CLASH
I have seen CLASH books on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. I love this fact. I can buy shit from a small press, in print & in person–the way I like to buy cool shit. More to the point, CLASH is where I go when I want to understand the current literary moment. CLASH authors tend to be swank Brooklynites in the mold of some of my exes. Or aging rednecks in the mold of yours truly. (And we are indeed old, or at least aging, me & my friends & exes & former workshop cohort). Or the authors tend to be insightful midlanders with incredible language in their utility belts. There are single pages in books by Madeleine Cash and Brian Allen Carr and Kevin Maloney that stab hard. I’m pretty sure these authors understand how to communicate better than I ever will. So do most Zoomers, probably.
FC2
If you’ve never considered writing a fake & antiquated but factually (mostly) accurate tourist guide to Indiana… Or an analysis of the bureaucracy of–again, a fictional–Texas wherein the Arapaho or Cheyenne or Choctaw have constructed their own Bureau of Indian Affairs to investigate a particularly haunting supernatural murder… Or a Book of Days starring January as a nightmarish rabbit who can be summoned via Ouija board… Well, you can diagnose your imagination as lacking b/c that’s the kind of stuff you could probably find in FC2’s books. 10/10 Recommend.
House of Vlad
House of Vlad spreads the visions of the disaffected drones among us, the manic and insightful narrators capable of blunt judgments and strong feels and hallucinatory images–sometimes all in the same sentence. House of Vlad might be a 22-year-old kid on the Great Plains sitting alone in an empty office on a Saturday night with no plans or obligations, just sneaking tequila shots from the boss’s secret top-drawer stash. My therapist tells me that I’m not her only patient who constantly refers to Lost Highway to explain my inner self, so I feel at home reading books published by House of Vlad.
Future Tense Books
A load of people tell me that Kevin Sampsell’s classic, A Common Pornography, is a must-read. They say this because I tell them I am working on a memoir. I tell them I am working on a memoir so that they will shut up about the money they lost investing in $TRUMP crypto while trying to raise funds for a new roof on their Grandma’s house. Instead, I recommend This Is Between Us, a masterpiece if ever there was one. Sampsell is a born confessionalist. He’s even more glorious as a publisher/editor, and thanks to his skillz, Future Tense is back, baby!
Two Dollar Radio
How the eff is this a small press?! No one knows. Do yourself a favor & check out their catalogue already, for fuckssake. You will recognize authors’ names, discover themes (both familiar and surprising) and authors possessed of a magical facility with language. Synopses will haunt you–in a good way. You may, like me, wind up endlessly longing for their French flaps and deckled edges.
Autumn House Press
Friend of the Fox Lauren Woods has some experience with this bully press, as they will be publishing her brilliant collection soon. These guys know their stuff. Any doubts? Pick up Eric Tran’s haunting pop-culture-inspired poetry or any other winners of their Autumn House prizes.
Short Flight / Long Drive Books
At one particular AWP more than a decade ago, I bought picked up enough SF/LD books to tile my entire kitchen counter back home. More great stuff from the kinds of indie darlings whose titles you’ll see in a lot of these presses: Garielle Lutz, Chelsea Martin, Elle Nash, Chloe Caldwell, &c. Elizabeth Ellen’s barometer for captivating sleaze is incomparable.
Dzanc Books
Dzanc seems about as close as you can get to a big-time NY press without multinational corporate backing. They publish classically award-winning-literary stuff (T.C. Boyle and Carole Maso come to mind), but their titles range off toward the experimental end of the scale, like a Daniel Hoyt novel featuring a grieving punk kid on the run after his mentor is murdered carrying along some dynamite stolen from anarchist terrorists and a tape recorder that play back his own past via some form of magic.
Madrona Books
New Kid on the Block Madrona has only published two books so far, but they’re both whoppers. Check ’em out.
Autofocus Books
Gotta dig a press with a focus. Autofocus publishes only personal non-fiction. Would have been my absolute dream press in my late twenties.
Malarkey Books
Recommended by friends. I’ve only gotten to browse a few titles (many thanks to Kramers in Dupont for their rad Indie section). The “free samples” on their site are my kind of voicey and bizarre.
Belle Point Press
Founded and run by a couple of fellow Okies, this press has exploded from publishing one anthology in 2022 to more than a dozen titles per year. I’m particularly excited to read their books from Bethany Jarmul, Troy Pancake, and Jim Roberts.
Torrey House Press
A bit different from others on the list. The collections I’ve read from Torrey House have Iowa Workshop levels of polish. What draws me in is that authors like Stacie Shannon Denetsosie give voice to the complexities of the American West. A big focus on social & environmental issues.
Baobab Press
I read Michael Martone’s Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana, and had to meet the team that managed to put together such a beautiful, compact, and eye-catching edition of Martone’s moving monologues. I have a quirky postcard from Baobab that I find inexplicably inspiring to look at.
YesYes Books
Lots of striking design. Experimental text. Platform for marginalized voices. Winner of lots of awards. Deserver of all said awards. YesYes actually won me over with poetry collections like Jamie Mortara’s some planet and GOOD MORNING AMERICA I AM HUNGRY AND ON FIRE.
Red Hen Press
Red Hen nails regional literary realism and social fiction with authors like Ron Carlson and Kristen Millares Young. But they run the gamut to funny and magical realism in books by authors like Lara Ehrlich and Steve Almond. One of the West-Coast presses most engaged with new writers, it seems to me.
Maudlin House
The Maudlin House books I’ve read are some of the most bonkers, Gonzoesque fever dreams that, nonetheless, narrate in plain, gritty language. Imagine cartoonish dreams of cults, disco, violence, road trips, lemon trees, Mormons, and deli sandwiches on rye.
Trident Press
Run out of a Boulder, CO, coffee shop, Trident displays the editorial work of Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, whose book Cactus brings together chain gangs, aging punk bands, and a cop with an unflagging curiosity about deriving mescaline from a household cactus.
Still House Press
A local indie press partnered with George Mason University’s Watershed Lit and creative writing programs. Notably, one recent book–Amy Stuber’s Sad Grownups–won the 2025 PEN/Bingham Prize.
Open Road Media
This is an interesting one. Open Road has been re-publishing a ton of public domain works and out-of-print classics. I’m very excited to see that they are reissuing out-of-print titles by my old favorite, Lazy Fascist Press, including early works by Stephen Graham Jones.
Fox City Lit 