Solstice has come and gone, but in addition to the returning of the light, we can also herald another excellent small press publishing season. What I love about these titles is the richness of imagination and inquiry, leading to inventive plots in fiction and deep emotional honesty in non-fiction. There is such a striking contrast between how these amazing authors approach narrative, but what they all have in common is a true attention to craft and a dedication to the story.
Empire State Editions: Colorful Palate by Raj Tawney
Food is an anchor in this coming of age story which explores Tawney’s relationship with his family from childhood to adulthood. Interspersed with the recipes that were staples of growing up with Indian, Puerto Rican, and Italian heritages, the memoir always comes back to the kitchen. Even when teenage Raj is trying to be cool and throws a party so his band can perform, his mother and grandmother cook food from their respective cultures—and the party-goers love it, even though Raj was worried. Later, he bonds with an elderly woman over her grocery-store purchased rainbow cookies. When he actually finds some success as a musician, he’s sent off on tour with Arroz Negro. On the first date with the woman who becomes his wife, they have Korean hot pot, a food Raj has never before tried. This is a book that shows food as emotional, cultural, and sometimes just caloric sustenance—but always centers what it means to share these experiences with the people who make us who we are.
McSweeney’s: Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls
When a chapter of his forthcoming novel is excerpted in a popular Cairo-based magazine, what for many writers is a nice piece of pre-publication publicity becomes a nightmare for Ahmed Naji. After a trial with a dubiously reasoned verdict, Naji is sent to prison for “offending public morality” and eventually serves 10 months of a 2 year sentence in an Egyptian prison. Even against the backdrop of corrupt politics and the chilling consequences for artistic expression, this memoir focuses mostly on connection: the relationships he builds on the cellblock, the support he receives from family and friends, and his own continued engagement with his writing. While Cairo’s Tora prison is a dangerous and dirty place that retains the social hierarchies of the outside world, the inmates also care for one another. The light touch Naji takes with his narrative—he jokes, he earnestly recounts his dreams—buttresses the power of his account rather than diminishes it. He is, along with everyone else, trying to survive. A beautifully written account that also serves as a deep reminder of the importance of a free press.
Unnamed Press: Upcountry by Chin-Sun Lee
In Caliban, a small town in the Catskills, worlds collide. Claire and her husband Sebastian are Manhattan transplants, April and her children are locals, and pregnant Anna is a member of a strict religious order that supports themselves through carpentry and running café. The women see themselves as very different from one another, but they are linked by circumstance, by geography, and by the ways that every person in a small town is only one degree of separation from another. It is the local, April, who forms an uneasy alliance with Anna, after she is shunned; and it is April who finds a kind of tentative truce with Claire, who has purchased her family home after April can no longer afford it. Throughout the novel, there is class anxiety, tension around race and religion, but it ultimately is a novel about women trying to find their way. With Upcountry, Chin-Sun Lee establishes herself as a writer to watch.
Ig Publishing: Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed: Notes From Periracial America by Kim McLarin
In this incredible collection of essays, Kim McLarin details everything from earning her motorcycle license at age fifty, to getting a gun permit as violent white nationalism escalates. In many scenarios, she is the only Black person in the room. She also writes of her divorce, of the passing of her dog, and the rejection of travel as a luxury—positing that it is a necessity for people, whether going across town or across the world. Deftly, she both in no uncertain terms underscores how the fight for racial justice is imperative and writes compellingly about hosting dinner parties. The title is after the seminal Lucille Clifton poem won’t you celebrate with me and the book is laced with the legacy of other influential Black writers, in particular Baldwin. The real power of Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me And Has Failed is the concise clarity of McLarin’s voice. She is a writer who knows not just what she wants to say, but exactly how and why to say it. Every single page of this book is necessary and should be required reading.
Two Dollar Radio: Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims
In this collection of a dozen stories, ekphrastic flash fiction is interspersed with longer narratives where the characters find themselves in eerie and unnerving situations. A private detective takes a case that leads him to a nearly abandoned seaside hotel where he and the subject of in investigation are the only guests, but never physically see one another; a locavore tries to kill his chickens humanely, but instead engages in cruelty; a man loans his phone to a woman he does not know, only to receive a series of increasingly alarming messages from an unknown number. There is a deep current of paranoia in these stories, and it’s often like a rip tide. In Other Minds, things usually start off with reasonable calm, until an unseen—or unforeseen—event pulls a character under. Richly imagined and skillfully executed.
Haunted Doll House: Barely Half in an Awkward Line by Jay Halsey
In this mixed-media, multi-genre work, the author’s compelling and austere photographs are interspersed with deeply emotionally prose and verse. In a work that does not have a clear categorization, there is a clear thread that runs through it: the world is a hard and sometimes unforgiving place, full of addiction and poverty and violence, despite some moments of mercy. A young man of color confronts his racist step-father, another man is razzed by his friends for living in a shelter. A boy who is young enough to have a He-Man action figure is taken to a sex worker’s house by his biological father. What Halsey captures in a starkly effective way, through both the images and the writing, is the sometimes tiny space between being almost okay and everything falling apart, and the deeply complicated ways that blood and found family love one another. A stunningly original book that defies genre.
Braddock Avenue Books: Heading North by Holly M. Wendt
Viktor Myrnikov wants nothing more than to play in the National Hockey League. In his native Russia, he’s skating at the top of his game—and he’s falling in love. Yet, in a sport that both in the novel and in real life has no openly gay players, Viktor knows that if anyone finds out about him and Nikolai, it could threaten more than just their ice time. When a catastrophic plane crash kills the entire team that Viktor has just been traded from, Nikolai is among the dead, and Viktor is devastated and guilt ridden: he should have been on that plane. Later, playing in San Francisco, a world of LGBTQ acceptance is illuminated for Viktor, and he can’t share it with Nikolai. He also can’t escape Nikolai’s family, who are powerful in the ecosystem of hockey. Viktor has long accepted himself, but will his teammates and the league do the same? A thoughtful debut with a complex and satisfying plot.
Clash Books: All Things Edible, Random & Odd: Essays on Grief, Love & Food by Sheila Squillante
This collection of short essays form a strong narrative arc of the reckoning Sheila Squillante has with the loss of her father, a divorce, an ill child. However, while there are challenging experiences and a full spectrum of grief, it is largely a reclamation. In an essay that stands out for braiding many of the themes of the book together, Mother-Out-Law, she tells of visiting her former-mother in law with her new husband, the anxiety about her ex-husband being at the Thanksgiving table, and to top it all off Squillante is newly pregnant and her ex publicly demonstrates he’s found Jesus in an unusual way. Food is central—whether that is exploring what it means to claim the title of “foodie”, giving up dairy for medical reasons, trying new flavors, cooking as care—and offers a tangible, sensory grounding in a collection that often explores unreconciled feelings. All Things Edible is as clear-eyed as it is poetic and impressionistic.
Black Lawrence Press: Dressing the Saints by Aracelis González Asendorf
A collection of linked stories, Dressing the Saints tells of the Cuban exile diaspora living in Florida. In many of the stories, the characters are well beyond middle age. The plots are refreshing in the exploration of not only the history of counter-revolutionary Cubans, but also the vibrant lives of women in assisted living, the sex appeal of both long marriages or relationships that come later in life, and the way in which aging and all of the loss—and wisdom—that may come with it can either open up the heart or clamp it down tight. As families handle past traumas and recent ones, and as social norms change, the characters in Dressing the Saints embody the complexity of what it means to exist in a changing world. Asendorf gorgeously offers a lament for what is lost, and a hope for what is to come.
Tin House: Nonfiction by Julie Myerson
The speaker of Nonfiction—a novel—is a writer who watches her daughter slip into addiction. She and her husband work to navigate the complicated terrain of wanting to help their only child, but also not enable her. None of the characters have names, but names aren’t needed: readers already know the disapproving mother, the old flame who is heady in one moment and non-committal in the next, the husband who can’t take it anymore, the daughter who is bent on destroying herself, and the woman who is trying to tie all of the threads of her life together. There are no answers in Nonfiction. The situations are bleak at best and the outcomes inevitably disastrous. Yet in this beautifully written book, Myserson speaks to the most unspeakable pains, addressing terrifying grief and deep regret. A masterful novel.
Rare Bird Books: The Dirt in Our Skin by J.J. Anselmi
Ryan and Jason are best friends and dedicated BMX bikers. As high schoolers, they spend hours hand digging complicated tracks and building jumps, and they are both skilled enough riders to start getting some attention outside of their small Connecticut town. Yet, as high school ends, they find themselves on different paths—and trying to navigate their friendship. Written like non-fiction, with journal entries and photographs, The Dirt in Our Skin is a novel about young men figuring out what it means to love, and how to express it. There are intense parties and sexual dynamics in the BMX scene, and both Ryan and Jason have to figure out their relationship to the culture of the sport they love, and understand their relationship to one another. This voice-driven novel lands big leaps and twisting curves with the same skill and execution of the riders Ryan and Jason admire.
West Virginia University Press: Roxy and Coco by Terese Svoboda
Roxy and Coco are sisters and harpies—mythical bird-women who appear in both Greek and Roman mythology—living in contemporary America and working for Child Protective Services. Over centuries, even though they can still fly at supersonic speeds, they’ve learned to blend in with humans. In their exceptionally long lives, both have become dedicated to guarding children. Yet, when Roxy becomes enamored with their new supervisor at the agency, Coco is suspicious. At the same time, Interpol is investigating Coco for a series of murders that have one strange thing in common: predators of children who seem to have fallen to their deaths from great heights, even when there is no structure nearby. Roxy and Coco is trademark Svoboda, where outsiders are the stars. As action-packed as the novel is, at the core is the deep love for a sibling, and in this case the love has grown for a millennium. A dazzling story that is compulsively readable and deeply relatable.
Black Rose Writing: The Last Bird of Paradise by Clifford Garstang
Aislinn Givens has worked hard to get on the partner track at a NYC law firm. Her husband, Liam, has his own lucrative job in finance. On the surface, Aislinn and Liam are a classic Manhattan power couple. Yet, when Liam accepts a position in Singapore—without consulting Aislinn—the first of many fissures surface. Their union started from an affair, so Aislinn knows her husband can be deceptive, just as she can be. Yet, when they move to Southeast Asia, the cracks widen. Aislinn becomes obsessed with a British colonial-era painter who lived in Singapore nearly a century earlier, and with the shopkeeper who has sold her some of the paintings. Though she does not know it, the painter has lived a parallel life to Aislinn’s, and though many decades separate them, the grip of powerful men has not loosened. The Last Bird of Paradise asks what we will sacrifice for power, for money, and, most importantly, for love.
Moonstruck Books: The Rain Artist by Claire Rudy Foster
In a not-so-distant future, Celine, Yochanna, and Paul are an unlikely trio. Celine is the last umbrella maker in a world so ravaged by climate change that rain is a manufactured luxury enjoyed only by the upper class; Yochanna is an office worker saddled with such debilitating student debt she is forced to steal; and Paul is an ex-convict who was sentenced for a brutal crime and now runs flower shop as a front. Yet, what the three have in common is living under the regime of the ultra-rich, with no visible future. When Celine is ensnared in a murder plot, Paul and Yochanna are her allies. They make their way through a constantly surveilled, crumbling, and chemically poisoned New York City, only to have another dangerous encounter in the underworld. C. R. Foster’s The Rain Artist is strikingly written and artfully imagined with characters who are beautifully flawed. There is no other book this season that makes speculative horror feel so close to our everyday lives. Unforgettable.
Santa Fe Writers Project: Horse Show by Jess Bowers
The voices of carnival barkers, old time radio, early Hollywood, and 1970s-era television meet literary fiction in this equine-inspired collection from debut author Jess Bowers. An old mare drowns in a homemade country swimming pool, a young one dies on a film set when a director does not have enough imagination to get his shot without catapulting her into a reservoir. A woman rides a mechanical horse, a poet says goodbye to his saddle mule. Each story is punctuated by vivid imagery and a unique voice, and in the final story, an abandoned gelding is a harbinger of doom for a young couple’s marriage. Horse Show has a sweeping, cinematic quality to it, and a thematic cohesion that tightly ties the stories together. A distinctive accomplishment.