Perhaps independent presses are most vital in their willingness to confront, to engage with ideas and possibilities that make readers uncomfortable.

Consider Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s book about reading James Baldwin and William Styron, which opens with this epigraph from Raoul Peck’s J’étouffe:

“Forgive me in advance, but I don’t really
know how to say these things other than
brutally. I just don’t know how to confront the
intellectual laziness, the denial, the inability
to feel empathy, without being blunt. I am
tired of being the one who has to educate,
be patient, put up a good front against
misfortune, all the while I am experiencing
degrading racism (whether it is conscious or
not), I am tired of being a pedagogue […] I am tired of being the one who MUST make
an effort to be understanding, to be the one
who explains, to be the magnanimous one in
the face of your ‘innocence.’

Abdelmoumen’s is the kind of bookish writing I enjoy, beginning with this epigraph, broadcasting her intention to reflect on her own reading habits, her acceptance of her own responsibility to various relationships, in the context of how and what she chooses to read.

The title encapsulates the heart of the work in simplest terms; but it’s the nuance in her narrative that makes it such a rewarding experience (in translation from the French by Catherine Khordoc).

Abdelmoumen is not only passionate about these writers’ works—that’s obvious. But also about their reasons for writing them, and her reasons for reading them. And about what happens in the gap between a writer’s intentions/ideas and a reader’s reception/thoughts. About how chaotic all of that can be. Particularly when we come to realise how much can be—and has been—misunderstood.

There are three sections to the three-page-long bibliography: James Baldwin, William Styron, Other Writing, Film and Video. And the book, published by Biblioasis, opens with this quote in bold, on a full-page spread:

“Sometimes we have no choice but to maintain our balance between two opposite positions. As if we were on a tightrope. In a perpetual and vital state of precarity.”

In Angus Gaunt’s debut novel, Anna (2025), this young girl inhabits a position of precarity from the moment readers meet her—in motion, determining whether/how to move ahead or back, to travel towards the unknown or the intolerable. She is young, malnourished, and weakened in every way –but reports this so matter-of-factly that readers understand it to be a chronic state. What circumstances have changed, those which put her into motion, are not flagged with proper nouns or context (suiting her age and experience): readers simply move, with her, through 110 pages.

In this short novel, we adopt her perspective necessarily; it’s some time before we accumulate enough information that we could apply a complex term to summarise the experience encapsulated herein. But Gaunt does not supply a  term, which suggests that he intends readers to focus on human experiences—of loss and sacrifice, generosity and dislocation, resilience and dehumanization—without linking them to one single, identifiable atrocity. (There was a war, and Anna believes it has ended but not every character has this view.) And because of the way he chooses to end his story—in a state of suspension, with a hint of promise but no concrete resolution—it feels like an invitation to apply a different framework to an archetypal tale, to change one’s thinking first (then galvanise readers into motion).

There are some recurring images situated like parentheses through the story; they are not always so clear as to be echoes, sometimes merely reverberations. Very early, for instance, another character holds a hand-rolled cigarette between their fingers inwardly so that the burning end is enclosed in a cupped palm. There is a strange sort of comfort to this, in a scene which is otherwise uncomfortable: a sense of shelter, where this is none for the two figures in the scene. Just a few pages later, another character’s face turns inward, toward the soil and away from violence, and the position of that other character’s palm and hand is outlined in such a way that it nudges readers to recall that earlier positioning which highlights vulnerability in an unexpected way.

Something similar happens with how flesh atop bone is described in different scenes. And even in these vague descriptions, you can see how this story revolves around elemental and essential realities. But not so vague that it feels like a fable or an allegory; Gaunt highlights universal truths but creates a heroine whose glimmer of individualism is recognisable after we have travelled with her for some time.

Published by Finlay Lloyd in New South Wales, Australia, Anna won the 2025 Finlay Lloyd twenty-forty Prize. Finlay Lloyd is an indie non-profit dedicated to championing “ideas and authors for their intrinsic interest and quality.” MizzzGumzzz has written about it here and Bill here; we’ve each our own slant, so it’s interesting to notice just how differently three readers can experience the same 110 pages (and where there’s overlap too).

Isabella Cosse was 13 years old “living in Quito, far from my native Rio de la Plata” when she discovered Quino’s Mafalda comics. She writes: “The sharp, direct, and ironic dialogues captivated me.” It was Emma whose obsession with Mafalda (her site’s fav-icon is a tiny Mafalda!), but it was Mafalda herself who convinced me to buy this book published by Duke University Press. Umberto Eco and Eduardo Galeano: also big fans (and their commentary is included).

Isabella Cosse’s Mafalda (2019) is a great way to learn about South- and Ibero- American history, politics, and daily life too (mostly in Argentina, but also Uruguay and Cuba). Because Mafalda is a little girl, but she’s also actively resisting the old-fashioned ideas of her parents and she doesn’t hesitate to challenge her friends when she disagrees with them either (and they repeat their parents’ opinions, so there’s a lot of opportunity for dissent). But because it is believable that Mafalda might simply hate eating soup for lunch, it’s not entirely clear that soup can also be a stand-in for what people are expected to swallow when they’re living under the thumb of a dictatorship. It’s a powerful reminder of how art can house resistance, when opportunities for free expression are limited.

Seeing how the comic strip changed the illustrator’s life and work was also interesting; he loved Mafalda—even kept her in mind while browsing in shop windows and thought about what books she would choose to read—but his decision to draw her as a figure who openly challenged authoritarianism impacted his career massively). Who doesn’t like a spunky heroine (Mafalda reminded me of reading about Little Lulu, another comic history from an indie press, Drawn & Quarterly).

Later this week, in my last ReadIndies post for 2026, three Canadian indies: one from the east, one from the west, and one from the middle. The event, hosted by Kaggsy, has its main page here.