Eponymous Books
Eponymous Books is a brand new publishing imprint. Based in Brooklyn, Windsor Terrace Brooklyn to be exact; it will bring forth novels that entertain and captivate. In other words to bring some fun into the whole idea of book publishing. With new titles like The Napper, I Was a Teenage Communist and Shit Show, right away you know that you are getting something different, perhaps irreverent, yet in the tradition of say Phillip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante and other writers who have a compelling reason to put pen to paper or fingertips to an Olivetti. The Napper, the debut novel by Vietnamese American writer Linh Luu, tells the story of an Ivy League student from Vietnam in her freshman year, who cannot stop taking naps to deal with the stress of her new environs, a domineering mother and social diffidence. She forces herself to seek out lovers in an attempt to fill the void in her soul. Ultimately her journey takes her to Paris and to Vietnam where she has an epiphany in regard to the sacrifices her mother made on her behalf. In the YA slash literary fiction novel, I Was a Teenage Communist, J.C. Hopkins tells the story of a group of diverse, non-conformist teenagers in high school during the 1980’s. With punk rock music as its soundtrack the teens discover Marxism and romance in the heart of Ronald Reagan’s America and find that in Orange County California asserting one’s sexual, political and racial identity can be hazardous to one’s health. Arthur Nersesian, author of the cult classic The Fuck Up, has a new novel which is entitled Shit Show, an apt title for the book and for the times we are living in. Heralded as the laureate of the East Village, Nersesian’s new novel begins in Stalinist Russia, takes us to the rain drenched days of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and culminates in the final minutes before the collapse of World Trade Center. Shit Show explores how personal obsessions collide with the cataclysms of history, and how not even drugs, rock and roll can spare us.
