The Millions: Covering the Catalogs: Soft Skull Spring/Summer 2006

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March 07, 2006

Covering the Catalogs: Soft Skull Spring/Summer 2006

The latest catalog to cross my desk is from the Soft Skull Press, the daring Brooklyn-based publishing house that always manages to deliver books from well outside the mainstream. Their books strike a balance between rage and art, and I like looking through their catalog because I know there will almost nothing familiar in it; I will be introduced to new writers and artists.

Coming in May is Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, a historical novel about Custer's Last Stand as told by Captain Frederick Benteen who managed to survive the massacre. Benteen's account is told from a distance of twenty years, and the catalog calls the book "an exploration of our dawning age of celebrity (the lionization of Custer, carefully tended to by Custer himself while alive), and what it is to be a soldier (in this era of Iraq memoirs.)"

Soft Skull, which often publishes books in translation, is putting out three books originally published in French this time around. One of these, a graphic novel called Siberia by Nikolai Maslov, sounds particularly intense. In the mold of Marjane Satrapi, this is a memoir, and it tells of the brutality of Maslov's life in the Soviet Union. According to Soft Skull, it's the first ever Russian graphic novel published in the U.S. The book is already out

Also originally published in France are SuperHip JoliPunk by Camille de Toledo and Electric Flesh by Claro. SuperHip JoliPunk is a "manifesto, examining present day counterculture from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. He asks what it is, exactly, his generation is protesting against." Harry Houdini is at the center of Electric Flesh, but its protagonist is Howard Hourdinary, who claims to be the bastard grandson of the great magician.