To help bookstores and libraries share titles from independent publishers, we’ve put together this roundup of essay collections published by indie presses.
Bellevue Literary Press | April 28, 2026
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 9781954276543
In this essay collection, Badkhen “probes the ways we ward off despair as she imagines the language we need for survival.”
Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability by Therese Estacion
Book*hug Press | April 28, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-77166-964-1
In this collection of lyric and poetic essays, Estacion “confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.”
Backyard Alchemy: on life with other creatures in a time of salvage by J. D. Ho
River River Books | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Itasca Books
ISBN: 979-8-9926116-2-5
This collection of environmental essays “transforms the loss of climate stability, relationships, health, and ecological integrity into sites of repair and restoration.”
Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kocak
Trio House Press | April 1, 2026
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-949487-54-1
Kocak’s memoir in essays is a “collection of exploits and delusions about chasing your dreams with reckless abandon and what happens when their pursuit becomes a new kind of trap.”
Green Writers Press | March 5, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 9798992398861
The essays in this collection “focus on the Great Salt Lake and its beauty, its fragility, and its changing landscape in the face of climate change.”
How to Disappear and Why by Kyle Minor
Sarabande Books | February 24, 2026
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1956046144
“Considering a wide scope of cultural, historical, spiritual, and philosophical figures and ideas,” this book “assembles a collection of essays centered on the concept of disappearance.”
Postmuslim: A Testimony by Youssef Rakha
Graywolf Press | September 15, 2026
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1-64445-415-2
Rakha’s debut essay collection “tells the story of Islam’s clash with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader.”
Black Lawrence Press | October 6, 2026
Distributor: Independent Publishers Group
ISBN: 978-1-62557-178-6
This essay collection follows Shin’s “journey from her childhood as a nameless, abandoned nine-month-old baby in Seoul, South Korea to an award-winning author.”
CHABÓCHI DOLL by féi iká shumarí
Abode Press | July 1, 2026
Distributor: Abode Press
ISBN: 979-8-9955832-0-2
In this essay collection, shumarí turns “womanhood, citizenship, and disability on their head” while “negotiating the radicalness of her joy and two-spirited embodiment, when confronted with a brain tumor diagnosis.”
Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders: Writing on Music, Culture and More 1979-2025 by Tim Sommer
Trouser Press Books | August 4, 2026
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 979-8-9990487-3-8
“Part memoir, part high-octane cultural criticism,” this collection of essays “documents a vanished era when knowledge was precious currency and a T-shirt was a flare sent up to find fellow survivors.”
Books as Drinking Buddies: A Book of Re-readings by Gary Soto
Limberlost Press | May 1, 2026
Distributor: Limberlost Press
ISBN: 979-8-2954-8346-2
In this book of humor essays, Soto “re-reads books by Charles Darwin, Claire Tomalin, Pablo Neruda, Oscar Hijuelos,” and more, and “has literary opinions that might extend beyond his own local 94708 zip code.”
Read Furiously | June 2, 2026
Distributor: Ingram
ISBN: 978-1-960869-25-8
“With wit, vulnerability, and a feminist eye for the ridiculous,” Teets’s debut collection of essays “explores what happens when you refuse to play the role society assigns you.”
The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals by M. K. Thekkumkattil
The Feminist Press | July 14, 2026
Distributor: Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
ISBN: 978-1-55861-362-1
This essay collection illustrates how the “medical system fails both its patients and its laboring nurses” and how “radical consent found in queer kink practices lets us imagine a future where hospitals are abolished, yet care thrives.”
Translated from the Spanish by Francisco Cantú
Restless Books | May 5, 2026
Distributor: Publishers Group West
ISBN: 978-1-63206-411-0
In this collection of essays about soccer, Villoro explores “the elements that make it the world’s favorite pastime, from its ancient origins, mythic players, exhilarating matches, endemic rivalries, and the unlikely moments in which football has changed history.”
Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl by Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Graywolf Press | February 17, 2026
Distributor: Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Macmillan
ISBN: 978-1-64445-373-5
This book of essays collects “Wong’s reminiscences, dreams, investigations, and experiments in being with small invertebrates whose vulnerability and creativity inspire radical reimaginings of Earthlinghood.”
