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Poet and fiction writer.

$We can’t stop talking about this book! Stealing Marquee Moon is a hallucinatory triptych about a dying industrial town in the 1970s, a failed love affair in the West Coast art punk scene, and a man reckoning with his fractured past. Order yours today from asterismbooks.com$

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Because 2026 has been such a strong year for books, we couldn’t pick just ten. Here’s a stack we’re looking forward to cracking open this fall & winter. What about you? Which books are you excited about? Which ones did we miss? Let us know in the comments!

- Love Hound by @jacobsaenz / @nexpagepress
- Pagan Era by @philgooder / @barrowstreetpress
- Letters of the Alphabet Go to War by @usetobo (tr. @katiefar & @ilya_poet) / @sarabandebooks
- Tree of Knowledge by @fattery12 / @fsgbooks
- Film and Television Thoughts and Notes by @mr_wheatley
- Close Second Person by Graham Foust / @floodeditions
- 57 Wyomings by @heyclown / @blacksquareeditions
- Book of David by @malsmart / @houseofvladpress
- The Universe Thinks About Anger Management by Jake Bauer / @burnsidereview
- Stealing Marquee Moon by @ck1355 / @rosebooks.co
- Unkillable Angel Goes to the Cinema by @bartonsmock

*Launched in 2025, Piżama Press strives to be an indie press unafraid of sharing books from other presses. As long as you’re reading, we all win.

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I found Stealing Marquee Moon, the debut novel from Christopher Kennedy, to be quite reminiscent of Harmony Korine’s Gummo, or the memoirs of Scott McClanahan, but simultaneously quieter and more bizarre. There are drugs and debauchery abound, but Kennedy distills these memories into brisk, dreamlike scenarios that feel both distant and fleeting. Not a lot of time is spent building the emotional interiority of characters; rather, they are given codenames and stand as open molds, people who could be anybody, really, and maybe they are everybody. I’m sure you know someone just like The Driver from your own youth, a fucked up and circumstantial friend who you still miss, and you probably have your own Butterfly Girl, too. I know I have mine. Kennedy recounts these memories of his life with an aloof detachment, but there is clearly something he is reaching for by bringing these moments back to life. At one point he asks bluntly, “Why conjure the past? What could be accomplished by trying to explain the things that make us and haunt us?” Later he skips over two decades of odd jobs, going to school, getting married and divorced, leaving the reader with a simple “What is there to say?” It feels to me like Kennedy is grappling with the acknowledgment that sometimes life isn’t profound. Sometimes a bunch of fucked up shit just happens, and then you die, and sometimes you numb yourself to life so thoroughly that you don’t even realize how much those fucked up events shape you until you try to reconstruct them from a bird’s-eye view. Sebald once wrote that memory makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, and I think Stealing Marquee Moon captures that essence delightfully by embracing the distortion of time and allowing the resulting images to speak for themselves instead of trying to fabricate a meaningful story arc or moral.

(Continued in comments…)

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$Very excited to get into these two from @rosebooks.co! • Fights! by Scott McClanahan (RB-005) “Fights! is a novel set in the mountains of West Virginia and the indie literary scene in New York, uniting the two great love stories of Scott McClanahan’s life: his wife, the writer Juliet Escoria, and Tyrant Books publisher, Giancarlo DiTrapano. In his first novel in eight years, McClanahan interrogates the meaning of art, devotion, and destruction.” • Stealing Marquee Moon by Christopher Kennedy (RB-006) “Stealing Marquee Moon is a hallucinatory triptych about a dying industrial town in the 1970s, a failed love affair in the West Coast art punk scene, and a man reckoning with his fractured past. This stunning debut novel by Christopher Kennedy moves through decades of desire, addiction, music, and loss and asks: can art ever return us to ourselves?”$

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$Announcing the cover and preorder for STEALING MARQUEE MOON by Christopher Kennedy @ck1355–available October 6 from www.rosebooks.co and from @asterism_books! About the Book: STEALING MARQUEE MOON is a hallucinatory triptych about a dying industrial town in the 1970s, a failed love affair in the West Coast art punk scene, and a man reckoning with his fractured past. This stunning debut novel by Christopher Kennedy moves through decades of desire, addiction, music, and loss and asks: can art ever return us to ourselves? Excerpt: “Like an astronaut, I look for you in the flare of the genius sun in the blue-black sky, while terror draws a picture with its finger on my bedroom window—sand-worm, drought-fish, day-ghost—hieroglyphics I come to understand eventually: There is no sun. There are no stars. The coast is never clear.” About the Author: Christopher Kennedy is the author of six poetry collections, The Strange God Who Makes Us (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2024), Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018) Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003), and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Epoch, The Progressive, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. Book Credits: Cover Design: Sarah Schulte @sarahcschulte Interior Design: Adam Robinson @pubgen Editor: Chelsea Hodson @chelseahodson_ Proofreader: Brittany Menjivar @brittmenjivar Printed by: @bookmobile_printing in the USA$

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