Mike Nagel is spending too much time in his duplex. Mostly he’s hungover. There's a squirrel in the attic, the ceiling’s caving in, and he’s not sure who to call about it. Not much else seems to happen in Mike Nagel’s Duplex, except of course everything happens there: a distinct mind is constantly working over the absurdity, meaninglessness, and mundanity of contemporary life in ways both laugh-out-loud funny and thoughtfully compelling.

Duplex

Humor & Entertainment

Nagel, Mike

Humor

Autofocus Books

Sara Rauch is in a long-term, committed relationship with another woman when she begins a low-residency MFA in fiction. Though it goes against the promises she’s made, she finds herself pulled into an intense affair with a married man, a well-known writer in the program. More than an essay about bisexual infidelity and the resulting heartbreaks, XO unfolds Rauch’s story like a map of psychic terrain, allowing the author to explore her longstanding obsessions with romantic love, personal faith and belief systems, and the stories we tell ourselves to get through our ever changing lives.

LGBTQ+ Books

Rauch, Sara

Biographies & Memoirs

Emily Costa has had obsessive-compulsive disorder since childhood. After decades of unsuccessful treatments, her condition worsens significantly during the pandemic, and she decides to try an intensive program of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Until It Feels Right is a series of framed and stylized diary entries written during the three weeks of this treatment. It’s a closer look into the realities of OCD outside traditional media depiction, a peek behind the curtain of the processes involved in CBT, and an entertaining complex portrait of a mind fighting against itself.

Until It Feels Right

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Costa, Emily

Mental Health

Nextdoor in Colonialtown

Rivas, Ryan

Ryan Rivas has lived in Orlando's Colonialtown North neighborhood for over a decade. In Nextdoor in Colonialtown, he pairs photos of the neighborhood with conversations assembled from the area's Nextdoor.com posts. The result is at turns absurd and abject, goofy and gothic, paranoid and profound. By displacing his familiar surroundings, Rivas evokes the broader White imaginary underlying colonialism and suburbanization.

Arts & Photography

Ryan Rivas

Photography & Video

Adrienne Barrios and Leigh Chadwick became friends on the internet. They live 939 miles apart. They found each other's writing and liked each other's writing. Then they started writing together. Too Much Tongue is a series of prose poems in which the writers imagine themselves into each other's lives, stretching and bending language into constant delight and surprise, taking turns sometimes so absurd they might float into the air at any moment if they weren't so grounded to the visceral need for human connection and recognition.

Too Much Tongue

Literature & Fiction

Adrienne Marie Barrios

Leigh Chadwick

Poetry

Since 2020, Tyler Gillespie has spent a lot of time online and in other landscapes devoid of humans IRL. While undergoing quarantine with his grandmother in Florida, he began expanding his writing practice with new forms of media expression, going as far as recording snippets of a comedy album and creating a pop diva robot persona through text-to-talk technology. Although he eventually abandoned these projects, traces of them can be found in the nature machine! Throughout this collection, Gillespie merges poetic forms with interstitial moments of sound and visual technologies to playfully theorize the now and to seriously contemplate the future. With dexterity, he threads ideas on cybernetics, pop music, the environment, desire, and recovery to examine how technology has transformed our natures. But ultimately, full of warmth and wit, this book reminds us why, despite everything, we're still not-yet-machines.

The nature machine!

Tyler Gillespie

That Spell

Tate N Oquendo

A Kind of In-Between

Aaron Burch

United States

A Calendar Is A Snakeskin

Langley Mahler, Kristine

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Autofocus Books