Sirens
10 best books like Sirens (Joshua Mohr): IRL, The Speed Chronicles, Edie & the Low-Hung Hands, Big Lonesome, Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you, Hollywood Notebook, Cake Time, Cult of Loretta, A Common Pornography, Made to Break
| Author | Tommy Pico |
| ISBN | 0991429869 |
IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyoncé’s visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of...
"Akashic launches a new series of crime anthologies, each focused on a different controlled substance, with this addictive volume."
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Publishers Weekly
"All told, The Speed Chronicles deserves great praise for the audacity of the topic, the depth of the discussion, the diversity...
Edie & the Low-Hung Hands
| Author | Brian Allen Carr |
| ISBN | 0984874429 |
After murdering his elder brother, Marlet must flee the broken town of Victory. With his sword, our low-hung handed hero maneuvers his way through a decrepit southern desert murdering blank-skinned men, being pursued by his illegitimate son, and deceiving those he encounters. All the while, Marlet...
| Author | Jim Ruland |
| ISBN | 0975396439 |
Wildly imaginative tales of America's past and present. Understanding that history is nothing but a fable purged of grit and grime, Ruland transforms historical fiction into something slick, brutal and weird. Whether he's spinning a lurid yarn about the previous adventures of Popeye, imagining...
Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you
Memory assists perception, grounding our understanding of those around us and those who have left their traces through time – but how reliable is memory really? Memory is malleable, shaped and shifted through consolidation and reconsolidation. Consolidation is the neurological process that...
Hollywood Notebook is a prose poem-ish memoir of fragments. Ortiz takes us through the streets of Los Angeles and the internal maps she's charting as she moves from her twenties to her thirties in a studio apartment in Hollywood. A cartography of love, loss, and transformation, Hollywood Notebook...
Winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Fiction Award.
A new Novel-in-Stories that New York Times bestselling author Jillian Lauren calls -a delicious indulgence.-
Daring yet aimless, smart but slightly strange, Cake Time's young female protagonist keeps making slippery choices, sliding...
| Author | Kevin Maloney |
| ISBN | 1621051838 |
“Kevin Maloney alchemizes the allure of dicey friendships, hallucinatory sex and a drug so terrifying I’m heartbroken I’ll never get to try it. Cult of Loretta captures the manic fury of Richard Brautigan writing a sequel to The Outsiders during a ketamine binge.”
- Jim Ruland, author...
| Author | Kevin Sampsell |
| ISBN | 0061766100 |
In 2008, Kevin Sampsell's estranged father died of an aneurysm. When he returned home to Kennewick, Washington for the funeral, Kevin's mother revealed to him disturbing threads in their family history — stories of incest, madness, betrayal, and death. In A Common Pornography, he tells his family's...
| Author | D. Foy |
| ISBN | 1937512169 |
Two days before New Years, a pack of five friends—three men and two women—head to a remote cabin near Lake Tahoe to celebrate the holidays. They've been buddies forever, banded together by scrapes and squalor, their relationships defined by these wild times.
After a car accident leaves...
| Author | Antonia Crane |
| ISBN | 1940207061 |
A small town girl leaves her troubled family and starts stripping — which introduces her to a community that keeps her sober and saves her life — but a roller-coaster lifestyle ensues. She gets drugged, does enema shows, and unionizes the club. When she tries to quit and go to graduate school, her...
| Author | Scott McClanahan |
| ISBN | 1937512452 |
"[The Incantations of Daniel Johnston] captures Johnston's visions—both artistic and hallucinatory—in an intensely colorful cartoonish style and vivid recurring images: frogs, cascades of pills, volcanoes, eyeballs of many varieties."
—John Williams, New York Times Book...
Another writer I've heard lots about and the hype turned out to be completely justified. WITCH HUNT is a very personal, borderline confessional poetry collection but it feels much more involving than a simple diary. Juliet Escoria is inhabited by a powerful anger I recognized almost immediatly: the...
“Sean H. Doyle is a punk rock sailor shaman with a message from way down below decks where the guys with horns and hooves go jet skiing on a lake of fire. This Must Be the Place is a ferocious testament to love and loss written with razor blades and backed with blood. An unputdownable debut.”
–Jim...
Yokohama Threeway: And Other Small Shames
| Author | Beth Lisick |
| ISBN | 0872866254 |
Peering into life's cringe-worthy moments, best-selling author Beth Lisick excavates territory that most would rather ignore. Funny, odd, deeply personal, yet somehow universal, these are the kind of memories that haunt us all, the small awful moments of shame and humiliation that we'd rather...
| Author | Melissa Broder |
| ISBN | 0988750376 |
There's something really contrary about these poems. They're completely selfish, but incredibly giving and generous; they're hopeless but find a way to see hope; they are godless but filled with "god"; they are scary but comforting; they tell you you're on your own but are nurturing; they will rip...
Fiction. Ranked one of Flavorwire's "Must Read" books for March, 2014. Made DEEP SOUTH Magazine's Summer 2014 reading list.
"DEEP ELLUM is a novel of beauty and power, about family and transcending family, lives unwinding even as they tangle together. Brandon Hobson writes luminescent prose...
| Author | Patrick O'Neil |
| ISBN | 1936873575 |
I've read a lot of junkie fiction and nonfiction but none that has as much hardboiled criminal activity as O'Neil's story from the streets of San Francisco. For a period in the '90s the selfie king of the LA lit scene was, how shall we put it, not a nice man. Searing and pitiless, Gun, Needle, Spoon is a reminder...
Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller
| Author | Chloe Griffin |
| ISBN | 3942214202 |
Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a...
| Author | Lewis Nordan |
| ISBN | 1565121996 |
Lewis Nordan is famous for his special vision of the Mississippi Delta. His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark,...
The short vignette-style tales in Troy James Weaver's literary debut, Witchita Stories, combine to make an evocative brew of small town melancholy, working class gloom, and coming of age charm. Told through the eyes of a young man who yearns to find excitement, truth, and a deeper family bond in his...
| Author | Elisa Gabbert |
| ISBN | 1939568269 |
Elisa Gabbert's recent essay in The Paris Review—"On Writerly Jealousy"—made me very glad not to be a nonfiction writer, because Gabbert's essays collected here are exactly the sort that would drive me batty with jealousy. "Reading writers I admire writing about things I want to write about,...
