NOVELS. MEMOIRS. BIOGRAPHIES. SHORT FICTION AND ESSAY COLLECTIONS.
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Writing the Virus:
Work from StatORec magazine
"talented writers of all stripes, weighing in with honesty, vigor, anguish, and hope. Read this book: it'll help.”
- Martha Cooley
Enemy Combatant
David Winner
"unsettling and completely original...a state of eerie suspense the whole book through”
- Elizabeth McKenzie
No One You Know
Jason Schwartzman
"an understated and zoomed in account of what it means to be a person... Jason Schwartzman is an exciting new voice to watch"
- Chloe Caldwell
Howard and Charles at the Factory
Dave Housley
"A furious, darkly comic fable for this precise American moment.”
- J. Robert Lennon
The World and The Zoo
Rob Roensch
"Rob Roensch is the Jim Jarmusch of Central Oklahoma zoo-fiction—contemplative and dreamy and in awe of the strange.”
- Benjamin Warner
Godflower
Kevin Scott Magruder
"A tense and timely love story from the near future that probes the disastrous gulf between class and technology"
- Ben Marcus
Still Life with Meredith
Ann Lewinson
"The most decadently imaginative thing I’ve read in years”
- Sandra Newman
True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape
Micah Perks
"Characters so very alive that they practically escape off the page when you encounter them... This collection will cure what ails you.”
- Kelly Link
The Spirit of Disruption:
Landmark Work from The Normal School
Edited by Steven Church. "Indispensable for anyone interested in discovering new directions in the contemporary essay”
- Robert Atwan, Best American Essays series founder and editor
The Art of Gay Cooking
Daniel Isengart
"Hugely entertaining, provocative, and useful -- an Alice B. Toklas Cookbook for a new generation."
- Luke Barr
I'm Just Getting to the Disturbing Part
Steven Church
"One of the bravest and fiercest essayists we’ve got.”
- Steve Almond
Nothing Short Of:
Selected Tales from 100 Word Story
"Epics the size of sound bites... they prove once and for all that size doesn’t matter. Just the stories that fit inside.”
- Amber Sparks
Who The Hell Is Imre Lodbrog?
Sebastien Regnier and Barbara Browning
"A very true love story, told in counterpoint, about friendship, politics and rock ‘n’ roll. "It’s like being seated between the best dinner guests at a party of strangers."
- David Duchovny
A Book of Uncommon Prayer
Edited by Matthew Vollmer
Rick Moody, Leslie Jamison, Courtney Maum, Ravi Shankar, Gabriel Blackwell, Dawn Raffel and over 60 others deliver everyday prayers in a multitude of styles and dimensions. "A truly exceptional gathering of authors."
- Small Press Review
Wire Mother Monkey Baby
Rob Reynolds
In search of meaningful connection, Clayton Draper moves into The Complex, an Austin residential development sponsored by Kool Kola. A remarkable debut set in Austin, TX.
OUTPOST19 BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT LOCAL AND ONLINE BOOKSELLERS. IN PRINT AND DIGITAL.
Boy On A Unicycle
Dan McCall
Edited by Steven McCall. "A compelling and highly relevant tale in these times of fake news.”
- Philipp Meyer
This Is: Essays on Jazz
Aaron Gilbreath
"Makes you want to turn the page and run to the record store in equal measure."
- Roxane Gay
Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California
Lisa Locascio
"California has the curious distinction of occupying the cultural imagination at a chronological remove."
One Million Maniacs: Beanie Babies, Killer Cars and The Power of Collecting
David LeGault
"The result of a lifelong obsession with the glorious detritus of the culture, and it's a glorious debut."
- Ander Monson
Family Genus Species
Kevin Allardice
"Allardice’s deft novel is actually deceptively complex, layered not simply with satire, but with emotional revelations about family, community, sexuality, parenthood, race, and class..."
- Nina Renata Aron
while you're browsing
consider these collections
Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction
Intro by Bill McKibben
Edited by Josh MacIvor-Andersen. Explore our messy, beautiful, symbiotic relationship with trees with original work from thirty remarkable writers.
44 American Boys: Short Histories of Presidential Childhoods
William Walsh
"From Washington to Trump, these are the stories of each president’s childhood—told through fragments and quotes appropriated from more than 300 children’s books, pop history books and scholarly biographies. "Fabulously original"
– Kenneth Goldsmith
Massive Cleansing Fire
Dave Housley
"It's time to admit what everyone knows: there's no bolder, no wittier critic of our modern, polarizing American culture than Dave Housley, who points out the absurdities in our relationships while reminding us why we must hold on to each other."
– Susan Muaddi Darraj
Following Disasters
Nancy McCabe
“A masterfully told story of betrayal and dislocation vibrantly narrated through the voices of an odd-ball aunt and her eccentric niece, Following Disasters is at once a mystery, a love story, and a narrative of healing. Nancy McCabe’s most recent novel explores that deepest human yearning: our need to belong. I couldn’t put it down."
— Elaine Neil Orr
Children of the Country
Abigail R. Shaffer
"a literary novel that reads like a thriller. In luminous prose, Shaffer tells a riveting, terrifying story of human violence, cruelty, and undying love, and she never puts a foot wrong. A marvelous debut."
—Pinckney Benedict
The Adventures of Joe Harper
Phong Nguyen
"Phong Nguyen takes on American history and literature in this captivating novel. Writing about a marginal character in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he illuminates the marginal characters of American culture in the 19th century. The imaginative return of an adult Tom Sawyer is alone worth the price of this book."
— Viet Thanh Nguyen
What Becomes Us
Micah Perks
"This is a warm, wild, hilarious, eccentric and moving book."
— Lauren Groff
On Heights & Hunger
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
"Written with a passion that burns onto the page. . . one of the finest memoirs I’ve read in quite a while."
— Andre Dubus III
The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage
Lawrence Lenhart
"A special kind of genius. . . Intense awareness combined with his intense concern make for a big heart and a big brain and a big, as in important, book."
– Nicole Walker
IRL
Timmy Reed
"Timmy Reed is one of the most original prose stylists to come down the pike in the last couple of decades, but there's more to his work than just style, and that 'more' includes a remarkable emotional honesty"
– Madison Smartt Bell
Madeleine E.
Gabriel Blackwell
"Gabriel Blackwell's writing proves that a genre-defying literature is not only possible, it's necessary"
— Evan Lavender-Smith
Patrick Fitzmike and Mike Fitzpatrick
Larry Smith
"Patrick Fitzmike and Mike Fitzpatrick is a vigorous tumble through the power plays of sex, politics, and 20th-century Catholicism... Redemption, if it's possible, emerges from the mud"
— Dennis Mahoney
Welcome to Christiania
Fred Leebron
"Fred Leebron is one of the best writers working today. If you haven't read him yet, this beautifully written novel is the one to get first"
- Jenny Offill
The Marble Army
Gisele Firmino
"A fierce lyrical tribute to the families that lived through the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état"
- Ada Limon
Devotion
Michelle Herman
"Michelle Herman's beautifully written and wise novel probes the crucial and enduring questions of how we choose our paths in life"
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Kama
Terese Brasen
"A timeless tale of enslavement and empowerment"
- Jake Lamar
California Prose Directory: New Writing from The Golden State
Edited by Sarah LaBrie. Short fiction + non-fiction in our third annual anthology about life in California
Valetta78
Erin Fitzgerald
"Lures us into the underbelly of online friendships and suburban dreams, persuaded by fictions, rooting for liars and self-destroyers, and loving every minute of it."
- Tara Laskowski
Tyler's Last
David Winner
"Its language is hipster shorthand for readers to absorb as they become spectators to the extravaganza, as the book, itself, expands into its political implications."
- Ann Beattie
Becoming Westerly
Jamie Brisick
"Dazzling, devastating, funny and surpassingly strange."
- William Finnegan
Spaces
Joel Kopplin
"He tells me this, this is beautiful whatever he means. . ." A short novel about the spaces within intimacy.
Like A Song: Essay
Michelle Herman
"A collection of six quietly transgressive essays about music that ultimately asks, Why speak when you can sing?"
- O: The Oprah Magazine
5 Months 10 Years 2 Hours
Lisa Reisman
"Swift, merciless, unsparing. High-strung and brilliant, she navigates her terrifying passage with swagger and wit, never mind courage. I couldn't put it down."
- Honor Moore
Indolence
Alison Wellford
"As passionate and elemental as a Greek myth in breathless, painterly prose."
- Naeem Murr
California Prose Directory:
New Writing from the Golden State
Edited by J. Ryan Stradal. The second in our series collecting fiction and nonfiction about life in California.
The Wes Letters
Feliz Lucia Molina, Ben Segal and Brett Zehner
"Writing into the sand hole that is 'Wes Anderson,' three friends write their way almost to the limit of their engagingly ambivalent and indisputably brilliant personalities, thereby calling into question the certainty of anything... A gripping read."
- Chris Kraus
A Moody Fellow Finds Love and Then Dies
Douglas Watson
"A wise, funny and strangely sad fable of love, art and life. Moody Fellow is a hero for anyone who's young and lost and yearning to be found."
- Lev Grossman
Commercial Fiction
Dave Housley
"Dave Housley once again stakes his claim as the poet laureate of pop culture. No one else could take the cynical manipulations of commercials and extract from them so much humor and empathy and heart."
- Matt Bell
Understudies
Ravi Mangla
"Funny, moving, perceptive, artful -- these are the first words that came to mind when I tried to describe Understudies to a friend. And then, to better capture its spirit, I began reading it aloud and marveled all over again at Ravi Mangla's ability to tell us, with precision and wit, what deserves to be known."
- Joanna Scott
Dark March
Colin Fleming
"Colin Fleming is one of the truly exciting and significant writers of his generation."
- Richard Burgin, editor of Boulevard
Something Pretty, Something Beautiful
Eric Barnes
"This is a world where the pull of friendship is far stronger than the pull of family, where cars are freedom, stories are everything, and home is thick with ghosts."
- Emily St. Jean Mandel
California Prose Directory:
New Writing from The Golden State
Edited by Charles McCleod. Our inaugural collection of fiction and nonfiction about life in California.
The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart
Filip Noterdaeme
"A lovely romp with the absurd. . . It's hard to imagine anything more charming."
- Andrew Solomon
Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey
Daniel Mueller
"These stories are outrageous and big-hearted, disturbing and beautiful, wretched and redeemed. Half of them made me want to sleep with the lights on, and all of them reaffirmed that Dan Mueller is some kind of mad artistic genius."
- Paul Harding
City On A Hill
Stanley Jenkins
"Stanley Jenkins' unforgettable characters roam America's heartland in search of its soul. If there is grace to be found amid nihilism, the stories in this disturbingly beautiful collection find it. Jenkins finds shards of humanity inside hardened criminals, and the petty larceny lurking in all our hearts. A stunning debut."
- Dick Scanlon
metamemoirs
Perry Glasser
"A literary version of a great rock album. . . the story of our generation, and how we got to where we are by doing the best we could with what we knew at the time. . . No irritable reaching after fact and reason. Just. . . truth. And it deserves to go platinum."
- David Bradley
Self-Helpless: A Misfit's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
TJ Beitelman
Thirteen thumbnail sketches in a semi-causally related sequence that more or less maps out what it was like to be the author from, say, 1996 to 2011, with a judicious feint or two toward the back story where appropriate.
American Weather
Charles McCleod
"The type of courage we should expect from American writers but rarely find."
- Matthew Duffus
National Treasures
Charles McLeod
"These stories are a portrait of America in all its breadth, across regions, classes, races, religions. Charles McLeod knows the whole country through its ill-fitting parts and people. All through this book, there are moments of wild candor and insight that crack the surface of daily life."
- Salvatore Scibona
Inscriptions for Headstones
Matthew Vollmer
Thirty short essays, crafted as epitaphs, each one unfolding in a single sentence. "A courageous, honest, and decidedly non-angelic dissection of the instants, both mundane and macrocosmic, that shape a man, and the malaise that tears him to the core." - The Colagist
Danielle Déronde
Burton Raffel
"What sort of God would allow not only the black, bleak existence of Hitler and all his minions, all the things that had happened and were still happening, and not only to Jews, but blindly, indifferently tolerate the revolting fact of this disgusting, immoral, impossible pregnancy?"
Trip
Mindy Hung
"No more gazing longingly into the glowing windows of family homes. . ." A mordant comedy about sex tourism in South East Asia. A Lolita for the global economy.
Loud Memories of A Quiet Life
Tom Molanphy
"Tom's prose is as clean and strong as a Quaker chair."
- Dee McNamer
High Street
Tetman Callis
"The devil is right behind me, tapping me on the shoulder to get me to come back, reminding me of how good it feels to be high in the summertime, day and night; telling me, Hey, big fella, you haven't fallen far enough; I keep shooting at you, big fella, but all you get is grazed and I want a square shot."
The You-City
Jeff Ferzoco
"A tour through a digitally-enhanced city of the future if Siri had a soul, a sense of humor, a questioning nature and the ability to make friends."
- Tony Hiss
Hist-o-rama
Diza Sauers
"This book is so strange and so good, a discovery, a treasure found, in more ways than one. It's a book of awesome links and leaps, peopled by characters mythic in their divine and formless quests. Feral children, runaway moms, ruthless reckless men and fabulous stories in every rock, seed and desperate room. A most disquieting and satisfying read."
- Joy Williams
Love in the Time of Foreclosure
Stephanie Alison Walker
A first-person account from someone who's made it to the other side. Walker details the daily struggle. And after hearing from others facing the same trouble, she's committed to fighting the stigma of financial hardship.
I'll Be A Stranger to Your
Cara Diaconoff
A young software pro returns to Moscow - with carnal memories of his old missionary companion. His wife stays in Boston, waiting for him to return, to build a family and a Mormon way of life. But it's the end of the 1990's, the end of Russia's gold-rush era, and the end of ideals stretched beyond good use. "An excellent novel of conscience."
- Kevin McIlvoy
Adios, Mexico
Two Gay Refugees
Two real-life stories adapted from asylum testimonies given by men born and raised in different parts of Mexico. With an introduction from frontline advocates East Bay Sanctuary Covenant.