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SPD

Introducing Small Press Distribution

More than 500 publishers are now selling directly through Abebooks.com thanks to the support of an organization called Small Press Distribution (SPD), which is dedicated to promoting independent literary publishers.

“Our mission is to provide access to the finest titles from smaller and independent literary publishers,” said Brent Cunningham, operations director at SPD. “These are books that readers would otherwise have a difficult or impossible time finding..." More About SPD

Meet the People Behind SPD

An Interview With Omnidawn Publishing

One of the publishers supported by Small Press Distribution, Omnidawn was founded by husband-and-wife team Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan to create books that are closely aligned with each author’s vision, and to provide an interactive and rewarding publishing experience for poets and writers. Read the Interview

 

An Interview With Poet Lyn Hejinian

“It is often said, and no doubt true, that a relatively small percentage of the North American population reads poetry. I suspect that a large segment of the population would scoff at the idea of doing so..." Read the Interview

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Featured Titles

Never Let Me GoNever Let Me Go
Chuck Rosenthal

Memoir. The true story of the seduction of a young athlete by his basketball coach. In 1964, Chuck Rosenthal was a thirteen year old boy whose greatest dream was to make his grade school basketball team. Never Let Me Go tells the true story of how a college professor, who coached grade school basketball as his hobby, became the man who held that dream in his hands; became Rosenthal's coach and eventually his mentor; how he made Rosenthal his boy, his confidant, and eventually his lover, and how that teenager, trapped in the cycle of loyalty, betrayal, denial, secrecy, and sexual abuse, found the inner resources to escape and take the first steps toward adulthood.

From: $16.95

 

LarenopferLarenopfer
Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated from the German by Alfred de Zayas, this is the first complete translation of the Larenopfer into English. Bilingual edition. This translation of the Larenopfer, or offerings to the household god Lar, are songs that Rilke sings to his hometown Prague and to his beloved Bohemia, short poems on the parks, fountains, churches, bridges and palaces of Prague, as well as Rabbi Low's legends, the Jewish cemetary, the Thirty Years' War and, of course, young love. This cycle of 90 poems offers a unique view into turn-of-the-century Prague, possessing not only literary merit but also of considerable sociological and historical interest.

All Editions: $12.50

 

Literature is FreedomLiterature is Freedom
Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag delivered Literature is Freedom as her acceptance speech after receiving the highly prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Past recipients of the prize, awarded annually since 1950, include Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse, Octovio Paz, Vaclav Havel, Chinua Achebe and Mario Vargas Llosa. Among other things this brilliant speech touches on the historical and philosophical roots of Sontag's fervent opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

From: $7.95

Featured Titles

Often CapitalOften Capital
Jennifer Moxley

First published as two separate chapbooks in 1995 and 1996, Often Capital explores the tensions between political commitment and personal desire. Moxley draws in part on the love letters of the Polish radical Rosa Luxemburg in searching out a habitable space for resistance. Moxley employs techniques of collage and juxtaposition as well as narration to sound her subject. Yet the lean, sonorous lines that result leap out of any categorical dichotomies.

From: $12.95

 

One Stick SongOne Stick Song
Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie's poems, fiction, and essays have won him an international following since his first book, The Business of Fancydancing, was published to great acclaim in 1992. Smoke Signals, the film he adapted from one of his stories and coproduced, enlarged his audience still further. Alexie's honors include awards from the NEA, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation, and the Washington State Arts Commission, and a citation as One of the 20 Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40 from GRANTA magazine. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and son.

From: $15.00

 

Dog WomanDog Woman
Chris Abani

"These poems reveal a prodigious imagination, which is enlivened by sardonic wit and an inexhaustible capacity for irony and empathy. Daring to span a historical continuum that takes us as far back as the rituals of Christ suffering, through the tragic history of the Mayans of Mexico, to the starkly modern concerns of contemporary life, these poems find beauty and grace in the most painful things. The achievement here lies in the poet's ability to bring an engaging. Intelligence to bear on the complexities of race, gender and memory. Abani's line has a sharp precision that turns a scream into a line of memorable lyric music without losing the emotion and force. That he does this again and again in poems of such vulnerability speaks highly of Abani's art"--Kwame Dawes, author of Midland.

From: $14.95