Our Fall 2017 Books

We’re very excited to announce our first books and authors:

THE GLAMSHACK, a novel by Paul Cohen

Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Prairie Lights Fiction Prize winner Paul Cohen’s debut novel THE GLAMSHACK is a lyrical, darkly humorous meditation on love, divinity, the Plains Indian Wars and the male gaze. Cohen’s prose has echoes of James Salter and Martin Amis, but is bold and original in and of itself. The story follows a doomed love affair in its final 12 days from the setting of a rent-free pool house in Silicon Valley. THE GLAMSHACK was nominated for a Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award by an editor at a Big Five publishing house for a favorite manuscript that he tried and failed to acquire.

Paul Cohen’s fiction has been published in Tin House, Five Chapters and Eleven Eleven. He was a finalist in the Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest and his recently completed novel The Sleeping Indian was named a finalist for the 2016 Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Village Voice, Details, the Christian Science Monitor and others. Cohen earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a teaching scholarship as well as the Prairie Lights Prize for Fiction (judged by Ethan Canin). He has taught writing at UC Berkeley Extension, the University of San Francisco MFA program and the University of Iowa, and has guest lectured at California College of the Arts. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“There is a powerful, innate tension in his writing which comes not only from his voice but from his particular way of looking at things, an unusual way, and in art—in fiction—the only real worlds are likely to be the unusual.”
—James Salter

“[THE GLAMSHACK] is that exceptionally rare, uncategorizable novel that not only finds its greatest achievements in its singularity, but also serves as a reminder of how very familiar and commonly un-daring contemporary fiction is in general.”
—Josh Kendall, senior Viking editor

“Poignant, sharp writing infused with flashes of brutal humor. Paul Cohen’s The Glamshack cuts to the quandary we all endure: the burden of desire. With a voice distinct and resonating, Cohen cast a sober eye on life and longing, love and failure.  He personalizes a universal plight and casts a searing spotlight on the fact that we are all uniquely un-unique—that, in the end, we all share the same fate.”
—Douglas Light, author of Where Night Stops

PLANET GRIM, stories by Alex Behr

Alex Behr’s debut story collection PLANET GRIM is a vivid, unsettling portrait of people on the gritty fringes of San Francisco and Portland who long for connection in strange, psychologically difficult ways. Her idiosyncratic prose and wholly unpredictable characters will remind readers of the work of Miranda July and Mary Gaitskill.

Alex Behr has taught creative writing residencies at Portland, OR, high schools through Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program. Alex’s work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Tin House, Salon, Nailed, Mutha, Bitch, Manifest-Station, and other publications. She has performed nationwide in the comedy show Mortified. She can be found online at alexbehr.com and on Twitter @alex_behr.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Alex Behr’s imagination is wild, rigorous, and totally unique. I haven’t been able to decide if her stories are comedies intercut with horror or horror stories leavened by comedy, but when they’re this entertaining, who cares?”
—Tom Bissell, author of Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“Alex Behr’s Planet Grim turned me inside out. No, really, these stories of eros and ids getting loose, inner contradictions and desires crashing into each other like marbles, brutal instances of violence up against a moment of tender beauty, the people and lovers and mothers and families in this book are carved from the guts of us. What sits dead center at this hybrid of self and other is, mercifully, an unbeaten heart.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan

“Alex Behr’s characters are conflicted, uncertain, and pained. What’s so compelling about her fiction is how she honors that conflictedness, explores the uncertainties, and examines the pain until it reveals itself as irreducibly human and therefore a kind of grace.”
—Dan DeWeese, author of You Don’t Love This Man and Disorder

“In Alex Behr’s funny poignant stories the kids are sharp, fearless, and insatiable, the parents conflicted, lustful, and tough. The meaning of family and love is an epic game nobody can win or stop playing.”
—Mary Rechner, author of the story collection Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women