Coffee House Press: 122 books

A Time Out New York Best Book of the Year. “[Bernheimer is] one of literature’s foremost champions of the fairy tale.” —Nylon   Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer’s latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just...

Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador's austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends-an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright-who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything...

The first of ten novellas in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era.   Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s...

"I Hotel" is the third novella of I Hotel, a National Book Award finalist and epic of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Yamashita’s cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, caught in riptides of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil.

“Fourteen writers take on perhaps the most important cultural issue of our time: figure out what we’re talking about when we’re talking about cat videos.” —New York magazine   Are cat videos art? This essay collection, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, addresses not just our fascination...

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential...

“A darkly funny set of stories that look closely at heartland American culture and reflect it back with devastating accuracy.” —Library Journal An enraged village gaslights unsuspecting vacationers. A young man delays an impending confession, fondling the nostrils of his mother’s pet...

**The author of Mulligan Stew presents “**a savage, baffling and beguiling novel about the wreckage that infidelity leaves behind” (Kirkus Reviews). Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives...

Null Set collects the slightly obsessive possibilities that rise when we give them the space—odd jobs, trouble-making, and farm boy rambling, all in dialogue with mathematics, or William Faulkner, or other poets. From "Hypotenuse": HYPOTENUSE I write three, erase it, blow...

When a hit man takes a sabbatical to focus on love, his bosses aren’t happy in an award-winning debut novel that earns comparison to Paul Auster and Kafka.   When the anonymous narrator botches an assignment from the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life becomes a participant...

“With this hilarious and tragic novel, Travis Nichols has captured the menace and pathos and ridiculousness and dead-seriousness of the Internet.” —Emily Gould, author of Friendship   Charli and Nico’s wedding blog has an uninvited guest: a commenter convinced the bride is being romanced...

Whether celebrating clones or revising Led Zeppelin, Equi melds verse with aphorism, wisdom with wicked playfulness."—Entertainment Weekly Equi's poems are under the breath asides from your cleverest friend—witty, thoughtful, and wry. SLIGHT A slight implies if not an...

The two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and author of Mulligan Stew paints a “clever parodic take on the contemporary art world” (Publishers Weekly).   How often have you been subjected to supposed artists, art critics, or works of “art” that left you wondering what the word even means?...

“A greatly enjoyable and splendidly well-written suburban farce.” —Yuri Herrera Rodrigo likes his vacant lot, its resident chicken, and being left alone. But when passivity finds him accidentally married to Cecilia, he trades Mexico City for the sun-bleached desolation of his hometown...