Books published by Acre Books

All the Tiny Beauties follows five characters in California as their lives intertwine. All the Tiny Beauties begins with a kitchen fire that sends the reclusive Webster Jackson to the home of his new neighbor, Colleen, who discovers him on her doorstep wearing a lacy peignoir, his house in flames. Unwilling to take responsibility for the lonely eccentric, Colleen reaches out to Webb‿s estranged daughter, Debra. She also helps him find a live-in companion, a young adult reeling from the loss of her childhood friend. Moving among perspectives and generations, we see the longings and vulnerabilities that drive and impede these characters as their stories intertwine‿Webb‿s first love clashing with his last; Colleen embarking on a secret affair with Debra; the older Webb and his young housemate, Hannah, forming a bond over tragedy, guilt, and his passion for baking. Confronting the many ways they‿ve failed others as well as themselves, Webb, Colleen, Hannah, and Debra slowly find ways forward and ways out. While exploring the fragile nature of our connections to one another, All the Tiny Beauties asks larger questions about the constraints society imposes that warp and wound, leading us to deny those things that make us wholly ourselves.

An unvarnished accounting of one man's struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity. In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years--1989, 1993, and 1996--Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humor and wit afforded by hindsight, Alexander relives his closeted college years, his experiments with his sexuality in graduate school, his first marriage to a woman, and his budding career as a college professor. As he moves from tortured self-denial to hard-won self-acceptance, the author confronts the deeply uncomfortable ways he is implicated in his own story. More than just a coming-out narrative, Dear Queer Self is both an intimate psychological exploration and a cultural examination--a meshing of inner and outer realities and a personal reckoning with how we sometimes torture the truth to make a life. It is also a love letter, an homage to a decade of rapid change, and a playlist of the sounds, sights, and feelings of a difficult, but ultimately transformative, time.

In C. T. Salazar's striking debut poetry collection, the speaker is situated in the tradition of Southern literature but reimagines its terrain with an eye on the South's historic and ongoing violence. His restless relationship with religion ("a child told me there was a god / and because he was smiling, I believed him") eventually includes a reclamation of the language of belief in the name of desire.

Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.

The characters who populate Jenn Scott's debut collection are both trapped and adrift. Stuck in dead-end jobs or stagnant relationships or simply caught in the grip of their own inertia, they opt out, act out, and strike out, searching for emotional sustenance in a landscape of pointless patterns and dwindling hopes. Cuttingly clever remarks and excoriating observations act as shields--thrown up to protect an aching vulnerability, a bewildering sense of loss . . . of being lost in a world rife with expectations, where responsibility is ritualistic and meaning elusive. "The beauty of being young was, in fact, the ability to project all that might happen. She recognizes, suddenly, how less grandiose the projection of her plans has become. It's like she was once standing looking an expanse of field, but now she's trapped in a hallway hung with too many pastel prints of landscapes that refuse to interest her. It's as if she's moved her entire life inside a dental office, minus the gas that sings a person to sleep while their cavities are filled, their roots fixed." Assumed identities, Russian mail-order brides, pie theft, lost (and found) cleavers, coworkers who commit murder, the sudden ballooning of breasts, conversations with the (surprisingly opinionated) vegetables in a restaurant's walk-in cooler: in stories sharply funny and deeply poignant, situations that delight and discomfit, Scott explores "the complicated, or simple, ways in which we settle."

Following his acclaimed debut novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo, the eleven stories of Ian Stansel's Glossary for the End of Days explore today's cultural and political climate with a disarming blend of speculation and realism. Whether faced with tragedy, approaching disaster, or an all-too-familiar uncertainty, Stansel's protagonists--siblings, lovers, executives, drifters--reveal complex and often startling turns of mind, surprising themselves as well as the reader. In Boulder, a man calls into a radio program with an altered tale of his brother's murder--and faces the consequences when the story goes viral. In Tampa, a woman attends a convention of people believing themselves to be targets of clandestine government agencies. In Houston, a family with many secrets attempts to escape an oncoming tropical storm. In an East Coast college town, a professor has a charged run-in with a young woman from the radical right. And in Iowa, a cult suicide spurs the lone survivor to create a "glossary" in an effort to come to terms with his experience. ​ Simultaneously gritty and lyrical, grounded and visionary, Glossary for the End of Days gives us characters grappling with how to push on through dark days and dark times. This arresting, relevant collection tunes into and seeks to illuminate shared anxieties about the present--and future--of our world.

Persephone in the Late Anthropocene vaults an ancient myth into the age of climate change. In this poetry collection, the goddess of spring now comes and goes erratically, drinks too much, and takes a human lover in our warming, unraveling world. Meanwhile, Persephone's mother searches for her troubled daughter, and humanity is first seduced by the unseasonable abundance, then devastated by the fallout, and finally roused to act. This ecopoetic collection interweaves the voices of Persephone, Demeter, and a human chorus with a range of texts, including speculative cryptostudies that shed light on the culture of the "Late Anthropocene." These voices speak of decadence and blame, green crabs and neonicotinoids, mysteries and effigies. They reckon with extreme weather, industrialized plenty, and their own roles in ecological collapse. Tonally, the poems of this book range between the sublime and the profane; formally, from lyric verse and modern magical-realist prose poems to New Farmer's Almanac riddles and pop-anthropology texts. At the heart of this varied and inventive collection is story itself, as Demeter deconstructs "whodunits," as the chorus grasps that mythmaking is an act of "throwing their voices," and as their very language mirrors the downward spiral of destruction. Together, the collected pieces of Persephone in the Late Anthropocene form a narrative prism, exploring both environmental crisis and the question of how we tell it.

Nancy Au's debut collection is rich with scents, sounds, imaginative leaps, and unexpected angles of vision. These seventeen stories present the challenges facing characters whose inner and outer lives often do not align, whose spirits attempt flight despite dashed hopes and lean circumstances. Marginalized by race, age, and sexuality, they endeavor to create new worlds that honor their identities and their Chinese heritage. Au excels at inhabiting the minds and hearts of children and the elderly. In the title story, Sophie Chu dresses daily in her increasingly shabby elephant costume to ensure her missing parents recognize her upon their return. In "The Unfed," a village elder seeks to revive, with her dimming magic, a mountain community struck by tragedy. "Louise" follows, with deceptive hilarity (involving a one-eyed duck), the nuanced give and take between May Zhou and Lai, dissimilar yet passionate partners considering parenthood. The volume also offers sparkling speculative work that taps into the strength of nature--fox spirits and fire beetles, swollen rivers and rippling clouds--to showcase the sometimes surreal transformations of Au's protagonists. Spider Love Song and Other Stories treads the fault line that forms between lovers, families, friends, cultures--exposing injuries and vulnerabilities, but also the strength and courage necessary to recast resentment and anger into wonder and power. Au's lyrical style, humor, and tender attention to her characters' fancies and failings make this powerful debut a delight to read.

"A. Molotkov's third poetry collection,Synonyms for Silence, traverses a terrain of terror and wonder. These sharp, brief lyrics and prose poems subject the world to ethical and metaphysical scrutiny, examining the familiar as well as the unknowable aspects of human existence and contrasting our transient chemical reality with our ability to manifest meaning"

"Follows Juan Gutéirrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his favorite watering hole--a ramshackle dive presided over by Bob the Bartender--is transforming into a karaoke hotspot. The story is set in a neighborhood that is also changing, gentrification inciting the ire of the established community. Upon the unexpected death of one of the bar's regulars, Juan is sent reeling, and a series of upheavals follow as he both seeks and spurns intimacy, pondering the legacy of distant parents and a failed marriage and grappling with his sexuality--all the while cycling and dating, drinking at Nicks Lounge, and parenting a determined and defiant child-become-woman. When his incarcerated father dies and Stella reveals she's pregnant, Juan is forced to examine the emotional bonds that both hold and hinder him, to reassess his ideas of commitment, of friendship, of love. His encounters with various characters--his mother, his ex-wife, a middle-aged punker, an aspiring acupuncturist, a dapper veteran--lead Juan to the realization that he himself must change to thrive. This is a story of making family and making mistakes, of rending and of mending. As a Latinx queer father with a mixed-race daughter, Juan exemplifies the ways identity connects and divides us"--