Hot News This Week
October 7, 2025
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Huge congrats to all the talented honorees, as well as our friends at Copper Canyon, Deep Vellum, and New Vessel. Winners will be crowned on November 19; learn more about the finalists via the New York Times.
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| Richard Siken’s Influence on American Poetry
“It’s not merely that melodies of Siken’s have been copied but that poetry is now tuned to his syntactic and emotive key signatures.” The Yale Review recently published a piece about the enduring influence of Richard Siken’s Crush on American poetry.
The essay, written by poet Richie Hofmann, also explores how Siken’s work has evolved in the two decades since Crush—first with War of the Foxes, and now with I Do Know Some Things (both Copper Canyon Press). The latter collection was written after Siken suffered a stroke in 2019, though “Siken’s signature intensity still throbs between sentences,” says Hofmann.
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| The Remembered Soldier in Words Without Borders
“The desperation of these women, who were willing to ignore facts and harsh reality so they could believe they had found their lost husband, inspired me to write [this book].”
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| Mohammed El-Kurd on NPR’s Code Switch
“The conversation around language is really a conversation about power because those who get to dictate the terms of engagement are those in power.”
Mohammed El-Kurd, author of Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (Haymarket Books), appeared on NPR’s Code Switch last month to discuss the stakes of calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. “It’s much more imperative to address things as they are happening in the present,” says El-Kurd, “not when forests grow on top of our graves.”
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| Rascally Mushrooms and Shooting Stars
Consortium’s latest Kids Kaleidoscope, a monthly newsletter dedicated to children’s books, features four picture books that champion topics like respect and empathy, plus rascally mushrooms, shooting stars, and recent news and reviews.
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| Celebrating Four Cercador Prize Finalists
- A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, trans. by Victor Meadowcroft (World Editions)
- dd’s Umbrella by Hwang Jungeun, trans. e. yaewon (Tilted Axis Press)
- Restoration by Ave Barrera, trans. Ellen Jones and Robin Myers (Charco Press)
- Smoke by Gabriela Alemán, trans. Dick Cluster (City Lights Publishing)
The Cercador Prize recognizes works of literature in translation published in the US and is selected by a committee of independent booksellers.
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| Consortium Corner with Ellen Towell
In the latest Consortium Corner, we’re CC’ing Ellen Towell, who reps Consortium titles in the West with the Karel/Dutton Group. Read the full interview here, which features:
- Ellen’s terrific recs for a pastoral dystopian novel and important works in American letters
- A memorable Vegas trip involving tigers and Barry Lopez
- Another Consortium meet-cute (see also: Julie Schaper)
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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| | The Aquatics
by Osvalde Lewat, trans. Maren Baudet-Lackner
Coffee House Press • December 2025 • 9781566897457
★ “Lewat makes her English-language debut with a shocking morality tale about an African woman torn between her bureaucrat husband and her artist friend, whose homosexuality is a high crime in their fictional country of Zambuena.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Hyper
by Agri Ismaïl
Coffee House Press • January 2026 • 9781566897471
★ “This is a searing, nearly flawless novel that evokes Paddy Chayefsky at his angriest—it’s a hell of an accomplishment from an author who looks to be at the start of a brilliant career. A bitter yet compassionate tour de force.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | Your Name Here
by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
Deep Vellum / Dalkey Archive Press • October 2025 • 9781628976267
★ “Each of these strands are irresistible, as are the many other dizzying layers, such as the authors’ endlessly quotable banter about their project and its place in a staid literary marketplace peopled by the ‘pullulating Da Vinci Coded masses.’ Readers will be left breathless.” — Publishers Weekly
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★ “The Grumpy Ghost Upstairs is an instant story time classic . . . and it carries within it a wonderful lesson: sometimes it’s okay to try new things.” — BookPage
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★ “Even math-phobes will find this pi tasty and nourishing. An astonishing, delightful, and illuminating celebration of mathe-magics.” — Kirkus Reviews
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| | A Very Cold Winter
by Fausta Cialente, trans. Julia Nelsen
Transit Books • January 2026 • 9798893380231
★ “In this overdue translation of Cialente’s vital 1966 novel, her first to be published in English, a family struggles to find harmony while crammed together in a frigid Milan squat. . . . The result is an exquisite chronicle of frozen hearts and their gradual thaw.” — Publishers Weekly
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| | Eden’s Clock
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press • July 2025 • 9781954276383
“Lock concludes a 12-volume series of stand-alone homages to America’s 19th-century literature. Blending fictional characters with references to a host of writers from Twain to Melville to (in this final novel) Jack London, Lock hopes ‘to understand, a little, the present American era by what came before and shaped its thought, beliefs, prejudices, virtues, vices and emotional undertow.’” — New York Times Book Review
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“Five best friends hold a séance on a hot summer night, hoping to summon better futures. . . . Castro deftly examines the tension between a young woman discovering herself and a society eager to demonize her.” — Rachel Harrison, via New York Times Book Review
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“In fewer than 160 pages, Jones undertakes a most crucial endeavor of our time: spreading the gospel of why Black history is for all of us to learn.” — Progressive Magazine
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| | Perverts
by Kay Gabriel
Nightboat Books • September 2025 • 9781643622941
“Kay Gabriel’s epic poem is far from phantasmic. It’s full of specifics about protest, desire, and being trans in our political moment.” — New York Magazine
“The book is not a record of the gods smiling on one lucky girl, but an example of our capacity to conceive of worlds other than the waking one.” — frieze
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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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ABA, MPIBA, PNBA, SCIBA, SIBA, GLIBA, MIBA, and USA Today Bestseller
I Who Have Never Known Men
by Jacqueline Harpman, trans. Ros Schwartz
Transit Books • May 2022 • 9781945492600
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Mule Boy
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press • February 2026 • 9781954276468
From the acclaimed author of The Bear comes a novel about the men in a 1920s coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the story.
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Persona
by Aoife Josie Clements
LittlePuss Press • January 2026 • 9781964322063
In Persona—“the year’s great work of literary horror,” per Gretchen Felker-Martin—a trans woman discovers pornography of herself she has no memory of making, only to find herself led to an unimaginably deeper evil.
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In this debut story collection, Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time.
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Of Beasts
by M. Jane Worma
CLASH Books • February 2026 • 9781960988867
In this queer horror novella, a small-town Texas priest falls in love with the antichrist—and even God can’t stop the horror it will bring.
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Part of Lanternfish’s Clockwork Edition series, these fourteen classic tales are annotated by fantasy and folklore scholar Jennifer Pullen and explore the boundary between the human and the beastly.
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