catalog #3

UNNAMED PRESS

fall 2015 | winter 2016

Connect with new voices

from the Unnamed Press

robert kloss

meghantifft

“Whimsical and wrenching”

“A charming, heartfelt re buke to corporate sameness and artificial relationships”

“Traces of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and the rattling bones of Bill Faulkner”

“Funny, b i z a r r e , and emotionally resonant”

JEREMIE GUEZ

BETTeADRIAANSE

“Devoured in a sitting and leaves you reeling”

carly j.hallman

fabienne josaphat“Challenging political dynasties”

matt kish

janicepariat

“A startlingly brilliant and compassionate writer”

“ Renews our age-old love of expressive handmade imagery”

“An unhinged and utter delight””

kristine muslimong

“Beautifully creepy”

AUGUST 2015

T H E l o n g f i r eM E G H A N T I F F T

Paperback, Fiction | $16.00978 -1 -939419 -44 -6Pub Date: 8/25/15Rights Available: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Turkish, Swedish, Mandarin

Natalie used to eat the pages of paperback thrillers as she read them. Now she’s trapped in the middle of a mystery that threatens to unravel her life.

Featuring the unlikeliest detective since Jonathan Let-hem’s Motherless Brooklyn, The Long Fire is a thriller about family secrets locked inside a secretive world: the American gypsy community. Natalie’s stalled-out college education, her job at the local news station, even her dys-functional relationship with her ex-boyfriend: Natalie’s never had much chance to be normal. Growing up, her life was dominated by an abusive and controlling mother who recently perished in a house fire. Her older broth-er, a drug addict, disappeared when she was still a kid. Underlying all of this is Natalie’s urge to eat the ined-ible, from pencil shavings to foam peanuts to plastic doll parts. Her compulsion, called Pica, helps fill the void left by a traumatic childhood, but it can’t shield her from a cryptic voicemail that implicates her mother’s estranged gypsy family in her gruesome and fiery death.

Meghan Tifft teaches English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. The Long Fire is her first novel.

“Equal parts funny, bizarre, and emotionally

r e s o n a n t , M e g h a n T i f f t ’ s b e a u t i f u l l y

written and wholly original debut novel

tells the wild tale of a woman who will

put anything in her mouth. I devoured it.”

— Seth Greenland, author of Shining

City and I Regret Everything

“Meghan Tifft’s auspicious first novel is

gripping and beautifully written, both

whimsical and wrenching.‘ It reminded

m e o f a b o o k I a t e o n c e , ’ t h e p r o t a g o -

nist says of her parents’ lives. The Long

Fire will remind you of nothing else.”

— Laurence Klavan, author of The Family

Unit and Other Fantasies

“An unusual, strik ingly written novel

a b o u t a y o u n g w o m a n ’ s d e s i r e f o r

understanding and love and how that

longing remains famil iar in even the

most eccentric of circumstances.”

— Kirkus Reviews

september 2015

Paperback, Fiction | $16.00978-1-939419-50-7Pub Date: 09/15/15Rights Available: Contact Kent Wolf at Lippincott Massie McQuilkin

“The Revelator carries traces of Carson McCull-

ers, Flannery O’Connor, and the rattling bones

of Bill Faulkner…I felt transported mind, body

and soul to some weird liminal space where

a prophet can emerge from the dirt and speed of

things, from the darkness in us all brought forth

by a ready-made zealot who can turn on a dime.

Read it and weep—because this novel turns us inside

out in the best way.”

—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of

Children and The Chronology of Water

“I’d be hard pressed to think of a young novel-

ist I admire more than Robert Kloss. An heir of

Melville, Faulkner, and McCarthy, Kloss stands

unflinching before conventional history, rich

with ambition and aesthetic daring. To read one

of his books is to be thrilled anew with the pos-

sibilities of contemporary fiction.”

—Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt

between the Lake and the Woods

From the darkest reaches of 19th century America, Robert Kloss channels a prophetic voice to reimagine the founding of the Mormon Church. Featuring original cover art by Matt Kish (Moby Dick in Pictures, Heart of Darkness) as well as exclusive interior illustrations.

Charismatic and conflicted, Joseph grows up carousing with con-men, crooks, and itinerant preachers at a time when utopic fanta-sies and wild ambition are drawing Americans westward in droves. Haunted in his dreams by a dark beast—an angel that condemns most of conventional society to hell—Joseph sets out to find a new way of life. Soon, he has attracted a congregation of believers. They squat in backyards and linger outside of towns, seeking the fund-ing to print Joseph’s book of revelations. With swelling coffers, a temple is built. The ministry is rich. But Joseph’s church is at odds with the “gentiles” living among them, not to mention the federal government. As Joseph and his followers are expelled from their camps and pushed further west, the church grows, and so too its troubles. And yet, despite lost children, fraying relations with his family, and constant challenges to his authority, the relentless beast remains at Joseph’s side—until the shocking end.

Robert Kloss is the author of one previous novel, The Alligators of Abraham, a novella, How the Days of Love and Diphtheria; and the hybrid genre work, The Desert Places, co-authored with Amber Sparks and illustrated by Matt Kish.

Matt Kish is a self-taught artist and librarian. He is the artist be-hind two books illustrating every page of two classics, Moby-Dick and Heart of Darkness (both of which were published by Tin House). He lives in Ohio with his wife, their two frogs, and far too many books.

R O B E R T K L O S Sa r t b y m a t t k i s h

T H E R E V E L A T O R

november 2015

EYES FULL OF EMPTYJ E R E M I E G U E ZTRANSLATED BY EDWARD GAUVIN

Paperback | Fiction $16.00978-1-939419-43-9Pub Date: 11/10/15Rights Available: Contact Laure Pécher at Agence Astier-Pécher

Jérémie Guez was born in Paris in 1988 and has been hailed as the rising star of contemporary French noir. His two previous novels, Balancé dans les cordes and Paris la unit, were awarded the 2013 SNCF du Polar and 2012 Plume Libre prizes, respective-ly. Eyes Full of Empty is the highly anticipated first English trans-lation of Jérémie Guez’s work. He lives in Paris.

Edward Gauvin is a prolific translator and the recipient of numerous awards. His work has been featured most recent-ly in The New York Times, Tin House, Best European Fiction 2014, PEN America, Words Without Borders, and Gigantic, among others. He lives in San Jose, CA.

From France’s hottest young crime writer, hardboiled noir with the pace of a Chandler novel and the French Algerian literary legacy of Camus.

Idir is not your typical Parisian detective. The son of an Algerian immigrant who made good, Idir’s middle class upbringing places him at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to his rich friends from university, while his street smarts make him just intimidating enough to handle the secret problems of Paris’s elite. Put another way, Idir knows precisely how much pressure to exert on behalf of his wealthy clients, while keeping things low profile. That is, un-til Oscar Crumley, a powerful media mogul, hires Idir to find his missing younger half-brother, Thibaut. Sent on a wild goose chase through highs and lows of the Paris underground, Idir must navi-gate upper crust treachery and entrenched criminal rings to dis-cover the truth. Echoing the headlong impulsiveness of Chandler’s Marlowe, and deftly translated by Edward Gauvin, Eyes Full of Empty introduces us to an entirely new kind of Parisian mystery.

“JEREmie Guez strikes again,”

—Macha SEry, Le Monde

“Tense, electric, carried by a beatnik rhythm, Eyes

Full of Empty is devoured in a sitting and leaves

you reeling.”

—Alexandre Fillon, Livres Hebdo

“In the weaving of a classic noir novel, JEREmie

Guez scores. An echo of Chandler, but with his

own unique voice, he is bringing more and more.”

—Michel Abescat, TELErama

december 2015

YEAR OF THE GOOSEC A R L Y J . H A L L M A N

Paperback, Fiction | $16.00978-1-939419-51-4Pub Date: 12/08/15Rights Available: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Turkish, Swedish, Mandarin

“Year of the Goose is a completely fresh and

original comic novel overflowing with

mayhem, sly and mordant humor, blood-

thirsty slapstick, corporate malfeasance,

hair extentions, Watermelon Wigglers,

an enlightened turtle and a malevolent

goose. It is an unhinged and utter delight.”

— Mark Haskell Smith, author of Raw: A

Love Story and Naked at Lunch

The era of the tycoon has reached its climax in China, and the lives of a snack food heiress, hair extension magnate, and the nation’s most cherished goose are about to collide.

Junk food scion Papa Hui’s beloved pet goose is not just the icon for an empire, it is the company’s sole inspira-tion. Desperate for her father’s approval, and bitterly at odds with the goose, Kelly Hui takes the reins of a gov-ernment-sponsored health initiative, only to watch it be-come a gruesome fat camp for children, from which there are few survivors. Meanwhile, hair tycoon Wang Xilai is a perverse modern day Gatsby, and his life is unravel-ing as quickly as his prized hair extensions. These are the characters whose lives revolve around the success of the Bashful Goose Snack Company, China’s most profit-able corporation. Out of the absurdist satirical tradition of Mo Yan, comes a hard-hitting yet whimsical portrayal of China’s new “tycoon culture,” from a darkly hilarious and original new voice.

Carly J. Hallman has a degree in English writing and rhetoric from St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX. She lives in Beijing. Year of the Goose is her first novel.

december 2015

RUS LIKE EVERYONE ELSEB E T T E A D R I A A N S E

Paperback, Fiction | $16.00978-1-939419-53-8Pub Date: 12/15/15Rights Available: Contact Chris Wellbelove at Greene & Heaton

Debut novelist Adriaanse weaves together intersecting lives to create a mini-epic;—a charming, heartfelt re-buke to corporate sameness and artificial relationships.

In an unnamed European city, a neighborhood’s local postal worker surveys the struggling lives around her with an omniscient eye. There’s Mrs. Blue, compulsively stealing hand creams and obsessing over a doomed soap opera; the Secretary whose failures at making small talk (much less human connections) drive her to surprisingly extreme conclusions; a delivery man whose immigrant status and general bad luck constantly undermine his attempts to make it big; and an aging bachelor, ham-pered by devastating paranoia, whose chance to meet the Queen might redefine the trajectory of his life (if he can just hold it together long enough). And finally, there is Rus—a happy-go-lucky man-child—who learns that there is such a thing as taxes, and that he owes quite a lot. Stumbling into the real world, Rus gets a dreary of-fice job, a demanding girlfriend, and a home that is not an illegal squat. But he misses the simple, albeit lonely life he once led. As it turns out, dreams of the parents who abandoned him, and in particular the submarine on which his father supposedly sails, may save Rus from be-coming like everyone else.

Bette Adriaanse is a writer and a visual artist. Bette graduated from the Image and Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2008 and received her M.A. in creative writing from Oxford University in 2010. She has published fiction in magazines for literature and philosophy, and she exhibits her visual work internationally. Rus Like Ev-eryone Else is her first novel. She was born in Amsterdam in 1984 and lives in London.

january 2016

S E A H O R S EJ A N I C E P A R I A T

Paperback Fiction | $16.00978-1-939419-55-2Pub Date: 01/12/16Rights Available: Contact Maria Cardona at Pontas Agency

“ J a n i c e P a r i a t ’ s f i r s t n o v e l h a s t h e

piercing insight and linguistic felicity

of her short fiction. It is an ardent and

highly accomplished meditation on art,

love and sexuality.”

—The Sunday Guardian

“Janice’s stories announce the arrival of

a startlingly brilliant and compassionate

writer whose book is as haunting as the

world it emerges from.”

— Siddhartha Deb

A sweeping tale of love, memory, and nostalgia, mov-ing through 1990s New Delhi and present-day London, Seahorse tracks one man’s undying love for his former professor across time and place.

Nem, a college student in New Delhi, is still reeling from the loss of his childhood friend when he falls in love with Nicholas, an enigmatic young professor from London. The affair is passionate, but brief, and after Nicholas re-turns to London, Nem continues with his life. He soon finds success as a critic in India’s burgeoning art world and when he is invited to speak to artists in London, the past is suddenly resurrected. While Nem is both exhila-rated and terrified at the thought of seeing Nicholas, he quickly finds himself immersed in London’s contempo-rary art scene. But when Nem sees Myra, the woman in-troduced to him in India as Nicholas’s sister, nothing will be the same.

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Col-lection of Short Stories (Random House India, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi (Indian National Academy of Let-ters) and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Seahorse is her first novel. She divides her time between Italy and India.

january 2016

AGE OF BL IGHTK R I S T I N E O N G M U S L I M

a r t b y a l e s s a n d r a h o g a n

Paperback, Fiction | $14.00978-1-939419-56-9Pub Date: 01/12/16Rights Available: French, Spanish, Italian, German, Korean, Turkish, Swedish, Mandarin

In this collection of speculative, horror-tinged sto-ries, human cruelty, in all of its abundant diversity, compels humanity toward the final stages of the Anthropocene.Illustrated throughout with charcoal drawings by artist Alessandra Hogan.

What if the end of man isn’t caused by some cataclysmic event, but by the nature of humans themselves? In Age of Blight, a young scientist’s harsh and unneces-sary experiments on monkeys are recorded for pos-terity; children are replaced by their doppelgangers, which emerge like flowers in their backyards; and two men standing on opposing cliff faces bear witness to each other ’s terrifying ends. Age of Blight explores a kind of post-future, in which the human race is finally abandoned to the end of its history. Muslim’s poetic vignettes explore the nature of dystopia itself, often to darkly humorous effect, while artist Alessandra Hogan’s illustrations provide these short tales with a beautifully creepy atmosphere.

Kristine Ong Muslim is the award-winning author of several short story collections. She grew up and continues to live in a small farming town in the southern Philippines.

february 2016

Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc or Baron Same-di, is the impoverished island nation’s brutal dictator. Relentless curfews, and Papa Doc’s terrifying Tonton Macoutes militia, have made life in Port-au-Prince in-creasingly difficult for struggling taxi driver Raymond L’Eveillé. But it is Raymond’s brother, Nicolas, a wealthy professor at the local university, who is stirring up trou-ble. After a tip-off from a disgruntled student, Nicolas’ home is raided and his secret anti-Duvalier manifesto discovered, landing him in Fort Dimanche, a notorious, disease-ridden prison many enter but few ever leave. Raymond resolves to get himself arrested as part of a death-defying plan to break his brother out of jail. Fabi-enne Josaphat’s electric prose brings to life a horrifying and not so distant time in Haiti’s past, describing in rigor-ous detail the shocking realities of life in the Baron’s shadow. A page turning jail break thriller—sure to be one of the year ’s best.

Haiti, 1965. Nicolas, a bourgeois socialist is sent to the notorious Fort Dimanche prison by dictator Papa Doc’s militia, and his brother Raymond must try to save him.

DANCING IN THE BARON’S SHADOW

FABIENNE JOSAPHAT

Paperback, Fiction | $16.00978-1-939419-57-6Pub Date: 02/09/16Rights Available: Contact Charlotte Gusay at Charlotte Gusay Literary Agency

Fabienne Josaphat received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University. Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow is her first novel. She lives in Miami.

COMING IN SPRING 2016March 2016: Deep Singh Blue

by Ranbir Singh SidhuSet in the 1980s, Deep Singh is a Spinoza-loving Indian-American teenager in a rural Northern California town famous for its large KKK rallies who begins an affair with an older married woman.978-1-939419-68-2

April 2016: The Border of Paradise by Esme Weijun WangA remarkable multigenerational novel about the inheritance of madness in an iconoclastic family set in mid-twentieth cen-tury Brooklyn, Taiwan, and Northern California.978-1-939419-69-9

April 2016: Ear to the Ground by David L. Ulin and Paul KolsbyA devastating earthquake is about to hit Los Angeles, and as a seismologist wunderkind fights to stop it, Hollywood producers rush to finish a blockbuster about the looming natural disaster.978-1-939419-73-6

May 2016: How to Succeed in Mexican Jail: Based on the actual cell-phone diaries of a dude who spent three years in jail in Cancun! The first book in our Accidental Tourist Guide series written by the Jack Handey of Mexican jail.978-1-939419-83-5

May 2016: Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie GraberThis hilarious collection of short stories offers an unspar-ing and comedic look at post-slacker office life.978-1-939419-84-2

june 2016: Arcade by Drew Nellins SmithA young man wrestling with his sexual identity becomes obsessed with a video peep show where people meet for anonymous sex.978-1-939419-72-9

June 2016: The Sadness by Benjamin RybeckA down-on-her-luck young woman returns home to Maine in search of her father, but instead falls into a mystery that in-volves her movie-obsessed twin brother, a missing woman, a movie star, and the cult film that connects them.978-1-939419-70-5

July 2016: Neon Green by Margaret WapplerA spaceship lands in the backyard of a family of en-vironmentalists in 1990s suburban Illinois, and no one knows what they are after.978-1-939419-71-2

July 2016: The Shooting by James BoiceWith Boice’s fourth novel, The Shooting, the author delivers what no American novelist has yet thought to do: a sprawl-ing, fearless, and ground-breaking portrait of gun violence in America.978-1-939419-74-3

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