In 2023 and beyond, we’re working on the following titles:
THE MOTH FOR THE STAR, a novel by James Reich
(Pub date: September 12, 2023, ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-2-4, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-3-1)
At once a gripping metaphysical mystery of Depression-era New York and a tender ode to our dying future, James Reich’s The Moth for the Star is by turns horrifying and poignant, coldly thrilling and richly evocative. Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime. With a control of language and rhythm few can match, Reich transports his readers from the streets of Cairo to the canals of Venice, from the heights of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building to the shadow of the Sphinx. The Moth for the Star is a dark, sprawling romance, riddled with paranormal drama, a singular work destined to remain with you long after reading.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“An interrogation of the nature of evil set against the backdrop of a thrilling murder mystery, The Moth for the Star’s nuanced evocations of the beautiful and the damned accumulate in a terrifyingly relevant fiction, one that will keep you guessing to the last page and beyond.”
–Jonathan Evison, author of Small World
“Hypnotic, brooding, and ultimately spellbinding, The Moth for the Star is a marvel of psychological suspense rendered in prose as polished and shining as the novel’s twin protagonists, who slice through space and time with the cold detachment of a steel razor.”
–Chuck Greaves, author of The Chimera Club
“A Depression-era murder ballad as sung by a high modernist, an amnesiac’s love story as told by the Devil, The Moth for the Star is above all a sentence-by-sentence pleasure of maximalist prose used to hypnotically readable effect. Stunning and strange, Reich’s latest whisks you up with the serious power of language into a compelling and utterly memorable world.”
–Constance E. Squires, author of Hit Your Brights and Along the Watchtower
“The Moth for the Star is a triumph. It evokes the Depression era with a stylized, enervated elegance, and argues that the past is another planet: exotic, alien and inhospitable. The exquisite writing shines with diamond-cut brilliance, and the cumulative effect is uncanny, revealing a damaged world where reality has been fatally upended.”
–Simon Sellars, author of Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe and Code Beast
“In The Moth for the Star, James Reich grips the reader from the first page and doesn’t let go. Across sweeping landscapes and eras, from the 1929 market crash to post-apocalyptic environmental ruin, Reich builds a narrative storm that is menacing, inventive, and beautifully blade-sharp.” –Anne Valente, author of Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
TAKE CREEK, FOR EXAMPLE, a novel by Chris Rugeley
(Pub Date: October 1, 2023, ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-0-0, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-1-7)
At Take Creek, one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States, an unnamed photography major attends to study under Salter, a famous and perhaps out-of-his-mind professor whose works rivals that of Cindy Sherman and Garry Winogrand. When Salter asks his protégé to surveil Manning, the new transfer, as his final project, what follows is a wild, unpredictable last year of college full of drugs, nudity, shifting viewpoints, and the occasional making of art.
Like a novelized version of Art School Confidential, Chris Rugeley’s Take Creek, For Example is a wry and empathic coming-of-age comedy about a young man finding himself through the lens of a camera, only to discover that the world around him is a carnival of absurdities.
ADVANCE PRAISE
“Welcome to Take Creek, the country’s number one elite undergraduate art school with a price tag to match, and the larger-than-life setting of Chris Rugeley’s whip-smart and wickedly funny send-up of the campus novel starring a day-glo cast of characters all pondering what kind of artist they want to be. With electric prose that pops with precision and rapid fire dialogue that will have you holding your ribs, Rugeley’s dynamic and assured debut is not one to miss.”
–Sara Lippmann, author of Doll Palace, Jerks, and Lech
“Chris Rugeley’s Take Creek, For Example is the quirkiest, most art-infused campus novel you’ll ever read, chockablock with fascinating and hilarious characters, thrumming with longing and belonging. This is an exciting and original debut.”
–Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac
THE CHILDREN OF THIS MADNESS, a novel by Gemini Wahhaj
(Pub Date: December 5, 2023, ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-4-8, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-5-5)
In The Children of this Madness, Gemini Wahhaj pens a complex tale of modern Bengalis, one that illuminates the recent histories not only of Bangladesh, but America and Iraq. Told in multiple voices over successive eras, this is the story of Nasir Uddin and his daughter Beena, and the intersection of their distant, vastly different lives.
As the US war in Iraq plays out a world away, and Beena struggles to belong to Houston’s tony Bengali American community—many of whom serve the same corporate masters she sees destroying Iraq—recently widowed engineering professor Nasir Uddin journeys to America not only to see Beena and her new husband but the many former students who make up the immigrant community Beena has come to view with ambivalence. With subtlety, grace, and love, Wahhaj dramatizes this mingling of generations and cultures, and the search for an ever-elusive home that define the Bengali American experience.
ALSO FORTHCOMING
TRANSITORY, stories by Tobias Carroll (originally published by CCM)
THE SIGN FOR DROWNING, a novel by Rachel Stolzman (originally published by Trumpeter)
7.13 Books 