This summer, find comfort in the power of chosen family and friendship, laugh at the absurdities of the patriarchy, and weep at a story of heartbreak and redemption. Themes often present in literature—and in life—like the search for belonging and reconciliation, the fight against oppression, healing from trauma, and grieving the past and lost loves are everywhere this season.
Here are 15 small press books for your summer reading list:
Tin House: Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy
In this story centered on the split of Hispaniola that divided Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two friends are cleaved and torn apart. Sisi and Gertie have a special closeness as girls, until a formerly obscured family connection takes them away from each other. A political upheaval ripples through the Haitian government under the dictatorship of Francois Duvalier, forcing them to leave their homes. Sisi flees to France, and Gertie is married off to a man from a wealthy Dominican family. Yet, despite their class differences and different paths, they reconnect in the US. This is a story of two girls who become women and must address a turbulent past that neither chose, but both have agency in reconciling. In Village Weavers, there are formidable political actors and influential families, but nothing is as strong as the bond of a best friend.
Dzanc Books: The Sentence by Matthew Baker
In this dystopian novel world which runs parallel to the contemporary United States, Riley—a grammar professor—is noticed by the new military regime, unfortunately for him. Riley flees. As an academic and word-nerd, Riley is not, on the surface, suited to living in the forest among sympathizing anarchists; but in this space, Riley finds community. The Sentence is both a reference to Riley’s presumed death sentence under the regime, and to the structure of Baker’s novel: it is single sentence, diagramed, with offshoots to tell of paths taken and those not, fears realized, bullets dodged. Billed as a graphic novel, The Sentence is more a work of linguistic precision with a visual element. Baker goes beyond an exercise in experimentation to deliver an impactful narrative that successfully pushes the limits of form.
Clash Books: How to Get Along Without Me by Kate Axelrod
A woman takes up a flirtation with a dermatologist treating her for genital warts; women scan and swipe the dating aps looking for sex or relationships, but also because it’s part of the zeitgeist; roommates find they have more emotional intimacy with one another than would ever be possible with their dates. How to Get Along Without Me is a thoroughly modern post-Obama-era, post-pandemic collection of loosely linked short-stories that does not just cut open the souls of millennials living in the 2020s, but rather filets it for display as if for an Instagram story. Axelrod captures what it is like to live in New York City, working jobs in public service and publishing, dating people who don’t want to commit, and reckoning with mortality of family. An absorbing and engaging collection that’s unmissable.
Press 53: The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
A mother and her son are afflicted by lycanthropy from which he recovers but she does not, a daughter gives her dementia-stricken mother a therapy doll that is eventually dismembered, and a sister stages a desperate intervention with her brother while trying to manage her career in deceased pet portraiture. In this collection, Shannon Robinson juxtaposes the mundane with the fantastical, the heartfelt with the heartbreaking, and ties the dozen stories together with a deep sense of longing. Most of the people in her stories are actually trying to be better friends, siblings, coworkers, spouses; and many of these same people are experts at failing. Robinson writes with such stunning emotional clarity and attention to our inner lives that her stories, even in harsh situations, take on a tender quality.
Forest Avenue Press: The Queen of Steeplechase Park by David Ciminello
The Queen of Steeplechase follows Bella as she comes of age in an Italian-American household with an overbearing father who abuses his authority and a mother bed-ridden with depression. When Bella becomes pregnant at 15, her baby is taken by nuns and she sets off on a journey to find her son. This raucous tale takes readers to Coney Island for a strip-tease and into the homes of Depression-era wiseguys. The characters are outcasts who have been judged and deemed unworthy by society. But Bella refuses to be cast aside, instead she finds her chosen family—and at every turn, she cooks with a spiritual dedication. Yet, she finally has to face a conundrum that not even her famous meatballs can fix. The Queen of Steeplechase Park is a novel that puts its faith in people believing in themselves, and the result is a joyful read.
Anti-Oedipus Press: Nervosities by John Madera
A young woman who can’t swim is tossed into a lake during a girl’s trip, a teacher is beat down and has to teach “The So-So Gatsby” yet again, and a woman finds an origami lily in her mailbox as she grieves her husband so deeply that his name is only blank space on paper—he is so gone, he has not even a name. While Madera’s prose has a technical quality to it in the sense that each sentence feels highly considered, it is not at the expense of evocative feelings and rich characterization. Nervosities explores the boundaries of the short story in a way that nods to intellectualism but cares more about the heart. Unique and surprising.
BOA Editions: Exile in Guyville by Amy Lee Lillard
In this collection of stories eponymous with the 1993 album from Liz Phair, middle-aged women form a Riot Grrrl cult worshiping punk feminism and Sirens of the Greek mythology, a living display of women from different points in history are on exhibit at a museum, and an app that comes with an implant and purports to help people live their best lives is actually a coercive force for toxic beauty standards. Lillard harnesses female rage, technological anxiety, and fears about dystopian futures to deliver a breathtaking book where characters reclaim their power, reject algorithms, and run towards freedom.
Catapult Books: Accordion Eulogies by Noé Álvarez
Part family story and part music history, the thread that runs through this memoir is Álvarez’s unwavering interest in how place impacts us. Whether the places we live, the places we left, the places we come from, and the places we might visit or places that might hold a key to unlock a door to yet another place; his exploration of how geography is more than lines on a map is potent and gripping. Through meeting with accordion makers, players, and traveling with and learning an accordion of his own, he gets closer to his own origin story, which includes an accordion-playing grandfather with a mysterious past. Álvarez seems to write with no agenda other than understanding. This memoir emerges as a thoughtful and empathetic answer to questions about where we come from—and how it’s shaped us.
SFWP: Splice of Life by Charles Jensen
Charles Jensen braids essays intersecting his experiences growing up gay with intelligent analysis of iconic movies. Splice of Life examines how popular culture becomes deeply imbued in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. Here, the movie Mean Girls intersects with the British feminist film critic Laura Mulvey, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure collides with Fatal Attraction. Midwestern Jensen becomes the unlikely prom king, and goes off to college—and has his own on-screen experiences, in a commercial and for Jeopardy. Yet, at its core, Splice of Life, is not about film nor public intellectuals: it is the story of Jensen becoming a man.
West Virginia University Press: How to Make Your Mother Cry by Sejal Shah
In this collection, young women search for connection at bars and with their roommates, a Gujarati adolescent in America cannot forgive her mother for an embarrassing linguistic mix up, a girl writes love letters to her 7th grade teacher, and a child drinks only orange juice until her body is razor thin. How to Make Your Mother Cry is a study in growing up. Trying to make it in New York, or just trying to make it through the day, Shah’s characters negotiate the diaspora and immigrant parents, but the center of the book is the feeling of longing. There is an auto-fiction element and more than a nod to feminist texts, but ultimately these stories shine brightly and stand on their own—just as the heroines of each story are trying to do.
Seven Stories Press: Breaking the Curse by Alex DiFrancesco
In this memoir about trauma and reckoning, Alex DiFrancesco uses tarot, Italian witchcraft, Catholic saints, Buddhism, and sobriety to free themselves from a cycle of self-destructive behavior that is the result of complex PTSD, sexual assault, and constant exposure to transphobia. As much as readers ache for DiFrancesco in the depth of addiction or in scary situations, there is a clear transformation taking place in the book. The reader is called to witness DiFrancesco’s very public confrontation and legal battle against a man who raped them—but the book transcends this act of violence. Breaking the Curse is ultimately a story of healing, and it is both a gift and a guide to anyone searching to reclaim their own power.
WTAW Press: Life Span by Molly Giles
This flash memoir is a retrospective on the author’s life, beginning in 1945 when she was three and proceeding through 2023 when she is nearing eighty, and the sections begin to zoom through months, which feels similar to how the past often seems to unfold slowly and the present whizzes by. With acerbic wit, Giles keenly captures the absurdity of our expectations of one another, of the patterns we repeat—three of her very serious relationships are with spendthrifts, for example—and the paths we choose to travel over and over again. In Giles’ case, that road is the Golden Gate Bridge, as she crosses the San Francisco Bay and the country. Writers will find her descriptions of floundering in manuscript pages relatable, but Giles offers a stubborn charm to any reader of thoughtful essays.
Tin House: Fire Exit by Morgan Talty
Charles Lamosway has been carrying a secret for over two decades: he, a white man, is the biological father of Elizabeth, a Penobscot Reservation member. Her home, just across the river, is visible from his porch. Charles himself was raised on the Reservation side of the river by his white mother and his Native stepfather. Now, with his mother slipping into dementia and his stepfather lost in a tragic hunting accident, he longs to tell Elizabeth the truth about her origins. More than anything, he is trying to hold on to what is left of his family, and the split between on- and off- reservation is like two halves of Charles’ broken heart. Fire Exit is a tender and riveting novel of what it means to belong.
Dzanc Books: Zan by Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh
An young Iranian student in America must decide if coming out as a lesbian to her father is worth it; a teen finds a connection to her grandmother who was a decorated swimmer before the post-revolutionary restrictions banned women from nearly all aspects of public life; two American sisters visit Tehran and laugh at their interactions with the morality police while their mother is wrecked with fear. These stories, set in Iran and the United States, are a tribute to women defiantly fighting against the patriarchy and gendered oppression. Zan explores the nuance of the cultural divide as Iranian immigrants or the children of immigrants lose (or never quite learn) Farsi; and, while many of the stories are specific to the overthrow of the Shah and installment of Ayatollah Komeni in 1979, all are still resonant to today’s society.
Restless Books: Between This World and The Next by Praveen Herat
Joseph was a war-time journalist with an adventurous life that earned him the moniker of “Fearless.” Yet, for all of his accolades, his personal life is in turmoil: his mother is in the grips of dementia, and his pregnant wife died in an accident. In search of closure and healing, he travels to Cambodia, the country where his father was murdered. There, through a connection with an old friend, he encounters Song, a woman who has her own gut-wrenching circumstances. Things turn dangerous quickly, and Joseph begins to understand how much distance the camera lens had put between him and the reality of tragic events, and the novel finds him swept into a world of sex trafficking, arms dealers, and globe-trotting criminals. Between This World and The Next is a page-turning literary thriller that you won’t be able to put down.