NEW: THE AUTODIDACTS, by Thomas Kendall

A man mysteriously disappears in a lighthouse, as if dissolved by light, leaving behind a notebook filled with bizarre claims of a curse and a series of drawings entitled ‘The Death of the Jubilant Child.’ The investigation into the disappearance unearths hidden connections between the disappeared man, Helene and the strange figure of the Man With The Forks In His Fingers. Fifteen years later, the discovery of the detective’s copy of the notebook by Helene’s daughter seems to set in motion a repetition of the events of the past.

Circuitously structured and intensely lyrical, The Autodidacts explores the mythos of friendship, the necessity of failure, the duty of imagination, and the dreams of working class lives demanding to be beautiful. It is a prayer in denial of its heresy, a metafictional-roman-a-clef trying to maintain its concealment, and an attempt to love that shows its workings out in the margins of its construction.

NEW: THE DROWNED WOMAN, by Abigail Stewart

Jeanette, a graduate student on scholarship and majoring in art history, arrives on the West Coast intending to be embraced by endless sunshine. She finds comfort in her studies and in her new apartment, drinking cheap Scotch and enjoying casual hookups.

From her youth slowly emerges a many-veiled seductive dance that begins in the carnal and veers toward the reluctantly domestic, before ultimately descending, as they do, into the maternal. Fueled by anger alone, Jeanette plies her own orbit, determined to reclaim her life.

With nods to the psychoanalytic works of Louise Bourgeois, The Drowned Woman explores the collision of the tender and the violent, and the brand of survival instincts unique to women artists.

Note: For every purchase of The Drowned Woman from the Whiskey Tit site now through July, we will donate $1 to Fund Texas Choice, who are doing the seemingly impossible and vitally important job of providing travel assistance to Texans needing to leave the state for reproductive health care.

NEW: THE FOUNTAIN, by David Scott Hay

Two no-talents nobodies have each created a masterpiece in a kiddie art exhibit at a museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. That critic over there wants to rep them. Be their manager. Guide their careers.

That critic? He’s going to find out that maybe, just maybe, they both drank from a fountain on the third floor of the museum. Maybe it’s the water that made them geniuses. Regardless, their legacy is secure. They will be remembered. Celebrated.

How jealous would you be? Just one drink. And you could be the celebrated one. But shortly thereafter, you die.

Maybe.

NEW: THE DADDY CHRONICLES, by Jayne Martin

In this emotionally-charged memoir written in cinematic vignettes, Jayne Martin fearlessly bares the parts of her that were broken when her father left the family upon her birth and, in doing so, leads readers on their own journey toward wholeness and healing. Whether you are a fatherless daughter or someone who loves one, The Daddy Chronicles will tear at your heart and open a world of understanding.

Brutally direct, hauntingly poetic, this memoir’s emotional center is its compelling honesty and vulnerability.” – Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences

NEW: TEENAGE WASTELAND: AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, by J. Bradley

Introducing Teenage Wasteland: An American Love Story, the debut novel from the prizewinning flash fiction author J. Bradley. Capturing a singular drop of our position in America’s history is not a small task, but if we trust anyone to do so, it should be Bradley.

“The girl whose mouth opens sideways then tells you about how the boy who coughs up oil speaks throughout his body, and you nod as if you didn’t already know this, didn’t make out “you” and “beautiful” when you nuzzled up to the boy who coughed up oil as he showed you your first star through the wheezing smokestacks while you struggled for air from the second bottle of wine.”

DONKEY, by Joey Truman

Don’t get me wrong, but work is a four letter word.

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, it is unavoidable.

In his new serial writing project, Donkey, Joey Truman manifests a bizarro literary sitcom as sexy romp as meditation on being trapped in the working class with no way out.

Starting when you sign up: 14 months of an intense journey of self-reflection and inertia mailed to you monthly!.

THE ESSENTIALS, by David Tromblay

The not-too-distant future. The global population reaches ten billion, leaving the planet at its breaking point. The population is being thinned; its people, their professions, and their health are reclassified: Essential or Nonessential.

Jonathan Shaddox works as a medical courier for a healthcare giant, navigating the crumbling remains of what had been great American cities.

This was once a work of fiction.

David Tromblay served in the U.S. Armed Forces for over a decade before attending the Institute of American Indian Arts for his MFA in Creative Writing. His essays and short stories have appeared in storySouth; Mystery Tribune; Michigan Quarterly Review; RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities; Pank Magazine; The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature; Yellow Medicine Review; Open: Journal of Arts & Letters; Watershed Review; FIVE:2: ONE Magazine; BULL: Men’s Magazine, and Red Earth Review.

His memoir, AS YOU WERE, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books (February 2021). His novella, SANGRE ROAD, is forthcoming from Shotgun Honey Books (April 2021).

TO MY MIND, or Kinbotes: Essays on Literature by Omar Sabbagh

Whiskey Tit is pleased to present our first collection of unrelenting Literary Criticism from outside the usual hellish circles.

This book provides its own answer. International in its scope, breathtaking in its ambition, Sabbagh’s essays combine thrilling erudition and an overwhelming conviviality, to draw the reader in and provoke them to think and think again. Not so much water in a desert, as an ocean of ideas in which to submerge oneself. – PETER SALMON, author of The Coffee Story and An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida.

Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic. He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford; three MA’s, in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London; and a PhD in English Literature from KCL. He teaches at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he is Associate Professor of English.

ISLE OF DOGS, Part 1 by Jon Frankel

It’s 2500—proprietary genetic enhancements are ruthlessly guarded by a caste of aristocratic Rulers who preside over the burnt-out husk of American democracy, and the imperious Sargon 3 is on the brink of achieving a lifetime’s worth of ambitions: he’s the Ruler of New York, master of the US Senate, and mere steps away from the presidency itself.

The birth of his cloned successor, Sargon 4, is an occasion for national celebration. But Sargon harbors a potentially deadly secret: an illegal bastard daughter, Phaedra, who was conceived the old-fashioned way—through love.

Rival Rulers—including the mad, decrepit incumbent President Iocle and the savage religious extremist Senator Everest from Texas (who believes bastards should be dissolved in acid)—will stop at nothing to expose Phaedra and destroy Sargon, who must try to protect his children and defend his city against a backdrop of mounting political discord and civil unrest.

At once a family saga, a sophisticated political thriller, and a briskly paced sci-fi fever dream, Isle of Dogs: Part One is the most ambitious installment yet in Jon Frankel’s acclaimed Drift series (which includes GAHA: Babes of the Abyss and The Man Who Can’t Die).

Jon Frankel is a poet and novelist, the author of Gaha: Babes of the Abyss and The Man Who Can’t Die, and writing as Buzz Callaway, Specimen Tank (Manic D. Press, 1993). Isle of Dogs, a prequel to GAHA: Babes of the Abyss, will be published by Whiskey Tit in four parts.

THE WAY RAIN FALLS by Mathew Michael Hodges

It’s 1998, and Jim Diffin is a charming, reckless, college sophomore with a unique moral code, a crew of wild friends, and no interest in serious relationships. That is, until he meets Diana Huntington, a precocious teenager who doesn’t fall for him so easily and embodies everything he’s ever wanted. The longer they date, the more her cool aloofness entrances him.

His friends, a memorably eclectic mix of social outcasts offer no shortage of dubious advice and the usual relief of tea with his mother will lose its typical solace once he learns she has worse troubles herself.

And while comforting his mother, weighing the insights of his friends, and agonizing over Diana, his mindset opens to a new way, but can his compassion, patience and burgeoning enlightenment ever win him the girl?

In the course of The Way Rain Falls, blind hope and frenzied despair send Jim careening from candle-lit dinners to street fights, intimate camp-outs to a drug fueled road trip to Canada, and an indiscretion Jim may never live down.

Mathew Michael Hodges lives and writes in Providence, RI. His fiction has appeared in Superstition Review, The Opiate, West Trade Review, and Jumbelbook. He earned his MFA from San Diego State University and teaches writing and Literature at Dean College, The Community College of Rhode Island, Bristol Community College, and Roger Williams University.

RAGE IS A WOLF by kt Mather

Sixteen-year-old Elaine Archer thinks the Earth might really be screwed. And she’s pretty sure sitting in a classroom memorizing Civil War battle dates isn’t gonna save it.

Desperate to do something meaningful, but not sure it will do any good, Elaine talks her moms into letting her drop out of school to write a novel. Spending her days circling Chicago in search of her story, she discovers a universe of people and ideas she’d never have encountered behind the doors of D.B. High. As her understanding of the complexity of the world and relationships deepens, so does her fear that she might not have what it takes to make any difference at all.

kt mather grew up in Alaska with a respect for two things—nature and the power of a good story. She was a high school English teacher and soccer coach for years and misses being around teenagers' humor and authenticity. She lives in Vermont with her family, where she writes, hosts the podcast “Out of Curiosity with kt mather,” and is busy converting her lawn into an edible forest and pollinator garden.

NEW ROSES by Stefan O. Rak

New Roses is a work of experimental prose that explores the relationships between madness and addiction, consciousness and language. Written by an anonymous drug-addled paranoid schizophrenic, New Roses offers a window into the shattered mind of a young man doomed to a lifetime of persecution.

Stefan O. Rak lives in New York City, because it makes sense. In the 1940s, his grandparents fled Ukraine for NYC, otherwise he may have never been born. As a child, some neurologists suspected that he had hypergraphia, but it turned out that he had other issues.

HOUSE OF APOLLO by Maxwell Olin Massa

If you could know exactly how and when calamity would strike, would you want to? And more importantly, would you tell your insurance company? What if it was something smaller, like the next time you were going to get a bad case of athlete’s foot… would you let them know then? In House of Apollo, they already know. The actuaries have won: Big Data predicts it all. At Longshot Insurance, it’s been years since the last claim, and HR has happily eliminated every department but Marketing. But fate cannot be so easily conquered, and when a priest in this temple of rationality meets his Dionysian match, comic chaos ensues. Like a thought experiment where Orwell drinks with Bukowski and Mervyn Peake transcribes, this novel of ideas is anything but predictable.

Maxwell Massa spent five years in China (including a year-long stint as a Mandarin TV star), only to return to the U.S. and find that — surprise! — intellectualism isn’t really a thing here.

NEWBORN by Agustín Maes

Shafts of afternoon light rained through oak and willow and eucalyptus, the boys’ small faces stippled with fine golden sunspots as though behind lacework mourning veils knitted from shadow. They stood side-by-side at the edge of a broad yawn of creekbed, eyes bound to what they had discovered there amongst sedge and blackberry and wild rye. Neither spoke.

What a gift, what a glorious incantation! Each sentence, each segment in Newborn is a stone dropped in a pond of still, deep water awash in quiet reverberation. Like Chekhov or the legendary German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, Maes writes with uncommon lyricism and precision as he traverses the rugged emotional terrain.

– Gina Ochsner, author of The Hidden Letters of Velta B., The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight, Pleased to Be Otherwise, and People I Wanted to Be