We’re excited to share with you the full FALL CATALOG for 2018 today, including all titles from The Accomplices (Civil Coping Mechanisms & Writ Large Press).
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Out Today (Oct 4, 2018):
Coldwater Canyon
by Anne-Marie Kinney
NOVEL / LITERARY FICTION / LOS ANGELES
Kinney’s precise and considered prose examines the insistence on reshaping the past through the lens of one’s own trauma and conceived desires as a means of moving forward. Why do we so often look for solace and redemption through others, pushing ourselves to do anything for them, even when it harms everyone involved?
Hot, gritty, swirling, hypnotic and sensual… an unhinged, sweetly sinister sun-baked noir; all danger, doomed love, and compassion.
—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
The Fat Kid
by Jamie Iredell
NOVEL / LITERARY FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL / WESTERN
A haunting and pulls-no-punches book about a struggling, damaged son and his brutal, damaged father, and the strange uncanny man who seems master of both of them. Kind of like what might happen if William Faulkner started a novel about fathers and sons, had a heart attack, and then David Lynch was called in to finish it.
—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
I don’t write about race
by June Gehringer
POETRY / MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / ASIAN-AMERICAN / LGBTQ
[T]his book doesn’t write about race, it writes about the meanings we make. “I write about erasure,” Gehringer writes, and “I write about silence.” But this isn’t just a story, it’s a space. We, as readers, enter into accountability for our dealings with race, transness, family, and class… how it really feels to be placed in proximity to those who fail to love us.
—Ginger Ko, author of Inherit
Sad Laughter
by Brian Alan Ellis
NONFICTION / HUMOR
Writing is like trying to make sense of an inside joke you have with yourself but haha joke’s on you ’cause the joke is more sad than funny.
Ellis is the rock and roll king of sad. Most happy people only wish they could be as sardonic, humorous, and at once morose as Ellis. But they can’t.
–Elle Nash, author of Animals Eat Each Other
Released Sept 2018:
Learning
by Andrew Choate
MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / SELF-HELP / MYSTERY
Free of hierarchical notions about where or from whom one gets an education, Choate gleans knowledge from disparate sources… His father — a mercurial lover of film and art — at his most vulnerable provides the aching center to this text but from there it radiates out in beautifully penetrating waves, touching food, music, sex, and all kinds of dark matter.
–Margaret Wappler, author of Neon Green
Tom Sawyer
by Joseph Grantham
POETRY / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In TOM SAWYER, Joseph Grantham is pulling it all back and stripping the language clean. These are poems about broken hearts and growing up, packed full of jokes and weirdo thoughts from a weirdo mind. When I think about Joseph Grantham, I think, ‘Ah…finally…the last living person who doesn’t judge or shout for a living.’ What sweet poems, from a sweet sweet man.
—Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book
Aaaaaand what to look forward to in 2019:
Spring 2019:
- Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (Poetry, Bilingual)
- Psychopomps by Alex DiFrancesco (Memoir, Creative Nonfiction)
- Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil (Memoir, Performance)
- (the other house) by Rocío Carlos (Poetry, Bilingual)
- Letters to My City by Mike Sonksen (Poetry, Essays)
Fall 2019:
- American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang (Experimental, Fiction)
- Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice (Hybrid, Memoir)
- Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich (Short Stories, Fiction)
- Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama (Poetry)
- The Sky Forever by Kimberly Alidio (Poetry, Experimental)
Reviewers & Interviewers: Download a PDF of our Fall Catalog and get in touch about review/press inquires (the5accomplices@gmail.com)
No, it isn’t a coincidence: The winner of the #IAMCOPING Mainline contest, Russell Jaffe’s beautiful new collection was born by the adopting our publishing namesake, “Civil Coping Mechanisms,” and turning it into a writing prompt. What does it mean to cope? Jaffe took it to heart and has crafted poetry as unique and heartwarming as much as it is devastating. This one’s for the community. Jaffe makes it clear: We’re coping.
“In In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, Kelly’s poems are crafting the next new reality, because what-ever duende would have had to offer, in terms of wisdom, has passed. Each poem is a breakup with nostalgia. Each poem is an invitation to the reader to accompany him in his search, to be conflicted with him and to come to terms with the burden of creating new normals and new moral codes. It’s about the transfiguration of ideas because the change that these poems seek in flesh conclude that no flesh is left available. These poems in their want and in their searching and in their fear will capture you because each one is a piece of you, too.”
“Good love stories aren’t interesting to read about. Thankfully, Dumbheart / Stupidface provides a wonderful reprieve; Wilhelm writes the brutal truths of what it means to love someone with a detached ferocity generally observed in nature, as when a tiger devours a deer. And it is as exciting to watch.”
“Bud Smith is one of the only writers I don’t mind hanging out with in real life. I’ve seen Bud Smith sober and I’ve seen Bud Smith drunk. He’s great either way.”
“Scott Esposito is a true American cosmopolitan—full of ideas and void of pretensions. His way of seeing—inquisitive and gentle—his way of writing—honest and charismatic—are a life-line out of our self congratulatory provincialism.”
“I’ve never read a book like this in my life and I love that so much I could scream. Ella Longpre’s How to Keep You Alive is a genre bomb love letter to identity dissolution and reformation. I think I held my breath a few times when I felt lyric language kissing the fact of a body, meanings coming apart but then reassembling kind of like the dance that creation and destruction make. Or, more precisely, when we go to tell the story of our lives and our bodies we find that what can be storied can be destoried and restoried. That’s the beauty and terror of memory meeting body meeting language. This storymaking will undo you in the best way, and restory you toward a difference you didn’t know lived in you. We could use that right now. It could save our lives.”
“Jared Joseph’s profoundly ambitious Drowsy. Drowsy Baby is simultaneously a mystical text, an autofiction driven by Nabokovian madness, the result of a termite artist eating his way through history, a no-holds-barred conceptual hoax, a personal genealogy. It is a book of fear and a book of defenses: from the violent and treasonous acts depicted in the pages, to the writing techniques of montage and erasure, the book is involved in a constant tugging between violence and protection, attack and defense.”
“Love letters. Love poetry. […] Johannes Göransson’s letters to an ex-lover Ra — as well as the letters in this book to the radiator, history, Susan Sontag, America, poetry itself–come from a poet whose ‘heart [and poetics] belongs to a drive-by shooting.’ Reading them is to be invited into the theater of utterly mixed metaphors where nothing follows.’”
“In the spirit of Donald Barthelme, Dolan Morgan queers the every day and leaves a sinister domestic scene behind.”
“Told almost entirely through lyrical fragments and beautifully-observed scenes, Alexandra Naughton’s American Mary is the latest incarnation of the Great American Novella, at once unsettling and moving.”
“Reading Ashley Farmer’s The Women is like reading a cubist painting. […] Even as she unapologetically documents the power that systemic oppression has over our daily lives, her women emerge as brave, hungry, and resilient. The Women simultaneously made my blood boil and made me feel less alone.”
“Gary Shipley’s conception of reality is more like our actual present reality than our literary culture’s usual inbred narrative realism can afford. […] Literature almost doesn’t deserve this maniac, and thank hell he’s here.
“With pop pastiche, lyrical pirouettes, and sage insights parading as ‘confessions,’ these poems position—like a ballet class at its bar pivoting towards the mirror—the young against the old, the native against the new, and the innocent against the cynical to show them how, together, they more beautifully out of sync.”
