Hot News This Week
September 11, 2025
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The news comes on the heels of Waldron’s memoir being selected as a Barnes and Noble Monthly Pick for September. Huge congrats to our friends at DoppelHouse!
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| Celebrating 6 National Book Award Nominees
Six Consortium titles have been longlisted for the 2025 National Book Awards! Half of the ten collections longlisted for poetry are from Consortium publishers. We’ll be crossing our fingers when the shortlists are announced on October 7 and the winners crowned on November 19.
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| Carmen Maria Machado on I Who Have Never Known Men
“The book enticed me and then inflamed me—I had never read anything like it. . . . It is a novel about community, loneliness, and solitude, about intellectual awakening in impossible situations.”
The New Yorker published an adapted excerpt of Carmen Maria Machado’s introduction to the new hardcover edition of I Who Have Never Known Men (Transit Books), Jacqueline Harpman’s runaway bestseller translated by Ros Schwartz.
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| Consortium Corner with Lise Solomon
In the latest Consortium Corner, we’re CC’ing Lise Solomon, who reps Consortium titles in the Bay Area and was Publishers Weekly’s Rep of the Year in 2016. Read the full interview here, which features:
- Lise marking almost 30 years with our wonderful friends at the Karel/Dutton Group
- A book to make you sob on the BART train
- What it was like to be an early (pre-Pulitzer) champion for Tinkers
Consortium Corner is a Q&A series with staff and reps to celebrate Consortium’s 40 years of independent book distribution.
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| Read This Next: “One of the Great, and Greatly Demanding, Literary Pleasures of the Year”
Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh, translated by Max Lawton (Deep Vellum Publishing), is receiving excellent reviews . . .
In a full review for the New York Times Book Review, critic Dustin Illingworth says the novel is “a fount of strange and terrifying novelty” and “one of the great, and greatly demanding, literary pleasures of the year.” The Washington Post calls it “a narrative wonder,” and the New York Review of Books has high praise for Lawton’s “impressive” translation, “which renders Lentz’s flinty though extravagant German into English sentences that are clear, nimble, and frankly full of beans, capturing the propulsive energy of the original text without sacrificing its difficulty.”
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| Remembering Rosalyn Drexler
We’re saddened by the loss of Rosalyn Drexler, award-winning writer, pioneering Pop artist, and onetime wrestler, who passed away last week at the age of 98. Her novel To Smithereens was reissued this year by Hagfish, and they’ve posted the book’s afterword to commemorate Drexler in her own words.
Learn more about Drexler’s remarkable life and legacy from the New York Times obituary.
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“What a sweet book about creativity and sharing stories! And the colorful illustrations are beautiful too!” — Christine Iwanaga, Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY)
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“An incredibly entertaining read. The unique format of stage direction, along with the novels over the top theatrical nature made it an engrossing read. The ending was amazingly sweet after so much pain.” — Zach Sunda, Novel. (Memphis, TN)
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“Making art has never been more important. The zines collected in Gendertrash from Hell are confrontations, motivations, and provocations. Though they speak specifically from the trans community, their stories can teach and inspire everyone. We need your voice. Gendertrash from Hell might help you share it.” — Josh Cook, Porter Square Books (Cambridge, MA)
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★ “This is a work worth its weight in gold. . . . These beautifully crafted letters offer relevance and practical guidance and will resonate with many readers.” — Library Journal
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| | The Mind Reels
by Fredrik deBoer
Coffee House Press • October 2025 • 9781566897372
★ “Instead of falling into clichés or sentimentality about mental health, deBoer presents Alice’s struggles with bleak humor and emotional clarity.” — Booklist
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| | Terry Dactyl
by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Coffee House Press • November 2025 • 9781566897419
★ “Sycamore spins a shimmering tale of art, drugs, and friendship spanning from the AIDS crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic. . . . It’s indelible.” — Publishers Weekly
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★ “These potent poems are shattering and sublime, intimate and communal. . . . Read and share these testaments to the fact that neither bloodshed or even death can extinguish truth and poetry.” — Booklist
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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The American Literary Translators Association’s longlists for the 2025 National Translation Awards include titles published by Black Ocean, Coffee House Press, and Deep Vellum / Open Letter.
Four titles from Consortium publishers are also shortlisted for other translation prizes announced by ALTA . . .
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ABA, MPIBA, GLIBA, PNBA, SCIBA, SIBA, NAIBA, MIBA, and NEIBA Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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