Soft Skull

Soft Skull began in 1992 in New York, when Sander Hicks, a student working shifts at a Kinko's, started photocopying his own writing, taping the pages into books and handing them to friends. The press grew out of that habit and kept a taste for risk. Its early notoriety came from Fortunate Son, a critical biography of George W. Bush by Jim Hatfield. According to a CounterPunch profile of Hicks, the book brought the press close to financial ruin.

Ownership has changed several times. In 2007 Soft Skull was acquired along with Counterpoint and Shoemaker & Hoard, and the three were combined as Counterpoint LLC. Counterpoint merged with Catapult in 2016. Soft Skull now sits beside Catapult, Counterpoint Press and, since late 2025, Hawthorne Books in the Catapult Book Group. Penguin Random House Publisher Services has distributed its books since January 2021. Mensah Demary became editor-in-chief in 2021, succeeding Yuka Igarashi.

The list covers fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and its tone is literary and a little off-center. The press's own About page names Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Noam Chomsky, Lydia Millet and Alain Mabanckou among its authors. Myles's Cool for You and Lynne Tillman's American Genius, A Comedy are Soft Skull books. So is Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The press says its titles have won Lambda Literary Awards, the Quill Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.

The most recent title to look at is Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda. Soft Skull published it in hardcover in September 2024 and in paperback in May 2025, and it was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Locus described it as a mosaic novel that follows humanity's evolutionary fate across thousands of years.

Expect books chosen for voice and nerve rather than for fit with a genre. A Soft Skull novel may be strange or formally restless, and the list includes work in translation as well as American writing.