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Bad Habits<BR>A Love Story
Cristy C. Road
Reincarnating Hubert Selby and Kathy Acker as a Bi Latina junkie-artist, Cristy C. Road's debut novel is a gut-punch-beautiful punk paen to finding human connections amidst urban squalor and capitalist decadence

Lost in the Supermarket
Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens
  • The Joy of Indie Rock Cooking
  • The Three-Chord Gourmet
  • This Meal Could Be Your Life

  • Sandhogs
    Thomas Kelly
    A working-class Bonfire of the Vanities, set in the literal and metaphorical underworld of Manhattan, featuring two brothers at brutal odds, one an underground construction worker the other an Irish mob boss.

    Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me
    Martin Millar
    A highly personal coming-of-age cocktail from Martin Millar, featuring his trademark self-deprecating humor, a splash of a parallel fantasy world and a twist of nostalgia.

    Speaking Treason Fluently
    Tim Wise
    A new essay collection by America's leading white anti-racist activist Tim Wise.

    Mr. Spic Goes to Washington
    Ilan Stavans, Illustrated by Roberto Weil
    A political "historieta" in which Mr. Spic indeed goes to Washington, a satirical tale about norteno Latinos taking over the capital.

    X Films
    Alex Cox
    Cutting-edge filmmaker Alex Cox tells us how it was and how it will be: a manifesto on the future of film, and guidance for the directors of tomorrow.

    Love All the People<BR>The Essential Bill Hicks<BR>
    Bill Hicks, Introduction by John Lahr
    An inspird and inspiring truth teller, dangerous and brave and scary all at once.
    —Richard Pryor

    Pisstown Chaos
    David Ohle
    The final installment of the cult trilogy that began with the cult classic MOTORMAN and continued with the Village Voice Best of 2004, THE AGE OF SINATRA.

    All About Lulu
    Jonathan Evison
    A freakishly charming tale of star-crossed, would-be step-sibling love in a family of failed bodybuilders in suburban Los Angeles.

    Coming of Age at the End of History
    Camille de Toledo, translated by Blake Ferris
    Takes the vision of Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zones," the incisiveness of Naomi Klein in her seminal treatise No Logo, and youthful idiosyncratic passion of William Upksi Wimsatt, and creates a new vision of political possibility for Generation Y. Click to download a sample chapter!

    Soft Skull Fiction Subscription 2008!

    The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates
    Edited by Louis Reyes Rivera and Bruce George, Foreword by Jim Brown
    An intergenerational, multi-racial anthology edited by two gang members turned cultural workers, The Bandana Republic seeks to showcase the creative impulse that, along with violence, has always been a part of membership in urban gangs.

    Be a Father to Your Child: Real Talk from Black Men on Family, Love, and Fatherhood
    Edited by April R. Silver
    An effort to better understand how young black fathers relate to their children, as well as their own fathers, and to better understand their roles in families and communities.

    War Nerd
    Gary Brecher
    A self-described slob and data-entry drone from Fresno, CA, Brecher is P.J. O'Rourke on Red Bull, writing with passion and profanity on the nature of warfare and the ongoing wars�those on the front page and otherwise�that are being fought every day around the world.

    Dead in Desemboque<BR>Historias de Amor y Sangre
    Eddy Arellano. illustrated by William Schaff, Richard Schuler & Alec Thibodeau
    America's first historieta, a bawdy border comic in the Mexican pulp fiction tradition.


    Black Flies
    Shannon Burke
    "Searing...affecting."
    —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

    Reproduce and Revolt:<BR>A Graphic Toolbox for the 21st Century Activist
    Edited by Josh MacPhee and Favianna Rodriguez
    A long-needed and wished for resource, Reproduce and Revolt is a collection of original anti-copyright graphics to be freely used for various political posters, flyers, and campaigns.

    That's Revolting<BR>Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation<BR>Revised and Expanded
    Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore
    A revised and expanded edition of the book that defines the new anti-assimilationist queer movement.

    The Solitary Vice: Against Reading
    Mikita Brottman
    The Solitary Vice will make you rethink your own relation to reading. Brottman is wonderful at reminding us what a very complicated act—of fantasy, recompense, adventurism, and (sometimes) perversity—reading a book can be.
    —Laura Kipnis

    Tintin and the Secret of Literature
    Tom McCarthy
    "No matter how much you want to disagree with McCarthy. . .his chatty style is so forcefully confident and his argument so tightly constructed and so well-supported, that by the end you're throwing your arms up in surrender. . . . It's brilliant."
    Daily Telegraph

    Lonely Werewolf Girl
    Martin Millar
    The latest urban fantasy from Martin Millar, featuring a parallel world of werewolves of every stripe and character causing intentional and unintentional mayhem on the streets of London and the moors of Scotland...

    Kissing Dead Girls
    Daphne Gottlieb
    The latest collection from Firecracker and Audre Lorde Award-winning poet Daphne Gottlieb, channeling the voices of the world's dead women.

    No Sleep Till Brooklyn
    Kevin Powell
    New and selected poems from the 20 years of Kevin Powell's poetry.

    Mercury Under My Tongue
    Sylvain Trudel, Translated by Sheila Fischman
    A lyrical and unsentimental arresting and arrested coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy dying of bone cancer...by the winner of the Governor-General's Prize for Literature

    On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City
    Erick Lyle (formerly known as Iggy Scam)
    A brilliant work of contemporary urban archaeology from the leading activist zinester of San Francisco, author of SCAM and formerly known as Iggy Scam.

    Woman's World: A Novel
    Graham Rawle
    Characterized as a work of genius both by the Times of London and by Absolutely Fabulous's Joanna Lumley, WOMAN'S WORLD is a page-turning, gender-bending, mind-blowing novel and work-of-art...

    In the Time of Assignments
    Douglas A. Martin
    The first poetry collection from the Ferro-Grumley finalist Douglas A. Martin.

    Gone and Back Again
    Jonathon Scott Fuqua
    A wonderfully disrespectful story of a boy, enwrapped in a completely unraveling family, who descends into depression but, in a singular act of defiance, claws his way out.

    Reviewed by the New York Times Book Review
    Black Flies
    Shannon Burke
    "Searing...affecting."
    —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

    How the Dead Dream
    Lydia Millet
    Millet's most stunning work yet follows a
    preternaturally gifted young real estate developer's passage from anodyne greed to an obsession with endangered animals so great he breaks into zoo cages at night to sleep alongside them, a journey culminating in a Conradian trip deep into a hurricane-ravaged Caribbean island...

    America's Mayor, American's President?<BR>The Strange Career of Rudy Giuliani
    edited by Robert Polner
    with a Preface by Jimmy Breslin
    “[A] welcome antidote to the encomiums heaped upon America’s mayor after Sept. 11th, 2001 by so many people who forgot or never bothered to find out where Mr. Giuliani stood on Sept 10.”
    —The New York Times

    My Happy Life
    Lydia Millet
    A simple woman looks back on her harsh life with extraordinary insight and unexpected joy in Millet's PEN USA Award-winning novel.

    Jamestown
    Matthew Sharpe
    A fantastical and dystopian re-telling of the Jamestown Colony story by the author of the breakout TODAY SHOW Book Club selection THE SLEEPING FATHER.


    American Genius, A Comedy
    Lynne Tillman
    A novel of remarkable perception, grace, and understanding that functions as a microcosm of America, AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is the most ambitious novel yet from the author of NBCC finalist and NY Times Notable, No Lease on Life.

    A Good War Is Hard to Find
    David Griffith
    Inspired by the recent Abu Ghraib torture photos, this is Griffith's journey through the vast catalogue of violent and sexual images that have accumulated in our collective unconscious, a journey he seeks to understand through filters ranging from Flannery O'Connor to Susan Sontag to Andy Warhol.

    Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
    Lydia Millet
    A masterfully crafted literary and philosophical tour-de-force that moves from the poetic to the hilarious to the dreamily apocalyptic, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart imagines the small foibles and grand moral negotiations of the "genius" A-bomb scientists. By the winner of the 2003 PEN USA Award.

    Skels
    Maggie Dubris
    ...Her New York has everything and nothing to do with the real world, which is a reminder of something very simple: books don't need to get all pompous about our social disasters in order to make the grandest possible statements about them.
    —New York Times Book Review

    The Fountain at the Center of the World<BR>A Novel<BR>
    Robert Newman
    "A sublimely frisky novel…[Fountain at the Center of the World] reads like what you’d get if Tom Wolfe clambered inside the head of Noam Chomsky.... The talismanic Catch-22 of the anti-globalization protest movement, the fictional complement to Naomi Klein’s influential treatise No Logo.... As ferocious as a jar of freeze-dried Paul Krugman columns.”
    —The New York Times Book Review

    The Sleeping Father
    Matthew Sharpe
    "[A] rare find: an ironist who actually seems to like other people.
    —New York Times Book Review

    Heredity
    Jenny Davidson
    Now available!… dark as your hat: sex-and-death with a side-order of extra death. A masterful and outrageously readable first novel.
    —Bruno Maddox, author of My Little Blue Dress

    Holiday Gift-Giving the Soft Skull Way
    The Customer is Always Wrong<BR>The Retail Chronicles
    Jeff Martin, editor

    Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages
    R.V. Branham, editor
    An exhaustive and hilarious compendium of curses and expletives, rendered in at least 69 different languages.

    Soft Skull 2007 Fiction Subscription
    Just in time for the holidays!

    Awake! A Reader for the Sleepless
    edited by Steven Lee Beeber
    THE book to read when you can't sleep.

    Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
    Sigrid Nunez
    The incandescent fictionalized biography of the Woolf's monkey MITZ hailed by Alice Sebold in an Amazon.com reader review as an "inventive, intelligent, thoroughly researched and alive creation."

    Daily Negations
    John S. Hall
    An antidote to "Daily Affirmations," from John S. Hall, lead singer of the cult 90's band King Missile ("Detachable Penis," "Jesus Was Way Cool")

    Half/Life<BR>Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes
    edited by Laurel Snyder
    By turns tragic and funny, religious and heartbreaking, angry and surprisingly familiar, Half/Life represents the altogether diverse memories and reflections of a handful of Half-Jews, among them Thisbe Nissen, Katharine Weber, Jennifer Traig, Jeff Sharlett, and Joyce Maynard.

    What Would Bill Hicks Say?
    Edited by Ben Mack and Kristin Pulkkinen
    Famous writers, humorists, musicians and cartoonists comment on America by channeling their observations through the lens of seminal comic Bill Hicks.

    Soft Skull Poetry Subscription 2006!!
    All the poetry Soft Skull will publish in 2006, with a few 2005 bonus tracks!

    The Neighborhood Story Project: Complete Set
    Ebony Bolding, Jana Dennis, Waukesha Jackson, Ashley Nelson, and Arlet and Sam Wylie
    The Neighborhood Story Project is a community documentary program based out of New Orleans, Louisiana. In the weeks leading up to Hurricane Katrina, they celebrated the release of five books written by students at John McDonogh Senior High. The books were best-sellers in the city and stand as a testament to New Orleans� community spirit and as a map back from disaster. Through interviews, photography, and story-writing, these New Orleans teenagers explored their families, their neighborhoods, and their city. All proceeds from the sales of these books will go to the authors and the Nieghborhood Story Project as it seeks to document the stories of the hurricane and its aftermath.

    Burn, Christmas! Burn!!
    Brian Gage
    A humorous Christmas book about Santa’s Elves who are tired of being third-rate drones in his oppressive sweatshop.

    GAMERS<BR>Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
    Editor: Shanna Compton
    The first book to ever seriously explore the culture of video and online games.

    The Saddest Little Robot
    by Brian Gage, illustrated by Kathryn Otoshi
    Ages 8 and up • 35 color illustrations • Co-published by Radiation Press • A Winter 2003/2004 Children’s Booksense 76 Pick!


    Snoot is a Drudgebot, and a confused one at that. He can’t figure out why the Halobots, who run Dome City, get so much extra light (all robots need light to survive). He thinks so much about this he gets easily distracted and is consequently the least productive of all robots. He is also oddly shaped and the others make fun of him. Curious about what exists in the awful darkness outside the Dome, he ventures forth and discovers that all it not as it seems. Snoot vows to restore equality to Dome City. With guile, cunning, and good old-fashioned courage, Snoot, aided by some special friends, returns to Dome City to free the Drudgebots.

    Lambda and Publishing Triangle Awards Finalists!
    That's Revolting<BR>Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation<BR>Revised and Expanded
    Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore
    A revised and expanded edition of the book that defines the new anti-assimilationist queer movement.

    Choir Boy
    Charlie Anders
    Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Trans and Genderqueer Fiction and for the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction! And Richard Labonte's Top Ten Book of 2005!!!

    Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother
    Douglas A. Martin
    A genre bending novel of biographical fiction about the sole Bronte brother, Branwell Bronte, which details his tragic demise under the weight of great expectation, while his sisters cultivate their genius in the background.

    Manstealing for Fat Girls
    Michelle Embree
    Cynical yet sweet (but never oversweet) and frequently hilarious, this first novel captures the free-fall, occasionally magical hell of being a freak in high school as well as anything I've ever read. If you ever got called faggot or lezzy on the school bus, you'll find this instantly recognizable. If you didn't, maybe it's time to find out how it felt.
    —Poppy Z. Brite, author of Liquor and Prime

    Choir Boy
    Charlie Anders
    "[A] voice box of gold in a dispassionate third-person narrative peppered with wry wit...Choir Boy may well be the first trans novel with Christian-youth crossover potential."--Bitch Magazine.

    Deliver Me from Nowhere
    Tennessee Jones
    In 1982, Bruce Springsteen departed from an upbeat rock and roll sound to release Nebraska--a spare, haunting piece of story-telling populated by deadbeats, desperadoes, and the poor souls unfortunate enough to fall in love with them. In Deliver Me From Nowhere, the shadowy folk fables of Springsteen's mastework are re-imagined in stories that trace a proud but perilous journey across the class and gender badlands of Middle America.

    Juicy Mother
    edited by Jennifer Camper
    Juicy Mother is a cartoon anthology with work by and about queers, women and people of color. The collection showcases comics by such well-known cartoonist as Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Howard Cruse (Wendal, Stuck Rubber Baby), Diane DiMassa (Hothead Paisan), and Ariel Schrag (Definition, Potential).

    The Pornographers Poem<BR>
    Michael Turner
    “This is an astonishing book, as much for the brilliance of its form as the richness of its subject matter…A dense, witty, and disturbing novel.”
    —Elle (France)

    © 2003 Soft Skull Press, Inc.


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