Books published by Salt Publishing

This new selection of winners and runners-up from the inaugural International Salt Prizes has been chosen by judges and publishers, Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery.

Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions. These tales probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines we wouldn't normally hear.

Mark Burnhope's poems peer out over disability, faith and prejudice. They visit town and sea, husband and wife, monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth.

A tenth anniversary edition of Chris Emery's black comedy debut, Dr. Mephisto, made simultaneously available in print and electronic form. Flamboyant, funny, poignant and excessive, Emery's modernist work is a picaresque, historical road show of hell from the brink of the 21st Century.

Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. These poems are clear, direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery, but head right for the heart of shame, laying bare the terrors of parenting, loss, regret, and falling in love with the wrong people.

The Bridges by Fayad Jamis (1930-1988) is unanimously considered one of Cuban poetry's most stunning and engaging books. The collection offers a brilliant representation of the intellectual and his position before colonialism by one of the great Cuban artists of the twentieth century.

Pigeons fly us into the heart of the city to a little private space cut off by darkened gullies, the wing of a pigeon protruding dramatically, seeming to be a sign. What answers will it give? We follow the rest of the characters. A street artist-escapologist handcuffed inside a sack asks us a fundamental question. Somehow we have moved full circle.

The characters in the collection mirror today's fast paced restless energy. They're not content to be written in by anybody else but themselves and are all striving to recreate their world, through performance, or an expansion of what they are.

Event, the first book by Australian poet Judith Bishop, is the work of a border-crosser. Emotionally intense, formally inventive and musical, with influences ranging from Ted Hughes and Elizabeth Bishop to Yves Bonnefoy.

Greetings from Below chronicles the life of Nick Danze, a young man who suffers from several "fixations" he believes are associated with some kind of sexual addiction. Most of the book is set in Las Vegas, where Nick's widowed mother resides, struggling with addictions to shopping, gambling, and pure cane sugar.

On Listening is a collection of essays covering many of the key areas of contemporary debate in creative writing. From translation as the art of the impossible to the significance of community writing projects, by way of teaching debate and personal enthusiasms, it affords a portrait of the field as a whole.

Almost Ashore is a selection of new and nurtured poems. The scenes are sentiments of survivance, and a tease of nature in original haiku poems. The imagistic scenes and associations are similar to the visual images in Anishinaabe, or Chippewa, traditional dream songs, mythic by nature and connected by images of natural reason.

This anthology furthers this braiding with the work of four emerging Pacific islander women poets from Guam, Hawai'i, and Fiji. Despite their distant origins, all these writers explore culture, history, politics, genealogy, feminism, and the environment. They each have their own unique style, ranging from the lyric to the avant-garde.

One professor, five students, a week-long field trip on an isolated island in the Norwegian Sea. Four of the undergraduates are typical in their aims and ambitions. And then there is Magnus. Who will heed their call?

Centred upon the Villa Hibiscus, a guesthouse on the beautiful southern coast of Sri Lanka, this expansive and multi-layered debut traces the life of Padma, her stepfather, Gerhardt, and the lives of the many guests coming to stay, each seeking a better life and independence, free of oppression.

Ursula Owen's wide-ranging memoir begins with her fleeing Nazi Germany, explores her education and travels, her life in Egypt, Lebanon and the USA, explores her successful publishing career, her campaigning for freedom of expression, and ends with her still feeling an outsider while playing vital roles at the cultural heart of contemporary Britain.

In this collection, Peter Daniels looks at his life as an older gay man, his London neighbourhood, his furniture, other people's gardens and London's creatures.

It Gets Worse is the second instalment of Nicholas Lezard's rueful, dissolute life.

On the hottest day of the year, Ana Sharma and her mum check in to the Hotel Splendid, a place where bells seem to ring all by themselves, jam pots and milk jugs appear on the breakfast table as if by magic, and things go bump in the night.

Cracked Skull Cinema offers poems on culture and society, colonialism and its legacies, media and power. Set between these are homages and reflections on middle age, on life's loves and losses.

Death Magazine is a futuristic, glossy body horror magazine in poetry form. It takes our cacophonous obsession with perfectionism and turns it into a series of synthetic, blackly-comic nightmares.

Trine and her mother live on the German coast. The mudflats that surround them disappear and reappear with the North Sea tides. Anna roams the beaches collecting flotsam and jetsam to make art, Trine loves playing on a war-time shipwreck. That is, until Trine's brother appears.