Where Independent Publishers Live

Looking for books? We've got them. In fact, we’ve got an incredible array of fiction, poetry, politics, current affairs, children’s books, and just about everything else from over 100 independent publishers around the world. In representing this vibrant community of publishers, our mission is to get their books into the hands of the widest possible audience. Our publishers’ authors include Howard Zinn, Charles Bukowski, Elfriede Jelinek, Che Guevara, Tony Kushner, Pablo Neruda, and Arundhati Roy, and their honors include Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes (to name a few). These are great books from great publishers.

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Theatre Communications Group To Publish 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama

Theatre Communications Group has acquired exclusive rights to Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner in Drama. Part of a trilogy that follows the character of Elliot, who has recently returned from the Iraq War, Water by the Spoonful will be published in August in both hardcover and paperback. The book will be followed in September by the first book in the trilogy, Elliot, A Soldiers Fugue, a Pulitzer finalist in 2007. Theatre Communications Group will publish the third play in the trilogy, The Happiest Song Plays Last, in Fall 2013.

Water by the Spoonful
Quiara Alegría Hudes | Theatre Communications Group | August 2012 | 978-1-55936-438-6 | $14.95 | Trade Paper
Water by the Spoonful
Quiara Alegría Hudes | Theatre Communications Group | August 2012 | 978-1-55936-439-3 | $28.00 | Trade Cloth
Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue
Quiara Alegría Hudes | Theatre Communications Group | August 2012 | 978-1-55936-437-9 | $14.95 | Trade Paper

Bookslinger Update: "Trouble at Pow Crash Creek"

The Bookslinger app has been updated with a new story!

This week’s story is from I Know You Are But What Am I? by Heather Birrell, published by Coach House Books. Kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies: populated as they are with lives both ordinary and extraordinary, Heather Birrell’s stories pull at the sinews of the strange until the strangeness shapes itself into something familiar. At the same time, they mould the day-to-day into something new and wholly unexpected. Oldrick must come to terms with his ex-girlfriend’s new lover and a belligerent barista in the midst of a smelly garbage strike. Young Misha learns about the complexities of grownup love when his mother is bitten by a stingray. Home-schooled Rational gets a tutor and learns that his ‘hunker in the bunker’ family isn’t quite what he thought it was, and bus-bound Marion, in love with a married man, finds solace in conversation with a convict. The stories in I know you are but what am I? are like snow domes – perfect little self-contained worlds that you can hold in your hand, turn upside down, shake until the meaning settles in a hundred different ways. Here are children and adults, men and women, all struggling to define themselves, all searching for ways to belong. This is a lucid, dextrous collection that marks the ascension of a writer to watch.

Consortium Launches Bookslinger!

As the home of a wonderful, award-winning roster of independent publishers, we’d like to help readers discover our curated collection of top-notch literature from emerging and often underappreciated literary voices. Our indie publishers strive to provide an option to mainstream books in much the same way indie filmmakers and record labels provide alternatives through their companies; the rationale for the app is that the same people who enjoy independent films and music are likely to be drawn to quality indie books — if they have an easy place to find them! Short stories are a great introduction to a new writer and ultimately Consortium hopes to cultivate more fans of independent press books.

Click here to see our demo video!

Launching today on the App Store with five preloaded stories, including one from Holly Black and one from Ry Cooder, Bookslinger will make a new story available each week to readers, helping them to discover the best new voices in contemporary short fiction. Users can browse by interest category, title, or author, and share what they’re reading with friends via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail. Currently available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, we plan to make Bookslinger available to Android devices later this year.

About this week’s books featured in Bookslinger:

The Poison Eaters (Small Beer Press): In her debut collection, New York Times best-selling author Holly Black returns to the world of Tithe in two darkly exquisite new tales. Then Black takes readers on a tour of a faerie market and introduces a girl poisonous to the touch and another who challenges the devil to a competitive eating match. Some of these stories have been published in anthologies such as 21 Proms, The Faery Reel, and The Restless Dead, and have been reprinted in many “Best of ” anthologies.

Cradle Book (BOA Editions): Timeless yet timely and hopeful with a dark underbelly, these fables revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet’s mastery, Craig Morgan Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and the people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly behaving gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.

Los Angeles Stories (City Lights Publishers): Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked, noir-ish tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America’s most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders, and oddballs populated the old downtown neighborhoods of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. Ordinary working folks rubbed elbows with petty criminals, grifters, and all sorts of women at foggy end-of-the-line outposts in Venice Beach and Santa Monica. Rich with the essence and character of the times, suffused with the patois of the city’s underclass, these are stories about the common people of Los Angeles, “a sunny place for shady people,” and the strange things that happen to them. Musicians, gun shop owners, streetwalkers, tailors, door-to-door salesmen, drifters, housewives, dentists, pornographers, new arrivals, and hard-bitten denizens all intersect in cleverly plotted stories that center around some kind of shadowy activity. This quirky love letter to a lost way of life will appeal to fans of hard-boiled fiction and anyone interested in the city itself.

This Is Not Your City (Sarabande Books) Eleven women confront dramas both everyday and outlandish in Caitlin Horrocks’ This Is Not Your City. In stories as darkly comic as they are unflinching, people isolated by geography, emotion, or circumstance cut imperfect paths to peace—they have no other choice. A Russian mail-order bride in Finland is rendered silent by her dislocation and loss of language, the mother of a severely disabled boy writes him postcards he’ll never read on a cruise ship held hostage by pirates, and an Iowa actuary wanders among the reincarnations of those she’s known in her 127 lives. Horrocks’ women find no simple escapes, and their acts of faith and acts of imagination in making do are as shrewd as they are surprising.

Elephants in Our Bedroom (Dzanc Books): The debut short story collection from the editor of the Mid-American Review. Michael Czyzniejewski’s writing is both poignant and playful. The collection includes flash and longer fiction and is the antithesis of those collections complained about for having every story too similar to one another.

Tomas Tranströmer Awarded 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Tomas Tranströmer. Tranströmer’s most recent book of poetry, The Sorrow Gondola, was published by Green Integer as a bilingual edition in 2010, translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl. Completed after Tranströmer suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990, The Sorrow Gondola is considered one of his very best works. Tranströmer has been a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize for many years, and we are thrilled to congratulate him on a long-deserved win! "The Owls," a poem from The Sorrow Gondola, is available here.

The Sorrow Gondola
Tomas Tranströmer; Translated by Michael McGriff and Mikaela Grassl | Green Integer | October 2010 | 978-1-933382-44-9 | $11.95 | Trade Paper

The Sojourn Nominated for National Book Award

The Sojourn, a first novel by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press) has been named a finalist for the National Book Award, joining such esteemed company as The Tiger's Wife, The Buddha in the Attic, and Salvage the Bones. Inspired by Andrew Krivak's own family history, The Sojourn is the first novel published by Bellevue since Tinkers, another debut, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The winners will be announced on November 16, at the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony, hosted by John Lithgow.

On May 29, the Los Angeles Times noted: "[The Sojourn] is an ever-hopeful series of fresh starts and dashed hopes, a beautiful tale of persistence and dogged survival, set in the mountains, villages and battlefields of a Europe that exists only in memories and stories."

The Sojourn
Andrew Krivak | Bellevue Literary Press | April 2011 | 9781934137345 | $14.95 | Trade Paper
The Sojourn
Andrew Krivak | Bellevue Literary Press | April 2011| 9781934137413 | $14.95 | eBook