Books published by Tough Poets Press

"Johnny Stanton's Mangled Hands is such an oddity that it confounds description or comparison. . . . [It] is so unusual and original that many readers with a serious interest in fiction will find it liberating." - Bob Halliday, The Washington PostExcerpt from the back cover of the original 1985 Sun & Moon Press edition:: "For years, Manged Hands was passed among New York poets and fiction writers in manuscript form, and its author, Johnny Stanton, developed an underground reputation as one of the most gifted writers of the generation directly influenced by the New York Poets. . . . Mangled Hands stands between Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in style and spirit."

Maxwell Bodenheim's 1934 novel Slow Vision depicts a young couple, a pair of average Americans swept up in labor struggles and reduced to painful subsistence, portraying the protagonists' gradual understanding of labor unions and the psychological, philosophical, and political trials that led to sympathetic affiliations in Socialism and Communism. Thus initiates their "slow vision," a simmering understanding of the manifestations of Leftist movements and of special relevance to the climate of the first two decades of the 21st century.Bodenheim's books-thirteen novels and nine volumes of verse-are mostly out of print. Some were resurrected in the late-1940s through the mid-1950s as cheap pulp paperbacks after Bodenheim had lost the rights to his own work. Slow Vision was not one of them. Presumably, nobody wanted to be reminded of the Great Depression. Slow Vision would be Bodenheim's last published novel and literary history has forgotten it.

Six humorous plays written between 1952 and 1968 by Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), two of which have never before been published.

SPEAKING IN AN EMPTY ROOM collects 72 years of letters by author John Sanford (1904-2003), a PEN/Faulkner Award recipient and LA Times Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

According to author Kirby Doyle (1932-2003), Happiness Bastard, his only published novel, was "written on a sojourn that my lover post-wife and I took to New York in 1959-1960." Similar to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the novel was composed on a single scroll formed from taped-together sheets of paper. The novel was submitted to, and rejected by, several publishers before it was finally released in 1968 by Essex House in North Hollywood, California.Poet Michael McClure described the original manuscript of Happiness Bastard as "the most grotesque and hilarious novel I'd ever seen." Charles Bukowski called the novel "good stuff." In the only known review of the novel (Los Angeles Free Press, Sept. 6, 1968), Lawrence Lipton, author of The Holy Barbarians, the classic 1959 study of the Beats, wrote: "The most important innovative breakthrough in wordcraft since Howl, Naked Lunch, The Free-Lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed, Informed Sources by Willard Bain and Mailer's Why Are We In Vietnam? . . . Read Happiness Bastard by Kirby Doyle. Then, if you still don't know where it's at, the hell with you."

A vicious, and often quite funny, satire of Southern California's bohemian community in the 1920s by Jewish-American novelist Myron Brinig (1896-1991). Illustrated by Lynd Ward (1905-1985)

Debut collection of "neo-Beat" poems and prose poems by L.A.-based writer and filmmaker Vanessa Matic

PLAYS ON WORDS collects for the first time six of Marvin Cohen's humorous and occasionally surreal plays written in the early 1980s, five never before published.

New edition of noted American prose poet Russell Edson's 1951 debut collection of poems and short stories

New edition of Gil Orlovitz's neglected and long out of print experimental opus, Milkbottle H, originally published in 1967 by Calder & Boyars.

New edition of J.S. Scott's 1924 English translation of Children of the Age (original title: Børn av Tiden) by Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

The Water Wheel recounts both the real and imagined-real adventures of one John B. Sanford in New York and London over a short period in 1927. The novel is completely dominated by Sanford, a self-assumed individualist-and self-styled "lawclerk, sinner, ex-convict, adolescent, grandson and legatee of a Litvak matchvendor."

Expanded 30th-anniversary edition of Patricia Eakins's critically acclaimed collection of short stories, "a modern bestiary which reworks the stuff of mythologies, spanning the cultures of the planet."

Donald Newlove's The Wolf Who Swallowed the Sun is an enthralling and unorthodox dark fable, full of intrigue and comedy, and with a healthy dose of romance and sex. Written in 1998 but never before published, the novel is a sweeping saga of one family's greed, extortion, and double-crossing as they strive to acquire a controlling interest in the world's wealth. It is also the story of Billy Baxter, heir to this massive fortune who, with the help of a married couple of Chinese-Swiss Jungian psychologists (one of whom he has fallen in love with), seeks atonement for his family's sins. As an added twist that only a first-rate storyteller like Newlove could credibly pull off, Baxter also happens to be descendent from an ancient clan of humanoid wolves on the brink of extinction.

Originally published in 1944, Alan Kapelner's first novel, Lonely Boy Blues, is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop, it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s.

First-ever resissue of GULPING'S RECITAL, the humorous, somewhat absurd, and somewhat surreal first novel by Russell Edson (1929-2014), "the godfather of the prose poem in America."

Originally published in 1978, Sweet Adversity is two novels in one. Author Donald Newlove edited his critically acclaimed novels of jazz-playing alcoholic Siamese twins, Leo & Theodore (1972) and The Drunks (1974), into a single volume, explaining in his Author's Note that "the story loses scope and focus when halved into two books."

A semi-autobiographical novel about a Turkish-born writer living in New York City's Greenwich Village during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with flashbacks to his childhood in Istanbul, who makes a promise to himself "to become the greatest writer of the new American generation," despite the fact that he can barely speak or write in English.

Five previously unpublished seriocomic novellas and short stories written in the mid-1960s by American postmodern writer Marvin Cohen.

What Are They All Waiting For? is an anthology of long out-of-print works by Philadelphia-born experimental novelist, poet, playwright, and screenwriter Gil Orlovitz (1918-1973), one of America's most innovative, yet virtually forgotten, writers of the 20th century. This volume contains 9 short stories, 4 essays, and 49 poems, originally published between 1944 and 1962. Also included is a comprehensive biography of Orlovitz and a bibliography of his works.

Expanded new edition of humorist Marvin Cohen's 1974 collection of 30 essays on the art and myth of America's pastime.

50th-anniversary edition of critically acclaimed writer Marvin Cohen's debut fiction. Not quite a novel, the book is best described as a series of humorous philosophical dialogues between the narrator and his "other" self, touching on a vast array of subjects such as birth, love, art, nature, religion, death, and everything in between.

Prior to the publication of his first collection of poetry, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote three plays while living as a "stowaway" on the campus of Harvard University. The first of these plays, written in 1954, was Sarpedon, which Corso described as "a great funny Prometheus Unbound ... all in metre and rhyme" and "...an attempt to replicate Euripides, though the whole shot be an original. Like the great Greek masters, I took off where Homer left an opening (like Euripides did with the fate of Agamemnon). My opening was found in The Iliad. Sarpedon, son of Zeus and Europa, died on the fields of Troy, and Homer had him sent up to Olympus with no complaint from Hades, who got all the others what died there. Thus I have Hades complain, demanding from his brother Zeus, the dead, all the dead, from said fields." The play comprises 17 pages of this volume. It is supplemented with a two-page introduction by Corso himself, taken from a transcript of his prefatory remarks at his 1978 reading of Sarpedon at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Also included are an editor's introduction which provides information about the plays Corso wrote while at Harvard and describes the circumstances surrounding his brief residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The volume is footnoted as well. Corso never professed to be a Greek scholar but this brilliant yet little-known work clearly demonstrates the depth of his mastery of classical literature, no doubt picked up from auditing Harvard lectures as well as from the extensive reading he did in the Clinton State Prison library in Dannemora, New York, while serving a three-year sentence for theft. What makes it all the more significant is that, despite the ancient subject matter, his verse is infused with the street slang and Beat vernacular of the time in which it was written, and portends the irreverent humor that would become a hallmark of much of his later work.