Bücher veröffentlicht von Soft Skull Press

“A family’s world is irrevocably rocked when an old female lover from Mom’s past reappears” in this “sexy, audacious, politically charged” novel (Vanity Fair).Eager to escape her damaging past, Alison Rose is drawn to Zoe, a free-spirited artist who offers emotional stability and a love outside the norm. They spend a number of happy years together—until the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake deepens fissures in their relationship, and Alison leaves Zoe for a “normal” life with a man.But Alison’s son is born in the midst of these complications and shifting emotional bonds, and ultimately the three adults must strive to create a life together that will test the boundaries and balance the needs of all. A story spanning two decades, set against the social, political, and geological upheavals of the Bay Area, A Theory of Small Earthquakes “explores the vagaries of love and the true nature of family” (People).“[An] inventive, addictive novel [that] teaches us something new about love and sex, jealousy and loyalty, and also, and perhaps most importantly, motherhood.” —Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother and Red Hook Road“Call it "Two Women, One Man and a Baby." Maran’s take on the modern family is at once unexpected and totally relatable.” —MORE

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 moment that has lacked a clarifying manifesto.Until now.Pulling from his personal confrontations with the FBI, Rudolph Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer, and Dick Cheney, activist, maverick, and investigative reporter Sander Hicks reaches for a broader understanding of who was behind the 9/11 attacks. He reports the mysterious murder of Dr. David M. Graham, a Shreveport dentist who met two of the 9/11 hijackers but was then harassed by the FBI and poisoned. Scientific evidence leads him to take a hard, critical stance against Bush, Cheney, and the 9/11 "Official Story.”Weaving evidence with anecdote, Slingshot to the Juggernaut is an inspiring ride into the 9/11 cover-up and the revolutionary possibilities it inadvertently created. Provocative and unyielding, Hicks examines the evidence, draws conclusions, and offers a vision for the future of the United States.

A powerful memoir “about a difficult childhood . . . tough stuff, honest and real”—The Oregonian Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him. Over the years, he watched his mother disintegrate into her own form of mania, while his father—a scholar and doctor who had once played semi-pro baseball—was strict and pushed Peter particularly hard. He wanted only the best from his son, but in the process taught Peter to expect only the worst from himself. In the midst of his chaotic home life, Peter began to hear a voice—an insistent, monotone that would periodically dictate his actions. When Peter finally entered public school he started to break free from his father’s control—only to fall sway to the voice more and more. His obsessive-compulsive behavior morphed into ruthless competition in sports and, ultimately, into lies, violence, and drugs. The End of Boys follows Hoffmeister to the very brink of sanity and back, in a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the trauma of adolescence and the redemption available to us all, if only we choose to find it. “Peter Brown Hoffmeister calls every sense into play, providing rich imagery, grounded reflection, and the tension inherent in a coming-of-age tale in which drugs, violence, and a genetic tendency toward OCD conspire.” —Los Angeles Review “The End of Boys takes no prisoners with its gritty, entrancing realism . . . a chilling and captivating read . . . a voice that is refreshingly new.” —Eugene Weekly

“Fried’s stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully weird, yet his many strange worlds also have the power to haunt.” --Dan ChaonIn “Loeka Discovered,” a buzz flows throughout a lab when scientists unearth a perfectly preserved prehistoric man who suggests to them the hopefulness of life, but the more they learn, the more the realities of ancient survival invade their buoyant projections. “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” meditates on why an entire town enthusiastically rushes out to the annual picnic that ends, year after year, in a massacre of astonishing creativity and casualty. The title story illuminates the desires and even the violence that surges beneath the tenuous peace among the animals in the Garden of Eden.Equal parts fable and wry satire, Seth Fried’s stories suggest that we are at our most compelling and human when wrestling with the most frustrating aspects of both the world around us and of our very own natures—and show why he has been called “one of the most exciting new voices in fiction” (Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe).“He’s channeling Saunders by way of Barthelme and Kafka, but also clearing a whole new territory of his own . . . Seth Fried is the future of fiction.” —Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief

Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story.In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.

Associated with key 1960s avant garde figures such as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Rauschenberg, and Johns, John Giorno was an early pioneer of multimedia poetry through Giorno Poetry Systems, which also distributed a who's who of the American underground from Patti Smith to Sonic Youth. Giorno's use of transgressive material and in-your-face, amplified delivery was also a key influence on punk/new wave pioneers such as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and Black Flag. Not just a poet but a sexual, spiritual, and political radical, Giorno helped pioneer the open celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s. "Subduing Demons in America" offers the best of Giorno's revolutionary poetry, from his striking Pop Art-influenced poems of the 1960s to the psychedelic, echo-laden, multitracked cut-ups of the 1970s with their explosive configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice, and the bohemian Good Life. Also here are the pared-down punk/hip-hop performance poems that Giorno performed in the 1980s.

There’s a megalomaniac professor digging a hole outside his flat. His small stake in the amphetamine market in Brixton is being threatened by a mysterious Chinese man. And the Milk Marketing Board has taken out a contract on his life. Welcome to the bizarre, obsessive world of Alby Starvation.Alby’s doctor refuses to believe he’s allergic to just about everything (which he is), especially milk. But when Alby soon discovers that his ongoing ailments are directly linked to the consumption of said product, he gives it up and is cured. Only thing is, he goes on to suggest this remedy to a number of other people suffering from milk allergies. In Millar’s surreal backyard, the Milk Marketing Board sees sales slump to an alltime low. So there’s only one thing left to do: put out a contract on Alby Starvation. Now Alby must save both his life and his precious comic collection.In Martin Millar’s surreal tale of the urban counterculture—a world full of shoplifting, deaththreats, paranoia, and video game arcades—Alby’s frantic struggle to avoid being shot falls somewhere between Irvine Welsh and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

This exhaustive study focuses on the New York filmmakers that coalesced around the radical manifesto espoused by downtown filmmaker Nick Zedd: "none shall emerge unscathed." Placing their work within the wider alternative film and downtown post-punk scenes, "Deathtripping" offers detailed analyses of the movement's films alongside interviews with the filmmakers and their collaborators, including Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Tommy Turner, Beth B, Joe Coleman, and Lydia Lunch. Also discussed are seminal influences such as the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol as well as the history of underground and trash cinema.

For many performance poets, the simple act of writing down the words can kill a poem's spirit and energy. Not so with Daphne Gottlieb. In Why Things Burn, Gottlieb tackles sexuality, lesbian issues, rape, urban life, and a host of other topics with the same power of her live performances.

"Mesmerizing . . . a vivid world, both familiar and foreign, dark and slyly humorous, makes the book a grim delight" (Publishers Weekly).One family finds themselves forceably dislocated in the midst of chaos, disease, and forced-relocation. Political power seems to be solely in the hands of one Reverend Herman Hooker, an "American Divine" who revels in the peoples' suffering as they are "shifted" (separated from--and then randomly coupled with--one another) by decree every five years. There are up-shifts, down-shifts, and side-shifts, but no attempt to make harmonious pairings. Chaos rages on as parasitic infestations spread and the Reverend rules with an iron fist from his Templex headquarters, spouting platitudes to the ever-moving masses. The final book in the trilogy that began with Motorman and its sequel, The Age of Sinatra, The Pisstown Chaos is a wild end to the cult favorite series.