2013 William Carlos Williams Award"e;Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms Smiths new book, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, is just beautifuland like the America she embodies and representsdangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines."e; Sapphire"e;One of the best poets around and has been for a long time."e; Terrance Hayes"e;Smith's work is direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome."e; Gwendolyn BrooksIn her newest collection, Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals "e;that soul beneath the vinyl."e;Patricia Smith is the author of five volumes of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection. She lives in New Jersey.

';These short, fiery verses describe with sorrow and passion the Crescent City just before, during and immediately after Katrina.' Publishers Weekly In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its ';scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,' to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television. Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar: The cowboy grins through the terrible din,And in the Ninth, a choking woman wailsLook like this country done left us for dead. ';Smith's poems are captivating and their heartrending subject matter adds to their allure. She is observant and precise; she captures a moment in our history that many will never forget, but also a moment that just as many will never begin to know.Blood Dazzlermakes available to its readers a chilling time in America and crystallizes the nation's fears and weaknesses.' Coldfront