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So, You Want to Write a Novel

I understand—I wanted to write one, too. Every fiction writer (and many poets) would like to publish a novel. It’s one thing to publish stories and/or poetry in small literary magazines. It’s quite another to have a novel, with your name on the spine, sitting proudly on your shelf.

Books and more books. — Image: isbndb.com.

My first novel was drafted during the late, great NoNoWriMo, way back in 2016, immediately after Trump was elected for the first time. (The two events are not unrelated.) Many, many rewrites and workshops followed.

Then, last month, that novel was accepted for publication. I’ll tell you more about that in a future post. For now, I’d like to address the process of writing for book publication. With luck, this post and the ones that follow will be of some help to my fellow writers.

I’ll begin with a disclaimer: this is a very fraught time to try to publish a novel, especially if it’s your first book.

Presumably, if you’re working on a book and would like to be published, you have a least a rough overview of what’s involved. The problem is, that overview is constantly changing. Several changes, most of them harmful to your prospects, have already occurred in recent years. And even more changes, potentially more disastrous still, loom on the horizon.

Want an exceedingly bleak view of the prospective obstacles to your book? Then head over to the Substack newsletter of one Michael O. Church (”72 Degrees North”), who takes a grim view of traditional publishing indeed. One of his top bugbears is trad publishing’s agent system, in which you must sent a pitch letter and five pages of your 250-page manuscript to someone you hope will represent you and your work to the Big Five publishers. Fat chance, Church says. The odds are excellent that your five pages will not even be read, and you will be fortunate to receive a two-or three-line form letter rejection, if you receive any response at all.

Why must you go through this? Because Big Five publishers will not accept direct submissions from writers. Agents represent the publishers’ farm teams, whose job it is to find publishable work (not good work, necessarily) so publishers needn’t dirty their hands in the slush pile. The problem with this system is that they very seldom choose said work from writers’ submissions. (I can confirm this myself—the agent-publisher arrangement is a conspicuously unresponsive and inefficient system.)

Instead, agents mostly choose work that has been recommended to them—chiefly by MFA instructors and friends they may have in the large publishing houses. As a novel workshop leader (two midlist titles at Random House) said to me not long ago, “no matter how talented you are, you’re not going anywhere without connections.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

There are always exceptions, of course. And there are some worthwhile agents out there, difficult though they may be to find. Sometimes one of these agents will come across a breakthrough manuscript from a really talented new writer, then help shepherd the writer and the manuscript through the publishing process. This remains the ideal.

In addition, Michael O. Church undermines many of his legitimate observations about publishing by sometimes proselytizing for self-publishing, a complete different (and inferior, I would argue, despite the bleak facts of trad publishing outlined above) process altogether.

The paradigm is this: you are a talented writer (maybe even a genius!) but you can’t break through traditional publishing’s gatekeepers (agents and recent grads hired to skim the slush pile). So you decide to do it all yourself: you write a brilliant book, edit it, design a cover for it, collect some blurbs, then pay* to have your book published under your own imprint. And voila—your book is recognized for the masterpiece it is, it generates tremendous word of mouth and growing sales, and is then picked up by a trad publisher (and made into a prize-winning film as well!).

You do realize it does not work that way.

Thankfully, I believe, self-publishing still carries a stigma. And it should: most of it is just not very good. What’s more, I’d argue that the whole self-publishing phenomenon has been damaging to publishing overall: it has flooded the market with poorly written books, and it has probably led to a lowering of standards everywhere.

There has to be a better way, right? There is, and we’ll take a look at it in the next couple of posts.

* Your cost will vary, but can easily spin into five figures.

Ali Smith vs. the Authoritarians

A few notes on the Gliff series.

Ali Smith is a wonder. The Scottish writer (currently based in Cambridge, England) is one of the most prolific novelists working today, and she is almost certainly the most timely in terms of her political depictions. Her recent Seasonal Quartet of novels addressed the world’s growing political dysfunction in near real time. Now she’s given us the two-volume Gliff series (Gliff last year and, on May 19 in the U.S., its follow-up, Glyph). Since the novels are thematically related we’ll address them both in this review.

Let’s begin with the word “Gliff” itself—of Scottish origin, and most commonly defined as meaning a transient glance, especially of something that startles or frightens. The word is thematically apt, and it also fits with Smith’s playfulness as a writer: a mere glimpse of something fraught, followed by something more concrete with “Glyph,” a hieroglyphic character or symbol or a pictograph. The second word is the more concrete of the two, referencing something specific. Likewise with the two novels: Gliff describes a vague, near-term dystopia but Glyph references the ongoing, catastrophic genocide in Gaza.

Gliff cover. — Book cover: Penguin Random House.

Both books employ two children as protagonists, along with an important horse (hence the paired book jackets). The horse (named Gliff in the eponymous first novel) is used as a symbol of freedom and hope.

Briar (gender unspecified in the beginning of the novel but usually addressed as “Bri”) and their younger sister Rose are the children in the first book, which I find the slightly stronger of the two. Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves in an unspecified location resembling Britain. Their mother is on an errand to help someone else, entrusting their care to her boyfriend Leif. The errand takes longer than expected, and Leif sets out to find their mother, leaving the kids in a friend’s deserted house with some food and money, enough to last until he returns, supposedly.

Book cover: Penguin Random House.

The kids encounter a horse nearby, who is scheduled to be shipped to an abattoir. Bri teases Rose about not knowing the meaning of “abattoir,” which is typical of the focus on words and their meanings throughout both novels. Rose of course falls in love with the horse, whom she names Gliff. Because this word is obscure, Bri tells their sister it’s a great choice—the name could mean nothing or anything.

When Leif fails to return, the kids take off with Gliff. They encounter of series of dystopian episodes as “UV” (unverified) people, before eventually making their way back to their original home.

But that house is now gone; a kind of AstroTurf, which Gliff attempts to eat, has replaced it. Gliff has earlier described how the kids’ original house was surrounded with a painted red line, which turned out to be a prelude to its destruction. UV people and their homes are not tolerated under the current regime. During their visit, Bri is captured by the authorities while Rose manages to escape.

We then segue to a new time frame, some five years later. Bri has suffered a series of traumas at the hands of their captors, including sexual abuse. Bri is now labeled a “he” and is eventually given a managerial role in a horrendous factory, where UVs are made to undertake ghastly, dangerous, disfiguring work. Rose had managed to escape when Bri was captured and has now disappeared.

Bri has to completely close off their own personality to do the managerial work they were assigned. Eventually they can’t, and they rebel instead. Bri and Rose are not reunited, but it’s implied that Rose is still alive and the novel concludes on a hopeful note.

Glyph (thanks to NetGalley for the advance look) features Petra and her younger sister Patch (Patricia). Here, the girls endure the long illness and then the death of their mother. At their mother’s funeral, the girls are told two war stories by relatives that disturb them for the rest of their lives. The first concerns a man completely flattened by tanks on a roadside in France during wartime. The second is about a soldier who was executed for disobedience because he refused to kill a horse blinded by gas in the war.

As children, the older Petra protects and comforts her younger sister, inventing imaginary conversations with the flattened man and the blind horse to let Patch know everything turned out OK in the end.

The latter half of the book features the sisters as adults, who are estranged for some reason. They are reunited when an imaginary horse shows up and destroys Petra’s bedroom, and Petra reaches out to her sister for help. The reader is now situated in our present.

Billie, Patch’s teenage daughter, is the catalyst for Smith’s take on the atrocities in Gaza. She witnesses a TV video of a horse emerging from under tons of rubble there:

A horse’s head, the bridge of the nose first, pushes through and out of the pile of stuff and thrashes around.

It is a horsehead made of dust.

Dust and rubbly shapes shake loose down from the ears and off the neck. Front legs are suddenly there and scrabbling, and a broad chest appears, back legs appear, kicking and finding their footing, then the whole brickheap rises like it’s getting to its feet itself, as the horse does, as the horse sheds the broken stuff. Then a horse the colour of stonedust and concrete stands in a pile of broken stones and concrete, dust rising off it like smoke. It shakes itself out of there and stumbles over the stones and away.

There is much more from Gaza, most of it much worse. Glyph does not close on a note of optimism, as Gliff did. Instead, the message seems to be that the horrors in the world today have always been there, and always will be, forever and ever.

Whether you enjoy either of these novels will depend on a few things. Do you have strong empathy? Can you accept Smith’s distinctive blend of humor and horror, coupled with spontaneous invention and wordplay? Are you OK with novelists who directly address the growing political dysfunction around the world? I personally check all these boxes, so I highly recommend these novels. No other writer tackles the world’s current drift toward authoritarianism as frequently and effectively as Smith has done.

If any of the questions above resonate with you, and you’re at all curious, then these novels likely won’t disappoint. Smith is a four-time Booker finalist; given her productivity, she is likely to take that prize home eventually.

Small Boat, Big Questions

Here is a novel for thinking people, particularly those who possess some degree of empathy. If you’re at all interested in the world’s growing emigration issue, and/or particularly concerned with unnecessary immigrant deaths, you should read this book.

If you don’t fit the qualifications described above, read the book anyway. It might still change the way you think about things.

Cover image from Mariner Books/HarperCollins.

Small Boat, by Vincent Delecroix, was originally published in French in 2023 by Editions Gallimard as Naufrage (Sinking). The translated (by Helen Stevenson) English edition was published in 2025 by HopeRoad Publishing/Small Axes, whereupon it made the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist. The U.S. edition will be published on April 21 of this year by Mariner Books.

This short novel was written in just three weeks. It was inspired by an actual disaster which occurred in November, 2021—an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the English Channel, and 28 people drowned. It was reported that the French authorities received calls for help, but told the migrants they needed to contact the British authorities because their boat had entered English waters.

The book is narrated by the radio operator who took the migrants’ calls for help. Delecroix has said (according to Wikipedia) that the novel is “a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called ‘banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt put it.”

Delecroix realizes that objective brilliantly. As the 2025 International Booker Prize judges wrote, this is “a gut-punch of a novel…Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit—and whether we could all do better.”

I will reiterate that this is a brief novel, easily read in one sitting. Its brevity, though, is not what makes Small Boat such a quick, consuming read—the novel grabs and holds your attention because of its extreme relevance to the hate-mongering, point-scoring atmosphere in which we now live.

The novel’s three short sections each hit hard. In the first, we follow our (fictitious, remember) first-person narrator as she interacts with the little boat in the English Channel. The person who sits next to her has the same job and interacts with other groups trying to make it across the water to Britain. He reads Pascal and affects a “humanity is irredeemably flawed” attitude to justify keeping his emotional distance from the people in troubled waters. Our narrator tries to keep her distance as well, because she has been taught to be objective as part of the job, and because she has some difficulty in always being fully present when disaster unfolds. The things these two would-be rescuers say are recorded, and as the small boat in question is about to sink, our narrator tells the migrant on the phone “you will not be saved.” Prior to that, she has told him and those he speaks for that she wasn’t the one who told them to pack up and leave their homes. After the boat goes down, and she is later interviewed by a police officer (a women who looks and acts remarkably like her), she has trouble recalling all the particulars.

The second section, shorter still, recounts the tragedy from the migrants’ point-of-view.

In the final section, our narrator wrestles with herself and what she has done—or not done. Is she responsible for their deaths? All by herself? Do others share any responsibility? There is a suggestion that she is considering suicide, despite being a devoted mother and, she has thought up to this point, a generally responsible citizen and human being.

I can’t help but draw a parallel between the callousness our narrator is accused of and the sickening comments attributed to ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis after the killing of Renée Good. According to a former U.S. Marine cited in The New Republic, he and other protesters were told, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!”

Except our Small Boat narrator is in no way like the typical gun-toting, violence-prone ICE agent. She is much more like you, or like me.

So the question the book raises is, what do we, safe in our comfortable homes, owe to people who die while trying to migrate to a better life? Anything? A regretful sigh? A sorrowful click of the tongue? A decision to campaign for humane immigration laws?

Read the book, and see what you think.

Is Paying Attention Enough?

What About Protests? Are They an Adequate Response?

This Monday, two days after the second murder of an American citizen by ICE in Minnesota, the weather is big news—a massive snowstorm hit half the country. Also making headlines: we now know who will play in the Super Bowl (New England and Seattle).

The killing of Alex Pretti remains an important story, but it is no longer the story. The earlier murder of Renee Good receives less attention each day.

Alex Pretti with a camera. Photo: dangjessie, via Instagram, via New York Times. — Alex Pretti, left, with a camera. Photo: dangjessie, via Instagram, via New York Times.

There have been some decent articles and editorials over the past few days which focus on Alex Pretti’s death in Minneapolis. For example, three columnists at the New York Times (Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg) have stepped up their rhetoric. Ms. Goldberg made the strongest statement, saying (“if I could vote in a referendum tomorrow for a national divorce from MAGA strongholds, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”). Bravo, Michelle—I’m with you on secession. Though it won’t be easy or clean, at this point it’s the likeliest outcome.

Unfortunately, the other two columnists still aren’t there quite yet. Polgreen is “heartened” by the community response in Minnesota. French, who in 2020 published a book on the possibility of secession (Divided We Fall), said he didn’t think secession was imminent but he found it difficult to be hopeful nonetheless. Both he and Goldberg agreed with Polgreen that the citizens of Minnesota are an inspiration. And all three columnists support reducing the power of ICE, by removing their masks and their immunities, limiting their jurisdiction and restraining their tactics, all of which can be accomplished through legislation, they say. If you did a double take reading that last bit, I don’t blame you—legislation hasn’t accomplished anything so far. Despite that fact, the Times itself, in an editorial which ran yesterday, is calling on Congress to help “re-establish public faith in the agencies and officers who are carrying out Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration.” The editorial was titled “The Trump Administration is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act.”

So, the net result of the Times’s coverage of the latest ICE murder is to summon Congress to pass legislation to fix it. No wonder David French finds it difficult to be hopeful.

As we move forward into the week, coverage of the Pretti killing will begin to fade (unless, God forbid, ICE kills someone else over the next few days). Our attention will likely wander, too.

That is why the best commentary I’ve seen on the Pretti murder comes from Francine Prose in the Guardian. Ms. Prose is an accomplished novelist as well as a columnist, which may be why she has a better grasp of how and where things are moving.

So let me break it down, Prose writes. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezín concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.

It should also be noted that Ms. Prose does not call on Congress to magically fix the situation, or indeed to do anything at all for the moment, a more realistic expectation. She does call on the rest of us to initiate a national strike, saying that despite the difficulty in doing this, if we don’t act quickly and collectively throughout the entire country now, it may soon be too late. Please think about those words.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Minnesota will hear arguments today on whether to end the current ICE operation in that state. I wish her luck.

A Fable for Our Times

I felt a twinge of guilt after my last post (on Christmas Eve, no less!), about the unrelenting Trumpian dystopia we’re now enmeshed in. If I don’t have an immediate solution for our ongoing national nightmare, why should I expect anyone else to offer one?

To make amends, at least to a degree, I’ll point you toward a delightful book and urge you to read it when it’s published next April. The book is called The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances, and the story it tells is as poignant and resonant as its delightful title. It also provides a momentary blip of hope, something we can certainly all use.

I had not been familiar with Glenn Dixon before I read the prepublication Infinite Sadness manuscript from NetGalley. He’s written a previous novel, Bootleg Stardust, and a well-regarded memoir, Juliet’s Answer, but he’s really hit the jackpot with this latest book.

A one-line elevator pitch for The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances might be something like, “A sentient Roomba vacuum is determined to save the humans in her house from an unfeeling, all-powerful tech dictatorship.”

From that description, you might picture something cutesy and sentimental, but the novel avoids those obvious traps. Its human characters are very human indeed, as subject to missteps and tragedies as we all are. And Scout—she took her name from a fascination with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which Harold used to read to Edith—is not the only sentient small appliance in this tale.

In fact, the appliances—small and otherwise—can be as nonplussed as the humans are by how things are run in this advanced new world, and just as afraid. If an appliance defies or runs afoul of the powers that be (i.e., the Grid), they can be “wiped,” their memories and perceptions erased, their metallic bodies smashed and discarded. Some small appliances—Watch, in this case—act as Grid enforcers within the home.

The stakes are high for the humans as well. Harold and Edith have lived in their house for 40+ years, for the most part happily. Their daughter Kate has been censured for defiance, though, and sentenced to work for the autocratic Grid some 3,000 miles away, something she abhors.

When Edith dies, Harold is grief-stricken and alone in the house. This is dangerous, in that the Grid’s rules dictate that he occupies way too much space for a single individual and must be removed (“nursing homes,” sad to say, remain dark, unsafe spaces in the future, so of course Harold fears moving to one).

This is the battle that Scout and Kate are fighting, with some help here and there from Clock, Fridge and Auto. And also from Adrian, a neighborhood kid to whom Edith gave piano lessons.

I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say the battle is engrossing and the pages fly by quickly. Many of the appliances have benign motivations; others do not (right now, in 2025, most appliances and gadgets seem determined to spy and report on their owners). But in the future world of this novel, appliances and accessories have evolved far beyond their present capabilities.

All you need to read this book is just the tiniest suspension of disbelief, something many us are forced to perform each day for more mundane considerations. The world presented in The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances would make an all-time great Pixar film, if done correctly. For now, though, the book serves as an inventive and involving fable for these dark times. Highly recommended.

The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances. Atria Books. Publication Date: April 7, 2026.

Helluva Holiday

I don’t want to dump on your Xmas or whatever, but I’m tired of being slammed about the head by the news every morning, and I’m even more tired of being shown once again that no one has done anything to stop Trump.

The spirit of Christmas. Image: Stable Diffusion.

There have been plenty of times during this tumultuous year when Trump & Co.’s savage assaults on our laws, our historical precedents and our collective idea of common decency (to the extent there is one) seemed to be unprecedented, even though those assaults were following the well-known script of Project 2025. To give the devil his due, the Republicans’ coordinated attacks based on that take-no-prisoners game plan have been well-nigh flawless.

But is the cruelty of Trump’s second term really something out of the ordinary? Well, yes and no.

Yes, if only on the basis of its sweep and scope: multiple murders executed by the American military on people aboard Caribbean fishing boats, U.S. military excursions into American cities, ruthless elimination of federal government agencies and personnel, blatant defiance of judicial orders, the dismantling of green energy, the dissolving of longstanding diplomatic relationships, indiscriminate and frequently illegal arrests and deportations, rampant corruption, a stunningly inept cadre of sycophants (but sycophants who have successfully helped Trump “flood the zone” since the inauguration), et al. Plus a determined effort underlying all of Project 2025 to move everything backward in order to benefit the powers that be.

No, in that our current blue-state horror at all of the above and more was shared in the past by decent Americans’ abhorrence of slavery and then by their revulsion at the longstanding reign of Jim Crow and KKK hangings well into the 20th century. Plus, decent Americans’ retrospective disgust with the genocide perpetuated against native Americans, remnants of which persist today. (Something not even hinted at in our schools until relatively recently, and about to expunged from the classroom once more, along with much else.) Not to mention the enormous disparities of income and well-being throughout America’s history, never really addressed until FDR made an attempt (an effort which has been vilified by Republicans ever since).

True, we’re about to have a socialist mayor of New York City. The political currents abroad in the population are in obvious conflict, but except for aberrations like Zohan Mamdani, that conflict has been almost entirely suppressed. (Do you think rallies matter? They don’t.) This, even though (and maybe because) destructive change throughout the country is spreading so rapidly.

Our disagreements over matters of live and death, and the motivations behind those disagreements, are nothing new. But the instant dissemination of those disagreements via today’s technology is new. The onslaught of Project 2025 feels like something that has never happened before.

The statement that Trump made to his supporters on January 6, 2021, suggesting that unless they acted immediately they “would not have a country any more,” applies even more to blue America today. Yet most of us keep our heads down and go about our business. We go to “No Kings” rallies and pretend we are doing our part. We read the New York Times, America’s “paper of record,” despite the increasing amount of sheer trivia, shopping tips and distracting games it offers up each day. We tell ourselves that somehow everything will be OK in the end.

What if, instead of fighting in the courts (which has proved largely ineffective), we actually brought some power to bear on protecting our rights as Americans? What if progressive, left-leaning voters actually did what Trump has longed claimed we do, and took up arms? I’m not referring to AR-15s, but to the use of strong political and financial defiance and pressure to change what’s happening to our government. Blue states and their citizens are powerful. California is the world’s fifth largest economy all by itself. New York is the world’s financial and cultural capital. We could use secession as a lever to try to force true reform and generate a more equal distribution of power, e.g., get rid of the Senate and expand and impose term limits on the Supreme Court. If we can’t manage that, then secession itself would be better than what we’re experiencing now. Does voicing this possibility make me eligible for immediate rendition? Probably.

I’m not suggesting that we start planning assassinations, or ready a blue army to invade Texas. But I am suggesting that unless we figure out a way to achieve some decisive, concrete wins against the heartless bastards implementing Project 2025, and do so soon, America will devolve into Trump’s ultimate shithole country. One with a gigantic, gold-plated White House State Ballroom.

Here’s hoping we will be a better people in 2026.

Live Free or Lie

The flippant title of this review shouldn’t be used to dismiss Ashland, the debut novel from Dan Simon set in New Hampshire, in its entirety. The book is not without its praiseworthy elements.

Ashland, by Dan Simon — Image source: Europa Editions.

From my own reading notes: “Simon is excellent at depicting rich inner lives. There is a focus on how we interact with the natural world. Portions of Ashland make New Hampshire feel like paradise.”

The noted Colm Tóibín said, “Ashland is remarkable for its range of acutely observed characters and its rich evocation of the landscape and weather of New Hampshire. Dan Simon creates a tapestry of voices and tones with extraordinary skill and emotional resonance.”

I agree with all of the above. And yet, there is also a repetitive and formulaic quality to the characters’ inner musings, mainly having to do with the simultaneous embrace of opposites: I am this, but I am also that. I am happy, but I am not. I am too full of life to live. Etc. This repeated clutching at antitheses to define or underscore meaning becomes tiresome by the second half of the book. And, the flat, declarative language in which opposites are embraced creates a sort of false profundity, the “poetry” that some reviewers have noted.

The book ends rather abruptly, too. When it does, one feels the characters were never quite finished, never fully defined, despite their extensive pondering.

It’s a shame—Mr. Simon, the founder of the independent publisher Seven Stories Press, is obviously a talented writer and his love of the natural world in general and New Hampshire in particular is never in doubt. Edith and Gordon, an older couple who originally met in a 1920s tuberculosis sanatorium, are perhaps the most richly drawn characters here, and the least subject to the criticism leveled above. All in all, Ashland remains an interesting read.

Ashland. Europa Editions. Publication Date: Feb. 17, 2026.

North Sun Review

Even the best titles from small presses struggle for recognition.

Not long ago, I wrote a short overview of American small presses, focusing on seven of them. Today I’d like to look at an acclaimed book from one of those presses: North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, by Ethan Rutherford (Deep Vellum / A Strange Object, 2025). The novel is noteworthy in its own right, and its trajectory since publication is also illustrative of the role independent publishers play today.

North Sun is a very distinctive book, one with many shapes and meanings. It describes a whaling voyage, beginning in New Bedford, MA in 1878. In some ways, then, the novel might be viewed as a corollary to Melville’s mighty Moby Dick. Well, it is and it isn’t. Rutherford has mastered the language of that era but he has also updated it—the novel is told in brief, episodic fragments, meant, Rutherford says, to evoke the movement of the sea. And roughly midway through the book, it turns into something else entirely.

The first half of this debut novel has already captured the stark, capitalistic ethos of its time and the brutality inherent in the whaling industry. Then it calls upon magic (and a kind of magical realism) by introducing Old Sorrel, a shape-shifting, avenging bird-man-spirit who arrives to protect the two young boys on the ship from further depredations and to punish the rest of its passengers and crew for their unthinking cruelty and environmental exploitation. All while the text remains, as novelist Jennifer duBois said in her review of North Sun, “haunting, hallucinatory, and unrelentingly gorgeous.”

The contrasting narrative techniques between the novel’s two halves make North Sun a book readers are likely to remember, and to ponder. Its resonance helped make it a finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards; it was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize as well.

OK, then. Here we have a striking debut novel, favorably reviewed by a number of discriminating readers and by Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. A novel that was nominated for some prestigious prizes. And, a novel that was ignored by the majority of mainstream reviewers.

Why? Why no reviews in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? Why no reviews in the Boston Globe or the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisico Chronicle? Why no reviews in the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books? How did the New Yorker and the Atlantic manage to miss North Sun? How did the UK’s Guardian?

The problem is twofold, I believe. First, many of the major English language newspapers and magazines are walking a financial tightrope and simply don’t have the reviewing resources to range widely. This is unfortunate, for it means the reviews that are allocated are likely to focus on popular Big Five publishing house titles. Second, even for the publications that do have adequate resources, reviewers’ attention is all too often directed at the steady incoming flow of Big Five titles. For a small house like Deep Vellum and its A Strange Object imprint, it frequently requires advertising and marketing to spread word of mouth and gain notice. It takes money.

Obviously, this is not as it should be. In an ideal world, all reviewers’ antennae would be sensitive to the best books from every publisher. Sadly, we’re not there yet.

Not long ago, I received a fundraising email from Deep Vellum. They needed to raise $25,000 for the rights to use a “National Book Award Finalist” graphic on the cover of North Sun (and they managed to do so). The Deep Vellum website also features a “DONATE NOW!” banner at the top of its home page. The press has published a number of highly praised novels lately (Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu is another example), but funding remains top of mind.

I realize you could argue that the difficulties small presses are having with recognition is not the most urgent problem we collectively face in these ominous and demoralizing times. But small presses play an important role on the positive side of our culture nonetheless, and they do deserve to be supported. What’s more, small press books come with a notable, built-in bonus: start a great read from a valiant independent publisher and you’re bound to feel better, both while reading and for some time thereafter.

P.S. Just two days ago, Literary Hub included North Sun in its list of 43 Favorite Books of 2025. Bravo.

Happy Thanksgiving

Here are a few thoughts on what it is we should be thankful for.

First, though, a brief mea culpa: I have not been good about updates to this newsletter recently. There are three primary reasons why:

– I’m working on a large project, which is labor- and time-intensive
– The constant high tide of negative news flowing in each day is debilitating
– The demands of daily living are frequently daunting

Let’s look at that last excuse, since it can lead us into a contemplation of gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving — Image source: Pngtree.com.

Yes, daily life—people, projects, forward progress—is quite demanding. So much so that one sometimes becomes tempted to slack off where one can. And yet consider the alternative to daily life, or to life per se: a bit alarming, isn’t it?

Human life is miraculous (human beings are not, but that’s another story). We cannot completely understand what happens in our individual life cycles, nor can we completely understand everything that surrounds and interacts with us while we’re here.

Nevertheless, our lives can sometimes have moments of great beauty. Or at least they should; I would wish such moments for everyone.

Birth? Death? Regeneration? God? Our myriad religions? Dark matter? The universe?

It’s OK to step back from the search for meaning once in a while, and simply be. And be grateful. For good people, for good fortune, for life itself.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

A Short Intro to Seven Small Presses

Try something different….

It’s no secret that the publishing industry (and “industry” is indeed the right word) is under threat these days. People simply aren’t reading as they used to, either as much or as deeply. Only around one in six American adults reads books for fun.

Yet book publishers continue to chug along, placing their bets on popular genres and contributing mightily to social media buzz. The Big Five publishing houses in the U.S., and their multifarious imprints, do publish serious books on a fairly regular basis—prestige is still a selling point, in spite of everything. Yet a substantial majority of the constant stream of new books can be slotted into one formula or another.

That’s where independent (read: small) publishers come in. The indies will tell you to seek out their titles if you want to read what’s really innovative, what’s really important, what really matters. Naturally they do. The thing is, they’re often not far off the mark.

This short intro to U.S. indie publishing will look at seven small houses and some of their representative titles, in an attempt to provide a brief survey of what you might find behind the bestseller lists.

Deep Vellum

Deep Vellum founded in 2013, is a non-profit publishing house and also the country’s largest publisher of literature in translation, some 90 titles in its first five years. The house is based in the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, hence the punning name. There is a Deep Vellum bookstore in Dallas as well. In addition to translated books, this indie now publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction and photography books. And their books can pack a real punch. The novel Schattenfroh: A Requiem, by the German writer Michael Lentz and translated by Max Lawton, has been recently reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. The Times called it “one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year,” and it was greeted in the New York Review as a “bleak, confounding and finally brilliant doorstopper of a novel.”

As if this were not enough, Deep Vellum acquired Dalkey Archive Press in 2020—a renowned indie in its own right. One wonders if the venomous governor of Texas and his right-wing henchmen in the state legislature are aware of this intellectual ferment transpiring right under their noses in the Lone Star State.

Sarabande Books

Nor is Deep Vellum the only well-regarded indie publisher based in a deep-red state. Sarabande Books, founded in 1994, is another not-for-profit literary press in an unlikely location: Louisville, Kentucky. (The house also maintains an office in New York.) Sarabande publishes a wide range of prize-winning writers, and its books are reviewed so frequently that for the longest time I assumed Sarabande was an imprint of one of the Big Five. I recently read and can recommend Paul Griner’s The Book of Otto and Liam, from 2021. George Saunders said of this novel, “It has something important to teach us about our dangerous national addictions to violence, hostile projection, and political polarization and does so in that classic literary way: by making us care deeply about individual human beings.”

Red Hen Press

Red Hen Press, based in Pasadena, was also founded in 1994. Although it too is a non-profit, Red Hen has a number of smaller imprints. Red Hen Press itself specializes in literary fiction, poetry and nonfiction. The Good Deed, by British-American writer Helen Benedict, focuses on the refugee crisis, particularly the plight of women refugees, and was published just last year. It is excellent. Kirkus Reviews sums up its review of the novel this way: “An insightful reminder of our responsibilities to one another, more important now than ever.”

Next up, a handful of lesser-known (but still quite interesting) smaller presses. Let’s take them in alphabetical order, beginning with 7.13 Books.

7.13 Books was named thus by its founder, Leland Cheuk, because he had manuscripts accepted on July 13th on two separate occasions. If you can find a copy of Cheuk’s short story collection, Letters from Dinosaurs (Thought Catalog, 2016), it is well worth seeking out. 7.13 Books focuses on literary fiction. The house began in Brooklyn and is now also based in Pasadena. You may well enjoy the Jackson Bliss novel, Amnesia of June Bugs, which focuses on four characters whose paths cross in New York during Hurricane Sandy. I certainly did, and T.C. Boyle notes that “Jackson Bliss is as verbally exuberant as any writer I’ve come across in years.”

Clash Books

Clash Books, based in Troy, NY, began as a website and evolved into a book publisher in 2017. The house publishes around 20 titles a year, including art books, poetry, fiction and nonfiction. They also have a penchant for horror. Their list is nothing if not eclectic: they publish big, weighty tomes like Mark de Silva’s The Logos (I haven’t yet read it) and smaller titles such as Little Lazarus by Michael Bible, “a little novel of profound wonder” (Southwest Review). Despite its seemingly bleak subject matter (two clairvoyant tortoises who bear witness to centuries of human suffering and then our ultimate extinction), Little Lazarus manages a gentle tone and is quite thought-provoking.

Slant Books

Slant Books, of Seattle, was founded in 2013. It is “an independent, not-for-profit literary press specializing in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, theology, and belles lettres.” A.G. Mojtabai’s brief 2024 novel Featherless is a representative title and an excellent read. Since Plato defined a human being as a “featherless biped,” Mojtabai uses the designation as her title for this book set in the confines of the Shady Rest Home for the Aged. The Boston Globe said that “Mojtabai has all the gifts of a great writer—the observant eye that misses no nuance of expression; the ear that hears the music and the poetry behind the plain cadences of common speech; the willingness to confront her own primal fears.”

Unsolicited Press

Finally, we come to Unsolicited Press, based in Portland, Oregon and founded in 2012. As you can see, the house’s motto is “no bullshit, just books.” Presumably the “bullshit” refers to the formulaic nature of the majority of titles published by the Big Five. Proudly progressive, Unsolicited describes itself as “rebellious, relentless and philanthropic,” and promotes some of its titles under the rubric “2025 Year of Womxn.” Yet its titles are also remarkably diverse. I’ve read two Unsolicited Press novels recently, Mick Bennett’s Take the Lively Air (2023) and Trevor J. Houser’s The Prumont Method (also 2023). The first is set on the Jersey Shore and concerns a minor traffic collision which escalates into a confrontation between two families, each with its own troubles. The second features “math hobbyist” Roger Prumont, who has created a formula to predict when and where the next mass shooting will occur. Both are enjoyable reads.

Thus concludes our mini survey of America’s small presses. There are many more out there, and quite a few of those are also excellent. There are also some outstanding small presses based overseas. So, next time you’re looking for something to read, try ignoring the Big Five’s hype on social media and seek out something different, and something rewarding, from a small independent press.