Books published by Brick Mantel Books

You are The Girl, and The Girl is a Badass.From the opening lines, it's clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged-which is another way to say she's a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society's suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems' sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl's absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.

You feel watched. It’s nothing new, but the feeling is amplified when the streets are busy. That hum in your head is now a buzz. Laika desperately wishes for a new life. At fourteen, she’s hardened and independent, living on the streets of Southern California. She’s finally free of her volatile home but yearns for true stability.As Graham, a waiter at a local Russian restaurant, watches Laika steal and struggle to survive, he sees there is something else going on. Something dangerous. An insidious disease that gnaws at her mind and drags her deeper into a world of chaos and delusion.Laika brings to light the often-shrouded world of paranoid schizophrenia. It also examines the socially stigmatized issues of homelessness, addiction, and PTSD, in the hopes of fostering greater awareness and compassion.

Menashe Everett is a tormented man. He's ruled by depression and addiction. He's haunted by his past. At 37, he barely keeps his job and lives in a haze of blurred reality.But to many in his life, he's their only hope.For the past ten years, Menashe has been acting as a counselor to similarly afflicted clients who agree to his unorthodox brand of pseudo-therapy. When Menashe encounters two particularly challenging cases-a Vietnam vet and an anxious teenager-he is forced to finally cope with his own personal failures or risk losing everything.Set in Cleveland in the late 1980s, Glass tests traditional ideas of interpersonal responsibility and what it means to struggle with mental illness.

Luce Garrison narrates the unraveling of her stoic Midwestern family: a mother plagued by bipolar disorder, a father guilt-ridden by his inability to confront his wife's descent into madness, and Luce's own unassailable conviction that she can never be as loved as the brothers she has lost.As a child, Luce often lingered over albums of glossy photographs, longing to be just like her lovely, enigmatic mother. But images frozen for an instant could not capture the lightless depression and manic bouts of frenzied activity which demonized Bets Garrison. Luce does not know the depths of her mother's undiagnosed mental illness. Her only certainty? She is an inadequate substitute for the older brother who was stillborn just three months after her parents' marriage.After giving birth to Jonny, eleven years Luce's junior, Bets develops an obsessive, disturbing devotion which trumps every other relationship in the Garrison home. Although Luce tries to minimize the gulf, she is excluded from the smothering attention her mother lavishes upon Jonny. Caught in a void, she can neither be loving sister nor cherished daughter. She can only be in the way.Set in rural Wisconsin, We Dare Not Whisper explores the toxic legacy of a self-destructive family. With hauntingly beautiful prose, Jan Netolicky illuminates the suffering of individuals with bipolar disorder and the unthinkable challenges facing those closest to them.