This is a true crime novel for people who have some deep seated criticisms of true crime. I read this for the first time years ago and still think about it constantly. Zerán recounts four crimes that took place in Chile over the course of the 20th century, and with each crime she lays out for the reader the way societies expectations infiltrated the courtroom, putting each woman on trial for more than murder. Each essay is blended with Zerán’s own research diary for a lyrical story both deeply insightful and incredibly personal. I found I couldn’t put it down, eager to know not just what happened to each woman, but for the truth of how patriarchy influenced their journeys to be revealed to me.

No telling of Coffee House Press' history is complete without Brian Evenson, the friendly horror author whose novels and stories are the stuff of discomfiting legend. As a former Mormon myself, people used to recommend I read The Open Curtain, and to this day I have never understood why (other than the book is a very good novel). The Open Curtain is about "troubled teen" Rudd, who runs across the secret Mormon ritual of blood sacrifice and its role in a 1902 murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young while conducting a research project for school. Evenson is still underestimated, I think, writing in spaces between this world and the next.

This strange, meandering essay-memoir-screenplay crafts a melancholy so specific that you will find it in the back of your mind months later, enshrined next to your own coldest and loneliest memories. Investigating the death of a Japanese tourist in rural Minnesota in 2002, Larson grapples with obsession, womanhood, and art. As long as you aren't expecting answers, Reel Bay is the best kind of mystery.

Mean is a hybrid memoir about rape and sexual violence, structural and internalized oppression, anti-Mexican racism, and growing up in a dangerously corrupt world. The book is structured in 60 meticulously-crafted short chapters, often no more than a few pages each. These chapters could function on their own as short stories, but together they create a kind of frenetic momentum toward and away from closure. Here Gurba manages to simultaneously inhabit the innocence and audacity of a child’s point of view, and the nuanced and scathing humor of an adult awareness. She invokes petty meanness, and indicts systemic cruelty. She exploits the often-paradoxical distance between the experience of trauma and the body’s reactions to create a fractured narrative that teases the line between disclosure and revelation.

One of my two or three favorite books that Coffee House has published, Jawbone is also one of the most successful literary horror novels I have ever read. Kind of like what might happen if you did a season of Channel Zero about a girls’ school and had Junji Ito write the scripts. Strange and uncanny and deeply unsettling—but above all deeply and terrifyingly rooted in the fears and hierarchies of adolescent girlhood.

Brian Evenson scares me like no one else can. His unique take on horror puts me in the minds of characters who are losing their grip on reality, and I feel as though I am slowly going insane along with them.

Adore! I think Surface Tension (1989) was actually the first Elaine Equi book I had, snaring a used copy at the bookstore on Snelling Ave at Selby that I used to walk to when I first moved to Minnesota. Equi’s lines in Surface Tension and Decoy and all her Coffee House titles since then, are carved like delicate crystal ornaments for a fun house. Gentle and weird, decorative and shocking, quotidian and extraordinary. I don’t quite know how she does it, but I’ve forever been glad that she does—and that CHP continues to publisher her, including the newly released Out of the Blank.