| Programming note: we’re off next Thursday for the holiday, so look for the Communiqué back in your inbox on July 10. Thanks! —Jordan
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Hot News This Week
June 26, 2025
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| Silky Shah’s Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books) was mentioned in the New York Times profile of Mahmoud Khalil, who spoke with the paper following his release from detention. Unbuild Walls, “a book describing the history of immigration policy and mass incarceration in the United States,” was one of the books Khalil read while imprisoned, reports the NYT.
Read more about Khalil here and revisit Shah’s recent interview with Public Books.
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| Satire, Snails, and Sarabande
The cover for The Longest Way to Eat a Melon features Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville’s painting of a snail-stalking kitten, and designer Emily Mahon tells the NYT she chose the art because it “represented the ‘humorous and quirky’ aspects of Ross’s fiction,” in which each story is “more satirical and surreal than the last.”
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“I would read this again and again, there is so much to gain from this book and this amazing forgotten writer!!!!” — Dany Batchelor, Old Firehouse Books (Fort Collins, CO)
“This is precisely my type of novel: strange, dark, wet, and written in a style that could only be this author’s. Belben’s prose is nothing short of phenomenal.” — Charlie Jones, A Room of One’s Own (Madison, WI)
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“This book was bonkers in the best way possible. I can’t wait to get a physical copy and read it again. And annotate it??! I don’t even annotate books! I think there are so many weird and healing layers to this novella. I need more!!! . . . I can’t wait to share this one with all my weirdo friends!!” — Molly Cellon, The Lynx (Gainesville, FL)
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“This is my kind of southern fiction. Loved Okonsky’s writing style. Will definitely recommend to others!” — Amber Brown, Quail Ridge Books (Raleigh, NC)
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| | Little World
by Josephine Rowe
Transit Books • August 2025 • 9798893380163
“Little World by Josephine Rowe revolves around women’s bodies, lovers, heartbreak, and a deceased young saint who touches them all. This is a swift punch of a novella gorgeously written.” — Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Mercer Island, WA)
“A masterful novel that far exceeds the bounds of its slim size. Josephine Rowe has worked magic here.” — Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes Station, CA)
“A cool little book! . . . In structure it reminds me a very small amount of North Woods.” — Annie Tate Cockrum, First Light Books (Austin, TX)
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| | Audition
by Pip Adam
Coffee House Press • June 2025 • 9781566897310
“In Pip Adam’s extraordinary, humane novel Audition . . . space is both the dystopian place where humanity’s worst impulses flourish and a site of uncharted possibility where humans can become something entirely new. The story follows three giants who are hurtling through space.” — The Atlantic
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“The photos deliver. Because they flow west to east in the book, and because Wilton-Steer’s favorite angles emerge as patterns throughout, they braid a telling human gradient: from onion domes in Venice to the pitched facades of Uzbekistan, from a Christian stele in Turkey to a Buddhist one in South Asia.” — New York Times Book Review
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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| We’re Hiring
Love working with small presses, indie books, and sales reps? Come work with us! Consortium is hiring a full-time Sales Specialist to join our Minneapolis team.
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Last Friday, the Paris Review published an excerpt of Cori Winrock’s Alterations (Transit Books), a piece entitled “Dickinson’s Dresses on the Moon.”
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ABA, MPIBA, NAIBA, PNBA, SCIBA, SIBA, MIBA, GLIBA, and NEIBA Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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