Coffee House Press: 122 books

Comemadre is a natural fit for our Latin American translation list—funny, oddball, and dark. It came to us recommended by Valeria Luiselli and Daniel Saldaña París and is our first collaboration with translator Heather Cleary, who lives in New York and is an eloquent, charming advocate for the...

“A unique baseball book, one that cleverly explores the history of the sport through cultural and political lenses.” —Largehearted Boy   The Devil’s Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal...

**A hostage and a deep-sea scientist recall their romance in this “**strange, intelligent, gorgeously written” novel about love, oceans, lust, and terror (New York Magazine). In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters....

A brilliant collection of “nineteen new and sixty-four previously published stories from one of America’s masters of the form” (Largehearted Boy).   In this volume, readers will be drawn into Herd’s fertile literary cornucopia as his vivid prose captures the imagination. Written with brevity...

**A universal portrait and an insider’s look at life in Latin America in this “**vivid, graceful, tautly constructed” novel of love, anger, hope, and tragedy (Tim O’Brien). At the heart of this “profound . . . quietly stunning work that leaves soft tracks in the heart” is Chayo,...

The tragicomic tale of a frustrated writer angry at the world: “Scathingly funny.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)   Living on a diet of fried Spam, vodka, sardines, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort, Andrew Whittaker is slowly being sucked into the morass of middle age. A negligent landlord,...

A black veteran of Afghanistan searches for his missing brother in “a rich and passionate” debut novel exploring issues of race, war, and family (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).   When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, their white mother presents...

In this “vividly rendered novel-in-stories” (Booklist), Aaron Michael Morales “wrestles with nothing less than the parameters of the human soul” (Luis Alberto Urrea).   Set in Tucson’s toughest neighborhoods during the late 1980s, this explosive debut follows the disintegration of the Nuñez...

Ifi and Job, a Nigerian couple in an arranged marriage, begin their lives together in Nebraska with a single, outrageous lie: that Job is a doctor, not a college dropout. Unwittingly, Ifi becomes his co-conspirator-that is until his first wife, Cheryl, whom he married for a green card years ago, reenters...

Yamashita “blends the . . . surrealism of Garcia Marquez, bizarre science fiction . . . à la Stanislaw Lem, and a gift for satirizing . . . that recalls Heller of Catch-22” (Publishers Weekly). This freewheeling black comedy features a bizarre cast of characters, including a Japanese man...

These eleven short fictions evoke the microcosmic worlds every human relationship contains. A woman is captivated by the stories her boyfriend tells about his exes. A faltering artist goes on a date with a married couple. Twin brothers work out their rivalry via the girl next door. In every one...

"I had always imagined that my life story...would have a great first line: something like Nabokov's 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins;' or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'... When...

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen’s poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.

An imaginative, hauntingly poetic collection of contemporary fables that redefine the fairy tale for the modern woman.   In Kate Bernheimer’s familiar and spare—yet wondrous—world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger’s daughter befriends...