Hot News This Week
October 23, 2025
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Helwig is a lifelong activist and the rector at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church, and Encampment documents her battle to provide sanctuary for unhoused people in her churchyard.
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| News for International and Translation Awards
- Poetry: Just Like by Lee Sumyeong, translated by Colin Leemarshall (Black Ocean)
- Prose: Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán, translated by Will Vanderhyden (Deep Vellum / Open Letter)
- Prose: Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, translated by Barbara Romaine (Coffee House Press)
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Nine titles from Consortium publishers are finalists for Canada’s 2025 Governor General’s Literary Awards:
And finally, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Berta Páramo’s Lice: How to Survive on Humans, translated by Marc Correa Haro (Helvetiq), was awarded the nonfiction Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2025, a renowned German literary prize for young readers.
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| Queer Joy and Rocky Horror
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| Consortium Corner with Bill Richter
In the latest Consortium Corner, we’re CC’ing Bill Richter, one of Consortium’s client managers. Read the full interview here, which features:
- Bill’s insightful recs for literary horror and fiction in translation
- A bookstore encounter with Brady Bunch patriarch Robert Reed
- Contagious enthusiasm for working with publishers
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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“Mixing dry, dry wit, blazing female interrogation of the poetic tradition, historical blights, and literary criticism, Pollard’s latest poetry collection continues to cement her legacy as a literary master.” — Joshua Lambie, Underground Books (Carrollton, GA)
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| | Analog Days
by Damion Searls
Coffee House Press • October 2025 • 9781566897396
“Set during the summer before the 2016 election, Analog Days by renowned translator Damion Searls is a knockout in style and form. . . . Highly recommended!” — Caitlin Luce Baker, Island Books (Mercer Island, WA)
“Akin to classics by Sebald or Adler, both light in its compactness and heavy in an inflated state. With an attention to the United States in 2016, right before, well . . . It’s a great book for folks who like to focus on distractions.” — Ian McCord, Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)
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| | The New Economy
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Copper Canyon Press • October 2025 • 9781556597213
★ “Survival is revolutionary in this brilliant collection. . . . The enchanting latest from Calvocoressi examines the dichotomy of the body and soul, and the joys and sorrows each provide, through the lens of aging.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Persona
by Aoife Josie Clements
LittlePuss Press • January 2026 • 9781964322063
★ “[A] harrowing and gorgeously written debut . . . Clements’s prose is fearless and sharp, diving into gut-churning corners of the human experience and balancing brutal body horror with pitch-black social commentary. The result is an impressive thrill ride.” — Publishers Weekly
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★ “An essential library title. . . . The continuing importance of author and activist June Jordan is on full display in this collection of poems and essays. With contributions by literary luminaries, including Imani Perry and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, this volume examines and celebrates Jordan’s life and work.” — Booklist
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★ “[A] heartfelt book exploring her path toward discovering her asexuality. . . . This powerful account will comfort those who grew up feeling broken.” — Booklist
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“[A] mesmerizing little fable. . . . . There is much to admire in Fosse’s rhythmic prose, his bursts of humor and heightened sense of life’s pervasive oddness.” — Wall Street Journal
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| | The Island
by Antigone Kefala
Transit Books • June 2025 • 9798893380033
“Kefala’s is the language of desire and striving, the desire to blossom out of oneself and the striving to connect most of all. . . . In The Island, Kefala sings to us in a voice as welcome as that of an old friend and as alien as a Delphic prophecy.” — Washington Post
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| | New Digital Review Copies
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“Over nearly twenty years we have bonded by sharing similar levels of disdain for modernity/postmodernity and being aggrieved by various slights and injustices pitted against us.” Ilya Gridneff and Helen DeWitt were interviewed in The Baffler about their new collaborative novel, Your Name Here (Deep Vellum / Dalkey Archive).
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“Amid the prospects of a lasting cease-fire and Palestinian self-determination, there must also be pressure to end the unsparing detention of the thousands of Palestinians who continue to be held in Israel’s prisons.” Andrew Ross, author of The Weather Report: A Journey Through Unsettled Climates (Common Notions), wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last week.
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ABA, SIBA, GLIBA, MPIBA, NAIBA, PNBA, MIBA, NEIBA, NCIBA, and SCIBA Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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| LibraryReads Pick for October
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Vampires at Sea
by Lindsay Merbaum
Creature Publishing • October 2025 • 9781951971229
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