What Books Press & Giant Claw Press Launch

Join us for the launch of What Books Press and Giant Claw Press' fall slate!

Authors will join to read from their work and engage in scintillating conversation!

About the authors:

Stephen Cooper is the author of Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He has worked as a longshoreman on the docks of Los Angeles Harbor, a mule packer in the Eastern Sierra, a guard in Stockholm’s subway system, and at sundry other jobs. Long a Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, he has written and published on both literature and film. He also cowrote and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski. River of Angels is his first story collection.

Patty Seyburn has published six books of poems: Jukebox (What Books Press, 2025), Threshold Delivery (Finishing Line Press, 2019); Perfecta (What Books Press, Glass Table Collective, 2014); Hilarity (New Issues Press, 2009), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998). She earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is a professor at California State University, Long Beach, and was a 2024 Fulbright Scholar in Iasi, Romania.

Suzanne Lummis edited the new anthology, national in scope, Poetry Goes to the Movies (2025). Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Plume, Catamaran, Rattle, The New Yorker and elsewhere. She is an influential poet and teacher in Los Angeles and 2018-19 City of Los Angeles (COLA) fellow.

About the featured titles:

River of Stories:

From John Fante’s biographer, ten stories of blood relations, family skeletons, random forces, and the often-violent folly of love. Set against the double-edged splendors of greater Los Angeles, from downtown streets to studio soundstages to gated mansions, from desert to mountains to sea, these are stories of people striving to reckon with the American hands they’ve been dealt in the marked-card gamble of their lives.

Jukebox:

Music is the car and driver of Jukebox. These poems explore the intersection between the musicality of language and musical references as signposts of meaning. The song lyrics and instrumental riffs that take up space in our brains (where arguably classic literature should be?) infiltrate the poems and proceed to assume a prominent position. They return author and reader to the moment when first heard and people and places associated with those moments. Musical references liberally salt the book’s first section. The shorter second section addresses those singers “everyone has heard” – the birds that poets so love. The third section speaks to ideas and spaces of silence. And so a loud book goes not gentle, but quiet.

Crime Wave:

From the low backstreets to the highest echelons of power, crime, malfeasance, corruption or shady dealings recur in these poems, often in the voices of characters from film noir, true crime, or the current news. These “terribilities,” as Lummis calls them, are divided into four sections, Nouvelle Vague (New Wave), Rogue Wave, Undertow, and the darkest of the four, Criminal Wave. And yet the noir style that Lummis is identified with, and which—in the realm of poetry-- she’s helped to define, allows for humor, and humor shows up in this collection by way of irony, paradox, the outrageous, or a sense of the absurd.

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