Books published by Coffee House Press

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A legendary work of literary wizardry in which the author reckons with Christopher Columbus, America, myth, and his great-grandfather Herman Melville. First published in 1965, Genoa is Paul Metcalf's literary masterpiece in which he attempts to purge the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothersone, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song. Includes an introduction by Rick Moody (The Ice Storm).

The complete plays, including never before published work, from one of the major writers of the twentieth century.