Soft Skull Press

19/03/2025

💛 COVER ANNOUNCEMENT: 💛 New Kawakami alert ‼️ We’re thrilled to share the jacket for Hiromi Kawakami’s forthcoming novel THE THIRD LOVE, designed by Farjana Yasmin with art direction by .

THE THIRD LOVE hits bookstores on 10/21 and is available to preorder now!

About the book:
A time-bending story of love, desire, and destiny that sways between Japan’s past and its present—from a courtesan of Yoshiwara in Edo to a serving lady of the Heian period to a wife and mother in the twenty-first century—by one of our most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists

Having married her childhood sweetheart, Riko now finds herself trapped in a relationship soured by infidelity. One day, she runs into her old friend Mr Takaoka, who offers friendship, love, and an unusual escape: he teaches her the trick of living inside her dreams.

Now, each night, she sinks into another life: first as a high-ranking courtesan in the seventeenth century, and then as a serving lady to a princess in the late Middle Ages. As she experiences desire and heartbreak in the past, so Riko comes to reconsider her life as a twenty-first-century woman—as a wife, as a mother, and as a lover—and to ask herself whether, after loving her husband and loving Mr Takaoka, she is ready for her third great love.

27/02/2025

Publishers Weekly highlighted CODE NOIR in their round-up of books to read during Black History Month!

"[Canisia Lubrin's] gorgeous and innovative style shines on nearly every page. . . It’s a monumental achievement."

In recognition of Black History Month, we have gathered a selection of books by Black authors and about Black lives that were published this February and reviewed in PW.

25/02/2025

Thrilled to announce that Anna Moschovakis' AN EARTHQUAKE IS A SHAKING OF THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH is now available in audiobook format! 🎧

Listen now: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798331906627-an-earthquake-is-a-shaking-of-the-surface-of-the-earth

25/02/2025

"The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth. . . The over-all effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of “history’s wide grave.” — The New Yorker 🖤

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-world-after-gaza-cold-kitchen-victorian-psycho-and-code-noir

18/02/2025

Happy paperback pub day to Mariah Stovall's I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IT'S KILLING US BOTH! 💔

Susan Choi’s TRUST EXERCISE meets Nick Hornby’s HIGH FIDELITY in this immersive coming-of-age story, chronicling a life-changing friendship, the interplay between music fandom and identity, and the slipperiness of sanity.

✨ Named a best book of the year by NPR , ELLE , Debutiful , and more ✨

✨ "Nostalgic yet fiercely relevant . . . this book is a coming-of-age treasure." — ELLE

✨ "An emotionally perceptive debut." — Vanity Fair

✨ "Dynamic, agile and auspicious.” — Ms. Magazine

✨ "A powerful testimony to the enduring violence of harmful relationships and the profoundly difficult task of recovery." — Kirkus Reviews (starred ⭐ review)

12/02/2025

😒 COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 😒 We’re thrilled to share this beautiful jacket for ’s newest collection, RESTING BITCH FACE, designed by the fabulous !

RESTING BITCH FACE will hit bookstores on 8/26/25 and is available to preorder now at the link in our bio 🔗

About the book:
The author of the award-winning national bestseller I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES returns with a new poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim, to subject, critic, and master of her story.

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.

12/02/2025

😒 COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 😒 We're thrilled to share this beautiful jacket for Taylor Byas' newest collection, RESTING BITCH FACE, designed by the fabulous Nicole Caputo!

RESTING BITCH FACE will hit bookstores on 8/26/25 and is available to preorder now.

About the book:
The author of the award-winning national bestseller I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES returns with a new poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim, to subject, critic, and master of her story

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.

07/02/2025

🚍 COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 🚍 Today we share the cover for Joanna Pocock's GREYHOUND, designed by Jaya Miceli with art direction by Nicole Caputo.

GREYHOUND will hit bookstores on 8/12/25 and is available to preorder now!

About the book:
Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless

In 2006, Joanna Pocock decided to travel from east to west across the US in a Greyhound bus as she mourned her miscarriages. Seventeen years later, at the start of 2023, and now in her midfifties, Pocock undertook the same journey again.

Pocock follows in the wake of Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz, who all chronicled their travels across America. Exploring the intersection between capitalism and geography—urban, suburban and rural—and the impact of our relationship to the landscape, she zeroes in on the rivers of tarmac, the gas stations, the suburbs, and the sites of extraction created specifically for our twenty-first-century lifestyles, and their unintended environmental and social consequences. By revisiting the same cities, edgelands, roads, and motels in 2023 as she did in 2006, Pocock dissects the overlap between place and memory, between an earlier, more prosperous version of the United States and one mired in extreme poverty, drug addiction, and a larger division between the wealthy and the dispossessed.

04/02/2025

Happy publication day to Canisia Lubrin's CODE NOIR! ✨

Canisia Lubrin’s debut is a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; CODE NOIR has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

Accompanied by black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson, and with a foreword by Christina Sharpe, CODE NOIR ranges in style from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction.

⭐ Named a most-anticipated book by Bustle and Electric Literature ⭐

⭐ "Lubrin's gorgeous and innovative style shines on nearly every page . . . It’s a monumental achievement." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

⭐ “A singular achievement.” — Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of HOW TO PRONOUNCE KNIFE

28/01/2025

Happy publication day to ’s ELSESHIP! ✨

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.

⭐️ “A kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. It’s a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neatly contain them.” —Angela Chen, author of ACE: What As*xuality Reveals About Desire

⭐️ “Tree Abraham has managed to do the impossible: transform the excesses of that delirious, excruciating fever state into a true work of art.” —Anelise Chen, author of SO MANY OLYMPIC EXERTIONS

24/01/2025

STRANGE BEACH is a most noteworthy book of January according to Debutiful ! ⭐

“Olayiwola’s poems made me stop and catch my breath. He writes without fear, inviting readers to experience raw emotions and unspoken truths. . . Profoundly moving.”

Check out these January debut books and find your new favorite writer today!

23/01/2025

Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) calls AN EARTHQUAKE IS A SHAKING OF THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH "endlessly rereadable, continuously shimmering at its edges, generating new meaning with each slight shift in tone or light." ✨

Annie Lou Martin reviews Anna Moschovakis’s new novel “An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth.”

21/01/2025

Happy publication day to Oluwaseun Olayiwola's STRANGE BEACH! ✨

At times surreal, at times philosophical, the poems of STRANGE BEACH demarcate a fiercely interior voice inside of q***r Black masculinity. Oluwaseun’s speakers—usually, but not specified, as two men—move between watery landscapes, snowy terrains, and domestic conflicts. Each poem proceeds by way of music and melody, allowing themes of masculinity, s*x, parental relations, death, and love to conspire within a voice that prioritizes intimate address.

STRANGE BEACH is a searching collection where land and water, body and mind, image and abstraction, are in productive tension, leading to third ways of considering intimacy, selfhood, and desire.

✨ "What do we mean when we read a book and feel that we trust the writer? What I mean when I say that I trust Oluwaseun Olayiwola is that the poems in Strange Beach are as sure in their storytelling as centuries-old myths." — Taylor Byas, author of I DONE CLICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES

✨ "STRANGE BEACH is intimate, capacious, present, and absent, and always consistently brilliant." — Victoria Chang, author of WITH MY BACK TO THE WORLD

15/01/2025

"I didn’t come to writing with any shame about looking exactly like the people whose work was important to me."

Oluwaseun Olayiwola chatted with The Rumpus about the connection between poetry and choreography and his forthcoming book STRANGE BEACH.

While I am a poet who is concerned with place, imaginative nowheres are where I think a poem begins.

10/01/2025

THRILLED TO DEATH is a Vulture most-anticipated book of 2025!

"[Tillman] writes fiction that’s formally innovative but unpretentious, inherently political, and unmistakably of our time."

In uncertain times, we look to our sharpest writers.

09/01/2025

elseship: An Unrequited Affair by Tree Abraham has been selected as an American Booksellers Association February 2025 Indie Next Pick! ✨

Thank you to all of the indie booksellers who nominated us! 🖤

✨ "elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. . . A gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires." — Angela Chen, author of ACE: What As*xuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of S*x

✨ "For those of us who have ever Googled 'what is love' late into the night, this book is ours. Tree Abraham has managed to do the impossible: transform the excesses of that delirious, excruciating fever state into a true work of art." —Anelise Chen, author of SO MANY OLYMPIC EXERTIONS

“elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught in the middle of friendship and unrequited love. It’s a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neat...

31/12/2024

Anna Moschovakis () chatted with the Rendering Unconscious podcast about her new novel, AN EARTHQUAKE IS A SHAKING OF THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH.

RU322: ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS ON HER NEW NOVEL AN EARTHQUAKE IS A SHAKING OF THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH http://www.renderingunconscious.org/psychoanalysis/ru322-anna...

27/12/2024

Exciting things coming in 2025! 📚✨