Soft Skull Press: 132 books

Maggie Nelson’s fourth collection of poems combines a wanderer’s attention to landscape with a deeply personal exploration of desire, heartbreak, resilience, accident, and flux. Something Bright, Then Holes explores the problem of losing then recovering sight and insight - of feeling lost, then...

Jane tells the spectral story of the life and death of Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane, who was murdered in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Though officially unsolved, Jane’s murder was apparently the third in a series of seven brutal rape-murders in the area. Nelson...

On June 1st, 1914, Una O’Shaughnessy sends a postcard home from a Cornish seaside town. Back in two weeks, she promises. But seven months later, she still has not returned to Ireland, and she sends another postcard, this one signed Una, Michael, Rene (!). The Past is the story of Rene, this...

The new book from award-winning historian W. Scott Poole is a whip-smart piece of pop culture detailing the story of cult horror figure Vampira that actually tells the much wider story of 1950s America and its treatment of women and sex, as well as capturing a fascinating swath of Los Angeles history. In...

Narcotic euphoria meets the demands of everyday life in Richard Wirick’s brilliant new collection of interlocking stories. Whether depicting a Valium-fogged lawyer representing a car painter who cooked a client in his kiln, or revealing a Gulf War orderly’s drift in and out of morphine dreams...

What does it mean to live against a wall? In this ambitious first person narrative, Marcello Di Cintio travels to the world’s most disputed edges to meet the people who live alongside the razor wire, concrete, and steel and how the structure of the walls has influenced their lives. Di Cintio shares...

Deep Focus is a series of film books with a fresh approach. Take the smartest, liveliest writers in contemporary letters and let them loose on the most vital and popular corners of cinema history: midnight movies, the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies, film noir, screwball comedies, international...

In the ten years since 9/11, a grassroots truth movement has sprung up that unites the best elements of the right and left. The call to resist the secrecy, imperialism, and the manipulation of the elite has been heard by a wide spectrum of people, across religious and political lines. This is a revolutionary...

Joseph Guiteau is a working actor who moved to New York to escape a tragic family history in the Midwest. Wandering through a city transformed by the attacks of September 2001, he frequents gatherings of conspiracy groups, trying to make sense of world events and his own personal history. Looming...

Four Corners is a bare-knuckled debut novel in the style of Daniel Woodrell, Barry Hannah, and Charles Bowden. Both a savage, mean-streets thriller and a heartbreaking story of unfortunate love, Four Corners is carved from the rich, distinct voices and landscapes of the American Southwest. It manages...

Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? I, Judas reimagines Iscariot’s relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity...

Set in an alternate present that is a slightly, if dangerously, skewed version of our own, Keyhole Factory tracks the interwoven destinies of disparate characters up to and beyond the end of the world-as-we-know-it, brought on by a global super-virus. Beginning with a biting satire of an academic...

America is in the midst of a meat zeitgeist. Butchers have emerged as the rock stars of the culinary world, and cozy gastropubs serving up pork belly, lamb burgers, and sweetbreads rule the restaurant scene. In New York, the humble meatball enjoys entrée status from upscale Gramercy Tavern to newcomer...

Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As...