For ReadIndies this year, hosted by Kaggsy, I’ve written about presses from Minneapolis Minnesota, during the democratic crisis unfolding in the United States: Graywolf Press | Coffee House Press | Rain Taxi Magazine. (I should have included Milkweed Editions there!) Presses that push the boundaries and invite readers to
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,
Two young women in Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch (2021; Trans. Christina MacSweeney) find a list of the books their friend had planned to read and the copies of them she had gathered, after she has died. They “divvy up the books and tear the reading list in two.
Sarah Cox’s Signs of Life (2024) vividly but succinctly describes many key figures in the conservation community: the two-legged, among them. The way she describes Ken Wu, for instance (executive director of Endangered Ecosystems Alliance): “a mile-a-minute talker”, son of Taiwanese immigrants in Alberta, who saw a photograph at
Joe Sacco’s Journalism (2012) is a longtime resident of my TBR; I was reminded of it because of his Footnotes in Gaza and Palestine. This, however, is a fabulous introduction to his work, divided into six sections: The Hague, The Palestinian Territories, The Caucasus, Iraq, Migration, and India. Most
