Unsolicited Press to Publish Douglas Cole’s Hallucinatory Literary Crime Novel The White Field

Unsolicited Press will publish The White Field by Douglas Cole on September 8, 2026. Winner of the 2021 American Fiction Award, The White Field is a gritty, surreal literary crime novel that follows a man newly released from prison as he attempts to rebuild his life while navigating the brutal absurdities of labor, poverty, addiction, and systemic failure.

Fresh out of prison, Tom wants to stay clean, reconnect with his family, and survive long enough to create a future for himself. Instead, he finds himself dropped into a decaying industrial landscape populated by exhausted workers, addicts, failed authority figures, and men barely holding themselves together. As mounting pressures close in around him, Tom is drawn into a criminal scheme that threatens to erase any possibility of escape.

Blending poetic language with dark humor and psychological intensity, The White Field rejects easy redemption narratives in favor of something stranger and more unsettling. The novel explores incarceration and reintegration not as isolated experiences, but as extensions of larger systems that consume and discard people long before prison ever enters the picture.

Readers of Denis Johnson, Harry Crews, Hubert Selby Jr., and Donald Ray Pollock will find familiar territory here: raw humanity, moral tension, and characters searching for meaning inside broken landscapes.

Douglas Cole is the author of two novels and eight poetry collections. His work has appeared widely in literary journals and has received numerous awards, including the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry and the Clapboard House Best of Poetry Award.

The White Field will be distributed through Asterism Books and Ingram.