Indie Booksellers Recommend: The Best of Independent Presses This January
Bookstores From Around the Country Pick Their Favorites
We asked booksellers at independent bookstores across the country about the best books they were reading from indie presses this month. Here are their top recommendations for January, plus a few from this past December.
Edgar Gomez, High Risk Homosexual: A Memoir
(Soft Skull)
A charming and poignant coming-of-age memoir about the intersection of Latinx culture and homosexuality. Starting with the lessons learned about the dangers of machismo with the cockfighting rings of Nicaragua, to carrying the trauma of losing fellow Miami queers in the Pulse Nightclub shooting, Gomez’s effortless style carries his memior through heavy episodes with an elegant delicacy. High-Risk Homosexual does not apologize, dancing through the night, queer and bright. –Luis Correa, Operations Manager, Avid Bookshop
Patrick Boucheron, Trace and Aura: The Recurring Lives of St. Ambrose of Milan
(Other Press)
Patrick Boucheron’s latest work lays at the intersection of religion, biography, history, and memory. Stalking the famed Church Doctor’s life and legacy from the fourth to 16th century, Trace and Aura is a treatise not only on Catholic theology and humanism, but on the way we interact with history itself. Boucheron deftly handles the inherent issue of recursion within such an examination, creating an enlightening and accessible masterpiece. –Laura Graveline, Children’s Book Buyer, Brazos Bookstore
Bianca Stone, What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems
(Tin House)
In poems that reference “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Virginia Woolf with the same ease as noise music and Star Trek, Bianca Stone’s latest collection looks at the dark things that live in us all—shame, depression, doubt, addiction—and reminds us that even Christ spent “forty days in the desert / with what he thought was the Devil / but was really just himself.” This is the moral questioning of Dante and Milton updated with a contemporary gallows humor and the 21st century’s grappling with the existential fear of climate change and capitalism. “That’s purgatory, baby.” –Timothy Otte, Events and Communications Coordinator, Wild Rumpus Books
Marilyn Hacker, Karthika Naïr, A Different Distance: A Renga
(Milkweed Editions)
In this potent and poignant collection, each page shifts from speaker to speaker as the poets recount the intimate experiences of their first pandemic year—seasons pass, suns rise and fall, their bodies and hearts hurt and heal (and hurt again), and all the while they bear witness to their hopes and pains as well as those of their loved ones and the world. In a way, the reader becomes a potent third collaborator and conversant, recalling your own early pandemic days and dreams, observations and nostalgias. –Anna Claire Weber, Events Director, White Whale Bookstore
Christopher Gonzalez, I’m Not Hungry But I Could Eat
(Santa Fe Writer’s Project)
It’s wildly delightful to have such a slender short story collection provide a full course meal of emotion: savory, salty, sour, sweet, tender and all-around charming. These are portraits of hungry men—craving touch, love, and acceptance—and finding it in friends and family (and food). True to the title, I found myself satisfied by the end of the book, but excited for what Gonzalez will serve up next. –Luis Correa, Operations Manager, Avid Bookshop
Saša Stanišić, trans. by Damion Searls, Where You Come From
(Tin House)
Like Dubravka Ugrešić, Saša Stanišić writes about the experience of growing up in a country that no longer exists, the former Yugoslavia. I couldn’t name another work of literature that fuses Dungeons & Dragons lore, choose-your-own-adventure antics, multigenerational conflict, biting witticisms against fascists, and a stunning account of what it’s like to witness a person you love vanish beneath the specter of dementia. Stanišić could find no better translator than Damion Searls, whose gifted shaping of Stanišić’s prose into English makes Where You Come From one of the best books I read in 2021. –Spencer Ruchti, Author Events Manager, Third Place Books
