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A poet’s public reading shines a spotlight on her isolation. Robbers look to their former teacher for a chance at redemption. A painter of railroads stubbornly documents decline and abandonment. A Halloween festival is rooted in matters of life and death. Set in a fictional Pacific Northwest town, told through the gossip and grievances of its residents, Spearwood, OR examines the impacts of place, inherited narratives, and generational traumas on a community in seventy-two very short stories. John Carr Walker’s vision of the new American west is funny and furious, desperate and demure, familiar on the surface, yet deeply strange.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Series: Propeller Longform Original Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593151
Publication Date: September 30, 2026
Paperback, 5 x 7 in.

Donald Geary, a freelance copywriter on a failed business trip, pockets a flash drive left in a hotel bar by a talkative stranger. Compelled by the drive’s mysterious contents and a sense his own career is at a dead end, Geary changes his travel plans to return the item personally. What begins as curiosity, however, leads to a case of mistaken identity, and Geary finds himself forced to continue playing a new role—against his will. He is soon caught in an escalating game of cat and mouse that ensnares family and friends as it moves from Washington to Oregon, through misted city streets and lonely forest roads.

“It has always been important to you to do good work. Is that what you’re doing?”

This question hangs over many of the novel’s characters, and is faced most acutely by Leah, Geary’s longtime partner. Sympathetic to the man she loves, she feels the same desire to find a dynamic next chapter in her life, while still deeply committed to being a responsible parent. She also knows that men discouraged by the repetitions of work and family life are “far from the only people who think life overpromised and underdelivered.”

Traversing the Pacific Northwest, from the cold height of Seattle’s Space Needle to the rocky surf of the Oregon coast, Double Standard weaves a fast-paced thriller into a novel of treachery and surveillance, the limits of identity, and the maddening fact that though we only live once, we do so while imagining innumerable other lives.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593144
Pages: 218
Publication date: January 27, 2026
Hardcover, 5.5 x 8.5 in.

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 make it through a season in which he monitors the rise of social media and local “thought leaders” from an increasingly desperate position.

When two venture capitalists hire him to be their “Gielgud”—a sober-minded employee they can trust to translate their flights of capital-fueled whimsy into a refined, market-ready product—it seems his career and financial troubles may be over. As he realizes the opportunity might not be what it seems, though, he also finds it increasingly difficult to ignore the messages that appear on his phone from a woman who may be a chance for something more substantial. In scenes of humor, anxiety, tenderness, and desire, Gielgud chronicles men and women who, in a world suddenly flooded with streaming video and nonstop commentary, quietly struggle through personal crises almost entirely unobserved.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593137
Pages: 305
Original publication Date: December 2017
Second edition: January 2026
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

Criminals follows the lives of a sister and brother, Ruth and Hank Tanazaki, as they struggle to free themselves from the weight of their parents’ generation in a small Japanese American community in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This poignant story of the double-edged nature of community—a force that supports the group, at cost to the individual—explores the possibilities and limits of seeking personal freedom through creativity. Masaoka’s dazzling, deeply-moving debut is also an eloquent addition to the canon of Asian American literature.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593106
Publication Date: October 8, 2024
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

Survival Tips: Stories follows characters through their friendships, their jobs, their marriages, and their grief as they stumble toward connection and meaning. A wife begins communicating to her husband only in rebus puzzles. A new teacher confronts her strongest foes, the parents of a disruptive student. A group of conference-goers join their guru in a jerry-rigged sweat lodge. A woman shows up to her blind date in a "Don't Leave Me" t-shirt. With wit and candor, these ten stories examine the ways we live, the mistakes we make, and the paths we take in hopes of delivering us to ourselves and each other.

The collection features twenty years of stories that have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Pithead Chapel, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and other top publications.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593083
Publication Date: March 19, 2024
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, mercurial Therese gets tangled in competing desires and demands--her own and those of her friends and family on Long Island. Ambitious in scope yet carefully observed, Marrying Friends deftly illuminates multiple characters as grief forces them to reimagine their lives and relationships. A frank and often wry look at the bewildering bonds between women, men, siblings, parents, and children, this novel-in-stories confirms Rechner's talent for capturing how we find meaning not only in our dreams, but also in our desperations.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593069
Publication Date: October 2023
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

In this hybrid poem about militarized drones and militant angels, Elizabeth abandons her career as a physicist to become a museum administrator, finds god in the basement below the galleries, and dies there. But that is not the end.

A masterful blend of form and genre, ELIZABETH/THE STORY OF DRONE takes readers on a journey through terrain in which the personal and the political collide.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Contemporary Poetry Series
ISBN: 9781955593021
Pages: 134
Publication Date: September 27, 2022
Paperback, 6 x 9 in.

Janice “Pegs” Pegula, a mechanic and test driver at a driverless car company in 2030 Pittsburgh, does not steal from her employer. Not necessarily. She skims—a tire here, a battery there, reselling parts from the supply room to save for a higher, drier apartment. Surge season is about to hit, bringing with it hurricane-like winds, public protests for better surge pay, and desperate modifications to driverless prototypes by companies who see the climate emergency as a final chance to prove their social purpose. Dodging delivery drones on her test drives and tech bros on her maintenance shifts, Pegs struggles to keep everyone happy—bosses and family, the mechanic buying her parts, and her expanding crew of fellow skimmers. When the group decides to acquire and strip a full driverless prototype, driving—and life—gets even more risky in this first fictional work to dramatize the existential crises faced by individuals working in the driverless car sector.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593007
Pages: 198
Publication Date: May 24, 2022
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

Dear Weirdo is a wayward romp that offers prismatic insight into the nature of love, loss, and home along the way. With a spellbinding immediacy, Abraham Smith rides a prophetic cadence through town, into the sky, and down the “gut’s lonely road.” The deeply familiar reappears—neither dust-covered nor bathed in golden light—but as a continuous explosion in this book-length poem, drawing the reader into a personal history refracted through a lyricism utterly Smith’s own.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Contemporary Poetry Series
ISBN: 9780982770481
Pages: 88
Publication Date: February 1, 2022
Paperback, 6 x 9 in.

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.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Series: Propeller Longform Original Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593076
Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Paperback, 5 x 7 in.

“What are the poems like? Inventive, capricious, witty, aphoristic. There are bebop parts where what she’s doing is throwing words into a pan slicked with boiling oil and watching ’em explode all over the kitchen…If you set about making your first book with your eyes steady on the prize (“What do I really like? what do I actually get off on?”) you might coin a classic. That’s what I think we’re looking at here. Now the issue is: Can she keep from being corrupted by reviews like this.” —Anthony Madrid, RHINO

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Contemporary Poetry Series
ISBN: 9780982770498
Pages: 101
Publication Date: February 25, 2020
Paperback, 6 x 9 in.

Ten years in the making, The Best of Boneshaker is a weather-worn collection of prose, poetry, interviews, art, and literary cycling miscellany from ten issues of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac. Modeled loosely after the War Department’s 1941 Soldier’s Basic Field Manual, Boneshaker spent the past decade shining autumnal light on utilitarian bicycling.

With over 50 contributors (from Poem Store creator Jacqueline Suskin and Colorado Book Award-winning author Jonathan Waldman, to Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo and Tiny Showcase co-creator Shea'la Finch) The Best of Boneshaker is a collective ode to the ride itself—that fundamentally lonesome experience one has in the saddle—and the results of repeating that ride over and over in different directions on different days to different destinations.

Wendy Bourgeois is a poet, a teacher, and a staff writer at Propeller, where “Reading Lines,” her popular column on poetry and life, has run for the past several years. This collection reveals that in addition to the humor, intelligence, and insight Bourgeois offers in her responses to poetry and philosophy, she also has the ability to craft, in just a few words, indelible sketches of children and parents, lovers and friends. Together the pieces acquire the character of a subtle memoir, both intimate and cultural, from a fiercely intelligent woman assessing the power and predicaments we discover not only in literature, but in life itself.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780982770474
Pages: 81
Publication Date: November 13, 2018
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

About the Book

The Horse Latitudes follows one Cavalry platoon’s time in Baghdad, Iraq. The missions are long stretches of boredom broken by flashes of violence. The single sniper shot fired. An IED loosely buried in the roadside, waiting. A schoolyard of kids throwing fist-sized rocks at gun trucks. The enemy is vast and changing, and the downtime is a combination of homesickness, RPGs, and mortar fire. These men suffer through the war, heat, and each other. The Horse Latitudes observes not only the firefights and their aftermath, but also the soldiers’ struggles within themselves: how to fight a faceless enemy, what it means to serve, how one soldiers, what makes a man, what makes a good man, what it might mean to die for this, and what it might mean not to.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9780982770450
Pages: 188
Publication Date: 2016
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

An American au pair considers abandoning her German host family on vacation. A French girl is sent to Munich to live with her father, though she doesn't speak his language. An American woman becomes emotionally disoriented by a German actor, a journalist escapes a lover via a bewildering Mediterranean ferry trip, and a former model travels to Amsterdam to try to save a friend. Across these six stories, Elizabeth Lopeman captures the expatriate experience like no other writer. Her characters experience art, work, love, and tragedy as richly strange and sometimes dangerous when carried over borders or translated across cultures. A collection of vivid images and fascinating characters, Trans Europe Express is a smart, exciting new chapter in the literary tradition of Americans searching Europe not only for experience but, ultimately, for identity.

Elizabeth Lopeman's criticism on art and design has appeared in top magazines for years, but it is in this debut story collection that she reveals the full range of her powers as a writer. Trans Europe Express introduces readers to an exciting new voice in American fiction.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9780982770443
Pages: 155
Publication Date: 2014
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR discovers the island he has landed on is not as deserted as he thought. A lone survivor describes an extraterrestrial invasion surprising in its circumstance. A woman wakes up to find a stranger in her bed, twins compete for a woman’s affection, and a vessel trapped in the Antarctic ice becomes a site of dread and desperation. In the tradition of literary fantasists like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Tony Wolk delivers a feast of stories that challenge our assumptions about history, reality, and what stories reveal about their tellers. A collection decades in the making, The Parable of You is the work of a writer able to move from the cosmic to the personal in the space of a few deft sentences, with surprising and moving results.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9780982770436
Pages: 94
Publication Date: 2013
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.

Following publication of DeWeese’s critically-acclaimed debut novel You Don't Love This Man comes this collection of eight stories. DeWeese's 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 never seem more than one wrong decision away. In prose that can be subtly humorous or uncompromisingly direct, DeWeese reveals the lives of men under tension, in conflict with society and with themselves. The result is a compelling set of stories about men, women, art, and struggle.

Additional Information
Series: Propeller Books Fiction
ISBN: 9780982770429
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2012
Paperback, 5.25 x 8 in.