NEWLY PUBLISHED
THE MUSIC NEVER DIED is a collection of irreverent and inventive fictions by Mark Swartz that riff on rock and rap mythology. Praised by Jonathan Lethem for his “phantasmagorical cultural wit,” Swartz imagines what might have happened to Biggie, Amy, Jimi, Janis, Lil Peep, Gram, and more if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow hadn't been the end of their lives. With illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols.
MICE 1961, the new novel by Stacey Levine, has been hailed by Kelly Link as “unlike anything else . . . peculiar, vivid, preternaturally alert to the strangeness of the human condition.” Set in southern Florida at the peak of Cold War hysteria, Mice 1961 is a powerful meditation on belonging and separateness, conformity and otherness.
Our Dark Passage imprint completes its reissue of Australian queen of crime June Wright’s classic mysteries with MAKE-UP FOR MURDER, the third in her series featuring the incomparable nun-detective Mother Paul.
COMING SOON
DRESSED IN BLACK: THE SHANGRI-LAS AND THEIR RECORDED LEGACY, by Lisa MacKinney, is the first full-length history of one of the most significant—and most misunderstood—pop groups of the 1960s. (March 2025)
NOTHING BUT MURDERS AND BLOODSHED AND HANGING presents the dramatic crime stories of pioneering Australian writer Mary Fortune, who tackled murder, armed robbery, bootlegging, and sexual violence with unprecedented frankness. This collection contains 17 of Fortune’s finest stories and showcases her range as a writer—from melodrama to social realism, and Gothic horror to what we now call noir. (March 2025)
The novel ULTRAZONE has been hailed by Alan Moore as “a helter-skelter rush of delights” and Jim Jarmusch calls it “entertaining as hell.” Written by Mark Terrill and Francis Poole, it features the ghost of William S. Burroughs roaming the alleys of Tangier in search of a lost manuscript, aided and abetted by familiar fellow ghosts as well as an inept witch, an elderly sorcerer, and a gang of macaque monkeys.
WAITING AT THE BAR: MEKONS SCRAPBOOK 1977-81 (September 2025) is an autobiography in words and images of the legendary art-punk band’s early years, collecting writing by various Mekons about their early years and first recordings along with around 100 photographs and flyers. It also features contributions from longtime musical comrades such as Jon King (Gang of Four), as well as filmmaker Adam Curtis, who put together for this book a documentary sequence of still images from the weeks in 1977 when the Mekons first took shape.
RECENT TITLES
THE BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES by Hugh Raffles, winner of the 2023 J. J. Staley Prize, awarded by the School for Advanced Research for “a book that exemplifies outstanding scholarship and writing in anthropology . . . and adds new dimensions to our understanding of the human species.” The Book of Uncomformities has been hailed as a “mesmerizing, genre-melding work of history, memoir, anthropology, travel, and time travel” by the New York Review of Books, as “an astonishing book, both copious and profound” by Kathleen Jamie in the New Statesman, and “one of the most mysterious books I’ve ever read . . . a dense, dark star” by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times.
MAYBE THE PEOPLE WOULD BE THE TIMES, the latest collection from Lucy Sante, shortlisted for a 2021 PEN/America Award.
THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM
Our upstart sibling, THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM, launched in 2020 with a mix of new work and cult classic reprints. The first ten titles include an expanded new edition of Stranded, Clinton Walker’s epic account of Australian underground music; Ultrazone, a William Burroughs ghost story set in Tangier, by Mark Terrill and Francis Poole; Czech poet Tereza Riedlbauchová’s Paris Notebook; a graphic novel satire on TV sitcoms and their obsessive fans, Persiflage by David Nichols; the US debut of The Painting and the City, a fantastical novel of the New York art world by Robert Freeman Wexler; an expanded edition of Lucy Sante’s revelatory Folk Photography, on the early 20th-century phenomenon of the real-photo postcard, and Susan Compo’s two collections of goth and punk stories from the 1980s, Life After Death and Malingering.
MORE TITLES
Now Is the Time to Invent: Reports from the Indie-Rock Revolution - an anthology of writing and photography drawn from the pages of cult 80s/90s music zine Puncture
Great Balls of Doubt: poems by Mark Terrill with illustrations by Jon Langford
Amaze Your Friends, a fresh instalment of Peter Doyle's award-winning crime series featuring Billy Glasheen, Sydney's most irresistible crook
Begin the Begin: R.E.M.’s Early Years, by Robert Dean Lurie: the most detailed account to date of the band’s formative years, with previously undocumented stories that cast a fresh light on their story
David Nichols's history of Australian rock and pop music, DIG! From the Missing Links to the Triffids by way of the Bee Gees, Easybeats, Skyhooks, AC/DC, and many more, cult heroes as well as international stars, these 600 pages cover the territory with Nichols's unique wit and flair.
Arthur Nersesian's neo-noir Manhattan crime novel, Gladyss of the Hunt