May 2025
The Sleepers, My Father's Cabin, A Woman in the Wild, and Scraps, Orts, and Fragments—4 titles out today from Arcade Publishing
The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda
In crystalline prose, Gasda maps the territory between who we pretend to be and who we are—and how far we are willing to go when we think the internet isn't looking. The Sleepers, a ruthless portrait of educated Millennials who know better but act worse, throws a jagged, electric light on how desire upends our carefully curated social personas.
“Gasda adeptly generate empathy for all of the characters, as their story sleepwalks toward a subtle but devastating climax.”—Library Journal
“The Sleepers consolidates Matt Gasda’s status as an inventive, insightful observer of his anxious generation—and a commanding literary figure for our moment.”—Sohrab Ahmari, US editor, UnHerd
"A fearless, poetic, grotesque, and sensuous response to the challenge of our era in the manner of Chekhov and Lawrence. The novel’s hero is the novel itself: an act of generous self-abnegation before every last inch of the characters’ otherness."—John Pistelli, author of Major Arcana
"Put simply, Gasda’s capacity to open a window to the pathetic neuroses that plague New York’s younger elites is nothing short of prophetic."—Stephen Adubato, RealClearBooks
"Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers is an unflinching exploration of human relationships and what it means, in this internet-addled age, to be alive. He pulls no punches. His characters are so unsettling because they are so true." —Ross Barkan, author of Glass Century
“What better tool does a writer possess than their ability to torture? Gasda is a good torturer. . . He delivers his characters a clean anguish. Whether they answer the question or not, he gets them to spit the truth out. Brings out what’s within: desires.”—Garth Miro, Expat Press
“The Sleepers is a tragic, dissonant, Jamesian cantata of love, loneliness, and yearning in the final New Age of a dying world. It is a towering achievement.”—Bruce Wagner
“It is, for my money, one of the great novels of this period.”—Adam Hunter, The Death Drive
A Woman in the Wild by Tad Crawford
A Woman in the Wild is a revealing and memorable portrait of a woman boldly facing her demons in pursuit of a meaningful life.
A psychologist in crisis leaves her established practice in the city for an open-ended retreat in the mountains at the Institute for Healing and Transformation. Feeling lost, betrayed, and stricken by guilt not to have saved her daughter from sexual abuse, she hopes to find a new path to ease her pain and uncertainties.
Soon after her arrival, a “wild” man who roamed the forest with a bear is brought to the institute. When the man is given to her care, she performs a suspenseful balancing as she seeks to heal him as well as herself.
Hiking and meditating each day, she initiates an inner journey that shakes her free from the familiar. As the months pass, she engages her guilt and sorrow, confronts her failures, weighs the limits of therapy and self-forgiveness, and seeks to unleash the healing powers of the unconscious and of love.
Readers will find this an absorbing and dramatic novel of abuse, resilience, and the quest for transformation.
“Rich in insight, A Woman in the Wild is an engrossing story of desire, healing, and the limits of human knowledge. With mindful reflections upon the wilderness in the world and in our hearts, this tale of a psychologist in crisis is immediately and deeply captivating. A marvelous read.”
—Ethan Gallogly, author of The Trail: A Novel
“A Woman in The Wild shows how inspiring and healing the natural world can be. The retreat center where the main characters meet offers no prescription for healing other than a safe place to be and the nourishment of rest and reflection. I especially enjoyed the immense range and complexity of the characters’ inner lives as they actively engage the sensate world of the surrounding wilderness. As a psychologist myself, I was not only delighted and surprised with what Thea, the main character, discovers on her quest, I remain deeply inspired by the resounding truth of it!”
—Susan S. Scott, author of Healing with Nature
“A wonderfully original novel. The characters are unusual and engaging, especially the marvelously imagined wild man and the ever-hovering bear concealed in the wilderness. The precision and beauty of the language, together with the measured pace of the narration, allow the time and process required for inner development as well as for conversations and reflections on guilt, the making of amends, healing, loss, and death.”
—Inez Martinez, author of To Know the Moon and former general editor of the Jungian Journal for Scholarly Studies
My Father’s Cabin: A Tale of Life, Love, Loss, and Land by Mark Phillips
In the Rust Belt of the 1960s, a blue-collar father works double shifts, chasing elusive dreams: a good night's sleep, eternal life, a cabin in the Allegheny Mountains where he can hunt and fish. His son is a child of the times, chasing his own dreams: girls, long hair, politics, and independence. And both chase the same dream: each other's elusive love. This is a familiar story uniquely told, in a voice that perfectly captures America at its most turbulent, an era that continues to define the largest generation in American history. My Father's Cabin chronicles life in America as the Greatest Generation gives way to the Me Decade, as responsibility gives way to self-fulfillment-and then back again, as responsibility becomes self-fulfillment.
"I don't believe I have ever read so relentlessly honest, unsentimental and unsparing an account of working-class life. My Father's Cabin is a courageous account of American life that rings painfully true yet is, in its way, strongly affirming."—Joyce Carol Oates
"This account of how a son comes to accept his father's rough, fumbling love, and to return it, despite the chasm between them, is a genuine portrait of the ties that bind families together in difficult times."—Publishers Weekly
"We've heard it all before: a father and son, products of different times and values, struggle to find common ground and to win each other's love and respect. But we've never heard the story told quite this way. . . . In this memorable memoir, the author demonstrates that there is always something new to say on a familiar subject"—Booklist
"Sensitive writing, a continually evolving relationship between parent and child, and commendable personalities make this an engrossing and satisfying book."—Library Journal
"Phillip's writing elevates [his] themes from the topical to art. He writes so well . . . that his 'remembrance of things past' may give many of his readers something new, something grand."—Robert W. Lewis
"A hard-bitten, working-class childhood on the fringes of decaying Buffalo, New York, goes a long way toward rendering freelancer Phillips’s memoir into a plaint, an extended ache that finds its way right into the reader’s heart. . . . a beautiful thing to behold, fresh air rushing through a scarred system."—Kirkus Review
Scraps, Orts, and Fragments: Pieces of a Life by Michael Rosenthal
Scraps, Orts, and Fragments: Pieces of a Life is a collection of essays, written in fits over several years, comprising what the title suggests: snapshots of a life without any attempt to fashion them into a coherent narrative. Michael Rosenthal explores subjects as diverse as his teen-age fascination with Hubert's Flea Circus on New York's 42nd Street; life with his stoic father; sex in the fifties (for "Nice Horace Mann boys"); a brief and unspectacular performance as a janitor while a graduate student in Wisconsin; step-fathering; assorted aspects of a long career as a college Dean; and Rosenthal's tenure as a member of the Board of Directors of a wildly successful company on the New York Stock Exchange. And other memorable moments . . . some treated head-on, some with a gentle irony they deserve. In Scraps, Orts, and Fragments, Rosenthal has provided opportunities for people to experience a life through his eyes, and as he states, experiences which are "interesting for me to have lived it all, perhaps amusing and interesting for readers."
PRAISE FOR THE MICHAEL ROSENTHAL
"Setting up shop on the corner where the mid-century avant-garde met Victorian pornography, Barney Rosset helped crack wide open the staid world of American publishing. Michael Rosenthal's smart and candid biography captures the insatiable spirit of an oft unlovely but always intrepid literary daredevil."—Sean Wilentz
"Illuminating, insightful, and informative--a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher."—Kirkus Reviews
"From the opening sentence of this marvelous, fleet, perfectly rendered portrait of Barney Rosset—the most important American book publisher of the twentieth century . . . to its last—Michael Rosenthal has created an elegant, clear-eyed, irresistibly readable account of the renegade publisher who tore himself and the reading public through the rusting gates of American Puritanism and censorship. In this book Rosenthal has done his subject and his readers superb service."—Ric Burns
". . . a fascinating study, not merely of the Boy Scout movement but of a violent and bewildered age. Among other things it is a key to the imperial mind."—Paul Theroux
"The reissue of Michael Rosenthal's NICHOLAS MIRACULOUS, is cause for celebration on at least three counts. It reaffirms the book's literary excellence, attests to its value as a work of history, and shows why biography--the most maligned branch of modern literature--is a necessity in any culture aspiring to understand itself."—Patricia O'Toole
“Arcade is a storied literary imprint (its original publisher discovered Samuel Beckett) that mirrors and embodies Tony Lyons’s fierce, lifelong commitment to writers and their art. After thirty-five years and fourteen novels, I have never been treated with more care, respect, and devotion, and have never, hands-down, had such beautiful books created from my work than with Arcade . . . Long may Arcade (and Tony Lyons) live!”
—BRUCE WAGNER