Soft Skull Press

30/08/2024

🚨 This is not a drill, new Lynne Tillman incoming! 🚨 We're thrilled to share the cover for Lynne's forthcoming short story collection THRILLED TO DEATH, which will hit shelves officially on 3.25.25. Available to preorder now.

(Cover Design/Art Direction: Nicole Caputo)

About the book:
From award-winning novelist and cultural critic Lynne Tillman, THRILLED TO DEATH is a collection of selected stories across the career of America’s most audacious writer

Among the vanguard of American literary writers, Lynne Tillman’s work has defied categorization throughout her legendary career—a singular body of work that both redefined and reimagined the short story form entirely.

Curated by the author, THRILLED TO DEATH is the definitive entry point for both established fans and new readers alike. These selected stories collect a bold, playful, and eclectic ensemble of Tillman’s Borgesian fictions that span decades and traverse themes of s*x, death, memory, and anxiety.

With argumentative wit, Tillman’s meditations and reflections on art, politics, and culture are animated by deliciously paradoxical characters who desire and fret in turn, and who are imbued with searing intelligence and dolorous ambivalence. Describing Tillman’s writing, Colm Tóibín says: “Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing.”

30/08/2024

“An impassioned exploration on the experience and practice of writing, which, for me, served as a much-needed reminder of how writing and reading connects us to a mysterious joy. One that is cause for celebration.” —

Opacities is a book about writing, publishing, and friendship. Rooted in an epistolary relationship between Sofia Samatar and a friend and fellow writer, this collection of meditations traces Samatar’s attempt to rediscover the intimacy of writing

28/08/2024

🩻 COVER REVEAL 🩻 Today we're showing off the gorgeous cover of Irenosen Okojie's CURANDERA, which will be arriving next summer on 7/8/25.

(Cover Design & Art Direction: Nicole Caputo)

About the book:
Set between 17th Century Cape Verde, and contemporary London, Curandera is a kaleidoscopic story of rebirth and redemption, and a mythic tale of metamorphic recalibrations across time

In the Gethsemane, Cape Verde, the appearance of a mysterious new arrival, Zulmira, coincides with a series of strange events. Zulmira is a shamanic disciple of Oni, an omnipotent, loving yet vengeful deity. In contemporary London, botanist Therese lives with Haitian musician Azacca, Peruvian drifter Emilien, and daring Finn. Four kindred spirits, bound together by their shared descent from Oni, they travel to another realm to complete a secret, sacred task for her. But a disruptive object returns with them from the other plane: a bleeding ribcage, flowering with intoxicating fruit.

As Zulmira grows close to fisherman Domingos, his wife, Marguerite, and their daughter, Sueli, the increasingly disturbing occurrences in Gethsemane disrupt forms, time and place. In London, Therese and her group, growing ever more powerful on the otherworldly fruit, discover the disturbing costs of their service to Oni. As the stage is set for the collision of two dimensions, the workings of shamanism intersect with the powerful forces of friendship, love and jealousy.

28/08/2024

"Love is what makes our life worth living; afterward we are weak but we know we are powerful in the good times, that we don’t have to be violent or passive, that we don’t need anything and can, for a short time, fall in love."

Read the full excerpt from MY CHILD, THE ALGORITHM via :

I meet a Venezuelan woman who is a space engineer and has a six-year-old daughter. She’s looking for her forever person, so I don’t want to date her, but I want to meet her because she’s also a que…

28/08/2024

UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD has been named a most anticipated book of fall by !

"A disquieting work of speculative fiction.... Kawakami poses questions about cloning, reproduction, identity, memory, and evolution, while also offering solutions to combat mankind’s downfall."

From Ina Garten's memoir to Sabaa Tahir's new YA fantasy

27/08/2024

Happy pub day to MY CHILD, THE ALGORITHM by ! ✨

“Hannah Silva’s MY CHILD, THE ALGORITHM, is one of the best books I read this year. Merging the cozy familiarity of child-rearing with the mysterious tension of AI, she has created a new genre of personal narrative, and a story whose grief, hope and curiosity takes on poetic, spiritual dimensions, even when exploring the most common chambers of the human heart.” —, author of KNOCKING MYSELF UP

Available now wherever you get your books!

26/08/2024

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IT'S KILLING US BOTH is an best book of the year (so far) — right alongside fellow author 's BROUGHTUPSY! we love to see it! 📚

Here’s the literary fiction we’re loving—and itching to dig into—this year.

22/08/2024

DANGEROUS FICTIONS by is one of 's top indie books to read this fall! 📚

This season’s noteworthy offerings feature time loops, psychoactive booze, the Big Bang, and a hermit on a mission from God.

19/08/2024

"Writing, for me, had always been about connection, yet I felt both disconnected from what I’d written and by how it was being received."

—Sofia Samatar on the dissonance between writing and publishing and the relationship between writer and reader, via .

After publishing my first novel Catalina I spiraled into strange despair. Writing, for me, had always been about connection, yet I felt both disconnected from what I’d written and by how it was bei…

14/08/2024

"I think we had been almost stunned by publishing. It sent us into retreat. But we tried to be generous with our younger selves, the ones who thought it impossible that they would ever be published, for whom publication was the one thing, the consuming desire."

—Excerpted from Sofia Samatar's OPACITIES (out now), via

The dream is to create a book that will also be a tonic: not a course of study but a course of treatment. “I’m beginning a new book to have a companion,” wrote Hervé Guibert, “someone with whom I …

13/08/2024

“Opacities is a writer’s notebook that we get to read pre-posthumously, a conversation with the self and the dead, a gesture toward the fantasy of publication without publicity. A book for Rilke’s ‘narrow ledge, ‘ full of intimacy and intensity, comforts and agitations, the haunting desires of artists.” –

It’s another Tuesday, and I bring tidings of new books to consider! As we weather the start of a month of some extreme weather in America—wildfires on one coast, a hurricane and tropical stor…

13/08/2024

New 👏 Book 👏 Tuesday is here again - today we have:

🐍 LIQUID SNAKES by (now in paperback!): What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it? A Black biochemist provides an answer in this wildly original novel of pollution, poison, and dark pleasure.

⚪️ OPACITIES: In a series of compressed, dynamic prose pieces, Sofia Samatar blends letters from her friend with notes on literature, turning to Édouard Glissant to study the necessary opacity of identity, to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha for a model of literary kinship, and to a variety of others, including Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for insights on the experience and practice of writing.

06/08/2024

“Anyone who I’ve ever seen argue about a book or a movie on the internet needs to read this immediately. This is the thing they’ve been waiting for. This is the actual piece of substance that can steer some of these conversations.”

Thrilled to see 's DANGEROUS FICTIONS featured as one of 's "10 Noteworthy Nonfiction Debuts" of Fall 2024.

This season’s crop of notable nonfiction debuts tackle the nature of life, the role of religion in American culture, Indigenous histories, and book bans

05/08/2024

LIQUID SNAKES recommended by as one of this summer's "hottest titles now available in paperback." 🐍 ✨

Here are 15 of the best novels to come out in paperback over the past three months, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (S&S/MarySue Ricci Books) “Stu…

03/08/2024

"YOU ARE THE SNAKE is a field study, a voyage through the inhospitable terrains of a live-wire mind, its transformative power subtle and invasive like the skin cells we breathe in with the dust."—

By Mila Jaroniec

30/07/2024

Big congratulations to Taylor Byas on being awarded the Ohioana Book Award for Poetry for her book I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES, a "nuanced and complex" collection of poems that "offer unforgettable snapshots of Black life in a vibrant city." —
https://www.ohioana.org/programs/ohioana-book-awards/

16/07/2024

Happy pub day to JoAnna Novak’s Domestirexia!

A poetry collection contorting the idea of home away from being a site of comfort and nourishment by coaxing the reader to think about domesticity in knotty new ways

“Domestirexia is an astonishing pleasure dome of lyric cake, all verve and scrumptious compression.” ––Greg Wrenn, author of Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis and Centaur

12/07/2024

Lyta Gold's DANGEROUS FICTIONS is in stores this October, available for preorder now. 🔥📚🔥

11/07/2024

Juliet Escoria spoke with Emily Gould for The Cut about sobriety, the escape of writing, and her new YOU ARE THE SNAKE.

"I really don’t want to die a stupid death."

Talking with the author about her new story collection, addiction, and being honest about human nature.

10/07/2024

"Obviously you and I are safe from the influence of bad stories full of wrong ideas, but what about other people?"

Read an excerpt of the forthcoming DANGEROUS FICTIONS by Lyta Gold in The New York Times!

06/07/2024

"I really don’t want to die a stupid death."

Juliet Escoria spoke with Emily Gould for The Cut about sobriety, the escape of writing, and her new YOU ARE THE SNAKE.

Talking with the author about her new story collection, addiction, and being honest about human nature.

06/07/2024

"Obviously you and I are safe from the influence of bad stories full of wrong ideas, but what about other people?"

On the long history of outrage and book bans—read an excerpt of the forthcoming DANGEROUS FICTIONS by Lyta Gold in the New York Times!

Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.

02/07/2024

"I don’t think I’m strange to briefly imagine killing a stranger."

Juliet Escoria spoke with Emily Gould for The Cut about sobriety, the escape of writing, and her new YOU ARE THE SNAKE.

Talking with the author about her new story collection, addiction, and being honest about human nature.

02/07/2024

"Obviously you and I are safe from the influence of bad stories full of wrong ideas, but what about other people?"

Plato, Goethe, Sinclair, Wilde and the long history of outrage and book bans—read an excerpt of the forthcoming DANGEROUS FICTIONS by Lyta Gold in the New York Times!

Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.

29/06/2024

On publishing, mental illness, autofiction and Juliet Escoria's brilliant new YOU ARE THE SNAKE.

"I don’t sit around thinking 'I’m going to make a book that feels real but actually has lies in it.'"

Interview with Juliet Escoria on Launching a Book, the Dire State of Publishing, and Her Story Collection ‘You Are the Snake’

29/06/2024

From Kirkus Reviews, a tremendous review of UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD, the incredible book of far-future fiction by Hiromi Kawakami.

"Where does the human race go from here? This book is a radical answer to a dark question."

Out this September!

Where does the human race go from here? This book is a radical answer to a dark question.

26/06/2024

"Where does the human race go from here? This book is a radical answer to a dark question."

From Kirkus Reviews, a tremendous review of UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD, the incredible book of far-future fiction by Hiromi Kawakami.

Out this September!

Where does the human race go from here? This book is a radical answer to a dark question.

26/06/2024

"I don’t sit around thinking 'I’m going to make a book that feels real but actually has lies in it.'"

On publishing, mental illness, autofiction and Juliet Escoria's brilliant new YOU ARE THE SNAKE.

Interview with Juliet Escoria on Launching a Book, the Dire State of Publishing, and Her Story Collection ‘You Are the Snake’

26/06/2024

🚨Join our team! 🚨

We're looking for an experienced Digital Marketing Manager to work on award-winning and celebrated titles from Catapult, Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull.

Check out the listing here, and help spread the word!

Position: Digital Marketing Manager (Full Time) | Offered by: Catapult Book Group (New York, NY) | posted June 25, 2024

18/06/2024

Happy pub day to Juliet Escoria!
The brilliant, funny, bruise-your-heart YOU ARE THE SNAKE is on shelves today!

🍭🐍🍭🐍🍭

“A sharply observed and unflinching collection that perfectly captures the electric joys and sorrows of living a half-feral life.” —Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Department of Speculation

“Smart and grimy, raw and moving. There is no one making more interesting work than Juliet Escoria. These stories are so beautiful and make me so uncomfortable, but that’s Escoria for you.” —Chelsea Martin, author of Tell Me I’m an Artist

Exploiting the form of the short story in a voice entirely her own, You Are the Snake resists easy moralizing by subverting our expectations of how narrative functions. While Escoria plumbs the depth of girlhood and new womanhood, she leaves room for oddness, impulse, and yearning. Each story contains its own world, be it the suburbs of California or the mountains of West Virginia, but taken as a whole, this collection is expanding and challenging, corrupting expectations about what women can be and what they can write.

🍭🐍🍭🐍🍭

I can't overemphasize how exciting it is to have Juliet's skill with character paired with her formal adventurousness. Grab a copy!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/738579/you-are-the-snake-by-juliet-escoria/