Soft Skull Press

This Is the Place is the sinister tale of an aged and lonely blackjack dealer living in Wendover, Nevada, and his love that leads him to do a terrible thing, and the story he tells to justify it to himselfSixty-four-feet tall and made of metal, the neon giant Wendover Will stands in front of the Stateline casino in Wendover, Nevada and faces east. The sign under him reads "This Is The Place." Over a hundred miles away in Utah, across the salt flats, stands the statue of Brigham Young, atop his monument, proclaiming the same thing, "This Is The Place."This Is The Place is a novel of love, perhaps doomed, told by an endearing misanthrope who may be delusional, but who has managed to coalesce his manias into an alternative understanding that lies somewhere between Wendover Will''s depravity and Brigham Young''s morality:"The dispute between Will and Brigham is not for me to settle, nor would I want it settled. The words hang over the salt flats, the most forsaken stretch of earth, a terrifying expanse of sheer space, white, like another planet, hard and smooth where nothing can live. This all sounds so grim! I''ve known joy and I''ll know it again. It''s just that it takes work to get up the words to talk about love."His love leads him to do a terrible thing, and he tells this story to justify himself. His words, seductive and convincing, draw the reader into a world where the supernatural takes on new meaning. It is a haunting journey to the extreme realities of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City and many places in between. Above all, it is an odyssey to the depths of love.

Resting Bitch Face is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of ''watching'' throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity. From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop-culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris. Ultimately, while watching lies at the crux of this collection''s poetic concerns, the goal of the speaker is to query her own self, rendering these poems as invitations for readers to question their own.

After resigning from an adjunct teaching position, our narrator Sebastian Castillo, who shares a name with our author, Sebastian Castillo, and also with a translated Spanish writer, Sebastian Castillo, resolves to spend an entire year without speaking, passing the time by exercising each day and watching self-improvement videos. But, come New Year''s Eve, Sebastian (the narrator) - whose rich interiority in precontemplation alone is curiously and addictively easy to read - will break his silence by accepting an invitation to the home of a former professor for a reunion amongst his cohort, one decade after graduating. This invitation surely would have been ignored if not for the promised attendance of Maria, Sebastian''s former classmate and love interest. What follows is an inexplicable series of fascinating events charting the erosion of young, male hope. In conversation with Rilke, Descartes, Kant, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and others, Fresh, Green Life is a meditation on literature, academia, and philosophy; a trek through the past that forecasts a mediocre future; and a compact miracle of the fake-real.

Chipping a board - where small pieces of deck and tape break off around the nose and tail - is a natural part of skateboarding. Novice or pro, you''ll see folks riding chipped boards as symbols of their stubborn dedication toward a deck, a toy, and aging bodies that will also reach their inevitable end. In CHIPPED, Jose Vadi personalises and expands upon this symbol. Written after finishing his debut collection Inter State: Essays From California (Soft Skull, 2021), Vadi used these essays to explore his own empathy in aging, and to elaborate on the impact skateboarding has had on culture, power, and art. From tracing a critical mass skater takeover of San Francisco''s streets, to an analysis of visceral ''90s skate videos and soundtracks, to the solace found skating a parking lot during a global pandemic, Vadi expands our understanding of the ways skateboarding can alter one''s life. Vadi acts as a ''ethnographer on a skateboard,'' writing, living, and animating an object, likening the board and skate ephemera to the fear of being discarded, wanting to be seen as useful, functional, living. These essays analyse the legacy of seminal texts like Thrasher Magazine, influential programming giants like MTV, and skateboard artists like Ed Templeton. They imagine jazz composer Sun Ra as a skateboarder to explore sonic connections between skateboarding and jazz, obsessively follow bands, chronicle tours, and discover the creative Bermuda triangle Southern California suburbs have to offer. CHIPPED is an intimate, genre-pushing meditation on skateboarding and the reasons we continue to get up after every fall life throws our way.

From Ekho, the nymph of Greek mythology whose voice was stolen by the gods, through to the advent of the Amazon Echo smart speaker, the echo has been described as a condition of voicelessness, unfulfilled desire, loss and entrapment. These poems reconsider echoing as a poetic practice and as an orienting device that tunes the world into itself. Ekho is a book that combines Ancient Greek mythology with big tech to produce a philosophical, political and psychological exploration of love, capital, voicelessness and rage. A poem in three parts, through poetic narrative, this work considers the ''echo'' as a social and historical phenomenon. From Echo, the nymph of Greek mythology whose voice was stolen by the gods, through to the advent of the Amazon Echo smart speaker, the echo has been described as a condition of voicelessness, unfulfilled desire, loss and entrapment. These poems reconsider echoing as a poetic practice, and as an orienting device that tunes the world into itself.

When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end. elseship deftly and courageously recounts the starts and stops of a transitioning relationship. Having recorded the experience in real time, Abraham combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love. For readers of Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, and Carmen Maria Machado, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted territories of the heart. It is a deeply specific yet universal story of modern love that will accompany and enlighten anyone who''s been in any kind of complicated ''ship''.