SOFT ROCK
fiction

After the appearance of YouTube but before the invention of smartphones, a disconsolate young writer hears, from an apartment window, a soft rock song from his youth. Identifying and owning the song, he decides, will transform him into the confident man he needs to be in order to complete his manuscript on the relationship between Heian-era Japan and the 1967 Ice Bowl. His inability to name or locate the song, however, drives him to acts of increasing desperation and, ultimately, madness.

Beginning in the mode of 1960s hysterical realism, Soft Rock transforms into a meditation on delusion, mortality, and the haunting power of high-quality analog stereo systems.

“Novella-length at eighty pages, [Soft Rock] sports a voice that made me chortle and shake my head as I read. The narrator is as deluded as any of us are in this day and age—and obsessive…This is a tight, economical narrative of one man looking back on his (at times criminal) efforts to cure the ennui of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.” —Steve Ellerhoff, Tsunami Books (staff pick)

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GIELGUD
a novel

Don Geary, a single father and freelance graphic designer, barely manages to make ends meet as he works the margins of the churning creative economy in Portland, Oregon, during the Obama administration. Talented but solitary, sensitive but critical, Geary tries to survive a season in which he monitors the rise of social media and local “thought leaders” from an increasingly desperate position. In scenes of humor, anxiety, tenderness, and desire, Gielgud chronicles men and women who, in a world of streaming video and nonstop commentary, quietly struggle through personal crises almost entirely unobserved.

“There are no goofy ‘Portlandia’ moments here; rather, Gielgud comes across as a reality check for those who think the city’s been all but taken over by carefree creatives.” —Amy Wang, The Oregonian

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DISORDER
stories

DeWeese, the author of the novel You Don’t Love This Man (Harper Perennial), offers a collection of eight stories in this book, six of which have been published in well-known literary journals and magazines. His characters—fathers and their children, architects and their critics, writers and their fantasies—search for meaning and identity amid the chaos of contemporary life, in which personal and professional failure often seem just one wrong decision away.

“DeWeese’s stories are as thoughtfully crafted as the buildings they frequently describe. And like extracting meaning from the shape of a building, reading these stories is an exercise in examining the relation of form to function: the walls are sound, the roof keeps the rain off, but there's meaning beyond the purely functional...These stories deserve to be turned over and examined from different angles.” —Alison Hallett, The Portland Mercury

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YOU DON’T LOVE THIS MAN
a novel

Set in the Pacific Northwest, DeWeese’s debut novel delivers a witty, heartfelt, and keenly observed day-in-the-life of one father of the bride, casting luminous insight into marriage, fatherhood, and bank robbery. Readers of Benjamin Kunkel, Joshua Ferris, and Kevin Wilson, as well as fans of contemporary American masters like Philip Roth and Tobias Wolff, will be enthralled by DeWeese’s evocative, literary exploration of an everyman protagonist’s quiet struggle on one of the most monumental days in his life.

“In this assiduous, mysterious novel of a father’s doings on his daughter’s wedding day, Dan DeWeese gives us a portrait of one man’s alienation, self-doubt, passivity, and, ultimately, his redeeming passion. With admirable formal restraint and unyielding sympathy, DeWeese delivers a whole adult life in a day.” —Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

“The careful, unpretentious opening of You Don’t Love This Man can’t possibly belie the cataclysm of interpersonal drama it contains…The story has left me in that strange place between emotional exhaustion and raw, refreshed excitement for life. This amazing novel is why novels exist.” —Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist

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