Hot News This Week
March 6, 2025
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| “You might think, with sixteen books to my credit, that I’ve just loved every hour of writing. No.”
Gerald Murnane recently spoke with the Paris Review for their long-running “Art of Fiction” feature, a wide-ranging interview touching upon golf, Google Earth, the househusband life, and his long writing career.
The Australian author has been “celebrated by writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Ben Lerner” and put forth as “a perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize,” notes the Paris Review. And Other Stories has been steadily reissuing Murnane’s books in the past few years, including his novel Barley Patch, published last month.
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| Worthy of the Event Is an Indie Next Pick
“As trans people, we know the spaces that open up to us when we decide to live in the world on our own terms,” says Ren Dean of Skunk Cabbage Books (Chicago, IL), one of the nominating booksellers. “Blaxell’s essays bring us her invaluable and deeply generous thinking on how we become worthy of the life and the world that she clearly loves so much.”
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| Read This Next: Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat
“The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana’s unsettling and powerful debut novel, follows two teenagers on the fragile cusp of manhood in a Canadian border town.”
Writer Teddy Wayne reviewed The Passenger Seat for the New York Times Book Review this week, praising Khurana’s “precise, subtle narration” and its “gripping” execution. The story, following two teen boys on the lam, “is most relevant in the context of 2025,” says Wayne, “but could just as easily have taken place in 1965. . . . Things go pear-shaped, then the pear goes rotten as the boys harbor resentments, thwart each other and secretively plot.”
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| Stripe Press Author on the Ezra Klein Show
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| Recommended Books for Children and Teens
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“Sympathy for Wild Girls is heartbreakingly relatable and poignant. Demree McGhee is one to watch!” — Audrey Kohler, BookWoman (Austin, TX)
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“Angela Carter meets Hunter S. Thompson in this satisfying romp of a novel. . . . At once a satire of the cerebral over-intellectualism of the 1970s art world and a carnal exploration of fetish, violence, and desire, this novel will grip you—and hard!” — Molly Hart, Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston, IL)
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“A genre moshpit filled with a taxonomy of Orchids and an intimate fantasy of having sex with God. What a wild ride! This is sure to entertain and surprise. Feels like you’re wired on some hard drugs and talking with your best friend.” — Hadley Corbett, Anderson’s Bookshop (Naperville, IL)
“So fun. . . . I liked this even more than Sex Goblin; Cook’s fiction-cum-poetry is a hoot and a half.” — Charlie Jones, A Room of One’s Own (Madison, WI)
“Lauren Cook can make truly any subject captivating.” — Natalie Marlin, Moon Palace Books (Minneapolis, MN)
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| | Solo
by Gráinne O'Brien
Little Island Books • May 2025 • 9781915071798
★ “O’Brien accurately captures a time in a person’s life that is so fragile and overwhelming that it’s nearly impossible to get just right. A tightly written, incredibly well-characterized work: bravo.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | Mother River
by Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Open Letter • January 2025 • 9781960385314
★ “Brilliant and mind-bending . . . Can Xue delivers an exquisite collection of surreal stories animated by anthropomorphism, dream logic, and the search for hidden truths.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Hypochondria
by Will Rees
Coach House Books • March 2025 • 9781552454848
“Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, part history, Rees’s genre-bending meditation on hypochondria references everyone from Freud to Kafka to Seinfeld in a provocative search to find out why, exactly, we believe we’re sick. ” — New York Times Book Review
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“[Evenson’s] writing approaches the luxurious, haunted feeling that Bradbury conjured so well. It’s almost a shame to have all these stories in the same place; they shouldn’t be read at once for risk of overdosing.”— Wall Street Journal
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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Selected by a jury of independent booksellers and small press enthusiasts, three of the five novels shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize (US and Canada) are from Consortium publishers: Jón Kalman Stefansson’s Your Absence Is Darkness, trans. Philip Roughton (Biblioasis); Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins (Coffee House Press); and Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill, trans. Will Vanderhyden (Open Letter).
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The Pioneer Press featured Tree Trek by Stephanie Mirocha (Holy Cow! Press) in a guide to Minnesota’s spring and summer books.
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ABA, SCIBA, MPIBA, and Bookshop.org Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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