Coffee House Press: 122 books

Named one of Electric Literature 25 Best Novels of 2014, here is “a darkly funny romp through some collective nightmare version of Baltimore” (AskMen.com). The Baltimore Atrocities is a mordant, deadpan collection of more than one hundred murders, betrayals, heartbreaks, suicides, and bureaucratic...

Edward Hopper’s painting "Office at Night" is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on “the facts” of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.

“Luiselli follows in the imaginative tradition of writers like Borges and Márquez, but her style and concerns are unmistakably her own. This deeply playful novel is about the passion and obsession of collecting, the nature of storytelling, the value of objects, and the complicated bonds of family....

**A young man’s returns to the Philippines becomes a whirlwind tour of Manila’s perplexing postcolonial culture in a “**sardonically funny and vibrant novel” (Booklist).   After thirteen years of living in the United States, Vince returns to his birthplace, the Philippines. In the heat and...

Sun Yung Shin has a writerly practice that centers on using intellectual and formal tools to consider fundamental ideas—personal history within the political economy, parentage and parenthood, identity, binaries, what it means to be an outsider and what it means to be at home The toggling...

Luiselli's essays (originally published in Mexico) have been released to great acclaim abroad and has been translated for and published in the UK, Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands Alma Guillermoprieto called Luiselli "one of the most important new voices in Mexican writing" at...

“This experimental memoir” tells the story of a woman “whose experiences as an American immigrant . . . encompass issues of identity and belonging” (Chicago Tribune).   This is the tale of Melena, five times married, mother of three, burlesque dancer, and “the toughest, hardest-assed...

Cultural criticism for people who grew up with television as the primary background noise.

Essays on America’s changing environment from an author who is “funny and searching—a joy to read” (Elizabeth Kolbert). What does it mean to think about Dallas, the city where JFK was shot, in relationship to Dallas, the show that just seventeen years later made “Who shot J.R.”...

“Literary critic Ervin’s debut mines very different ways of achieving personal and artistic freedom in three neatly polished, interlocking tales.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Set in Budapest—a city marked by its rich cultural heritage, the scars of empire, the fresher wounds...

**A “**winning and expansive novel” that “describes one woman’s intimacies with lovers, strangers, culture and ideas, and family and friends” (Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick). In the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a writer and academic from New York named Barbara Andersen...

A couple loses their child in this poetic and devastating novel in which grief reaches “enthralling and mysterious pleasures” (Carol Maso). A couple named Catholic and Ethos struggle with the loss of their child. How? With fishtanks and jellyfish burials, Persephone’s pomegranate seeds,...

This dark, gripping tale of an obsessed college wrestler is “one of the best novels of the year” (NPR). Stephen is in his final wrestling season at his North Dakota school, and he intends to win the divisional championship in his weight class. He thinks about little else, in fact. It will...

Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals,...