With the fall season gearing up, there’s a lot of exciting fiction coming from small presses around the country. Torrey House, based in Salt Lake City, specializes in books about environmentalism and the Western states. The Missing Morningstar by Navajo writer Stacie Shannon Denetsosie (Sept. 12) is a debut collection of stories that “look closely at connections between self and community,” according to our starred review, which calls it “propulsive and complex…gorgeously written.”
Minneapolis-based Coffee House Press will be publishing The Devil of the Provinces by Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas (translated by Lizzie Davis; Sept. 12), which our starred review calls “a metaphysical crime novel” about a biologist who returns to his hometown after many years abroad and reconsiders the murder of his brother. “Briskly paced, thoughtful, and truly weird.”
Canadian press Biblioasis, based in Windsor, Ontario, also runs a bookstore and is well known in the publishing industry for its bookseller trading cards. This season, they’ll be publishing The Future by Catherine Leroux (translated by Susan Ouriou; Sept. 5), a novel set in an alternate Detroit that’s still controlled by the French. There’s a bereaved woman, her missing granddaughters, and a park that’s inhabited by bands of feral children. “This atmospheric novel elevates disparate voices, drawing a complex picture of community-focused life beyond the family unit,” says our starred review.
Hub City Press of Spartanburg, South Carolina, focuses on books from the American South. Their fall fiction title, Halle Hill’s Good Women (Sept. 12), is a debut collection of stories that “illuminate the lives of Black women in the contemporary Deep South and Appalachia,” according to our starred review. “A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.”
Another debut collection, Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn (Sept. 5), is set in the titular Michigan city but it’s published by Portland, Oregon–based Tin House. Focusing on Dearborn’s Arab American community, the stories are “full of humor and warmth,” according to our starred review. “What Zeineddine can do with a simple storyline and a few pages is a thing of wonder. A fantastic collection.”
Christian Kiefer’s The Heart of It All (Sept. 12), published by Brooklyn-based Melville House, traces the economic decline of an Ohio town through the lives of characters of many races, including a white couple whose 6-month-old son has died. Our starred review calls it “a thoughtful look at those just getting by from a writer who deserves to be known.”
New York–based New Directions is known for publishing books from around the world. My Work by Danish author Olga Ravn (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; Sept. 4) follows Danish author Anna as she experiences pregnancy and new motherhood in a fractured time frame. Our starred review calls it “a stunning book that speaks aloud thoughts the reader believed had been theirs alone in long nursery hours of the night.”
English author Susie Boyt is better known in the U.K. than here, but New York Review Press is trying to change that with the publication of Loved and Missed (Sept. 19), another novel about motherhood. Our starred review says, “Readers who are averse to crying in public be warned: You’ll want to sit with this astounding story at home.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
