BEA Recap: Discovering a New Press

I don't tend to focus on the publisher of a particular book as I read, but when I do fall for a press, I tend to fall hard (Other Press, I'm looking at you). This year at BEA, I found a new-to-me publisher whose titles I will most definitely be tracking more closely: Tin House. In fact, I fell so hard for their catalog that I left with more galleys from Tin House than any other publisher, and I'm excited about all four of them:

The Celestials, by Karen Shepard (June 2013): A reimagined tale of a group of Chinese immigrant workers brought to Massachusetts to work in a factory town, without knowing they were working as strikebreakers. The publisher promises "wide appeal to readers of historical fiction, relating the shared sense that we're all aliens of some kind — at home in no place."

The Virgins, by Pamela Erens (August 2013): How could one possibly turn up a galley with such a daring title? The Virgins is set in an elite boarding school, with one classmate regaling readers with tales of the school's power couple and their sexual exploits. Sounds provocative, to say the least?

The Revolution of Every Day, by Cari Luna (October 2013): Apparently, in 1995, NYPD rolled an armored tank into the East Village to evict groups of squatters from buildings in the area. Author Cari Luna has imagined a group of five squatters from this time, promising to reveal to readers "a life that few people know about or understand." Seeing as I learned at BEA that there was--actually, is--a squatter building no more than 2 blocks from my old apartment in NYC, I'd say I'm definitely one of the ones that knows nothing about this lifestyle... and after reading the first 10 pages of Luna's novel, I'm more than intrigued.

This Is Between Us, by Kevin Sampsell (November 2013): Five years of a troubled romance, from whirlwind affair to family to divorce. Jess Walter calls the novel "wry and wistful, strange and sexy, humming with desire, quaking with vulnerability," and my new-found love of Walter is going to temporarily trump my disillusionment with author blurbs in general on this one.