Soft Skull Press

22/09/2025

RESTING BITCH FACE is an Audacious Book Club pick! 📚 Join Taylor Byas and Roxane Gay for a virtual conversation on September 23 at 5PM PT/8PM ET.

Register here: https://buff.ly/hnP05V8

"Byas’s talent for pairing restrained emotional nuance with formal constraints is also showcased in I DONE KICKED MY HEELS THREE TIMES, her debut full-length collection from 2023 about a Black woman’s journey through the South Side of Chicago and inspired by The Wiz. But it’s her second full-length collection RESTING BITCH FACE where Byas both deploys those formidable talents and returns wholly to that sense of both watching and being watched, in particular the way in which that dynamic shapes the experience of living as a Black woman. From sculpture studies to examinations of WandaVision, from erasure poems to villanelles, from reflections on Gauguin to ruminations on jokes dropped in the group chat, Byas’s collection is inventive and intimate, intelligent and meticulously crafted." —Roxane Gay

19/09/2025

Festival weekend is finally here! Come visit us at booth #306 this Sunday and be sure check out some of the amazing author panels happening all day as well! 📚✨

08/09/2025

"In this westward journey, Pocock seeks not fortune, success, or survival, but connection, in all senses of the word: for her own sake but also, more urgently, as a balm for America’s pervasive ills to which her bus ride grants her a front-row seat." — Alta Journal

https://buff.ly/XSHMJnR

In Greyhound, Joanna Pocock traces two bus journeys.

26/08/2025

Happy publication day to Taylor Byas' latest poetry collection RESTING BITCH FACE!

✨"Stunning in scale and ensnaring in its lyricism, Byas remains at the top of her game." — Chicago Review of Books

✨ "This astute and ingenious collection shines." — Publishers Weekly(starred review)

✨ "Byas deploys strong, startling wordplay and clever imagery . . . A thought-provoking, gracefully executed collection.” — Booklist(starred review)

20/08/2025

🌧️ COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 🌧️ We're pleased to share the cover of .lubrin's THE WORLD AFTER RAIN, designed by Jennifer Griffiths 💙

THE WORLD AFTER RAIN goes on sale 2/3/26 and is available to preorder now!

About the book:
A Carol Shields Prize winner for her collection of fictions CODE NOIR, Canisia Lubrin now brings readers a long-form poetic tribute to her mother, praised by Dionne Brand as “incandescent”

In this stunning new poem, Canisia Lubrin’s signature epic vision is distilled into a elegy to her mother, along an interwoven and unresolvable axis of astonishment that belongs as much to history as to today. Her lucid attention to what might be the oldest metaphor for grief is drawn from the searing gravity and resonance of the modern poet’s decisive, interior, and inexpressible meditation on love, time, and loss in the excesses of life’s ambitions.

13/08/2025

🏛️ COVER ANNOUNCEMENT 🏛️ We're excited to share the jacket of Emi Yagi's WHEN THE MUSEUM IS CLOSED (translated by ), designed by with art direction by .

WHEN THE MUSEUM IS CLOSED hits shelves on 1/27/26 and is available to preorder now!

About the book:
A quirky, joyful, feel-good love story about a lonely museum worker who falls in love with a statue of Venus, from the author of international bestseller Diary of a Void

Rika Horauchi’s new part-time job is to converse with a statue of Venus— in Latin—every Monday, when the museum is closed.

Initially reluctant, Rika starts to enjoy her strange new job. Recommended by her old university professor for her exemplary language skills, Rika leads an otherwise unassuming life, working the rest of the week in a frozen-food warehouse. As Venus comes to life in the quiet of the museum, they talk about everything. Venus opens up new worlds for Rika, both intellectually and emotionally. They soon fall in love. But when the museum’s curator, Hashibami, makes it clear he wants to keep Venus for himself, what will Rika do?

When the Museum is Closed is by turns charming, funny and surprising, a surreal take on our most real emotions and concerns: love, loneliness, freedom, perceptions of beauty and how women are seen in society. This uncommonly original new novel confirms Emi Yagi as one of the most exciting Japanese writers published in English today.

12/08/2025

Happy publication day to Joanna Poc GREYHOUND! 🚌

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.

✨ "With clear eyes Pocock observes and reports from America’s interstitial spaces, its abandoned detours and dark medians, revealing a country of wild and violent edges that somehow still suffers beauty in its midst." — Lit Hub

✨ “Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound is an intimate epic, and a fierce mirror held to our U.S. ecological and sociological present such as only a visitor, seemingly, can provide . . . This book kept me up all night and will stay with me.” — Jonathan Lethem

✨ "Greyhound is an instant classic, a chronicle of desperation, anger, and violence, as well as the luminous beauty and humanity that four decades of neoliberal looting have been unable to kill off from the American countryside." —Daegan Miller, author of THIS RADICAL LAND

05/08/2025

Irenosen Okojie, author of CURANDERA, shares five books with unreliable narrators that surprise readers with "new ways of understanding the human condition" via Crime Reads.

Unreliable narrators surprise readers with unexpected trajectories, sleight of hands and new ways of understanding the human condition. What makes them so fascinating is not only their complex psyc…

04/08/2025

"Stunning in scale and ensnaring in its lyricism, Byas remains at the top of her game in RESTING BITCH FACE." — Chicago Review of Books

Here are the 12 books you need to read this August.

29/07/2025

"Castillo is such a virtuosic writer, fine-tuning words and sentences to produce an array of potent emotional and intellectual effects. . . . He puts his fellow chroniclers of contemporary masculine panic to shame." — Washington Post

Read the full review: https://buff.ly/UuiELqX

22/07/2025

We’re thrilled to share some early praise for ’s forthcoming memoir GREYHOUND!

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.

Coming 8/12 — preorder now! 🚐🗺️

24/04/2025

"Selected stories should feel like a cabinet of wonders and curiosities . . . quirky one-offs and virtuosic pieces that capture a whole world in a few pages. THRILLED TO DEATH has all those qualities." —

“Thrilled to Death” is a selection of Lynne Tillman’s fiction from the 1980s to the present day.