Soft Skull Press: 132 books

Dry, offbeat, and mostly profane, this debut collection of humorous nonfiction glorifies all things inappropriate and TMI. A compendia of probing essays, lists, profiles, barstool rants, queries, pedantic footnotes, play scripts, commonplace miscellany, and overly revealing memoir, How to Be Inappropriate...

A child’s life is full of both joys and challenges-the infinite wonder of learning, the literal and figurative scraped knees of everyday life, and, of course, deep, penetrating theological terror. That’s why Pastor Brett of the Mega-Pheasant Heights Assembly Church has created an activity...

In this devilishly clever collection of short fiction, renowned humorist Owen Egerton leads us on a wildly surprising, darkly comic, and often heart-wrenching ride into the terrible beauty of life's end. With razor wit and compassionate insight, Egerton has a crafted a work that brilliantly explores...

According to The New York Times, Noam Chomsky is “arguably the most important intellectual alive.” But he isn’t easy to read . . . or at least he wasn’t until these books came along. Made up of intensively edited speeches and interviews, they offer something not found anywhere else: pure Chomsky,...

In 2005, after publishing her book The Demons of Eden-where she denounced the very powerful men behind the a Mexican child pornography ring-Lydia Cacho became a target. Exactly eight months after the publication of the book, one morning as she was making her way to work, Lydia was apprehended by the...

With a new preface and updated chapters, White Like Me is one-part memoir, one-part polemical essay collection. It is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and elsewhere. Using...

Energy sources are massively depleted. The government is wasteful and incompetent. The economy is imploding, the environment is toxic, and international terrorism threatens our day-to-day lives. And gum sucks. It just sucks. Who is responsible? Who made our world so dangerous, so unlivable, so stupid? Matthew...

This riveting, poignant and hilarious memoir recounts Clancy Sigal’s escapades as a young agent, handling screenwriters and actors at the Sam Jaffe Agency in the blacklist-addled Hollywood of the 1950s. He’s hired by the take-no-prisoners agent Mary Baker after being fired from Columbia Pictures...

Steven Church grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety-and a place that, since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in the popular imagination. Childhood was quiet on the surface,...

Khadim has no idea why he's been called into the office of Dr. Danielson, the Vice Principal at Sheffield High. At first, Danielson is cagey, using a minor violation to keep the boy at school for detention. But as tension mounts, Danielson alternately plays good cop and bad, and winds up catching...

The Salafi are a revivalist Sunni Muslim movement misunderstood by most Americans, and even many Muslims. The New York Times’ first reference to Salafis as a distinct group appears in 1979 after a band of armed men seized control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. After 1979, there is not another mention...

Incredible as it seems, the government’s version of what happened on September 11, 2001, can’t possibly be true. Without engaging in any speculation or conjecture, this book proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. For example, it lists ten infallible indicators of destruction by explosives...

Understanding the Crash starts with a simple question that still haunts us all: What has happened to the world economy? With the kind of striking precision that only graphic nonfiction can provide, Seth Tobocman and Eric Laursen explain just how we got into this mess - and how we can get out of it. Looking...

If twenty-five years can discover the internet, the cell phone, this thing called the iPod, can twenty-five years discover the secret of a girl murdered, abandoned, by the side of the road? That is the haunting premise of Bury This, an impressionistic literary thriller about the murder of a...