Black Sparrow Books imprint: 6 books

We are pleased to add Donald Breckenridge to the Black Sparrow list. Readers of Perec and French New Wave Cinema will revel in his haunting take on the traditional ghost story. Christopher Sorrentino, National Book Award finalist for The Fugitives, says “I was moved and often startled by And Then;...

In this daring debut novel following in the hallowed footsteps of Black Sparrow titans Charles Bukowski and Lucia Berlin, Rachel Nagelberg, a true literary pioneer, explores the frail line between the human impulse to control everything and the futility of excessive effort to do so. Incorporating...

In 1981, John Martin published Lucia Berlin’s first book of stories, and in 1993 her last. With the recent publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, and the sustained critical acclaim it has received, Berlin has finally been recognized as a master of the short story, allowing her work to reach the...

One stormy night in 1826, just north of Galveston Bay, Old Bull, a Cheyenne Indian who had just seen the ocean for the first time, found himself trying to outrace a hurricane. Lifted from his horse, spun around, and thrown down in the bayou, Old Bull rode the current into a small canyon, and survived....

Set mainly in Los Angeles, Lucia Berlin’s gritty working-class stories bridge the gap between the Americas—rich and poor, North and South, Anglo and Hispanic. While her style has been compared to Raymond Carver’s, and her dream- and drink-addicted characters to Richard Yates’, her fictional territory and fatalistic humor are hers alone.

In Taking What I Like Linda Bamber reinvents some classic texts, mostly Shakespearean. Like Shakespeare himself, she sometimes showcases the brilliance of her models and sometimes plunders the past to make something new. As entertaining and contemporary as these stories are, they also revel in the plays...