A huge focus of mine is to try to search people out who have a different point of view than what we’re hearing from everybody else,” says Street Noise Books publisher Liz Frances, echoing a sentiment shared by many indie publishers. PW spoke with more than a dozen presses across the independent landscape about their most anticipated fall titles, which they hope can cut through the noise of the election season. From ambitious translation projects to witty and incisive takes on social issues, indies continue to seek out distinctive works that might be overlooked or undervalued by other publishers.
On the ballot
As the presidential election approaches, independent presses face a choice of their own: whether to “publish into the political moment,” as City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger puts it, or embrace less explicitly political or more escapist fare. Publishing during a highly contested election cycle is difficult when “the majority of the population is glued to the politics of the time,” admits Melville House editor-in-chief Carl Bromley, but Melville and other indies are nevertheless set to release a season’s worth of vital works worthy of readers’ attention.
Prometheus has two particularly timely books for the political moment, Distorting Democracy: The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today by Carolyn Renée Dupont (Sept.), and End of Immunity: Holding World Leaders Accountable for Aggression, Genocide, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity by Chile Eboe-Osuji (Oct.). Senior acquisitions editor Jake Bonar says the Rowman & Littlefield imprint is also well positioned to meet continued demand for true crime, with its entertaining histories alongside “heavy duty” technical books by criminologists. Forthcoming in December is The Cold Case Foundation: How a Team of Experts Solves Murders and Missing Persons Cases by the eponymous organization’s founder, Gregory M. Cooper, and journalist Thomas McHoes.
City Lights, the storied San Francisco progressive press, has a fall list that engages with critical social issues, but is not necessarily geared toward electoral politics. The Afterlife Is Letting Go (Dec.) is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award–winning The Grave on the Wall. “Its masterful how he’s able to synthesize so much history and trauma and keep it so immediate,” says Katzenberger.
Bottoms up
Melville House’s big fall title is The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit by Evan Rail (Oct.), which chronicles how, after various European countries banned the hallucinogenic liquor in the early 20th century, a black market arose for existing bottles. Bromley says the book is not only a fascinating cultural history but also an exploration of nostalgia and obsession. He also highlights The Italy Letters (Aug.), a queer love story set in Las Vegas by Vi Khi Nao, as an example of “the shortish, transgressive fiction” Melville is known for.
If absinthe’s licorice flavor is not to one’s liking, perhaps Malört, the Chicago liqueur staple of Swedish origin, will go down easier. Or not—its taste has been likened to burning rubber and old socks. Chicago Review Press senior editor Jerome Pohlen describes Josh Noel’s book about the distinctive concoction, Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit (Sept.), as “a business story about the little liqueur that could and the love story underlying it all.” Pohlen adds that it’s the kind of project “larger houses might not take on for being primarily regional or too quirky.” That’s fine with publisher Cynthia Sherry, who notes, “We’ve sold over a million copies of books like Outwitting Squirrels.” Also appearing from Chicago Review is Michael G. Lee’s When the Band Played On (Oct.), a biography of Randy Shilts, the first out reporter assigned to a gay beat at a mainstream U.S. newspaper and a biographer of Harvey Milk, the assassinated San Francisco city supervisor.
Indies abroad
Translations and internationally themed books abound on fall indie lists. Three years ago, Europa editor-in-chief Michael Reynolds had a conversation with Europa author and Booker winner Damon Galgut. “Galgut basically said, listen, there’s been a terrible mistake,” Reynolds recalls. “I’m not the best South African.” That, according to Galgut, would be S.J. Naudé, whose novel Fathers and Fugitives (Sept.) will be Europa’s first translation from the Afrikaans. It centers on a Londoner who returns to South Africa to care for his ailing father, who has left an odd stipulation in his will.
Reynolds says that while Europa’s brand of character-driven noirs has fared less well recently as readers have turned to cozy mysteries, the press is having success with a broader range of titles than in the past. “All of a sudden we have not one author like Jane Gardam or Elena Ferrante but three or four a year that have been firing on all cylinders.”
From classic cozies to contemporary noirs, Pushkin Vertigo has a diverse list of international mysteries. After working with Nilanjana Roy on The Wildlings, her YA novel about the feral cats of Delhi, Pushkin senior commissioning editor Daniel Seton snapped up Roy’s murder mystery, Black River (Sept.), the story of an Indian village shaken by a brutal crime. Seton says the novel “shines a spotlight on religious intolerance in modern India.”
Pushkin has had success reissuing British golden age detective fiction and translations of classic Japanese mysteries, and September’s The Little Sparrow Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, translated from the Japanese by Bryan Karetnyk, promises to continue that winning streak.
Soft Skull Press is also bringing out an intriguing Japanese translation in September, Hiromi Kawakami’s speculative novel Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda, which is considered by many to be the author’s masterpiece. On the nonfiction side, Soft Skull is set to publish Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality (Oct.), which explores, in the words of editor-in-chief Mensah Demary, how moral or cultural debates about fiction “are always about something else,” namely, political or social groups seeking to gain or hold onto power.
New Directions, no stranger to translations, is trying something new this fall. “I always said we’d never do a septology,” says president and publisher Barbara Epler. Never say never, as November will see the indie publish the first two installments of Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel, On the Calculation of Volume, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, which Epler acquired shortly before Balle won the 2022 Nordic Council Literature Prize. As the septology opens, a woman is stuck in a time loop, reliving November 18 over and over again as she considers her predicament in minute and engrossing detail. After publishing several books earlier in her career, Balle moved to a remote Danish island, where for the past two decades she has been self-publishing the septology, five volumes of which have appeared in Denmark. Also on New Directions’ fall slate is Herscht 07769 (Sept.), a monumental work of fiction from Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.
Brooklyn-based Street Noise Books is expanding its diverse illustrated list with Jon Macy’s graphic biography Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes (Oct.). Publisher Liz Frances says Macy’s “commitment and passion and obsession” for the author of Nightwood was contagious. Other forthcoming titles include Hanna Harms’s Milk Without Honey (Sept.), a paean to bees and a warning about their disappearance, and Toxic Tropics: A Horror Story of Environmental Injustice (Nov.) by Jessica Oublié, with art by Nicola Gobbi, about the devastating effects of the pesticide chlordecone in the French Antilles. Frances compares the latter to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, “if it were written by a Black woman from the Caribbean.”
Rounding out the season’s international offerings is Canadian press ECW’s Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall (Sept.), a critical study of the singer and poet by French academic Christophe Lebold. “The book has a European sensibility about Leonard, not a Canadian or an American one,” explains ECW copublisher Jack David, who learned about the title, which had been published by a small French press, from Cohen biographer Michael Posner and was immediately hooked upon reading a section about the song “Famous Blue Raincoat.”
Social work
Quirk Books president and publisher Jhanteigh Kupihea describes the Philadelphia press’s titles as having “a candy coating around a social justice center.” She points to The Unmothers by poet Leslie J. Anderson (Aug.), a horror novel about a reporter investigating rumors of a bizarre birth, as being “incredibly timely in the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade.” Kupihea adds that Anderson’s debut is especially exciting because, despite being a “company of women, the horror list hasn’t historically reflected that.” Also slated for a fall release is Clay McLeod Chapman’s Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (Jan.), an allegorical tale about the growing political divide in the information age.
Under its Hillman Grad imprint, Zando Projects will publish artist and writer Johanna Hedva’s searing, socially engaged essay collection, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom (Sept.). “This is not illness or ableism as you’ve been told to expect to consume it,” says editor Caolinn Douglas, explaining that the book is a radical indictment of capitalism and “the idea that needing care is weak, to be in pain is bad, and to be disabled is to be deficient.” Among other topics, Hedva, a self-proclaimed witch, identifies and explores various cultural archetypes such as the “Psychotic Woman” or “Hag in Charge.”
Noting that Zando is now in its fourth year, Douglas says that last year’s “incredibly quick and phenomenally successful” launch of a romance imprint, Slowburn, proves the publisher is doing what it set out to do as a small and independent press: “see trends and be agile and roll books out accordingly.”
It’s not all smooth sailing for indies, however. Black Lawrence Press was one of the publishers impacted by the sudden shuttering of Small Press Distribution in March. Apart from the financial blow, SPD’s collapse also interfered with the May release of a timely essay anthology: Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You’ve Been Told About Black Women, edited by Jan Boulware et al. “This is an important book,” says executive editor Diane Goettel, “especially now that we have a Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket.” Back up and running with a new distributor, Black Lawrence is coming out this fall with a book-length prose poem about humanity’s origins and future, Geoff Bouvier’s Us from Nothing (Sept.), which Goettel describes as a poetic version of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Voices new and old
“We want to champion older writers as well as younger ones,” says Hub City Press executive director and publisher Meg Reid, “because the publishing industry is really driven toward youth and newness.” An example from the South Carolina–based house’s fall list is Beautiful Dreamers (Aug.), the fourth novel by Minrose Gwin, who is in her 70s. The book, which centers on a mother living with her gay friend and daughter in 1950s Mississippi, is part of the press’s Cold Mountain Fund series supported by novelist Charles Frazier.
Hub City is also publishing a formally inventive collection, Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire (Sept.), and Little Ones (Oct.), Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s surrealist collection of Appalachian-flavored “fiction and graphic ephemera.” Reid wants readers to start expecting more formally daring or experimental books from Hub City. “There’s no one else in the Southern sphere that’s really doing that kind of stuff,” she says.
Dzanc Books prides itself on being an adventurous press. In September, the Michigan indie will publish Afabwaje Kurian’s promising debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens, which depicts tensions between locals and white missionaries in 1970s Nigeria. “We got so lucky to have so many beautiful books in the same season,” says Dzanc publisher and editor-in-chief Michelle Dotter, highlighting that the fall list also features First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Sept.), a flash fiction collection from Meg Pokrass.
Best of times, worst of times
Taking a broader view of the publishing landscape, Dotter notes that pandemic era readerly demand has leveled off partly because “avenues for marketing books are continuing to narrow.” On the plus side, she says that authors now “are coming to us with a good sense of who their audience is.”
Europa’s Reynolds sees an opportunity for independents as some corporate houses are “for reasons that are hard to understand, pulling back from good work.” But he notes that less established, smaller presses face significant challenges as production and distribution costs rise. “It’s a best of times, worst of times situation for independent publishing right now.”
Indies, however, are no strangers to these pressures. As Soft Skull’s Demary puts it, “We just have to remain consistent in what we do and handle the rest as best as we can.”
Read more from our Big Indie Books of Fall feature:
The Past Is Never Dead: PW talks with Brandon Shimoda
Imagination Takes Flight: Indie Books for Young Readers
