Coffee House Press: 122 books

A bravura debut novel hailed as “a continually hilarious, hopes-dashed account of an indelible American character: the con man” (Greil Marcus).   Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator,...

“Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary.”—The New York Times “Sorrentino’s ear for dialects and...

An “original and haunting” novel about two wars and two generations of men (Minneapolis Star Tribune).   Pensive in the wake of 9/11, a young man launches a mission to reunite his beloved grandfather, an American bombardier, with Luddie, the woman who saved him during WWII. Armed only with the...

Chandler State University is the one thing keeping the dusty, Western town of Chandler on the map. Now that its basketball program has fallen apart, CSU’s only claim to fame is its Gravinics Department, dedicated to the study of an obscure European country—its mythology, its extraordinarily difficult...

As a Welsh farmer plows through a long, hot day, the boundaries blur between animal and human in this acclaimed, award-winning novel.   On a long, hot day, Gareth searches for a missing pregnant cow. A dog must be put down, there are ducks to go in the pond, there are children, and there is Kate,...

Life and death, animals and land, and a farmer and a stranger are all inextricably linked in this “dark, tense, and vital” award-winning novel (The Guardian).   Daniel is a farmer in rural Wales who raises lambs. Another unnamed man hunts badgers and sells them to the locals. Slowly, the isolated...

“There are shades of David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter in this collection of feminist allegories and surreal skits” (The Guardian). Dolls, mirrors, tinned foods, malfunctioning bodies—the seemingly banal quickly turns unsettling in this debut story collection. A woman laments...

“This fine, final work by Brooklyn native Sorrentino . . . finds a rueful charm in the ‘wretched clichés’ of ordinary failure.” —Publishers Weekly Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor...

Victor Hernández Cruz is a major poet of the Nuyorican school and co-founded the East Harlem Gut Theatre and the Before Columbus Foundation. Closely associated with both it and Second Generation New York school poets, his work speaks to others on the CHP list, most particularly Ron Padgett. These...

Sam Savage's final book is a collection of stripped down visitations, flash fictions of smoke breaks and long drives and friends who finally stop showing up. The acidic tang of disappointment is here, and sparks of biting insight, in portraits of people and animals, in all our absurdity and failed attempts at meaning. As Sam says, "what a life."

"Amanda Nadelberg's poems . . . are jumping, funny, romantic, and frequently lyrical….which in the immediate reading is almost pure music."—Ken Tucker, Entertainment WeeklyFrom "Matson":So what patent reason is there to doubtthe color of a person's hair, there is sunand timpani. Rubber wood...

“This quirky and imaginative book celebrates individuals’ potential for creativity and libraries as vital and vibrant community resources.” —Kirkus Reviews Information is free to everyone who steps into a library. So is creativity. The Artist’s Library embraces the idea that...

“These short, fiery verses describe with sorrow and passion the Crescent City just before, during and immediately after Katrina.” —Publishers Weekly In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August...

• Toliver's work has the generosity and intelligence of C.D. Wright's and Claudia Rankine's, both of whom were her teachers, and the exacting standards of form, meaning, and language of Dawn Lundy Martin's. • One of the delights of Spectra is how it is maximal in content, and minimal in production—these...