https://staircasebooks.org Staircase Books Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:55:24 +0000 https://staircasebooks.org en https://staircasebooks.org/Index Wed, 01 Nov 2023 22:55:20 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Index https://staircasebooks.org/Ivan-Vasilievich-Preorder-22 Wed, 14 Oct 2026 21:50:27 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Ivan-Vasilievich-Preorder-22 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/52dbec7a2d2a4274ba149b3f93fac556b5abac4bbe1d61b1de21976b97cae76a/Ivan.png" data-mid="253400817" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/52dbec7a2d2a4274ba149b3f93fac556b5abac4bbe1d61b1de21976b97cae76a/Ivan.png" /> Ivan Vasilievich (Preorder)Mikhail Bulgakov (tr. Melkon Charchoglyan), 2026 $22 A 1936 play by Mikhail Bulgakov translated from the Russian by Melkon Charchoglyan. When a time-travel experiment goes awry in 1930s Moscow, Ivan the Terrible, the grand and tyrannical 16th-century Russian Tsar, bursts in on the time-machine’s inventor. Simultaneously, another Ivan, a blustery building superintendent who has been browbeating the inventor, finds himself on the Tsar’s throne. A cowardly and petty opportunist, he soon shows his own hunger for power. Ivan Vasilievich is a daring and entertaining comedy. Mikhail Bulgakov, a towering figure of 20th-century Russian literature, wrote this play just as Stalin was unleashing the Great Terror. Using his characteristic blend of wild fantasy and mordant satire, Bulgakov dissects the psychology of tyranny and the cyclical nature of history. His insights were so provocative for his own time and country that the Soviet government censored the majority of his works, including Ivan Vasilievich. Its vision of and commentary on Russia is as valuable today as it was in the 1930s. Melkon Charchoglyan’s translation is the first to appear in English in over 40 years. https://staircasebooks.org/Life-Drawing-Preorder-22 Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:55:24 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Life-Drawing-Preorder-22 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4890004fe23277b139da3669e12c0d98672beb2eea738d39b2067ff3597ede45/LifeDrawing.png" data-mid="253496992" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4890004fe23277b139da3669e12c0d98672beb2eea738d39b2067ff3597ede45/LifeDrawing.png" /> Life Drawing (Preorder)Louis Harnett O’Meara, 2026 $22 Forthcoming December 2026 A young man in Berlin finds the girl of his fantasies; an Irish peddler sells an old woman a picture of her own home; a librarian in Boston seeks the right gift for the man she admires. These five stories depict characters from different ages, places, and backgrounds as they try to make sense of how to share their lives with others. They are studies of the quiet tragedies, cruel comedies, and dubious loves of lives broadly and thinly lived. “An affecting and powerful quintet of stories, linked by a timeless, tragic theme: if you fail to take life seriously, if you live dishonestly, life will punish you, relentlessly.”  — David Shields https://staircasebooks.org/Duck-1-22 Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:18:53 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Duck-1-22 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3617bbb19de639af5fb42f5a4c6b6928e788032c432ea5fc336361e9d499270e/Duck1-front.png" data-mid="245770793" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3617bbb19de639af5fb42f5a4c6b6928e788032c432ea5fc336361e9d499270e/Duck1-front.png" /><img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f70910bcba8ed056e0012a5933b4d30929a3256156fc2115a23d4cedb0ce3603/Duck1-back.png" data-mid="245770795" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f70910bcba8ed056e0012a5933b4d30929a3256156fc2115a23d4cedb0ce3603/Duck1-back.png" /> Duck 1Edited by James Fraser and Bella Bennett, 2025 $22 Duck&nbsp;1 features previously unpublished work by Jonathan Franzen, Mary Ruefle, Sebastian Castillo, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jeannette L. Clariond, Forrest Gander, Christina Davis, Adam Judah Krasnoff, Sherman Alexie, D. A. Powell, Garrett Caples, Garielle Lutz, Ariane Koch, Damion Searls, Yongyu Chen, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Zoe Brezsny, Tawanda Mulalu, Randall Mann, S. Proski, Vincent Katz, Bianca Stone, Andrew Koenig, Thomas Bennett, Andrea Cohen, Robert Glück, Anne Waldman and Louis Harnett O’Meara. https://staircasebooks.org/Duck-Annual-Subscription-40 Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:25:06 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Duck-Annual-Subscription-40 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d9bdaa7ddf996bd3cc910ecc97af91bf75afa0a51030e9c1c521cae31f6fbc1/Duck-subscription.png" data-mid="246014584" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d9bdaa7ddf996bd3cc910ecc97af91bf75afa0a51030e9c1c521cae31f6fbc1/Duck-subscription.png" /><img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d9b9d97ee3e1ad0c1138ca6ad84e0844b1be347e3db77ca0b25f4a9b6a666a40/Duck1-frontback.png" data-mid="246014585" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d9b9d97ee3e1ad0c1138ca6ad84e0844b1be347e3db77ca0b25f4a9b6a666a40/Duck1-frontback.png" /> Duck Annual Subscription$40 Duck is released biannually. Subscribers receive two issues per year.&nbsp; https://staircasebooks.org/Mark-2-12 Thu, 04 Dec 2025 04:01:34 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Mark-2-12 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8eb3c4abeed4695da638dea5336aae188ba10443798b2fd8cfe93ad61c540841/Mark2.png" data-mid="241396237" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8eb3c4abeed4695da638dea5336aae188ba10443798b2fd8cfe93ad61c540841/Mark2.png" /> Mark 2Edited by Sam Bailey and Emma De Lisle, 2025 $12 Mark is a devotional poetry journal. Mark 2 features poems by Josh Bell, Chris Crowder, Carissa Chen, Josh Gregory, and G.C. Waldrep, and interviews with Kimberly Johnson and Fanny Howe. https://staircasebooks.org/1968-16 Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:38:46 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/1968-16 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/20d8a0a1035b3499e048de4575874c8b57611c3fbc688f74dd367a579dec72d9/1968.png" data-mid="241396222" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/20d8a0a1035b3499e048de4575874c8b57611c3fbc688f74dd367a579dec72d9/1968.png" /> 1968Anthony Walton, 2025 $16 Recalling an era as tumultuous as our own, the poems in 1968 describe a childhood haunted by assassinations and other forms of American violence and a young boy’s yearning for love born, in part, out of that chrysalis of fear In poems about history, family, music, and love, Walton writes of African American experience—which is to say American experience—one bookended by MLK’s murder (and memories of a deeper past) and 21st century backsliding. His vox humana is attuned to our hope—and our predicament. Press: Poetose with Meia Geddes “These history-haunted poems are passionate and poised, witty and blue, made out of a lifetime facing—and loving—the ‘killing machine’ of the world. Anthony Walton welcomes you in them like a friend. His artistry, so casual and elegant, reminds me why I read.”— Langdon Hammer “Gravitas, candor, melodicism -- by turns obdurate and becalmed, Anthony Walton writes about what matters with authority and style. His poems are grounded and they make you feel that history and pain can be talked about meaningfully, that we can understand others and ourselves better.” — Vidyan Ravinthiran https://staircasebooks.org/Cadet-18 Fri, 17 Oct 2025 17:33:05 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Cadet-18 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f67288aa0ade9004693fc6ef3c135a0830f7c03e7f1bd9546c42496a14e6260/Cadet.png" data-mid="241396220" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f67288aa0ade9004693fc6ef3c135a0830f7c03e7f1bd9546c42496a14e6260/Cadet.png" /> CadetBenjamin Bellet, 2025 $18 Cadet opens in the freezing cold of Ranger School, the US Army’s most difficult combat leadership course. The poems proceed through the intricate wreckage of deployment and return, family and erotic life, masculine performance and intrapsychic reality, dreaming and waking. A graduate of West Point, veteran of two combat deployments, and Harvard-trained clinical psychologist, Benjamin Bellet sheds new light on the veteran experience in the post-9/11 era with language that integrates psychoanalytic nuance, lyrical pathos, and the graffiti of the barracks latrine. Press:Harvard Griffin GSAS News with Paul Massari&nbsp; “An exemplary collection with very remarkable capture of time and tone. The fear of an ineluctable doom through training and deployment and deployment. Worst two words in the American language: ‘overseas levy.’ Do you recall the cartoon ads, someone obliviously facing an inescapable horror? And someone else asks ‘Who’s your insurance company?’ ‘Why . . . New York Life, of course . . . Why do you ask?’ I was sorry there were not more poems to read in this all too short book and I look forward to a non-chapbook sized edition.” — Michael Casey “These are poems of strange intimacies, of the tight knot of pleasure, dread, and shame, of the ‘blank moan,’ the thrust and burst, of nights when the bruise feels right because it means that something happened. Benjamin Bellet shows the way the hot fist of violence clutches inside itself the ‘unbearable softnesses.’ He is attuned to the emptiness at the center of things and with tenderness and rigor he reaches toward this place. Cadet is a work of force and grace. I want to read Benjamin Bellet for a long time to come.” — Nina MacLaughlin “Benjamin Bellet’s Cadet explores the layered interiority of a life, with a lyric eye attuned to tenderness, the unspoken moments that glimmer in a life, as well as the invisible tethers that bind and unravel between lovers, family, and fellow comrades in arms. Bellet’s poems are crafted with a deft hand, a mature touch, and a deep respect for the reader’s intellect. It’s a collection that adds to the literature and it’s one that will gather no dust on the shelf—as I’ll return to Bellet’s poems often in the years ahead.” — Brian Turner https://staircasebooks.org/Norway-Poems-And-Three-From-England-16 Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:32:54 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Norway-Poems-And-Three-From-England-16 <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/03a8ebfa127444fe00106e29fc813ac21410c24df3b6a905a4d11988db016999/NorwayPoems.png" data-mid="239081899" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/03a8ebfa127444fe00106e29fc813ac21410c24df3b6a905a4d11988db016999/NorwayPoems.png" /> Norway Poems And Three From EnglandKurt Schwitters (tr. Damion Searls), 2025 $16 Press:New England Literary News (by Nina MacLaughlin) https://staircasebooks.org/Acts-of-Resistance-to-New-England-Slavery-by-Africans-Themselves-in Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:25:22 +0000 Staircase Books https://staircasebooks.org/Acts-of-Resistance-to-New-England-Slavery-by-Africans-Themselves-in <img width="5000" height="3500" width_o="5000" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7dea8faef440c2312ef64c5eff5cac713c8f32fc16473867e6de74b1262ab7a9/ActsofResistance.png" data-mid="229447369" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7dea8faef440c2312ef64c5eff5cac713c8f32fc16473867e6de74b1262ab7a9/ActsofResistance.png" /> Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New EnglandDanielle Legros Georges, 2025 $16 Press:A Local Struggle: On Danielle Legros Georges’s Last Chapbook (by Michael McGillicuddy) New England Literary News (by Nina MacLaughlin) Remembering Danielle Legros Georges and the History of the Dark Room Collective (by Fallon Murphy) WBZ (by Carl Stevens) You Should Be Called Beacon: Remembering Danielle Legros Georges (by Jennifer Jean) “In Danielle Legros Georges’ work, the dead dance across the page in light. Using found text and the voice of ‘Africans Themselves in New England’ Legros Georges crafts lyrics in ode to resistance. She weaves defiance with the poetics and does not shy from the truth and horror of slavery. Afterall, Danielle Legros Georges makes it clear: this body of work is not about the inhumane but rather, it is the lyrical documentation of overt resistance and the declaration of life from Black and African folks who were enslaved. In couplets enriched in imagery, Legros Georges beckons us to remember. In each poem, breath is offered and suspended. My god—these poems—this poet.” — Porsha Olayiwola