Coffee House Press: 122 books

“A painfully timely story . . . an artful memoir . . . a powerful, vital book about damage and the ghostly afterlives of abuse.” —Los Angeles Review of Books   True crime, memoir, and ghost story, *Mean *is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race...

"Part treatise, part memoir, part call to action, Tell Me How It Ends inspires not through a stiff stance of authority, but with the curiosity and humility Luiselli has long since established." -Annalia Luna, Brazos Bookstore "Valeria Luiselli's extended essay on her volunteer...

“A triumphant, one-of-a-kind experiment . . . Much of Empty Set concerns the trauma of exile and its long-lasting effect on interrupted lives.” —Chicago Review of Books How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us...

An episodic novel of postwar working-class Brooklyn that offers “sometimes dreamy, sometimes gritty glimpses into ordinary lives” (Publishers Weekly).   In a novel composed of fragments of memory, Gilbert Sorrentino captures the unconventional nuances of a conventional world. A masterful collage...

“A nimble case for pretentiousness as a willingness to take risks.” —The New York Times Book Review   *Pretentiousness *is for anyone who has braved being different, whether that’s making a stand against artistic consensus or running the gauntlet of the last bus home dressed differently...

On a near-silent drive across a desert with his father, a teenage boy puzzles out the mysteries of his family and himself in this acclaimed novel. As a fifteen-year-old boy takes a long drive across Chile’s Atacama desert with his father in a smoke-colored Ford Ranger, the teen simultaneously...

**A widow, aging and alone, tells her side of the story in this “**hilarious, poetic, and heartbreaking” meditation on memory (Hazel & Wren).   Tasked with writing the preface to a reissue of her late husband’s long-out-of-print novel, Edna also finds herself taking care of a vacationing...

Witty, insightful reflections on twentysomething struggles from “a writer beyond gifted and generous” (Heidi Julavits). Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs—I’ll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at...

"Sam Savage [creates] some of the most original, unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction. . . . Readers are left with a voice so strong that Savage is able to derive significance from these events by sheer literary force."--Kevin Larimer, Poets & Writers "Savage's...

Praise for Saeed Jones:"Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."—FlavorWire"I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."—D. A. Powell"Prelude to Bruise...

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders. “What power. Smith’s poetry is all poetry. And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster.”—Marvin Bell “I was weeping for the beauty...

Praise for Bill Berkson: "A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous."—Publishers Weekly Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the...

A young woman’s life in New York City is upended by addiction in this debut novel “that is equal parts irreverent and hilarious, depressive and hopeful” (Bustle). Maya is a young woman with a smart mouth, time to kill, and a heroin hobby that isn’t much fun anymore. She’s been able...

An excursion through the Japanese-American internment using archival materials from the author’s own family. In this unique memoir, Karen Tei Yamashita draws on her family’s history and creates a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic...