Audition is a mesmerizing, endlessly inventive novel about brainwashing and captivity, knowledge and banishment—vibration, hunger, pain, and calm. Deftly pivoting between whimsy and devastation, satire and fable, social critique and speculative ingenuity, Audition soars with its own ambitions, rejecting the prison of narrative to make space for something beyond hope.

All the imagination and whimsy of science fiction, all the plotless, meandering pleasure of literary fiction, in a perfect little novella package.

A hilarious, slapstick, deliciously unbalanced novel about Samuel Johnson (unrelated), a man whose consciousness bounces from body to body after his untimely death, unable to depart this world but determined to see his son again. A book that gives meaning to the one-time Coffee House slogan, "Experimental Literature about Death."

I don’t know when I first came across Karen’s CHP books in the 1990s, but it was somewhere around this time. I was mesmerized. I hadn’t read fiction like this before, and as a poet Karen’s prose functioned like a continuous teacher. Years later I would share meals with Karen in Santa Cruz and Boulder (that tiny BBQ ribs restaurant just outside the Naropa campus that Samuel Delany recommended to us). And then, of course, her writing would just grow and grow and grow until she graced us all with I Hotel, a book that, together with Paul Metcalf’s Collected Works, seems to me to be not only books I adore but also the most quintessentially Coffee House Press books out there.

I have recommended this book to so many people. An inventive collaborative authorship between Luiselli (who I admire deeply) and workers in a Jumex factory in Ecatepec, Mexico, where she sent her novel in installments, which were then read aloud to the workers, who in turn edited her chapters.

I can't believe I was sleeping on Evenson! I've been working my way through his 2021 collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell to get myself in the spooktober spirit, and... Wow! This dude writes a mean short story! Hopscotching genres and settings and always keeping you on your toes, Evenson is a master of brevity. 'In Dreams' is probably my favorite short story I've read this year, and it's about five or six pages long. That's a quality-to-word-count ratio that would make George Saunders jealous!

Strong characters are the firm foundation of any Karen Tei Yamashita book, but if you’re also up to sightsee some magical realism in all its magically realistic glory, this is as picture perfect as any 4D postcard.