A Small Press Book We Love: Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante
Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.
The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.
Today, we’re recommending:
Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante
published by Metonymy Press (2019)
I can’t get enough of recommending this book, or the experience of discovering it.
I was killing time at Atticus Bookstore Café in New Haven during the Windham Campbell Prizes Festival a few years ago and I took a look through their blind-date-with-a-book selections. I often avoid those, because I read too much and think I know every book, but I was drawn to one that featured a description of a novel about grief, about a fictional TV series, and about unrequited love… I picked it up, and I’m so glad I did. I’d never heard of the book (or Metonymy Press, a charming queer publishing house in Montreal—Canada has some great small presses, I wish I had room to properly shout out Undertow Publications too) but it’s without a doubt one of the best things I’ve read in years, hitting the top ten list of my all-time favorite books.
Structured (as the title implies) like an encyclopedia, it is the narrator’s attempt to reckon with the death of her friend (and unrequited love) Vivian through diving into the cult-favorite TV show she adored. It’s a book about loss, certainly—queer loss in particular, as both characters are trans—but also about pop culture passions and the things that get left behind when a person dies or a show gets cancelled or a story of any kind starts to fade away. There are cute illustrations throughout, helping the structural gambit really land. The encyclopedic structure both challenges and confirms any expectations of a traditional A-Z narrative arc—and I keep going back to read little bits of the show-related stuff, because it is so charming and quirky and strange, very Twin Peaks but also The Pink Opaque and even a little bit of the oddball side of the Amy Sherman-Palladino-verse.
LBE is the kind of book that, to me, defines small presses: daring, joyous, somehow outside what you expect from books “these days” while also immediately and emphatically making you wonder why the fuck the big publishers of the world aren’t leaping at beautiful gems like this one and why the expectations about what a book can/should/will do have gotten so narrow. But more than any of that, it’s just a damn good story, beautifully packaged. I’ll dream about this book for the rest of my life, I’ll certainly be reading Plante’s work for the rest of my life, and I’m so glad to know Metonymy’s output now too.
–Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor
