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Release Day: The Walls Are Closing In On Us
March 3, 2026
Hey y’all. Joshua Trent Brown here. Alan is letting me take over for today’s newsletter because today is a special day! Today is the day my book enters the...
AWP and a Cure for FOMO
February 22, 2026
The walls are closing in on us. We’re just a week and change away from both the release of Joshua Trent Brown’s novel and AWP in Baltimore. For those of you...
A Bougie New Stapler
February 15, 2026
I got a stapler for my birthday. It’s a Bostich long reach, to replace the Swingline that now jams with pretty much every staple. The new one staples real...
Good
February 7, 2026
A couple weeks ago I gave my students a pretty easy assignment: make an argument for what grade you should get, based on your contributions in class this...
5 Poetry EPs
January 31, 2026
Sometime last year I was feeling regretful that we weren’t going to publish any poetry collections in 2026 or 2027 and I got to thinking about what we could...
Beautiful Poetry
January 25, 2026
Most times I plan what to do for poetry club on my plan, the day of poetry club, if I have time to plan at all. This last week I was looking for a sestina,...
The Walls Are Closing In On Us
January 18, 2026
Let’s start with a poem: Everybody Tells Me Everything Ogden Nash I find it very difficult to enthuse Over the current news. Just when you think that at...
Life Is Short and the World Is More Like 42% Terrible + A Cover Reveal!
January 10, 2026
I have been thinking about Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” this week. It begins with the line “Life is short, though I keep this from my children.” A...
1342
January 2, 2026
We sold 1,342 books in 2025. This figure does not include book club orders, zines, or anthologies. I’m just looking at the books we have to pay royalties on,...
Cover Reveal: The Inaccessible Rail
December 29, 2025
Roger Vaillancourt, author of Un-ruined (Malarkey, 2022), has a new book coming out called The Inaccessible Rail. This is what the cover looks like: This...
To Do
December 26, 2025
Happy Friday. I thought it was Thursday. It’s been a somewhat restful break for me so far, in that I got to take a nap yesterday in that nice lull when the...
Five Years of Ludd
November 28, 2025
Five years ago I had the idea to make a zine that would feature long stories. I set the minimum at 4,000 words and determined to pay $50 per story. I also...
Malarkey Public Radio
November 9, 2025
We have a podcast. One of the nice things about this podcast is you don’t have to jump ahead three minutes to bypass the ads because there are no ads....
Blue Jays in Cottage Country
October 25, 2025
One of the things I learned before I dropped out of journalism school was that stories had to be timely. I’ve always tried to not live by that rule, but I am...
Cover Reveal: The Walls Are Closing In On Us
October 12, 2025
We are so pleased to be able to share the cover for Joshua Trent Brown’s forthcoming novel, The Walls Are Closing In On Us. Cover design by John Chrostek We...
Nice News
October 4, 2025
This week I started class with some games. One day we did Name Drop from The New Yorker website, which was really hard a lot of the time, other than when the...
Scary Season
September 27, 2025
Scary season starts next week. This year we’re finally ready for it, with more than 200 copies of Hellarkey volume 4 already out in the world. We announced...
A Reading Tonight, and Also Books Books Books
September 20, 2025
Without, I hope, sounding alarmist, today’s email is kind of a naked plea to readers of the world to put money into the Malarkey coffers. We are forever on a...
The Barre Incidents + Hellarkey
September 13, 2025
Lauren Bolger’s second novel, The Barre Incidents, is on Reactor’s can’t-miss list. After Printers Row last weekend, we have a dwindling supply of signed...
A couple writing opportunities
September 7, 2025
Apologies for two newsletter emails in two days, but I wanted to get this out there: we have two very cool projects that we want writers to know about....
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