Book Dreams/Dream Books
Last night I dreamed I was at work, but in the gym, and I was supposed to be chasing after students, making sure they were where they were supposed to be and on time, but I didn’t want to, so I just stood on the periphery, and I had with me a blue plastic bin in which a bunch of our books live, mostly Sleep Decades and First Aid for Choking Victims at the moment, but also some copies of Thunder from a Clear Blue Sky, Deliver Thy Pigs, and Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell. These are two spheres—my real job, and Malarkey—that I try to keep far apart, but here they were, melded in this dream world. Someone had put ice in my bin. They thought it was a cooler. Why would someone put ice in my book bin, I wanted to know, of no one. I wasn’t mad, just bewildered, what kind of person . . . , as I hurriedly, and hopelessly, scraped out melting piles of ice. I can vividly see the stacks of Matt’s book floating in the ice bath, its blue cover bleeding into the cold water, no aid available to these once pristine copies of First Aid for Choking Victims. To me the meaning is pretty clear: I guess first there’s some anxiety around getting these books out of my house, but also it’s July now, an in-between time, a melding time, a time where you’re enjoying your summer but always in the back of you’re mind you’re thinking God no it’s almost August. I’ve been going hard on press-related work all summer, but thoughts of school are creeping in, and the days are getting shorter, summer is going to go the way of the ice cubes in my book cooler and turn all my hard work into a pulpy mess. The bin in my dream was not as full as the bin in my living room, perhaps suggesting that discerning readers around the country are about to take advantage of our nice summer sale (20% off books and merch, including t-shirts and a handful of tote bags we have left, with code SELLOUT at malarkeybooks.com), but I swear to God if anyone puts ice on my books . . .
In the interest of time, sanity, stress levels, and financial stability, we have decided to slow down a bit. We published thirteen books in 2022, then nine each in 2023 and 2024, counting Death of Print titles. This year we’re down to a more manageable five and going forward we’re shooting for four books a year. While our lineups for the next three years aren’t necessarily 100% complete, we thought it would be nice to announce the books we’ve selected from our last open call. First we’d like to thank everyone who submitted manuscripts. Here’s a quick Harper’s-style rundown of the types of books we did not accept, with the caveat that these percentages are extreme approximations; we have not and will not run the actual numbers (gross):
<1: percentage of books rejected because the writing was bad
0: percentage of books rejected because they were blatantly racist or misogynistic (very happy about this one)
20: percentage of books that were rejected because they were nonfiction or poetry and we wanted to focus on fiction
1: number of books that were accepted but then the author had to withdraw because they got a better offer from a bigger press (congrats!)
0: number of writers who wrote nasty replies to rejection notes
20: percentage of books that we agonized over because we wanted to accept them but didn’t have the time and budget to devote to them
There were many very good manuscripts, quite a few that we would have published if we had more time and more financial stability. So thank you, writers, for wanting to publish with us; managing an open call for manuscripts is a lot of work, and it’s no fun at all to have to tell people you’re not going to accept their book, but we consider it an honor that so many people sent us their book, and we also consider it a duty to run this press in such a way that we will be overwhelmed with manuscripts anytime we open up for them. Okay, enough, here’s what we’re publishing in the next three years:
2026
The first title has been announced before, but for the rest of the books on this list this is their first public announcement.
March 3, 2026:
The Walls Are Closing In On Us, a novel by Joshua Trent Brown, is a Southern odyssey that follows George, a dying man of Choctaw and white descent, reckoning with the ghosts of his past as he bleeds out beside a North Carolina river, hundreds of miles from home. Only by reexamining a lifetime of flight, grief, and the haunting consequences of a teenage act of survival is George allowed the solitude he's been searching for all his life.
May 2026:
Terrestrial, a novella by Suzy Eynon
Daisy receives a message from elsewhere and witnesses phenomena surrounding the small desert town she wishes to escape, but before she can go far, she must face the parts of herself she wishes to rewrite.
July 2026:
Submarines, a novel by Mike Andrelczyk, is a book about trying to find the laugh hidden in the silent slaughter of the daily grind and trying to find meaning when money seems to mean everything. We asked all these writers to give us a description of their book for this post, and Mike said he was better at writing about other people’s books but would give it a try. Just want to acknowledge that his description is pretty good!
October 2026:
The Inaccessible Rail, a novel by Roger Vaillancourt, is a set of complete thoughts that aspires to render a pointillist portrait of this new century we're hip-deep into now, this one we are not properly following instructions in our use of, this one we are not breaking-in properly. The Inaccessible Rail once encountered Adler's 'Speedboat' when too young to fully grasp it, but aspirated some fumes of its spirit. It also enjoys the beauty of Sebald but can't walk for such long distances, and so imagines the beauty of hilltops just beyond its actual range. It suspects it may have passed Tokarczuc between flights in Frankfurt once, her easing past with the merest whiff of formalin, but it could not tell through the haze of the Camel smoking lounge. It sat up with Hardwick in the Hotel Schuyler after driving down from Boston and there smoked cigarettes and watched the maids work.
2027
April 2027:
After Last Call, a collection of short stories by Will Musgrove, examines what it means to be stuck, to drink cheap beer in dimly lit dive bars, slowly sinking in small-town quicksand. Throughout the book, characters struggle to understand why they aren’t enough while clinging to nostalgia, to a time when everything felt like it would work out.
May 2027:
More Strange Visions, stories by Sheldon Birnie
From the shores of a northern lake, the shoulder of a remote rural road, an otherwise empty parking lot at midnight, where the uncanny meets the uncouth come More Strange Visions from Canada’s own Sheldon Birnie.
August 2027:
Green Bears, a novella by Travis Dahlke
Amid the sprawl of feral Lowe’s houseplants and an endless current of drugs, a TV wilderness series documents the paths of a devoted mother, a religious cult, affluent tribal tourists, and a retiree’s quest to become Sasquatch.
November 2027:
Francis Top’s Profound Vanity, stories by Craig Rodgers
A Death of Print release and the final volume in the Francis Top series. Francis Top is back one more time. Flappers, worms, curses, castles. This collection brings together the weird, the horrific, the absurd. Francis Top's Profound Vanity contains stories that have appeared online and in print and some never seen before.
2028
March 2028:
King Maker, a novel by J.S. McQueen, is an apocalyptic tale, written in haunting prose, about how for some groups, the world ends sooner than others. Join Brooke, Dominic, and Teresa as they journey through a crumbling Appalachia while elder gods howl at the edges of the world and their minds.
May 2028:
Dead End: Stories by Joshua Vigil
A man develops a strange affliction: when he picks his nose, tiny people come tumbling out! Another meets the love of his life: an alien from planet XX-ExYss. A woman drifting at sea is saved by a whaler and mathematics enthusiast named Cornichon. Another is in the throes of grief when she develops a crush on an electric scooter. In these stories, characters profess their love. Filled with courage, they go chasing after their deepest desires to only come back empty-handed, though all the more stronger for it. With a taste for the surreal, Dead End: Stories tackles the absurdities of the plight of being a human today.
Summer or Fall of 2028
Set against the backdrop of the Y2K panic, The Millenium Bug is a novella by Matthew Zanoni Müller about a lonely, brooding teenage boy lost in his fantasies and unable to take advantage of the good things that happen to him because of the way his family dynamic has shut him off from himself and the better parts of his inner life. A love story, a story about fraught parental relationships, but really it’s a story about the delicate way that vulnerability tries to crawl out of self-protection.
We may add one or two more titles to this list, but we wanted to go ahead and share this good news now. Most of these authors are not new to Malarkey. Suzy, Travis, and Trent continue the King Ludd’s Rag-to-Malarkey Book pipeline. Other books we’ve published by past KLR writers include Toadstones by Eric Williams, Sleep Decades by Israel A. Bonilla, and Gloria Patri by Austin Ross. We’ve been Will Musgrove fans for a long time, even before publishing his story “Would You Rather?” on our website in 2023. We are very excited to work with Roger Vaillancourt, Craig Rodgers, Matthew Zanoni Müller, and Sheldon Birnie again. J.S. McQueen published a brilliant story with us in the anthology It Came from the Swamp, which came out in 2022. Mike Andrelczyk is new to the Malarkey world. We’ve been fans of his poetry since Neutral Spaces came on the scene back in the day and it turns out Mike writes killer prose as well (no surprise). Joshua Vigil is brand new to us but his absurd, off-kilter stories have found a perfect home.
You can get all of these books sent right to your house, as soon as they come out, by joining the Malarkey Book Club. In most cases the books will be signed by the author, and book clubbers also receive each new copy of King Ludd’s Rag and Hellarkey as it comes out, along with bonus stickers and occasional one-off zines. Joining the book club is nice for readers because it exposes you to books you might not have ordered or read otherwise, and it’s nice for our writers because they get money, and it’s nice for the press because it helps us sustain our operation.
It’s an honor to publish these books and we think you’re going to love them.
Last thing: if you wanted to get the 2025 book club, you can buy the whole bundle in one payment and get $30 off with the SELLOUT code. And I’m probably also going to email you and ask if you want a free t-shirt to go along with the books, unless so many people sign up after this email goes out that we run out of t-shirts, which would be fine. BOOK CLUB!