Soft Skull Press: 132 books

**An NPR Best Book of 2017 "Rowe deftly juxtaposes dark humor with raw emotion without ever yanking the reader out of the story." —*The Guardian*** As a young girl, Maggie Rowe took the idea of salvation very seriously. Growing up in a moderately religious household, her fear of...

"A Girl's Guide to Personal Hygiene is everything I never knew I wanted: a disgusting, hilarious, and honest book that pays tribute to the female body and all of its habits and suppurations. It is delightfully and uncomfortably relatable and I love it with my whole self—heart, sweat, bowels,...

First pregnancy can be a fraught, uncomfortable experience for any woman, but for resolutely butch lesbian Teek Thomasson, it is exceptionally challenging: Teek identifies as a masculine woman in a world bent on associating pregnancy with a cult of uber-femininity. Teek wonders, “Can butches even...

A new edition, with author intro and foreword, for the critically acclaimed book's tenth anniversary

Set in India in 1648, Guards at the Taj introduces two young Imperial Guards, Humayun and Babur, as they stand watch in front of the city walls. New to their roles and just recently out of training, they have been assigned the less-than-exciting “dawn watch” leaving them plenty of time for discussion...

Sandeep Sanghavi, the mixed-race son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous American astronomer lives a nomadic albeit mundane life traveling the country with his mother's hotel consulting firm. His life becomes more interesting when various lost objects suddenly begin to reappear. Then a stranger...

Rajiv Joseph is one of today’s most acclaimed young playwrights. The winner of numerous awards, including an NEA Award for Best Play and a Whiting Writers Award, he is an artist to watch. This volume gathers together for the first time his three major works to date. Included herein are his...

"A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel." —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and Annihilation “Elvia Wilk’s Oval is a marvel. At the core of this seductive, acute, superbly-contemporary update of mid-period...

Shortlisted for the 2019 Pacific Northwest Book Award Named a Best Book of Fall by NYLON "[Dieterich's] writing is crisp and intelligent. . . She writes about her own reckoning with her sexuality and exploration of queer identity without becoming pat or coy, giving readers intimate access...

Bowling lessons with a hunchback. A bizarre first-grade teacher who hallucinates in class. A tragically innocent family blind-sided by flower power, and the salvation of soul music at a radio station straight out of a Quentin Tarantino version of The Twilight Zone. These are just a few of the luminous...

This is Leonard Pitt’s story of growing up the misfit in Detroit in the 1940s and 50s. In a later age he would have been put on Ritalin and paraded before psychiatrists because he couldn’t pay attention in school. In 1962, at the end of a misguided foray towards a career in advertising he took the...

A provocative look inside the most dangerous job in America by a powerful new literary voice What is the price of staying connected, of that phone in your hand or that watch on your wrist? Recent TV shows would have you believe that the most dangerous job in America is a crab fisherman, or...

A wild and uncompromising history of four infamous magazines and the outlaws behind them, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is the first book to rip the sheet off of the sleazy myth-making machine of Hugh Hefner and Playboy, and reveal the doomed history of Hefner’s arch rival, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione,...

Did you know that less than two weeks after Jack Kerouac reported to the Newport, RI U.S. Naval Training Station (the same month that the German 6th Army was surrendering at Stalingrad), he was discharged, diagnosed with a “Constitutional Psychopathic State, Schizoid Personality”? That just a few...