2021 Catalog

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The Unnamed Press publishes literature and non-fiction from the US and around the world. Based in Los Angeles, our books represent a diverse list of voices—ones that challenge conventional perspectives while appealing to a broad general audience: exciting, radical, urgent. We nurture emerging talent and partner with more established authors to help their platform grow.

Our books have been widely praised and featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, NBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Miami Herald, the Chicago Review of Books, Playboy, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other outlets.

Our authors include Man-Booker, Granta Best American Novelist, Philip K Dick and Pulitzer Prize award winners and have been finalists for many other book prizes.

You can find out more about the press in articles at the Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and Poets & Writers, among other places.

He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban tox icity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomer ates—the highly-rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Cope land’s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, every thing changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of Sethistory.inEast

Oakland, California in a very near future, Keenan Norris’s debut novel The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and startlingly contemporary voice, one that exposes the true dangers of coming of age in America: miseducation, over-medication, radiation, and incarceration.

Keenan Norris holds an M.F.A. from Mills College and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. A 2017 Marin Headlands Artist-in-Residence and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at San Jose State University and serves as a guest editor for the Oxford African-American Studies Center. Keenan is the editor of the groundbreaking Street Lit:Representing the Urban Landscape. Keenan’s short work, both fiction and non-fiction has appeared in numerous forums, including the Los Angeles Review of Books,Oakland Noir,Literature for Life,popmatters.com,Post-Soul Satire,Inlandia:A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire,Abernathy:A Magazine for Black Men, and BOOM: A Journal of California.

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive…

Cyber Mage Saad Z. Hossain

Praise for previous works:

One of The Guardian’s Best Books of the Year: “As charming and funny as it is inventive and strange.”

“Saad Hossain’s perplexingly weird debut novel captures the pure insanity of the Iraq War... It’s a Tarantinoesque Heart of Darkness set in war-torn Iraq, filled with absurdism and dark humor, a mash-up of satirical Joseph Heller-style comedy and sci-fi fantasy with a gratuitous mixture of good old-fashioned ultra-violence.”

—VICE

“Set in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, Bangladeshi author Saad Hossain’s debut is a riot of mordant humor and gonzo storytelling… The Gulf war may just have found its Catch-22.”

The Financial Times

Welcome to Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2089. A city notorious for its extreme population density has found an unexpected way to not just survive a global climate apocalypse, but thrive: pump enough biological nanotech into the neighborhood and all of the bodies together form a self-sustaining, and even temper ate, microclimate. Of course, this means that millions of hu mans have to stay put in order to maintain a livable tempera ture, and people are getting restless. All of the nanotech has also led to some surprises: certain people no longer need food or water while others can live without functioning organs.

So the mercenary Djibrel has to carry a machete wherever he goes. Only a swift beheading can ensure the job gets done any more. Djibrel navigates the crowded streets, humans teeming with genetic mutations, looking for answers about what hap pened to the Djinn, a magical super race of genies who seem to have disappeared, or merged, with humans for survival. What Djibrel doesn’t know is that his every move is being tracked by the infamous Cyber Mage—better known to his parents as Murzak, a privileged snarky teenager who regularly works for a Russian crime syndicate with a band of elite hack ers, like his best friend ReGi, who resides in North Africa’s FEZ (Free Economic Zone). Respected and feared online, Murzak is about to embark on one of his biggest challenges: attending high school IRL. But when he discovers a brand new type of AI, operating on a dark web from the abandoned Kingdom of Bahrain that he thought was just an urban myth, Murzak and Djibrel will have to face the unimaginable in an already inconceivable world.

In this laugh-out-loud-funny and totally original new novel, Saad Z. Hossain continues his signature genre mashup of SF and fantasy, challenging and subverting everything previously imag ined about our future and climate change. A scathing critique of corporate greed, Hossain shows us how to think beyond the naïve ideas of preening moguls like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Saad Z. Hossain writes in a niche genre of fantasy, science fiction, and black comedy with an action-adventure twist. He is the author of the novels Escape from Baghdad! and Djinn City, and The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday which was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best Novella. His short stories have appeared in the anthologies A Djinn Falls in Love,The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year,Vol 12., and the Apex Book of World SFVol.4. He lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The convergence is here. Each day, we see deepening intersections of people, business, and technology. This is a historic inflection point that demands leaders rebalance the energy and focus we place on technology and humans within our organizations.

Convergence alerts readers to signals of accelerating disruption and orients us to new mental models, decision priorities, and the humancentric perspective we need to achieve a resilient global future.

Author Deborah Westphal is a leader in future-focused strategy. In Convergence, she leverages more than 30 years of experience help ing the world’s most innovative business and government leaders to challenge biases, ignite ideas, and build connections. She delivers this rich insight with an empathetic and thought-provoking writing style to chart a path for readers. Throughout the book, personal stories and historical examples highlight convergences that span the globe, impacting everything from global supply chains to climate change, and reshaping the future of business, technology, and humanity everywhere.

Convergence Deborah Westphal

Publication Date: May 11, 2021 ISBN:

Praise for Convergence:

“Expansive, intriguing, and deeply human, Convergence continues the Toffler legacy. Westphal connects seemingly disparate facts to examine the vast opportunities and immense challenges facing a changing society. She offers her readers perspective and a path to create their future.”

— George Anderson, Partner and Leader of Board Effectiveness Services, Spencer Stuart

“Westphal’s Convergence is a call to action to create the future of humanity rather than stand by. Her words of wisdom and lessons shared cannot be more timely than in this very moment when hu manity is in crisis. In the midst of COVID-19, environmental disaster, and ever-accelerating technological change, Convergence makes the case for authentic leadership and challenges us to rethink our primary purposes of doing business: to serve humanity.”

— Diana Rau, Chief Experience Officer & Cofounder, twine.nyc | Forbes 30 Under 30

“Convergence will challenge your thinking about leading in today’s global environment. Westphal provides a compelling perspective for entrepreneurs in every sector to consider as they create tomorrow’s growth engines. This is a timely message about positioning your organization for the future.”

— Steve Case, Co-Founder of AOL and Chairman & CEO of Revolution

“In today’s world, there is no shortage of business books about technology, machine learning and what the future will look like. Convergence is a book that adds a much-needed human element to our collective understanding and vision for the future. Through her observations and stories, Westphal provokes us to think and to challenge our assumptions. There is no greater thinker than Westphal and she brings her exceptional clarity, insights about human behavior, and experience to this entire book. This is an essen tial read for anyone who cares about the future and our place in the world of business.”

—Elizabeth Ross, Chief Marketing Officer at Bright Health

Escapes

Daniel Tunnard

Publication Date: October 6, 2020

In an alternate 1990s where Scrabble is a global sensation broadcast live on TV, former world champions Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar meet deep in Argentina’s Tigre Delta for one final game. The words they play spell out how they ended up here, and why they are probably going to die.

“If you’re a Scrabble lover, rest assured: Mr. Tunnard fills his amusing tale with lexicographical highlights from invented tournament matches (played both in English and Spanish). Buenaventura’s and Florence’s competing versions of events are accompanied by spectacular moves in a game against each other that stretches out over the course of the book.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Daniel Tunnard lives in Buenos Aires and the fantastical influence of Jorge Luis Borges is clear, as are echoes of Terry Pratchett and Kyril Bonfiglioli, the author of the ‘Mortdecai’ series. Yet Escapes has wit in sufficient abundance to bear such comparisons. Quintuple word score.”

—The Times of London

“Daniel Tunnard’s Escapes, set in a world in which competitive Scrabble is a globally televised craze under the thumb of the Scrafia (yes, a Scrabble mafia), is an uproarious novel staked on the final encounter between former world champs Florence Satine and Buenaventura Escobar in Argentina’s Tigre Delta. Told from the alternating viewpoints of Satine and Escobar as they seek to flee the Scrafia’s long arm, this clever novel reads something like the imagined result had Piglia turned his attentions to competitive board games.”

—Words Without Borders

“Tunnard’s professional experience and outlandish premise combine wonderfully to create an entrancing alternate reality...this enjoyable romp will please lovers of camp.”

—Publishers

Fucked at Birth

Dale

Praise for Fucked at Birth:

“Dale Maharidge takes us coast to coast in 2020, down highways along which he first reported decades ago. His honed class awareness—unrivaled among contemporary journalists—reveals that today’s confluent health, economic and social crises are the logical conclusion to generations of unvalidated, untreated despair in a wealthy nation. Forget hollow commentary from de tached television news studios in New York City. ‘Fucked at Birth’ is the truth.” —Sarah Smarsh, author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dale Maharidge has spent his career documenting the downward spiral of the American working class, and for his new book, he traveled across the US in the year 2020 to explore how the pandemic has forever altered American society, the economy, and the rise of homegrown fascism.

Poverty is both reality and destiny for increasing numbers of people in the 2020s and, as Maharidge discovers spray-painted inside an abandoned gas station in the California desert, it is a fate often handed down from birth. Motivated by this haunting phrase— “Fucked at Birth”—Maharidge explores the realities of being poor in America in the coming decade, as pandemic, economic crisis and social revolution up-end the country. Part raw memoir, part dogged, investigative journalism, and featuring photos from across the US, Fucked At Birth channels the history of poverty in America to help inform the voices Maharidge encounters daily. In an unprecedented time of social activism amid economic crisis, when voices everywhere are rising up for change, Maharidge’s journey channels the spirits of George Orwell and James Agee, raising questions about class, privilege, and the very concept of “upward mobility,” while serving as a final call to action. From Sacramento to Denver, Youngstown to New York City, Fucked At Birth dares readers to see themselves in those suffering most, and to finally—after decades of refusal—recalibrate what we are going to do about it.

Featured in The Guardian, The Nation, Slate, and on C-SPAN Book TV

“This is a book ripped from the headlines, from Black Lives Matter to recently thriving downtowns stripped of office workers and service workers. Those catching the brunt of it all, those with the steepest hills to climb, may have been fucked at birth. But for everyone, as Maharidge observes, the feeling of safety is folly. A sharp wake-up call to heed the new Depression and to recognize the humanity of those hit hardest.”

—Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*

“In urgent, devastating prose, Dale Maharidge chronicles his road trip across a nation in freefall, meeting left-behind Americans who are surviving not only the pandemic but other deadly contagions he’s diagnosed in decades of reporting: income inequality, institutional racism, creeping fascism, hard-heartedness and fear. For all who seek the cure, ‘Fucked at Birth’ is essential reading.”

—Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

Dale Maharidge BIRTH

What 21, 2020 9781951213077

In the wake of her mother’s death, Jessica Pearce Rotondi uncovers boxes of letters, declassified CIA reports, and newspaper clippings that bring to light a family ghost: her Uncle Jack, who disappeared during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos in 1972. The letters lead her across Southeast Asia in search of the truth that has eluded her family for decades.

One of Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Summer 2020: “Part memoir, part investigative journalism, and completely engrossing, What We Inherit is not a book you’ll be forgetting anytime soon.”

“Everything about What We Inherit is unexpected and compelling... as breathtaking as any spy movie.”

—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Rotondi brilliantly probes the mysteries of a secret war while simultaneously exploring the secrets of her own family to give us a book about coming to terms with many kinds of loss. Exceptional.” —Salman Rushdie

“Rotondi deftly moves between the personal and the historical, and the book is a sensitive and searching examination of the ways loss and trauma live on through generations.”

—The Boston Globe

“A fascinating memoir about a woman’s search for answers about a secret that has haunted her family for decades. After Jessica’s uncle went missing in Laos in the ‘70s, the US government told his parents he’d died. His father, who was a POW in World War II, didn’t trust them. After her mother’s death, Jessica picks up the dormant investigation and searches for her uncle, uncovering personal and political secrets along the way.”

—BuzzFeed Books Editor’s Pick

From award-winning creator Mauro Gatti, The Happy Broadcast takes you on a phenomenal trip around the world to meet everyday people using their talents, skills and goodwill to create positive change.

The Happy Broadcast: How to Stay Positive, Take Action & Make the World a Better Place is filled with stories of people doing good, as well as prompts, tips, and how-tos for taking action to make good things happen in your own community. From drone delivered medical supplies, to a cud dle club uniting senior dogs with senior people, to a man who planted a tree every day for thirty-five years and created a forest larger than Central Park, the stories collected in The Happy Broadcast are surprising, diverse, and empowering, featuring Mauro Gatti’s charming and humorous illustra Packedtions.

with ideas and inspiration to make a difference, this book will remind you that no action is too small, and that every person (yes, that’s you!) counts.

James Boice, The Shooting (novel): A stunning novel of violence and heartbreak in contemporary America. [September 2016, 9781939419743, World & Film Rights: Unnamed Press]

Stefan G. Bucher, Letterheads (graphic design): From the creator of the popular Daily Monster YouTube series, a revolutionary new vision for “characters,” one that brings the alphabet hilariously alive. [November 2017, 9781944700492, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Marlena Chertock, Crumb-Sized (Poetry): Marlena Chertock grew up crumb-sized, with a rare bone disorder. She uses her skeletal dysplasia and chronic pain as a bridge to scientific poetry. [August 2017, 9781944700478, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Alex Espinoza, CRUISING:An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime (nonfiction): Alex Espinoza details and explores the rich history of cruising in the queer community, weaving his own personal experience within this narrative. [June 2019, 9781944700829, World Rights: Unnamed Press, Foreign Editions: Spain (Dos Bigotes)]

Isaac Goldemberg, Remember the Scorpion (novel): A hard-boiled mystery set in Lima, Peru, where Detective Weiss must confront two forms of trauma: the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and his own memories from the Holocaust. [June 2015, 9781939419194, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Joe Halstead, West Virgina (novel): When news of his father’s suicide reaches Jamie Paddock in New York City, he returns to the place he left behind, to confront what drove him away, and search for answers. [January 2017, 9781944700041, World & Film Rights: Unnamed Press]

Carly J. Hallman, Year of the Goose (novel): A satirical send-up of the lives of the wealthy in contemporary China and one of the BBC’s Best Books of 2016. [November 2015, 9781939419514, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Saad Z. Hossain, Djinn City (novel): Using Islamic mythology, Saad Hossain Creates an underworld populated by Djinn who have been holding a grudge against humans. [November 2017, 9781944700065, World Rights: Unnamed Press, Foreign Editions: India (Aleph Book Company), Bangladesh (Bengal Lights Books)]

Saad Z. Hossain, Escape from Baghdad (novel): Saad Hossain weaves fantasy, dark comedy, and action as regular Iraqis turned black marketeers, Dagr and Kinza navigate the streets of Baghdad during the height of the U.S. invasion. [March 2015, 9781939419248, World Rights: Unnamed Press, Foreign Editions: France (Editions Agullo), India (Aleph Book Company), Bangladesh (Bengal Publications)]

Dan Lopez, The Show House (novel): In the sprawl of suburban Florida, one family attempts to reunite as another spins out of control: The sinister link connecting them both is hiding in the show house. [December 2016, 9781944700034, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Rheea Mukherjee, The Body Myth (Novel): Rheea Mukherjee explores loss, illness, and recovery through Mira, an isolated widow recovering from a grief triggered meltdown and her intimate, volatile, and fragile friendship with a mysteriously ill woman and her husband. [February 2019, 9781944700843, World Rights (except U.K. and Australia): Unnamed Press, U.K. and Australia: Writer’s House, Foreign Editions: Penguin India]

Kristine Ong Muslim, Age of Blight (novel): A fascinating and absorbing collection of speculative stories, Age of Blight addresses climate change in a profoundly original way. [January 2016, 9781939419569, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Jaya Nicely, The OfflineJournal:A Guided Diary For a More Connected,Creative Life (Journal/Diary): Illustrator and Designer Jaya Nicley creates a guided journal for creatives of all types to take a step back from being online and connect with the world around you. [May 2019, 9781944700799, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Benjamin Rybeck, The Sadness (novel): Max never recovered from his mother’s death and has become increasingly obsessed with his film and finding his missing leading lady and muse. Kelly, his sister, finds herself in the snowy Portland reunites and tries to help Max. [June 2016, 9781939419705, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

T.Sean Steele, Tacky Goblin (Short Story): Absurdist, nihilistic, and lovable, Tacky Goblin is a very funny look at the dark side of (not) becoming a grown-up. [July 2018, 9781944700607, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Alice Stephens, Famous Adopted People (novel): Lisa and Mindy bond over being adopted and collecting biographies of famous adopted people but after a friendship ending fight in Seoul, Lisa is left lost. Eventually Lisa finds herself trapped inside a palatial mountain compound with other international misfits; all loitering in extravagant imprisonment. [October 2018, 9781944700744, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Meghan Tifft, The Long Fire (novel): A finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, The Long Fire sends amateur sleuth Natalie on a wild search for her mother and the Gypsy community she abandoned. [August 2015, 9781939419446, World Rights: Unnamed Press]

Dennie Wendt, Hooper’s Revolution (novel): Inspired by the North American Soccer League that began in 1968 and ended in 1984, Hooper’s Revolution is a hilarious and heartfelt ode to the beautiful game. [May 2017, 9781944700164, World & Film Rights: Unnamed Press]

Prisonero Anónimo, Experience MexicanJail! (travel guide/humor): The world’s only travel guide for navigating the customs, language, and culture of life in Mexican jail. [March 2017, 9781939419835, World Rights: Unnamed Press]