Hot News This Week
September 4, 2025
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| We’re celebrating Consortium’s 40th anniversary this year, and to mark the milestone, we’ll be talking with our staff and reps about their favorite titles and memorable moments.
Welcome to Consortium Corner.
- Julie’s take on 30 years in indie book distro
- Sixteen dogs
- The bookstore that introduced her to independent presses
- A Consortium meet-cute
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New and Upcoming Releases
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| Two Books on Animal Connections
Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories (Transit Books), the tenth entry in Transit’s Undelivered Lectures series, is reviewed in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine: “A searching, charmingly discursive meditation,” says writer Dan Piepenbring, “Zambreno’s reveries flit between criticism, history, and memoir—an approach well-suited to the diffuse melancholy of the zoo.” Read an excerpt of Animal Stories in the Paris Review.
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“An immersive, glittering anthology full of boundary defying voices that need to be listened to. Read this book and read it again.” — Kaitlyn Mahoney, Under the Umbrella Bookstore (Salt Lake City, UT)
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| | Sky Luck
by Erica Lee Schlaikjer, illus. Dagmar Smith
Blue Dot Kids Press • September 2025 • 9798989858866
“Beautifully illustrated . . . a lovely bedtime story about perspective, gratitude, and feeling in awe of space and nature.” — Meghan Bousquet, Titcomb’s Bookshop (East Sandwich, MA)
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| | Quiet Crossings
by Vivi Partridge
Conundrum / EMANATA • October 2025 • 9781772621136
★ “Debut creator Partridge leverages fantasy allegory surrounding death and grief in this reflective and heartfelt speculative graphic novel.” — Publishers Weekly
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★ “Ingratitude breeds monstrous results in this entrancing cautionary tale. . . . A triumphant blend of humor and horror, perfect for teaching and scaring by turn.” — Kirkus Reviews
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★ “[A] compellingly assembled retrospective. . . . Wickedly astute and surreally funny. A greatest hits collection of unclassifiable speculative fiction.” — Kirkus Reviews
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“Mushtaq does not offer easy answers, but she does offer reverence for the women who uphold communities, who glow quietly in corners, and whose stories flicker with uncontainable life.” — World Literature Today
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“A standout. On Earth As It Is Beneath is a must read for those who like their poetry written in blood. . . . It is inventive and unflinching. And while the atmosphere is heavy with brutality and murder, Maia’s prose offers the perfect counterbalance—it is beautiful and gripping.” — New York Times Book Review
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| | Happy New Years
by Maya Arad, trans. Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press • August 2025 • 9781954404342
“I was captivated by Arad’s cleverness. . . . [She] pushes the novel’s form in Happy New Years through the ingenious manner in which she delivers the tale.” — World Literature Today
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“A stunning tale of government violence, organized protest, and radical hope . . . You Must Take Part in Revolution proves both heartbreaking and heartening.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
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| | Delicious Hunger
by Hai Fan, trans. Jeremy Tiang
Tilted Axis Press • June 2025 • 9781917126021
“Over the next three decades, emergency conditions persisted, a phenomenon dramatized not only in Delicious Hunger, Hai Fan’s 2017 Chinese-language collection translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, but also in Tiang’s own English-language novel State of Emergency. . . . (Tiang notes that the research he conducted for State of Emergency ‘served as unwitting preparation to translate Hai Fan’s work.’) Both books, which have become available in the United States for the first time this year, paint rich portraits of social worlds forged by the ‘Second Emergency’ (1968–89).” — Los Angeles Review of Books
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“Yau Ching’s poetry negotiates language and belonging, homeland and love. . . . Jiang’s careful and detailed translation settles these fiery, gentle poems into an English that retains their complex yet playful sonics and semantics.” — World Literature Today
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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Announced in PEOPLE, Alison C. Rollins’s Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press) and Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies (Autumn House Press) are finalists for the Zora Neale Hurston / Richard Wright Foundation’s 2025 Zora Awards, which celebrate the excellence of Black writers in various categories.
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“Beautifully written, with a touch of magical realism, the book also includes fabulous-sounding instructions for cooking Basque cod stew.” Susanna Crossman’s The Orange Notebooks (Assembly Press) is recommended and excerpted in Electric Literature.
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ABA, MPIBA, SIBA, NAIBA, PNBA, MIBA, SCIBA, GLIBA, and NCIBA Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
🌙 Collector's Edition 🌙
coming in hardback this month, with a new intro by Carmen Maria Machado
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