We recently ran a powerful interview with Samira Ahmed about book bans, where she talked about how books shine a light on truth.
“Books and art allow us to be fully realized. Authoritarians want to oppress us. They want us to feel downtrodden. But art gives us hope.”
This is all the more compelling given the recent events surrounding the decimation of NEA grants which affect a broad swathe of the literary community, including some of our favorite presses and literary magazines. Fiction, essays, and poems give us hope. They sustain us.
Independent publishing is the heartbeat of contemporary literature. In these times—with the list of organizations affected increasing every day—the best way we can help is to donate as we can and continue to buy and read small press books. To get you started, we pulled together a list of a few titles we love that you can buy from their website today to help them continue their mission. And tell us which books you’ve been enjoying, too!
Alice James Books
Cold Thief Place
By Esther Lin
Alice James Books
Cold Thief Place speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems.
Aunt Lute Books
The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers
Volume One & Volume Two
Aunt Lute Books
Volume One of The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers includes over three hundred selections and spans three centuries of women’s writings in the U.S. From criminal confessions to politic pamphlets to fiction, plays, poetry, and memoirs, these pages are filled with words of women who embody the complex history of this nation.
The story of U.S. literature in the twentieth century is in many ways the story of the hard won emergence of women’s voices—all kinds of women’s voices—into print. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two is an unprecedented effort to capture, in all its scope and variety, the extraordinary results of that florescence.
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Come From
By janan alexandra
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Here is a collection that pulses with warmth and vitality, heralding the arrival of a fresh and vibrant voice on the poetry scene. Clear and concise, accessible and profound, janan alexandra’s debut poetry collection come from weaves from English to Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.
Part love song for the speaker’s mother and part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, and through language—feeling for its limits and possibilities. come from searches for what might be possible if we dislodge our practices of belonging, divest from nation and state, and instead turn deeply toward each other.
Center for Art of Translation (Two Lines Press)
Mending Bodies
By Hon Lai Chu
Translated by Jacqueline Leung
Two Lines Press
In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.
Coffee House Press
True Failure
By Alex Higley
Coffee House Press
Ben just lost his job, but he won’t fess up to his wife Tara. Instead, while he claims to be going to work, he’s actually devoting his time to auditioning for the wildly popular reality TV show Big Shot, where he’ll be able to pitch his unique entrepreneurial idea. Meanwhile, Tara is lying to the parents of the children at her day care, turning in fabricated accounts of the kids’ daily activities. And Marcy, the producer of Big Shot, has told her coworkers she’s taking some time to “unplug,” the better to avoid explaining her real reasons for getting away from the office . . .
Lies are the air True Failure‘s characters breathe: lies to themselves and lies to others, lies that comfort and confound. In this extraordinary novel, worthy of a place alongside the work of Joy Williams and Charles Portis, Alex Higley pokes a hole in the greatest and most perfidious lie of our time—that we are all either successes or failures in life—with warmth, wit, and wounding observation.
Four Way Books, Inc.
Red Wilderness
By Aaron Coleman
Four Way Books, Inc.
In defiance of life’s intractable march forward, Red Wilderness by Aaron Coleman (Winner of the 2020 GLCA New Writers Award) sounds the strange fathoms of the past, weaving a living song beyond what haunts our country and ourselves. Coleman’s second collection interpolates American history with his own family’s legacy, reflecting on national identity, Blackness, taboo, faith, and remembrance while enacting a multigenerational chorus of poems that stretches back to the Civil War. In present day, Coleman “[tries] a new way home / past the pawn shop neon-green with memory” and inspects bird bones in “tall, forgotten weeds” while “hard rain” turns his ground into “a gulch”—another place where “the end got here before us.” In the next poem, transported between storms, Coleman channels his ancestor, a soldier of the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry at sea during a downpour in March 1864: “I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave / now. I’m alive and not alone.” In these restorative lyrics, an end is an entrypoint to memory and reimagination, to something unending—a spiritual freedom, collective strength, and boundless love threading separate years into one strand. Red Wilderness visualizes an intimate, living archive that maps myths and realities of blood, boundaries, geography, and genealogy, and Coleman brilliantly curates the sound of time’s river wending across ancient land. “Hold and let fall water,” he instructs us. “If I / listen for my body living I hear who I am.”
Hub City Writers Project (Hub City Press)
World Without End: Essay on Apocalypse and After
By Martha Park
Hub City Press
When Martha Park’s father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes a world marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.
In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South. From man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina, from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Park chronicles the ways the faith in which she was raised now seems like an exception to the rule, exploring this divide with compassion and empathy. For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells, World Without End considers the ways religion shapes how we understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel us all to work to save the places we love.
Milkweed Editions, Inc.
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World
Edited and Introduced by Ada Limón
Milkweed Press
You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape—be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop—offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.
McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund
The Instructions: Bar Mitzvah Edition
By Adam Levin
McSweeney’s
Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and nine hundred pages later, with the Events of November 17, The Instructions is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Expelled from three Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.
n+1 Foundation Inc. (n+1 books)
City By City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis
Edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb
n+1
City by City is a collection of essays—historical, personal, often somewhere in between—about the present and future of American cities. It looks at the national rollback in industry that has caused the death of factory towns like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Reading, Pennsylvania. It also looks at the miniature engines of prosperity that have gentrified places like Brooklyn and Boise. In between are stories both telling and strange. Providence, Rhode Island, experiences a civic renaissance that disguises lingering corruption in its mobbed-up political system. The two hundred citizens of Whittier, Alaska, are approached about starring in a reality TV show. A would-be savior announces plans for the biggest mall in the world in Syracuse, New York. Meanwhile, racial profiling by the police haunts Cincinnati, Palm Coast, and Baltimore in advance of the protests that will go on to sweep the nation.
A cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Studs Terkel, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the Depression–era WPA guides to each state in the Union, City by City brings this tradition of American storytelling to the era of our own Great Recession.
Nightboat Books
I Hope This Helps
By Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books
I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our reality: time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I’m thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.
Open Letter Books
The Fake Muse
By Max Besora
Open Letter Books
Infused with the spirit of pulp fiction, b-movies, zines, and punk rock, The Fake Muse is a linguistic tour-de-force from the author of The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia.
The book opens by introducing us, one by one, to an array of troubled characters, each with their own typographical voice. There’s Johnny (an Aries) who turns into a vampire at a showing of Nosferatu, there’s Meritxell (a Leo) who falls in love with a giant mutant hamster-philosopher, Josep (Cancer) who is also known as the “King Kong of the Bronx,” and Amanda aka Maryjane (Scorpio) who has had it with the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of the…author, Max Besora (Aquarius), and who is ready to take whatever action necessary.
Red Hen Press, Inc.
Blood Wolf Moon
By Elise Paschen
Red Hen Press
In her riveting sixth poetry collection, Blood Wolf Moon, Elise Paschen explores the story lines of her Osage heritage. The core of the book grapples with a dark period of American history, “The Reign of Terror,” when outsiders murdered individual members of the Osage for their oil headrights. Paschen searches her cultural past and family history in poems about the land, ancestors, childhood, loss, nature, transformation, flight, and language. In this cinematic book, she builds drama in overlapping narratives, reinventing ways to approach the line on the page. Described by poet Timothy Donnelly as “one of today’s most formally astute poets,” Paschen opens Blood Wolf Moon with the long poem, “Heritage,” a bracelet of crown poems, then shifts registers to formal poems and prose sequences. Poet and editor Esther Belin calls the concluding poems with their use of Osage language, “significant leaps into literary sovereignty.” Blood Wolf Moon captivates with its emotional intensity and unrelenting quest for the translation of identity. It’s a book you can’t put down.
Transit Books
Little World
By Josephine Rowe
Transit Books
A strange and dazzling novel about the mysterious body of a child saint and the lives it touches across time.
Little World opens with the body of a child saint stranded in the Australian desert. Her name is unknown, as is the story of her life and the status of her canonization. She arrives in a box made of canoe timber, and Orrin Bird is dressed in his best clothes to receive her.
As the novel sweeps across time and place, from the 1950s to the present day, we encounter the lives the saint touches: from the retired engineer who unwittingly becomes her custodian, to a woman driving across the Nullarbor Plain in the mid-1970s with a pair of young lovers, and ending in contemporary Victoria.
We also want to share love and support for our many literary journal friends who are impacted, some of which are American Short Fiction, Bennington Review, River Styx, Oxford American, AGNI Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Electric Lit, The Paris Review, One Story, Mizna, and The Massachusetts Review.
Now is an excellent time to buy a book from one of these presses or subscribe to one of these journals. (You can even request your public library do so!) Sending love and solidarity to everyone who publishes, reads, and supports independent publishing.
