Rare Bird Books A Barnacle Book imprint: 47 books

Desire is the star attraction at a secluded Rust Belt gentlemen's club called Paradise, where it is rumored she possesses strange powers both on and off the stage. But the arrival of a mysterious stranger amid a series of gruesome livestock mutilations throws Desire’s life into a turmoil of secrets, dark passions, and the most dangerous magic of all: love.

A young boy in the Louisiana bayou is different than all of the men in his life: small, weak, effeminate. Through his eyes we see everything, from the mundane to the fantastical, the intricacies of Cajun life on the bayou, the trappings of masculinity, and the consequences for not adhering to those...

Ray Goldman will outdrink you, out-party you and, unfortunately for him, probably outlive you. As a hopeless and struggling indie rock musician, Ray's best chance of discovering any beauty and purpose in his dysfunctional life will come only when he ceases to struggle against life itself. These are his...

A collection of eleven one-act plays. With hints of Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, Neil LaBute, and Tracy Letts, Scott Caan grapples with the emotional interiors of people in a fractured world. Whether writing about actors, lovers, or co-workers, Caan takes on the complicated tension between what we say...

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls tells of the thirty-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

Reel follows two lives that collide at a Seattle punk show, and the strange consequences that arise. Timon serves as the hyperobservant western outpost of his family's business, verifying artifacts and losing himself in deafening music and isolation. Marianne fears stagnation, and has begun to crave...

Finally back in print, Richard Pryor's 1995 smash hit Pryor Convictions follows Pryor's life from his upbringing in a brothel in Peoria, Illinois, where he was sexually assaulted by a man in his neighborhood, to his early years as a stand-up comic in New York through fame, fortune, drug addiction...

In the Spring of 2012, reporter and travel junkie Justin Chapman threw his cares to the wind and, by himself, set off on an epic journey across eight countries in Africa - from Cape Town, South Africa, to Mityana, Uganda - by bus, train, and boat. Along the way, he narrowly escaped being locked away...

A small town girl leaves her troubled family and starts stripping - which introduces her to a community that keeps her sober and saves her life - but a roller-coaster lifestyle ensues. She gets drugged, does enema shows, and unionizes the club. When she tries to quit and go to graduate school, her...

The King of Good Intentions II by Los Angeles songwriter and novelist John Andrew Fredrick picks up where we left off cliffhangingly, unsure whether John and Jenny, the brilliant and charming on-again/off-again couple who play in the fictitious fledgling indie band the Weird Sisters, will break up or...

Jon Methven’s Strange Boat is the story of Danders Wake, a man raising money to build a new planet. The current world is evolving him out-of his home, his job, his religion, his marriage, his sexuality, even his dream of inventing the world’s first pay-for-toilet business, known as Swanktrines. As...

Where do you go when you've done everything right? Tom Claughlin, a forty-something labor lawyer, has spent his life fighting an unwinnable war. A husband, recent father, and longtime advocate for the noble New York City workforce, he plunges himself into every case-a school teacher threatened with deportation,...

In the tradition of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and P.T. Anderson's Magnolia, Adam Novak explores the city of angels and demons in his third novel Freaks of the Industry. Studio executive Rodney Muir quits the business after a prostitution scandal and returns home to Washington,...

Punk Elegies arrives like a chemically unstable mixture of Richard Yates and Damon Runyon. Set along Hollywood Boulevard at the birth of punk and the death of the 1970s, the thirty-three melancholic, comic laments of Punk Elegies are a mesmerizing concoction of delusion and revelation. A cultural moment,...