Still Alive
Happy New Year or whatever. It might not be, or like always it will be a mix, right. It’s hard to celebrate when one is mindful of all the trouble in the world, yet if one is only mindful of those troubles you can forget to live.
It’s another year, and we’re still here, thanks in large part to the successful completion of Project Malarkey, a Kickstarter campaign we ran to help get us caught up, give us a little breathing room. With these funds, we can pay for book printing earlier than usual, and they might be a little higher quality. For at least the first two books of 2025, we’re going to do some modest print runs with Bookmobile, out of Minnesota. We’re hoping they’ll give us a higher quality than Ingram’s print-on-demand books. And these first two titles will have something we’ve always dreamed of: French flaps. La-di-da. Hair Shirt, poetry by Adrian Sobol, comes out in April, and Boxcutters, stories by John Chrostek, comes out mid-May. Boxcutters will have something pretty unique: in lieu of blurbs or jacket copy, it will have an extra short story (flash fiction) printed on the French flaps. This will only exist in the copies printed by Bookmobile; if we do reserve print-on-demand those copies won’t have the story.
Read a sample of Hair Shirt.
Our other news is this: Still Alive, a novel by LJ Pemberton, has been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. You can see LJ’s book on the graphic below alongside books by Percival Everett, Colm Tóibín, Kaveh Akbar, and a bunch of other excellent writers.
The Dublin Literary Award is somewhat unique in that nominations come not from publishers but from libraries. Still Alive was nominated by the DC Public Library. They have this to say about it, by the way: “Pemberton is magic with words. She explores what it means to be an elder Millennial queer in a world that offers only disappointments. There are certainly many coming-of-age books, but Pemberton captures moments in time 15 to 20 years ago that speak to specifically today. She is a voice of her generation.” Out of all the books acquired by the DC Public Library in 2024, their nominating committee selected a debut novel published by a no name small press in the middle of nowhere. I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but her inclusion on the longlist is a sign of hope.
Get a copy of Still Alive
By the way I’m about to order the t-shirts and tote bags that we set up for Kickstarter rewards, and we’ve ordered extra so we can have them available in our store.
I don’t know how to wrap this up, other than with Thank you.