📚 Under the fold: A Lot of Books 📚

January 8, 2025 2:38 PM

In addition to Small Press Distribution's shutdown (previously), in November of 2024 independent distributor National Book Network announced that it will also shut down in 2025, offering clients a chance to move to Simon & Schuster Distribution Services and a lot more notice than SPD. Independent Publishers Group still exists, and small distributors Asterism and Itasca have bridged some of the gap. Many presses have incurred higher costs than usual—but the amazing and challenging work of small presses soldier on, producing books that are too loud, too transgressive, or too weird for the Big 5 (previously).

In December, Bomb Magazine published the "2024 Small Press Gift Guide, recommending, amongst others:

• Mary Ellen Solt’s The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt: "For the designer with too many Pinterest boards about minimalist typography." (Primary Information, a press that’s new to me and is a non-profit that publishes artists’ books, including the late photographer Jimmy DeSana’s Salvation, a reprint of Martin Wong’s Das Puke Book, Mel Chin and Helen Nagge’s account of "an extensive series of political works used as plot devices and props across two seasons of the show" Primetime Contemporary Art: Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place, and DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s "genealogy and current developments in techno" Assembling a Black Counter Culture—anyway back to Mary Ellen Solt: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Ryan Chapman’s The Audacity: "For the anti-capitalist who rolls their eyes at Cybertrucks." (Soho Press: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Lena Valencia’s Mystery Lights: "For the reader who insists season two of Twin Peaks was the best season." (Tin House Books: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Diane Oliver’s Neighbors and Other Stories: "For the reader who’s always first in line when a legendary author’s unpublished manuscript is finally released." (Grove Press: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Honor Moore’s A Termination: "For the memoir enthusiast who believes every ending is a new beginning." (A Public Space: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Stacy Skolnik’s The Ginny Suite: "For the friend who is always quoting ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ while scrolling." (Montez Press: Asterism)

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Electric Lit has two great articles to enjoy, with a little context and history for the mentioned presses:

1. "23 Indie Presses to Support After the Close of Small Press Distribution" which lists: Anvil Press, Apogee Press, Blackwater Press (side note: check out their book bundles), Black Lawrence Press, Black Square Editions, Cardboard House Press, C&R Press, ELJ Editions, Flood Editions, Fonograf Editions, Game Over Books, Hanging Loose Press, Kore Press Institute (KPI), Litmus Press, LittlePuss Press, Mason Jar Press, Noemi Press, Rescue Press, River River Books, Rose Metal Press, Sixteen Rivers Press, Tupelo Press, and Unicorn Press. They recommended these books, among others (descriptive quotes from the respective presses):

• Hilary Peach’s Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood: "a deep dive into the secret language and hidden culture of one of the most esoteric heavy construction trades: Boilermaking." (Anvil: Amazon)
• Truong Tran’s dust and conscience: "The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work—it explains why the writing is, and must be, simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric." (Apogee: Amazon)
• Leah Rogin’s Burying Norma Jeane: "Already in the throes of grief after the sudden loss of her husband, Miriam Renata is shaken by the news that Hugh Hefner, the lecherous founder of Playboy, has been recently entombed next to Marilyn Monroe nearly sixty years after her death. Unable to accept her idol sharing a crypt with this succubus for eternity, Miriam and her teenaged daughter set out on a road trip across the West to liberate Norma Jeane and themselves." (Blackwater: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Elizabeth Horner Turner’s Horsemouth and Aquariumhead: "Whether the characters yearn for a different, unknown life, or they wish themselves out of something else, Turner’s surreal yet relatable collection offers glimpses to the depths beneath, above, or in-between our own domestic realities." (Black Lawrence: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Charles North’s News, Poetry, and Poplars: "contains both poetry and selected prose (essays, interviews, memoirs and tributes, and smaller pieces)." (Black Square: Amazon)
• Alicia Genovese’s Bridges / Puentes, translated by Daniel Coudriet: "a long poem that wends its way through the structures that cross the Río de La Plata / River between Buenos Aires and its suburbs, creating a spatio-temporal reality in which biographical situations are interwoven with political events." (Cardboard House: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Lauren Berry’s The Rented Altar: "As her husband’s second wife, she enters stepmotherhood unprepared for its storybook tradition of distrust, a pain intensified by her discovery that she is unable to conceive a child of her own." (C&R: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Ronald Johnson’s Radi os: "First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text." (Flood: Amazon)
• A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Literary Anthology , edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan: "At the restless heart of this collection is a challenge to some fundamental questions: What is reading? What is writing? … Contributors include: Kimberly Alidio, Samiya Bashir, Victoria Chang, Gabrielle Civil, Vi Khi Nao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Paisley Rekdal, Sasha Stiles, Vauhini Vara; and more." (Fonograf: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Bri Gonzalez’s A Wellness Check: "follows a recently diagnosed speaker under the care of Dr. Ratman—part-time psychologist, part-time vigilante who ratarangs his patients into submission. Alongside characters like Mr. Double-Side, The Quippler, and Clown Princess, the speaker must untangle their relationship with Dr. Ratman and their disorder." (Game Over: Asterism)
• Barbara Ann Porte’s He’s Sorry, She’s Sorry, They’re Sorry Too: "The stories here are marked with understanding and wit. A brave and impressive collection." –Ha Jin (Hanging Loose: Amazon)
• Alexis Orgera’s Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms: "To begin to understand the emotional impact of a human unraveling by memory loss, Orgera tells the story through a kaleidoscopic lens of mythology and religion, visual art, migraines, ghosts, poetry, and science." (KPI: Amazon)
• Lyn Hejinian’s Fall Creek: "A new book-length lyric from one of our most prolific contemporary poets and thinkers." (Litmus: Asterism)
• Meanwhile Elsewhere: Science Fiction & Fantasy from Transgender Writers: "a large, strange, and devastatingly touching anthology of science fiction and fantasy from transgender authors" (LittlePuss: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Mandy May’s poetry collection Bone / Blood / Blossom: "a grimoire and a chronicle of chronic illness" (Mason Jar: publisher only)
• Alvina Chamberland’s Love the World or Get Killed Trying: "a raw and vulnerable work of magical brutalist autofiction; abstract in the sense of poetically digging beneath the surface, and experimental in the sense of trying to find out new things and express them in new ways, while concretely asserting that if trans women one day collectively outed every man who seeks them out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall." (Noemi: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Erik Anderson’s Estranger: "the suppressed story of a grandfather's death on the south side of Chicago in 1984... a book that pushes against the limits of both everyday thought and literary form" (Rescue: Amazon; Asterism)
• New Mexico poet laureate Lauren Camp’s An Eye in Each Square: "social critique within an imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin and a treatise on the multiplicities of the natural world" (River River: Amazon)
• Jasmine Sawers’s 2023 PEN/America finalist The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore: "a hybrid folklore for liminal characters who live between the lines and within the creases of race and language, culture and gender, sexuality and ability" (Rose Metal: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Christina Lloyd’s Women Twice Removed: "The poems are prominently tethered to Lloyd's grandmother, Esperanza, whose name means "hope," and who journeyed from Spain to the Philippines and on to California. Life, it is said, begins with a stumble, and so here begins the life of these arresting poems, which delve into what Christina and her grandmother experienced along the way." (Sixteen Rivers: Amazon)
• Liz Countryman’s Green Island: "The work found in this slim volume questions the poetic tropes of beauty and romantic love and their relationships to the lyric." (Tupelo: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Ruth Dickey’s Our hollowness sings: "Ruth Dickey writes out of human brokenness, season after season of losing things, losing people, especially her mother, and yet finds a way to heal and tether herself to earth." (Unicorn: publisher only)

and

2. "The International Indie Publishing Houses Shaking Up the Book World" which lists: Blaft, Epigram Books, FIXI Novo, Tilted Axis Press, Tramp Press, Unbound, and Zubaan Books. They recommended these books, among others (descriptive quotes from the respective presses):

• José Daniel Alvior’s Seven Days in Tokyo: "Two strangers meet in Manhattan and spend a perfect night together. In Tokyo, they have seven days to see if that one night might mean something more." (Unbound: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Choo Yi Feng’s The Waiting Room: "In this debut fiction collection, these imagined worlds are set variously in plural Singapores, Southeast Asia and beyond, and illuminate the urgent need to connect even after death." (Epigram: Amazon)
• Jon Gresham’s Gus: The Life and Opinions of the Last Raffles’ Banded Langur: " In this action-packed eco-novel, wild talking monkeys lead a revolution in a troubled Singapore." (Epigram: Amazon)
• The Feminisms of Our Mothers, edited by Daanika Kamal: " In this remarkable collection of essays about their mothers, women from Pakistan explore the many meanings of feminism and its varying interpretations through generations." (Zubaan: Amazon)
• Shih-Li Kow’s The Sum of Our Follies: "The first [narrator] is Auyong, a retiree from the city who operates a lychee factory in Lubok Sayong. The other is eleven-year-old Mary Anne, an orphan who is taken in by an irascible woman in charge of the Big House." (FIXI Novo: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Kuzhali Manickavel’s Conversations Regarding the Fatalistic Outlook of the Common Man: "a collection of 40 dialogues that melds the classical philosophical tradition of Plato and Socrates with the anarchic freedom of a mid-1990s chat room" (Blaft: Amazon)
• Mike McCormack’s This Plague of Souls: "Released from jail, Nealon returns to the family home but finds himself alone in an empty house. No light or heat, no sign of his wife or child, it’s as though the world has forgotten that he ever existed. Except, that is, for a persistent caller, a man who seems to know everything about Nealon’s life, his trouble with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family." (Tramp: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Charlotte Riddell’s A Struggle for Fame: "After the death of her mother and the loss of her family’s fortune, it falls to young Glen Westley to do what she can for herself and her ailing father. Determined to make her own way in the world, she moves from the West of Ireland to London and works tirelessly to succeed as a novelist, despite the limitations her sex and nationality represent. Having struggled so long for fame, it is at last thrust upon her – but fame always comes at a price." A reprint of a Victorian-era novel. (Tramp: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn, translated by Nguyễn An Lý: "follows a Vietnamese expat’s return from Paris to Sài Gòn for her mother’s funeral. The mother’s death is an odd one—she fell down the elevator shaft in her son’s new home, which just so happens to be the first private elevator in all of Vietnam. More strange facts emerge and the daughter finds herself tracking down strangers and loose strands of family history, synthesizing the detective, the archivist, and the mourning daughter into one, fascinating role along the way." (Tilted Axis: Amazon; Bookshop)

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This week, Toronto Star recommended "25 books to read in 2025" including these small press titles:

• Curtis John McRae’s Quietly, Loving Everyone: "humans on the cusp of profound realizations, whether they are contending with critical medical diagnoses or witnessing neighbourhoods metamorphose into unrecognizable husks of their former selves." (Vehicule Press/Esplanade Books: Amazon.ca; IndieBookstores.ca)
• Joni Murphy’s Barbara: "Barbara, the daughter of a Manhattan Project engineer, is trying to survive the tragedy of her mother’s suicide; while she carries this trauma with her, it does not impede her rise to becoming one of the silver screen’s most prominent actors from the 1950s to the ‘70s." (Book*hug Press: Amazon.ca; Bookshop)
• Devouring Tomorrow, edited by A.G. Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis: "An anthology of speculative writing engaging with the subject of food scarcity" (Dundurn Press/Rare Machines: Amazon; Bookshop; IndieBookstores.ca)
• Reem Gaafar’s A Mouth Full of Salt: "The lives of three women questioning the value of tradition intersect at a time of impending civil war, and their journey takes them to haunted Sudanese farming villages as well as the metropolitan bustle of Khartoum." (Invisible Publishing/Saqi Books: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here: "In Ugandan-Canadian writer Tushabe’s new novel, Aine Kamara fears for her sister Mbabazi’s safety while living under Uganda’s draconian anti-homosexuality laws." (House of Anansi: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Caitlin Galway’s A Song for Wildcats: "In this collection of five novelettes by Toronto writer Galway, historical upheavals create profound intimacies between lost souls." (Dundurn Press/Rare Machines: Amazon; Bookshop)

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In the course of putting this together, these additional books also caught my eye:

• Etel Adnan’s Voyage, War, Exile: Three Essays: "Written between 1984 and 1995, this new edition collects three essays... that present a multilayered meditation on the author’s life within and without Beirut." (Litmus: Asterism)
• William E Burleson’s Ahnwee Days: "Life is not going as planned for Sybil Voss. Growing up in a small town on the Great Plains, she had one goal: to get out as soon as she could. She succeeded, moving to New York after college and building a reasonably happy life. But now she’s back, the sole caregiver for her elderly father who suffers from ‘media-induced psychosis’ and can only communicate through TV sitcoms." (Blackwater: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Lambda Literary fellow Nora Hikari’s poetry collection The Most Holy Day of the Transsexual Calendar (Game Over: buy from the publisher)
• Patrick Pritchett’s Make it Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism: "After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity." (Black Square: Asterism)
• Anton Solomonik’s Realistic Fiction: "FINALLY, A BOOK FOR MEN! Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like: Stealing porn magazines? Hooking up with guys on Grindr? Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience? Crossdressing as a woman? Attending Gnostic Mass? Running for government office? Then this is a book for you! It is definitely not a deeply felt collection of transsexual short stories, engaged in dissident metaphysical investigation of the normative tenets of gender in our society! Bro, how could you say that? It is very dramatic and exciting, yes, but it is not metaphysical at all." (Littlepuss: Amazon)
• Caitlin Starling’s The Oblivion Bride: "In the glittering city state of Volun, Lorelei Steddart never thought she'd be anything but an office drone—until her family all die under mysterious and likely magical circumstances, leaving her to inherit everything. To figure out what's happened, her uncle marries her off to the city state's top War Alchemist, Nephele Corisande, an intimidating older woman who might just be able to save her. But what starts as a marriage of pure convenience becomes something deeper. Soon Lorelei and Nephele must untangle a terrible magic that has metastasized into something new and unstable, born in Lorelei's blood." (Neon Hemlock Press: Amazon; Itaska)
• Anne Blanchard’s Rosa Luxemburg: No to Borders, trans. Rosie Eyre: "A fictionalized biography of the great Polish-German revolutionary and anti-war activist. The only book about Luxemburg for readers 12+." (Seven Stories Press: Amazon; Bookshop)
• Murielle Szac and Mercedes Gilliom’s Victor Hugo: No to the Death Penalty: "The first young adult book about the great writer and social justice activist plunges us into the heart of Victor Hugo's fierce fight against the death penalty." (Seven Stories Press: Amazon; Bookshop)

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Amazon and Bookshop links above will benefit MetaFilter.

Previous roundups on MetaFilter.

posted by joannemerriam (5 comments total)

so many books…
posted by Lemkin at 2:49 PM on January 8 [2 favorites]

every description I set eyes on is a book I'd like to read, or at least hold and peruse
posted by ginger.beef at 3:06 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

The Audacity in particular sounds like just the kind of book I would love. I may have to get my hands on a copy.
posted by SisterHavana at 8:00 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

"For the friend who is always quoting ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ while scrolling."

ow!

Also, wow.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:02 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

this is magnificent, thank you
posted by chavenet at 1:26 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]