If you know Mike Andrelczyk for his poetry you will be delighted to know he also writes prose. If you don’t know Mike Andrelczyk you will be delighted once you do. I came across Mike’s work through Neutral Spaces quite a while back and was delighted, some years later, when he sent me a manuscript for a book called Submarines. That manuscript is now a book that is about to be published by Malarkey. Here’s the first seven paragraphs:

The shadow of a submarine-shaped cloud slid across water and over the sandbar and chilled the section of the beach where I stood sort of spaced out and doing nothing really.
I picked up a hollow stick and drew a dog in the sand. A dog started barking somewhere. I kicked sand over the dog and then I didn’t hear anything anymore. I wrote my name in the sand and erased it and then drew a submarine. I was bored. Standing there where the waves turned back.
It was April. Two days after Opening Day of the 2011 Major League Baseball season. I was twenty-five years old, living with my grandmother, hungover and unemployed.
An osprey was frozen in place like a glitch in an old Nintendo sky. He was locked in. The shadow of death was near at hand. Oh shit.
Life was extremely serious for the osprey, whereas I basically spent my life these days watching TV, getting stoned, eating hot chips, and collecting unemployment checks.
I remembered reading how newborn chicks instinctively knew to hide from the shadow of a hawk before even seeing an actual hawk. Maybe fish were like birds that way. The osprey was a predator but prey was in its name.
I was always thinking stupid shit like that.

I was immediately drawn in by the voice. I’m going to let Aaron Burch, Ben Niespodziany, Zac Smith, Jillian Luft, and Graham Irvin talk about why the loved the book. My main job here is to say that Submarines officially comes out on July 21, and if you preorder a copy before July 1 we will make sure that you get:

A. A signed copy of Submarines;

B. A copy of Comic Sans, a micro-chap featuring twenty poems and five drawings by Mike Andrelczyk;

C. A copy of King Ludd’s Rag No. 26, featuring stories by Kay Vaindal and Eli Sugarman; and

D. A copy of Hole, by S A Viau. This is the third entry in our 2026 Poetry EP series, in which we highlight the work of one author in a limited run microchap.

Submarines is also on sale for $15. Don’t let it slip past your radar: Preorder a signed copy of Submarines now!

Praise for Submarines

I loved Submarines for lots of reasons, but maybe most of all for what I felt like while reading it. Like any good hangout story, as soon as I’d finished it, I immediately missed hanging out in that world, with those characters. I challenge you to slip open to any page and not find a sentence and a passage that doesn’t make you want to read more. 

-- Aaron Burch, author of Tacoma

Submarines is a pristine slacker comedy. Laugh out loud, lonely, hysterical, relatable, and increasingly surreal. Mike Andrelczyk, a writer I previously knew as a master of the tiny poem, the joke poem, and the haiku, comes correct with his debut novel.

-- Ben Niespodziany, author of No Farther Than the End of the Street

A smooth and snappy novel written with a real poet's eye for beauty, full of both silly gags and deeply profound truths. Submarines made me both ruminate darkly on the decaying corpse of the American dream – the bleak death-march of our own doom, of grief and loss and pointless disaster – and lol. 

-- Zac Smith, author of Everything is Totally Fine

Submarines is one of those books that feels like it's emerged from the fathoms of collective human experience, to reveal its unspoken mysteries, if only for a nanosecond, before sinking into the marrow of our subconscious, haunting us when we we least expect, but desperately need, to be reminded that the 'everyday nothingness of life' is all that matters. In other words, Mike Andrelcyzk's debut novel is a gift.

-- Jillian Luft, author of Scumbag Summer

Mike Andrelzyk’s prose makes me ache not only for the narrator but for the narrator’s pain. It’s familiar in a tragic sense, like many great novels before it, about fuck ups who continually fuck up; Submarines makes me miss something I shouldn’t.

-- Graham Irvin, author of I Have a Gun