Publisher profile
Nonprofit independent literary press in Minneapolis publishing fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with a focus on experimental form, writers of color, and translated Latin American literature.
Coffee House Press traces its roots to Toothpaste, a mimeograph poetry magazine Allan Kornblum produced in Iowa in 1970. After a typography course at the University of Iowa introduced him to letterpress printing, he expanded it into Toothpaste Press, a small shop publishing chapbooks and broadsides for poets connected to the New York School. In 1984 he relocated to Minneapolis, incorporated the press as a nonprofit, and renamed it Coffee House Press, shifting from letterpress pamphlets to trade editions of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
The press releases fifteen to twenty new titles each year and carries a backlist of more than three hundred books, the large majority still in print. Its catalogue resists neat genre boundaries. Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel sprawls across decades, languages, and continents. Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station uses the novel as a vehicle for questioning what a novel is. Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist, shifts between prose and verse. The press has also built a growing translation program, bringing Latin American authors like Valeria Luiselli to English-language readers.
A consistent through-line is the press's commitment to writers of color and to sustained author relationships. Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Matthew Shenoda's Somewhere Else (American Book Award, 2006), and Yuko Taniguchi's The Ocean in the Closet (American Book Award, 2008) are part of that record, as is the work of Kao Kalia Yang, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and Brian Evenson. Coffee House Press won the 2017 AWP Small Press Publisher Award. Its authors have been finalists for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and have received the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Awards.
A reader who has enjoyed one Coffee House title will likely find the list rewards a slow, curious approach. The press runs Books in Action, a program pairing authors with visual artists, libraries, and community spaces in Minneapolis. As a nonprofit it is not answerable to a parent company's quarterly earnings, and that independence shows up in the books on the shelf: form that pushes back, political engagement without sloganeering, and prose or poetry that asks you to read it twice.
Subjects: Literary Fiction
Authors: Alia Trabucco Zerán
Literary Fiction
by Alia Trabucco Zerán
The Remainder is the debut novel by Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán, first published in Spanish as La Resta in 2015 and rendered into English by translator Sophie Hughes.
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