Katherine (Katie, sometimes Kate) escapes family dysfunction and an acrid suburban landscape with a nomadic life that takes her across the United States, into a snare of tough choices and fierce friendships. Flipping the American road-trip genre on its head, Scenic Overlook follows a radically independent woman as she grapples with grief, uncertainty, indecision, and the perils of newfound adulthood. This gripping novel-in-stories explores what it means to grow up—and what it means to grow.
“Erin Pringle has done it again. In this clutch of grimly gorgeous stories, resilient characters navigate perilous conditions and deteriorating landscapes in their efforts to transcend, or at least come to terms with, the dicey, mysterious predicaments of their strangely familiar lives. The greatest graces afforded these pilgrims, not to mention us readers, are the sentences, coldly true and perfectly pitched, that pump their blood and afford them breath. Erin Pringle is not a minimalist, nor is she a language-for-language’s-sake lyricist, but her prose, its sound and its sense, is the heart of the book.” - Tom Noyes, author of THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR
Awst Press is pleased to announce the release of their first novel in translation, A Book, Untitled (Girq-anvernagir, 2006) by Shushan Avagyan, translated from the Armenian by Deanna Cachoian-Schanz.
Written as a literary experiment, Girq-anvernagir was published as samizdat in Yerevan. As the reader navigates 26.5 chapters of seemingly unrelated vignettes, they discover that Avagyan, while writing the novel as a translator’s diary, is also mapping out a larger archival or archeological site: an imagined encounter between two early twentieth-century feminist writers, Shushanik Kurghinian and Zabel Yesayan. Having been obscured and forgotten through both Stalin’s regime and the patriarchal rendering of the Armenian literary and historical canons, this book recovers the legacies of these two feminist authors.
Kurghinian’s and Yesayan’s imagined encounter is juxtaposed with a contemporary conversation between the novel’s unknown narrator—an archivist and translator referred to as the “typist/writer”—and her friend Lara, who are both piecing together the writers’ fragmented stories. Uncovering these stories is no easy task: documents are censored, authors uncited, and text is missing or italicized, as if in draft form.
If the reader finds themselves asking—How can we distinguish voices or why are they indistinguishable? Who has written, and who is writing?—then Avagyan has succeeded in her experiment to “deprivatize words,” enabling them to “belong neither to the typist/writer,” the translator, “nor to you, reader” so that instead, they “unite our past, present and future”.
In this multi-authored experiment, penned yet anew by its translator, A Book, Untitled is perhaps best understood not as an original; not as a copy; it is an/other reading.
Borrowing from Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is? transforms the famed song’s fatalistic exuberance into a slim volume of minimalist and genre-blending narratives. From a vacation with friends to a retreat with strangers, danger lurks around every corner.
Spanning generations and continents, interweaving cursed travelers with prophetic artists, this book is a showcase of the luckless and lovelorn, the criminal and damned.
A week before spring semester, a Philadelphia writing professor sets out for L.A. to deliver a friend’s car. His first night on the road, alone in a Super 8 motel, he makes three pro/con lists: one for staying in his job; one for staying in his relationship; and one for staying in Philadelphia. This book-length essay is a log of the author’s life on the road, peppered with reflections on his family, history, and life’s simple pleasures. In these pages, Ingram confronts the disappointments of middle-adulthood set against his Big Desires. “It was okay,” Ingram writes of a roadside meal he gets along the way, “in the way that about eighty-five percent of life is okay.”
A funny and tender rumination on indecision and an account of the places the mind wanders while driving in a straight line, Notes from the Road is a long essay that fits in your pocket for your next trip.
Is it possible to be free while bound by an American myth? TO THOSE BOUNDED explores the effects of living in the far-reaching shadow of stereotypes, and the pressures one feels when their actions are always framed as reinforcing or rejecting an ethnic caricature. In this collection the author reflects on how popular media have shaped his identity, and how he's learned to navigate the expectations it creates. Drawing inspiration from MAUD MARTHA by Gwendolyn Brooks and PENSÉES by Blaise Pascal, the personal vignettes that compose TO THOSE BOUNDED examine Black exceptionalism and the mythos of criminality among African American men.
The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world's beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. In this short but moving work, travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, The Brick House is a delight to the eye and mind.
We Are Invited to Climb is a collection of partly computer-generated chance poems exploring “the bigandsmall.” At once a celebration of the impossible and the very real, the poems are made of refrigerator hums and upside-down kites. Watercolor stains and valleypeaks. Written using groundbreaking new techniques in generative poetry, the world Yoon creates reckons with contradiction: the sameness of other and self, choice and constraint, sense and nonsense. Through whimsy and experimentation, Yoon taps into the depths of humanity—the algorithm we all share.
2019 Awst Press Book Prize winner selected by T Kira Madden.
At once light and aching, Before Stonewall gives voice to a generation of gay men whose sexuality forced them into lives of public exile. These stories articulate the tragic comedy of young love, the many ways to lose a family, and the rigid anxiety that comes from the fear of expressing too much. Set against a backdrop of New York’s theater scene and looming McCarthyism, this book is about everything love is up against and the smoldering, dormant rebellion in the time before Stonewall.
The last Midwestern traveling circus is due to arrive in a rural village it has visited for a century of summers. Like the village, the circus is on its last leg. It’s down to one elephant and a handful of acrobats. The circus boss’s sweetheart is dying. The former starring act is recovering from cancer. The assistant, Frank, plans to retire after this show. Meanwhile, twins Heza and Abe wander the hot fields and roads, waiting for the circus or anything better. Hezada! I Miss You is a novel that explores tradition, love, and suicide—set under the fading tents of small-town America and the circus.
NAMED ONE OF THE “BEST INDIE BOOKS OF 2021” BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
SEMIOTIC LOVE [STORIES] draws upon symbols and objects to explore the loss of relationships. In these pages, Brian Phillip Whalen reaches deep into the throat of anxiety with a graceful hand and understated humor as he confronts mothers and best friends dying slow or sudden deaths, disappointing vacations, and vanishing sisters. While loss of all kinds permeates these compact stories, it is the tenderness and longing that attaches itself to the reader and propels them to turn the page. This book reminds us that for better or for worse, we're all a little rougher with the people we love the most.
In this collection of short fiction, Quist threads together intimate stories of family and culture with delicate, and emotionally complex, connective tissue.
His style is warm and humble, yet polished and poetic. The environments are highly sensory and vivid, whether it’s a cramped twelve passenger van in Ghana, or a Bangkok street stand selling mango and sticky rice, or a cash-only room at a roadside motel just over the border of Utah. The smells, tastes, and textures of For Other Ghosts transports readers across the globe while grounding them in the tender and familiar.
International orders may be accepted, but must be coordinated individually and outside of the website. Send inquiries to awst@awst-press.org.
This collection of dervish essays by Robert Vivian is a love letter to the world.
Vivian has published three collections of essays: Cold Snap as Yearning, The Least Cricket of Evening, and Mystery My Country. His novels include Water and Abandon and The Tall Grass Trilogy.
This pocket edition is designed to travel with you.
4.5 x 5”
Vida Cross is a blues poet. Bronzeville at Night: 1949 references her ancestry as a third generation Chicagoan, a Bronzeville resident, the artwork of Archibald J. Motley Jr., and the poetic research of Langston Hughes. She received an MFA in Writing and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in English from Iowa State University and a BA in English-writing and History from Knox College. She is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Creativity and Constraint Anthology for Wising Up Press, A Civil Rights Retrospective with the Black Earth Institute, Tabula Poetica with Chapman University, Transitions Magazine at the Hutchinson Institute, the Cave Canem Anthology XII: Poems 2008-2009, The Literary Review with Fairleigh Dickinson University, Reed Magazine at Reed College, and The Journal of Film and Video from The University of Illinois at Chicago.
Suspended between continents and cultures, Donald Quist charts the forceful undercurrents of an American identity. Through these essays Quist explores feelings of oppression and alienation as he wrestles with a single act of violence in a Washington, D.C. suburb, racial tensions in a rural South Carolina town, and the welcome anonymity of crowded Bangkok streets. These personal narratives are rich with Quist’s experience growing up as a person of color caught between parents, socioeconomic classes, and the countries he calls home.
Cover design by Maggie Chiang
Layout and design by LK James
Editing by Tatiana Ryckman
Copyediting by Emily Roberts
Tatiana Ryckman and Deanna Cachoian-Schanz win the TA First Prize for Debut Translation From Any Language. Video of acceptance speech attached.
We are delighted to reveal the cover of Susanna Childress's next book, Extremely Yours, and announce pre-orders are being taken through February. Pre-orders are listed at 20% off and come with free shipping.
Those featured in Extremely Yours—most prominently, the author—are all reckoning with extreme or misunderstood medical diagnoses. Though contextualized by history and science, it is lived experience and a poetic sensibility that creates this intimate collection of essays. In tracing her journey through marriage, motherhood, four first- and second-trimester losses, and finally, the precarious pregnancy that followed these losses, Susanna Childress excavates grief—and still finds room for joy.