Perfect Day Publishing

In 2011, Laura Moulton founded Street Books, a mobile library serving people living outside in Portland, Oregon. That summer, Ben Hodgson became one of her most dedicated regulars, setting the still-unbroken single-season record for borrowing. Then Ben’s routine’s changed, and he didn’t cross paths again with Laura for almost two years. Loaners is the story they began to tell when they reconnected, offering a street-level perspective of a community whose stories are seldom told, alternating between their two unforgettable points of view in this addictively readable, occasionally sublime memoir.

Loaners is a co-release with Street Books.

Paperback: 276 pages
ISBN: 9780983632795
Publication date: October 5, 2021
Dimensions: 5 x 0.83 x 7.75 inches
Cover design: Aaron Robert Miller
Photo: Eli Haan

July, 2016: Three days after the terror attack on Bastille Day, Mohamed Asem is detained overnight by British immigration officials without cause. In an elegantly digressive, self-interrogative style, Asem describes the boredom and uncertainty of confinement, and how this specific kind of helplessness leads, inevitably, to a self-reckoning. What series of events has led to this moment? As a teenager, he was stranded in Paris with his mother during the first Gulf War, while his father remained in Kuwait. He spent his twenties dutifully trying to follow the blueprint for manhood back home in the Middle East, only to cast it all aside after his mother's early death. Stranger in the Pen examines the burden of being disconnected from one's homeland, unpacks the emotional toll of racial profiling, and illuminates the quietly surprising ways in which grief can change one's life.

Paperback: 144 pages
ISBN: 9780983632771
Publication date: October 25, 2018
Dimensions: 5 x 0.4 x 7.75 inches

Named a 2018 Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Nonfiction

In their soaring and urgent debut memoir, sŭng captures a sleepy sad slice of Americana recognizable to anyone who’s driven past a strip mall at midnight. Equal parts grim and buoyant, here is an intimate portrait of trauma, family, addiction, and body. What About the Rest of Your Life exposes the harrowing terrain where there is no boundary between love and abuse. Unapologetically raw, sung reinvents the recovery narrative through an immigrant's lens.

Paperback: 208 pages
ISBN: 9780983632764
Publication date: November 3, 2017
Dimensions: 5 x 0.55 x 7.75 inches
Author photo: Jason Quigley
Cover design: Aaron Robert Miller

In her new memoir, Martha Grover goes undercover. Whether cleaning houses or looking for love, she peels back the surfaces of ordinary moments and reveals a life both hilarious and traumatic. The End of My Career sees Grover living with her parents again as she enters her late thirties, reconciling the pleasures and perils of being female, chronically ill, and subsisting on menial labor at the edge of an increasingly unaffordable city. Desperate for stable work, she gets hired as a state-sanctioned private investigator looking into shady workers’ comp claims—even while she herself fights in court for her own disability settlement. Angry and heartbroken, brimming with the outrageous contradictions of the modern world, The End of My Career embodies the comic nightmare of our times.

Paperback: 240 pages
ISBN: 9780983632757
Published: July 28, 2016
Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7.75 inches

When his beloved guitar is stolen, Nick Jaina finds himself untethered from the dream he’s pursued since he was sixteen. No matter how many albums he’s released or tours he’s led, he still can’t shake the feeling that he has failed at life. So the critically acclaimed, endlessly heartbroken singer-songwriter checks himself into a ten-day silent retreat. As those silent days unfold, Jaina attempts to rewire his own brain in a burst of unpredictable digressions and unsent love letters, musings on the miracles of science and the fallen heroes of popular music. Get It While You Can is a late-night ode to the pursuit of sanity.

Paperback: 224 pages
ISBN: 9780983632740
Published: January 28, 2015
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.5 inches

Across eleven essays, Michael Heald compulsively measures himself against men like Eli Manning, Ryan Gosling, and Stephen Malkmus, and always comes up short. After a decade of failed relationships, estranged siblings, and abandoned hopes, he may or may not have learned his lesson. Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension is not nearly as depressing as any of this sounds.

Paperback: 192 pages
ISBN: 9780983632733
Published: November 29, 2012
Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7.75 inches