This year was another banner year for independent literary publishing! We’re proud to share this list of CLMP member publishers’ books honored by major literary awards and featured in best-of lists in 2025.
For more literature from independent publishers, read our 2025 year-end roundups of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children’s literature, and art and drama, featuring more than 990 books published by CLMP member presses.
Absolute Pleasure: Queer Perspectives on Rocky Horror
Feminist Press | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781558613508
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
The essays in this anthology edited by Margot Atwell “explore the film’s complicated legacy, along with queer and trans joy, sexuality, family, generational understandings of queerness, and what we do with our problematic faves.”
No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Translated from the Arabic by Hazem Jamjoum
Cleveland State University Poetry Center | October 1, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9897084-1-3
Longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose and shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 First Translation Prize
This “novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives.”
How to Be Unmothered by Camille U. Adams
Restless Books | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781632063953
Featured in Best Nonfiction of 2025 (Electric Lit)
According to Jaquira Díaz, Adams’s debut memoir is “a work of art, an excavation of memory, a blend of fierce determination, vulnerability, and a journey toward liberation.”
The Book Censor’s Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
Translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain and Ranya Abdelrahman
Restless Books | April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781632063342
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
Al-Essa’s novel is “a perilous and fantastical satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government.”
Translated from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press | July 8, 2025
ISBN: 978-1644453452
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
Bang’s translation is “a revelation in its artistry, readability, and faithfulness to Dante’s ambition for an epic poem that dares to employ language and references recognizable to its readers.”
The Feeling of Iron by Giaime Alonge
Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford
Europa Editions | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661290
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times)
“From the horrors of WWII to the spy games of the Cold War,” this novel details “a haunting tale of survival, vengeance, and the enduring shadows of history.”
Sarabande Books | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-956046-33-5
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit), 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Described as “equal parts Southern Korean Gothic and slipstream,” this short story collection is “a meditation on language, identity, and names, and how deceptively fragile they can all be.”
Etruscan Press | April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798988198598
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this collection of prose poems, “hunted by death and the brutalities of farm life, Andrews begins to connect the small black dots of her upbringing.”
Translated from the Swedish by Nichola Smalley
Two Lines Press | October 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781949641691
Longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
According to Foreword Reviews, this is “a reflective novel about the dangerous allure and empowering vindication of using fiction to cope with reality.”
The Hebrew Teacher by Maya Arad
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
New Vessel Press | March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781954404236
Winner of the 74th National Jewish Book Award for Hebrew Fiction in Translation
In these novellas, all “comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity,” Arad “probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.”
Agrippina the Younger by Diana Arterian
Curbstone Books | June 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810148413
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
Arterian’s poetry collection “follows one woman’s study of another, separated by thousands of miles and two millennia but bound by a shared sense of powerlessness.”
Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf
Nightboat Books | October 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781643622385
Finalist for the 2024 NBCC Award in Poetry and for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
Baez Bendorf’s third collection “resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.”
Second Nature by Chaun Ballard
BOA Editions | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781960145529
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This debut collection “weaves childhood experiences, historical events, and family stories into a living tapestry of memory that celebrates the landscape of Black America, both rural and urban.”
The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949641-87-5
This biography of Mexican writer Elena Garro is a “portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable.”
We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard
Milkweed Editions | January 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-57131-148-1
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Béchard’s new novel “tackles the most pressing issues of our time—from AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions.”
The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem
Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle
Europa Editions | June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661009
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times)
Based on a true story, Bélem’s book “brings to light the contributions of a Black botanical innovator, who, during a time of colonial exploitation and against all odds, changed food culture forever.”
Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell
LittlePuss Press | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964324-99-5
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
“Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s,” this essay “takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai’i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind.”
Sing by the Burying Ground by Marianne Boruch
Northwestern University Press | March 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780810146921
Finalist for the 2025 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Through “poetry, the silence of Trappist monks, the pandemic moment, the Wright brothers’ quirky stab at flight, treasured knickknacks, and more,” this essay collection “celebrates the weird, the mundane, the overlooked, and the promise of a future.”
Graywolf Press | August 8, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-347-6
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
According to Kristen Millares Young, Caldwell’s memoir “becomes more about surrendering to the truth of her marriage’s implosion while embracing her own infinite potential outside of timeworn heterosexual norms.”
The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Copper Canyon Press | October 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781556597213
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry
Calvocoressi’s latest collection “invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.”
Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell
Feminist Press | March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781558613812
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography
This book “weaves together autobiography, criticism, and theory, and considers how Black women create alternative, queer, and ‘hysterical’ lives through visual culture and performance.”
Love the World Or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland
Noemi Press | March 15, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-955992-05-3
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction
In this novel, narrator Alvina “probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust.”
Return of the Chinese Femme by Dorothy Chan
Deep Vellum | April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781646053100
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry
Chan’s fifth collection “represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.”
An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang
Copper Canyon Press | October 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781556596995
Finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 2024 NBCC Award in Poetry
Through “dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God,” Chang’s third collection offers “a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy.”
The Revolution Will Not Be Rated G by Keya Chatterjee
Green Writers Press | October 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798991413435
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this debut novel set in 2042 Washington, DC, Aria Petros “must lead a desperate mission to protect her people as a catastrophic hurricane barrels toward the eastern seaboard.”
Wildness Before Something Sublime by Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press | February 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781556597169
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
Chatti’s poetry collection “confronts a world defined by dualities—love and loss, wonder and despair, the gift of ‘sunflowers / by the roadside’ and the pain of losing a pregnancy.”
A Sleepless Night by Micaela Chirif
Translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman
Transit Children’s Editions | September 24, 2024
ISBN: 9798893389050
Honor Book for the ALA’s 2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award
In this children’s book illustrated by Joaquín Camp, “Little Elisa can’t stop crying and no one knows why.”
Wave Books | April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781950268931
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Poetry
This poetry collection explores “memory, loss, and grief inside the system of capitalist nation-states.”
The Sorrow Apartments by Andrea Cohen
Four Way Books | March 15, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-954245-78-5
Finalist for the 74th National Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash
Cohen’s eighth collection “is home to spare and uncanny lyricism—as well as leaping narratives of mystery and loss and wonder.”
Essay Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 979–8–986135–28–1
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this lyric essay, Colby “applies her humor and exacting intelligence to teasing out tangles in relationships between memory, signification, and human perception.”
Out There in the Dark by Katharine Coldiron
Autofocus Books | June 17, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957392-37-0
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This collection of essays “blends film criticism with memoir and fiction, as well as lists, visual diagrams, and Wikipedia collaging.”
The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje
New Vessel Press | May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781954404328
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub), 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times)
The Remembered Soldier “immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity.”
We’re Alone by Edwidge Danticat
Graywolf Press | September 3, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-302-5
Finalist for the 2024 NBCC Award in Nonfiction
Danticat’s essay collection “asks us to think through some of the world’s intractable problems while deepening our understanding of one of the most significant novelists at work today.”
Mr. Dudron by Giorgio de Chirico
Translated from the Italian by Stefania Heim
A Public Space Books | December 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781736370988
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 Italian Prose in Translation Award
De Chirico’s novel is “an account of the misadventures of his autobiographical hero—a painter who wanders, dreams, remembers, frets, polemicizes, and tells stories.”
New Door Books | April 22, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7355585-7-8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Booklist, this novel is an “engaging, briskly told tale of self-discovery, mother-daughter dynamics, and the complicated bonds of unsettling personal truths.”
Day Lasts Forever by Mario dell’Arco
Translated from the Romanesco by Marc Alan Di Martino
World Poetry | November 12, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-954218-27-7
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
According to A. M. Juster, dell’Arco’s poems “bring alive daily life in Rome in a unique colloquial voice that often feels like a blend of Martial’s humor, Giuseppe Belli’s grittiness, and the surrealists of the era.”
Graywolf Press | October 21, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-361-2
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit), The 32 Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2025 (Them)
Delsohn’s short stories “portray the pleasures and pains of sex and romance, the possibilities and ambivalences of gender expression, and the joys and failures of community in a city and a time that has branded itself a radical queer utopia but proves much more complicated in reality.”
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
Dalkey Archive Press | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781628976267
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub), Best Books of 2025 (Publishers Weekly)
DeWitt and Gridneff “present a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books,” combining “countless years of literary history, Scientology, dream analysis, linguistics, email correspondence, screenshots, and graphs into a novel of unparalleled scope and vision.”
The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions | June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660873
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This “gripping psychological family drama weaves Lucia and Amanda’s personal struggles with the mystery of the tragedy that marked their familial land decades earlier.”
Redundancies and Potentials by Dominique Dickey
Neon Hemlock Press | February 25, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-952086-90-8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Ann LeBlanc, this novella is “an absolutely bonkers and brutal exploration of a deeply traumatized sisterhood, and the beauty that can arise from barren ground.”
ELJ Editions | February 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781942004844
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this memoir in essays, Domenus “takes a magnifying glass to subtle moments that many people don’t recognize as homophobic or transphobic.”
Graywolf Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-290-5
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
The short stories in this collection “spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time.”
University of Pittsburgh Press | October 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780822967583
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
“Rich in metaphor, affable and self-deprecating,” the poems in this collection “shine a spotlight on regret, infidelity, the feminine ideal, fear of death, and fear of insignificance.”
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd
Haymarket Books | May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798888903155
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
According to Abdaljawad Omar, El-Kurd’s book “offers a fresh, unapologetic, and powerful critique of mainstream modes of representation and the years of Palestinian politics of appeal that have only served to concede too much.”
I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books | August 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781949944631
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
According to Elliott Sky Case, Espinoza’s collection “hinges on this balance between the numinous experience of world and self vs. the mundane-yet-dangerous acts that make up survival within our capitalist system.”
Sonnets for a Missing Key by Percival Everett
Red Hen Press | August 20, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-63628-166-7
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
These poems “soar through the musical scale, from A Minor to A Major, exploring relationships, spirituality, compassion, despair, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our realities.”
Four Way Books | August 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781961897021
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Rara Avis “captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional.”
Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
Transit Books | October 7, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-893380-21-7
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
According to Robert Rubsam, Vaim “floats between states, intermingling life and death, present and past, an interstitial novel about lives that never quite arrive at their culmination.”
Translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
Open Letter Books | October 8, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-960385-16-1
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize and shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
In this novel Fresán asks, “Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time, and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—have as its source this ultimate paternal legacy?”
Unsolicited Press | March 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-956692-91-4
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to TaraShea Nesbit, Gaddis “creates a tender, bittersweet story, keeping the light on for all that we have lost,” writing “through the lens of motherhood, marriage, and infertility.”
American Animism by Jamey Gallagher
Cornerstone Press | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781960329714
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Gallagher’s debut features stories about “a girl working in a cryptid museum, a boy in the attic of a gift shop on Mystery Hill, a vacation house in Nova Scotia where strange things happen.”
Alabama Village by J. Malcolm Garcia
Seven Stories Press | November 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644214978
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
This narrative nonfiction work is an account of a “forgotten Alabama neighborhood, told through intimate, tender, and gritty profiles of its people.”
Black Lawrence Press | March 15, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-62557-067-3
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Pentimento is “a response to a kind of annunciation, the almost supernatural calling of the artist to find words through which the self is free to move.”
Copper Canyon Press | October 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781556596957
Finalist for the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
According to Lisa Russ Spaar, “the voicings of these poems are an attempt to conjure and reconstitute the beloved lost body and all that went with it.”
Fragments of a Paradise by Jean Giono
Translated from the French by Paul Eprile
Archipelago Books | November 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781962770002
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN Translation Prize
This is a new edition of “Giono’s oft-overlooked seafaring tale” that “sweeps the reader along a narrative as poetic and undulating as the wind.”
Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore
Feminist Press | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781558613362
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Gore’s book presents “a rich, nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful portrait of what it is to be diagnosed with, treat, and live with breast cancer in the twenty-first century.”
The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand
Cornerstone Press | May 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781960329370
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
According to Richard Siken, this book is “a meditation on grief and love and their textures, on what is and isn’t possible to promise, on what it means to be a fully available living self.”
Alternative Facts by Emily Greenberg
Kallisto Gaia Press | January 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1952224362
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this debut short fiction collection, Greenberg “imagines the inner lives of the politicians, celebrities, artists, and entertainers who have ushered in our post-truth era.”
Europa Editions | August 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660958
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Greenwood’s debut is “a fast-paced satire of the war news industry and a tragi-comic coming-of-age novel.”
Waveforms: A Short Course in Piano Tuning by Andrea Hackbarth
Small Harbor Publishing | February 13, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957248-44-8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Han Vanderhart, Hackbarth “shows so clearly the infinite possibility of attention and love, grounding both practices in the relationship of a piano tuner and their instrument.”
Goblin Mode by Caroline Hagood
Santa Fe Writers Project | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781951631499
Featured in Best Nonfiction of 2025 (Electric Lit)
In this novel, “the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn.”
Yard Show by Janice Harrington
BOA Editions | October 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781960145314
Winner of the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, finalist for the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and longlisted for the 2024 NBCC Award in Poetry
According to Martha Collins, in this collection Harrington “illustrates and celebrates the resilience of Black people, through whom ‘broken things’ are ‘redeemed, reused, repurposed.’”
Martha’s Daughter by David Haynes
McSweeney’s | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781963270273
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
The stories in this collection range from “the magically real life of a city’s crumbling superhero to a rundown motel whose long-term guests are lucky to call home.”
The Stuff of Hollywood by Niki Herd
Copper Canyon Press | August 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781556596964
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry
In this collection, Herd “relies on various modes—images, prose, and lyric and documentary poems—to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest.”
The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón
Archipelago Books | April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861863
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
This poetry collection is “an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma—and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue.”
Other Shane Hintons by Shane Hinton
Burrow Press | October 31, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941681-35-0
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This collection of short stories “follows eight Shane Hintons (not including the author) through the forking paths of a life, where visceral Florida realism meets the surreal and the absurd.”
Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
Spiegel & Grau | July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781954118966
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), Books We Love (NPR)
This novel “explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.”
Black Lawrence Press | March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781625571564
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Hom’s novella “takes place during a Sunday breakfast shift as the homeless hero waits tables at a popular ‘Cash Only’ diner tucked in the Redwoods, frequented by growers, rock stars, Dreamers, tycoons, and tourists alike.”
Rescue Press | October 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798988683919
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
In Jaffe’s short stories, “characters struggle to be perceived by others as they perceive themselves—as an authentic artist, a ‘good white person,’ a legitimate parent.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | February 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781948579247
Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
The poems in this collection “study the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
The Continental Divide by Bob Johnson
Cornerstone Press | February 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781960329646
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
These fourteen stories “explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana, where men, women, and children struggle to find their way in the darkness.”
Low: Notes on Art & Trash by Jaydra Johnson
Fonograf Editions | November 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798987589076
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
This essay collection “pays a finely hewn attention to that which our wasteful, capitalistic society discards.”
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Milkweed Editions | March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781639551286
Winner of a 2025 American Book Award
Joudah’s sixth poetry collection “speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land.”
Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat
Milkweed Editions | May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781639550708
Featured in Best Nonfiction of 2025 (Electric Lit)
In this book, Kabat “mirrors her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.”
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Spiegel & Grau | May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781954118904
Featured in The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 (TIME)
According to Shannon Carlin, this book is “a full-throated celebration of the diversity of the natural world that encourages readers, regardless of how they may identify, to reconsider their place in it.”
Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento
University of Pittsburgh Press | October 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780822948360
Winner of the 2025 Firecracker Award in Fiction
The short stories in this collection “expertly capture the complications of queerness, family, dislocation, and culture.”
The Village Beyond the Mist by Sachiko Kashiwaba
Translated from the Japanese by Avery Fischer Udagawa
Restless Books | May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781632063922
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
In this middle-grade novel that inspired Spirited Away when it was first published in Japan fifty years ago, a gust of wind “leads Lina down a secret path between the trees to a strange and incredible world.”
The River People by Liz Kellebrew
Unsolicited Press | January 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963115-27-7
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This novel combining fiction, historical documents, memoir, and poetry is “a haunting and lyrical exploration of 19th-century westward expansion into the Pacific Northwest.”
The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly
Graywolf Press | October 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-359-9
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
This poetry collection is “an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy.”
Black Lawrence Press | August 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-163-2
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This debut novel “invites us to witness a near-future dystopia filled with cloned animals, a sponsorship-based education system, and a subculture obsessed with body transplants as performance art.”
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Two Lines Press | 2025
ISBN: 9781949641783
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
According to Asymptote, in this novel Kheir “uses his characters’ ever-shifting perception of their surroundings to probe the truths around globalization and its consequences, patriotism and its faults, free speech and its oppression.”
The Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea by Elias Khoury
Translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
Archipelago Books | November 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781962770064
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
In the second installment of his trilogy, Khoury “weaves personal and cultural memory into a tale that humanizes the complex Palestinian experience, and traces the careful contours of the unspeakable.”
Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson
World Poetry | September 26, 2024
ISBN: 9978-1-954218-23-9
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
Kiros’s debut collection “stretches boundaries of genre, race, and gender in an alternative production of Shakespeare’s Othello that sidesteps black death for a multitude of futures.”
Kallisto Gaia Press | February 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1952224430
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this novel, “the life that took her so long to rebuild is in jeopardy when Lissa’s ex-husband is released from prison.”
Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović
Translated from the Croatian by Ena Selimović
Sandorf Passage | January 28, 2025
ISBN: 978-9-53351-512-0
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Kolanović’s English-language debut “brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity.”
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Ali Kinsella
Lost Horse Press | April 15, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9865715-7-7
Finalist for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
Lost in Living presents Kruk’s “unpublished work from the immediate ‘pre-invasion’ years when life in Ukraine was marked by turmoil but full-scale war was not yet normalized.”
John the Skeleton by Triinu Laan
Translated from the Estonian by Adam Cullen
Yonder | October 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781632063700
Winner of the ALA’s 2025 Mildred L. Batchelder Award
In this book for young readers, Laan “weaves death and grief into the bright fabric of life, crafting a tender, humorous portrait of what it means to care for one another.”
Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam
Red Hen Press | March 25, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63628-242-8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
These short stories “explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California.”
Wedding of the Foxes by Katherine Larson
Milkweed Editions | July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781639550067
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Larson’s book is “an elegant collection of lyric essays that embraces fractures, contradictions, and the interconnectedness of life on Earth.”
Translated from the Korean by Colin Leemarshall
Black Ocean | May 7, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-939568-75-5
Winner of ALTA’s 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
In this collection, Lee’s “problematized ‘repetitions’ chime with and against those of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, while her refiguring of the mundane reads like a darkly inverted congener to that of Alfred Starr Hamilton.”
Displaced Persons by Joan Leegant
New American Press | August 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781941561324
Finalist for the 74th National JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction
According to Jessamyn Hope, this short fiction collection shows “the resilience people show when they manage, while still haunted by all that was endured or lost, to make homes in new and foreign realities.”
Joyland Editions | July 15, 2025
ISBN: 979–8–992025–80–4
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
Narrated by a journalist and told in vignettes and dialogue, this novel is “spare, funny, and attentive, a playful blurring of public and private life.”
Milkweed Editions | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781639550517
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times), Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
Limón creates “both a lush overview of her work and a powerful narrative of a poet’s life” in this collection featuring new and previously published poems from the past two decades.
Cold Thief Place by Esther Lin
Alice James Books | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781949944709
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
According to Javier Zamora, Lin’s debut poetry collection is “not only a timeless and necessary addition to immigrant literature around the world, but an automatic induction into the American canon.”
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin
Dorothy, a publishing project | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-948980-29-6
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
“Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art,” this book is an “incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.”
Noemi Press | March 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781955992046
Winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
Girl Work “centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender-nonconforming self in our current political moment.”
murmurations by Anthony Thomas Lombardi
YesYes Books | June 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946303-03-5
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
This poetry collection “navigates the fractured intersections between addiction and grief, class and community, where the lyrical lives in the blasphemous and our invocations summon ghosts instead of saints.”
I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López
Feminist Press | April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781558613126
Finalist for the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
The stories in I’ll Give You a Reason “explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey.”
Elita by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
TriQuarterly | June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9780810147867
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
This novel follows “Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case.”
The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso
Translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
Europa Editions | March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781609459802
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times), Books We Love (NPR)
Madalosso’s English-language debut “is a gripping exploration of the complexities of modern family dynamics and the tensions hiding just under the surface of ordinary lives.”
Don’t Take This the Wrong Way by Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross
EastOver Press | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-958094-56-3
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich, the stories in this collection “are sharp-toothed, playful, trippy introspections on the mundane insanity of office-life, the gluey-soup of dating, the casual cruelty of childhood.”
Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk
University of Pittsburgh Press | November 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780822967354
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection
These poems “meditate on the changing sense of reality, temporality, mortality, and intimacy in the face of a catastrophic event.”
Document Shredding Museum by Afrizal Malna
Translated from the Indonesian by Daniel Owen
World Poetry Books | May 14, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-954218-19-2
Winner of ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
Malna’s collection “moves from intimate encounters between lovers and friends to mass environmental and semantic destruction.”
sympathy for the salami by Milena Marković
Translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref
Diálogos | July 1, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-956921-29-8
Longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
In this collection gathering work from Marković’s seven poetry collections and her novel in verse, Marković “revels in the crumbling concrete and smoked meat of Belgrade and other European metropolises populated by the addicted, the down-and-out, the mad, and the shady.”
Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy Martin
Nightboat Books | June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781643622316
Finalist for the 2024 NBBC Award in Poetry and for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Instructions for the Lovers is “a taught, tender collection of poems woven with sadness and loss dealing with aging, attachments, and the precarity of life.”
Sixty Seconds by Steven Mayfield
Regal House | July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781646035977
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Jeff Schnader, this novel is “fluent in its portrayal of European World War II culture and language with highly distinctive and flavorful characters, some virtuous, some evil, but all enjoyable.”
It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays by Tom McAllister
Rose Metal Press | May 14, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941628-35-5
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this collection, McAllister “challenges himself to write a short essay for every year he’s been alive.”
Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee
Feminist Press | May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781558613386
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
This debut fiction collection contains “surreal, skin-piercing stories about the boundless longing of queer Black women.”
Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Transit Books | April 2, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-945492-84-6
Finalist for the NBCC’s 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
According to Edmée Lepercq, Traces of Enayat “frees its subject from the rote interpretation of her life through the lens of her suicide, placing her in conversation with other women who felt similarly trapped and dreamed of new horizons.”
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Europa Editions | November 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661573
Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker), Books We Love (NPR)
According to Publishers Weekly, this historical novel is “a stunning portrait of domestic turmoil and post-WWII unease.”
McSweeney’s Publishing | November 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781963270341
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
Moffett’s debut novel is “a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.”
Abbreviate by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Harbor Editions | May 8, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957248-50-9
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this “small collection of small essays,” Montgomery “examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept—and even claim—small spaces and stories.”
University of Pittsburgh Press | November 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780822948315
Winner of a 2025 American Book Award
These interviews “address artistic, professional, and cultural issues including the building of intellectual communities, the writing and publication process, and the practical economics of making a living.”
Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Archipelago Books | October 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861948
Longlisted for the 2024 NBCC Award in Fiction
This novel “at its core is a story of what happens when women—black women and girls—seek the truth by any means.”
The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press | February 18, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949641-73-8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This book is “an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we’ve lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.”
Terminal Maladies by Okwudili Nebeolisa
Autumn House Press | September 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781637680940
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
This poetry collection “serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a mother and son and their emotional journey during her battle with cancer.”
Graywolf Press | April 2, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-281-3
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Like Love is “a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant work.”
Once Upon Argentina by Andrés Neuman
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García
Open Letter Books | August 20, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-960385-11-6
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 Spain-USA Foundation Translation Award and longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
This novel “relates the lives of the narrator’s relatives— a group of people from all over the world gathered in a land where immigrant traditions merge and thrive.”
Translated from the Swedish by Alice E. Olsson
Europa Editions | March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798889660828
Featured in 100 Notable Books of 2025 (The New York Times), Books We Love (NPR)
This debut novel is “a magnetic and deeply touching story about love, community, and the unfathomable power we have over others and that others have over us.”
The Barefoot Followers of Sweet Potato Grace by Megan Okonsky
Lanternfish Press | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 978-194136089
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this novel, “a closeted lesbian in the small Texas town of Tombstone has her world upended when a mysterious band of barefoot hippies crash her beloved cat’s funeral.”
YesYes Books | June 18, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-936919-99-4
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry
Olson’s third collection “reports from inside butch culture in the 1980s American South as it traces how geography, family, experiences, and popular culture shape one queer life.”
Simmering: A Kitchen Memoir by Rebecca Orchant
Unbound Edition Press | May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798989233328
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction
In this memoir, Orchant “takes readers behind the scenes of the personal and professional kitchens that have shaped her life and its hard-won lessons.”
Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Transit Books | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-89338-000-2
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this novel, “a woman drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols—Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka—puts her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs.”
A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon
University of Pittsburgh Press | January 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780822967217
Longlisted for the 2024 NBCC Award in Poetry
According to Ange Mlinko, these poems’ “geographical circuit—from Brooklyn to Africa to the Middle East—provides the backdrop for candid meditations on time and mortality, agency and accident.”
Translated from the French by Aidan Rooney
Archipelago Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781962770415
Featured in The 15 Best Books of 2025 (Los Angeles Times)
This novel set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is “a searing account of the commodification of violence in the age of social media, of community and survival, of human connection.”
An Inherent Tear by Rodrigo Quijano
Translated from the Spanish by Judah Rubin
Wendy’s Subway | April 1, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9863375-6-2
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 First Translation Prize
Edited by Gabriel Kruis and Rachel Valinsky, Quijano’s collection “assembles a suite of poems first published in Lima in 1998 as Una procesión entera va por dentro and his 2014 essay ‘A Terrace in Valparaiso.’”
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
Elsewhere Editions | June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781962770040
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
This collection of 1960s comic strips stars six-year-old Mafalda, whose “precociousness and passion stump all grown-ups around her.”
The Voice of Blood by Gabriela Rábago Palafox
Translated from the Spanish by M. Elizabeth Ginway and Enrique Muñoz-Mantas
University of Tampa Press | October 31, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-59732-223-2
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
In this short story collection, Rábago Palafox “reimagines gothic traditions through a feminist lens, using the vampire to show women as empowered rather than victimized.”
Mercurial, or Is That Liberty? by Rachelle Rahmé
Fonograf Editions | October 14, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-57-4
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This debut poetry collection is “the work of a dual citizen—dual in conscience, dual in political allegiance, in exteriority, in friction with gender’s dualism, aspiration’s dualism, and the ache of the ethical.”
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha
Graywolf Press | February 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-319-3
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
According to Isabella Zhou, The Dissenters is “a complex novel about womanhood, political resistance, and personal history.”
Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
Translated from the French by Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books | August 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861825
Finalist for the 2025 PEN Translation Prize
According to Publishers Weekly, in this 1926 novel “profound insights about the insignificance of human life and the force of superstition pave the way to an earth-shattering finale.”
Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening by Ben Ratliff
Graywolf Press | March 18, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-328-5
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction
According to Literary Hub, this essay collection “about listening to music while running” is a “meditation on the ways in which we can deepen our connection to even the things we imagine we understand the best.”
My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women by Christina Rivera
Curbstone Books | March 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810148376
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this book, Rivera “challenges that it’s not anthropomorphism to feel deep connection to nonhuman species and proposes that gathering in collective grief is essential amid the sixth mass extinction.”
Cosmic Tantrum by Sarah Lyn Rogers
Curbstone Books | February 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780810147935
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
The poems in Rogers’s debut full-length collection “examine how our most intimate relationships shape the way we move through the wider world—and what happens when we reject the stories we’ve inherited about our worth.”
ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín
Translated from the Peruvian Spanish by Noah Mazer
Cardboard House Press | September 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781945720321
Longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Poetry
In this book, Román Marroquín “reconstructs the survival of young migrant and worker ana c. buena amid the so-called Peruvian ‘economic miracle’ and its turbulent political space.”
Jellyfish Have No Ears by Adèle Rosenfeld
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Graywolf Press | August 6, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-296-7
Longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
In this novel, Rosenfeld “shines an extraordinary light on the black hole of losing a sense and on the vibrancy that can arise to fill the void.”
To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal
Archipelago Books | January 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861726
Winner of the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
To the Letter is a poetry collection that “follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair.”
North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford
A Strange Object | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781646053582
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction and longlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This debut novel is “an allegory of extraction and a tale of adventure and endurance during the waning days of the American whaling industry.”
Sex of the Midwest by Robyn Ryle
Galiot Press | October 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798998954702
Featured in Best Short Story Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit), Books We Love (NPR)
In this novel in stories, an email “opens up the secret (and not-so-secret) lives of one small town, and reveals the surprising complexity of life (and sex) in the Midwest.”
Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems 1964–2014 by Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry
Milkweed Editions | May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781639550401
Shortlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize
In this collection of Šalamun’s poems, “the histories of Slovenia, the former Yugoslavia, and Europe are broken into kaleidoscopic harmonies of terror and joy.”
Algarabía by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
Graywolf Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-351-3
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
Algarabía is “an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf.”
How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems by Mikeas Sánchez
Translated from the Zoque and Spanish by Wendy Call and Shook
Milkweed Editions | January 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781639550203
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Sánchez’s lyrics “fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant.”
Small Wars Manual by Chris Santiago
Milkweed Editions | April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781571315717
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Santiago’s collection “of erasure poetry and other forms sinks into the cold mechanics of American warfare in the Philippines and Vietnam to reveal a brutal rhetoric.”
Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire by Jason Schneiderman
Red Hen Press | August 13, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-63628-162-9
Finalist for the 74th National Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash
In this poetry collection, Schneiderman “confronts the rise of extremism and antisemitism in the United States while grappling with the end of his marriage and finding his feet as a newly single gay man.”
Book of Exercises II by George Seferis
Translated from the Greek by Jennifer R. Kellogg
World Poetry | November 14, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-954218-28-4
Longlisted for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
Book of Exercises II is the first English translation of Seferis’s “lesser-known political, satiric, and erotic poetry as well as previously unseen material from his diaries.”
Graywolf Press | March 5, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-275-2
Shortlisted for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize
In this collection, Seuss “provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.”
Copper Canyon Press | September 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781556597121
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 (TIME)
The poems in Shapero’s fourth collection “explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair.”
Translated from the Korean by Spencer Lee-Lenfield
Black Ocean | September 24, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-939568-93-9
Shortlisted for ALTA’s 2025 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
These poems “inhabit the voices of houses, colors, planets, childhood friends; they know the manic spunk of a good day and the dizzy lethargy of a bad memory.”
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken
Copper Canyon Press | August 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781556596247
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
According to Mandana Chaffa, in this collection of prose poems Siken has “created ‘an encyclopedia of myself,’ a kaleidoscope of memory, language and identity that reveals—at times revels—in the faultiness of our own narratives.”
Terminal Surreal by Martha Silano
Acre Books | September 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946724-94-6
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Silano’s poetry collection “follows a trajectory from early symptoms before diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to full-blown illness and its effects on friends and family.”
Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Haymarket Books | April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9798888903681
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Simpson’s book is “a genre-bending exploration of that most elemental force—water—through Indigenous storytelling, personal memory, and the work of influential artists and writers.”
Seven Stories Press | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781644214671
Finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Translated Literature
In this book, Sinno “explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality.”
The Dead Dad Diaries by Erin Slaughter
Autofocus Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-957392-40-0
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
“Part true-crime story, part poetic meditation on seeking to know a parent posthumously,” this memoir “confronts the impact of domestic violence and hereditary addiction on a family lineage, and questions the extent to which we can trust the stories we tell ourselves.”
Graywolf Press | August 20, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-298-1
Finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry
This poetry collection is a “manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning.”
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà
Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Graywolf Press | June 17, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-343-8
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
According to Catherine Lacey, this novel is “forged from the deepest and truest stories about the perversity of the body, the sheer drama of the natural world, and the vengeful side of the divine.”
Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik
LittlePuss Press | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781736716885
Featured in The 32 Best LGBTQ+ Books of 2025 (Them)
According to Xtra, Solomonik’s “trans stories are not a plea for acceptance—they are bold and bizarre and tender and confrontational.”
The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone
Translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions | August 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661306
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews), 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub), Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
According to NPR, Starnone’s novel is “a slim, quietly reflective volume that evokes Ernest Hemingway’s similarly titled classic, only with a heftier serving of sweetness and self-deprecating humor.”
Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder
Graywolf Press | March 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-324-7
Shortlisted for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Publishers Weekly, this novel following a young Indian woman in the US “coheres into a crystalline portrait of a woman straddling cultures and expectations while attempting to discover who she is.”
Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa
Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Seven Stories Press | February 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781644214534
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this novel dedicated to Taïa’s mother, narrator Malika “recounts with rage her strategies to escape the injustices of History. To survive. To have a little space of her own.”
TERROR COUNTER by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Deep Vellum | June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781646053797
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry
Featured in Best Poetry Collections of 2025 (Electric Lit)
This debut poetry collection “acts against the many languages—interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical—constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians.”
Deep Vellum | May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781646053360
Finalist for the 2024 NBCC Award in Autobiography
The chapters in this memoir “move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing.”
This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy
Haymarket Books | November 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798888904572
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
This anthology features a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and an afterword from Imani Perry as well as essays, poems, letters, and interviews from Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, and more.
Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature and the Silences Around Us
Sundress Publications | May 23, 2024
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Anthology
According to Lisa Lewis, “the liminal and the determined—the overdetermined—are forever in tension in these poems, in company with the world and in the privacy of the probing soul.”
Our Precious Wars by Perrine Tripier
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Europa Editions | November 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661450
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
In this novel narrator Isadora, “now an old woman relegated to a hospice, looks back on her life and how intimately intertwined it was with that of the big, sprawling house where she spent almost her entire existence.”
The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel
Translated from the French by Donald Winkler
Archipelago Books | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781962770224
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
According to Lillian Dabney, this novel “offers a portrait of two boys’ desperate longing to feel at home in the world and their search for identity and a place where they can be free of adult intervention and societal pressures.”
Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić
Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Open Letter Books | September 17, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-960385-25-3
Longlisted for the NBCC’s 2024 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize
This book is “a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil—especially in Yugoslavia, Ugrešić’s birth country—and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing.”
Sagging Meniscus | May 1, 2025
ISBN: 978–1–963846–21–8
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
Wrongful is “a twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest.”
Origin Stories by Corinna Vallianatos
Graywolf Press | February 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64445-321-6
Featured in Books We Love (NPR)
The stories in this collection “take as their subject the sources of love, marriage, motherhood, friendship, artistic ambition, restiveness, and shame.”
Graywolf Press | March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781644453261
Featured in The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 (TIME)
This poetry collection explores “the collective trauma and resilience experienced by Hmong people and communities, the ongoing cultural and environmental repercussions of the war in Vietnam, the lives of refugees afterward, and the postmemory carried by their descendants.”
The Mary Years by Julie Marie Wade
TRP: The University Press of SHSU | November 1, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-68003-388-5
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography
This nonfiction novella “follows our protagonist from her pre-teen years in Seattle through tenure at an academic institution in Miami.”
Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm
Milkweed Editions | March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781639551019
Winner of a 2025 National Book Award in Science + Literature
In this poetry collection, Wahmanholm “narrates the awful possibility of doom as well as the grim temptation to numb ourselves to it.”
Neon Hemlock | February 6, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-952086-69-4
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Romance
In this novella, “when schoolteacher Cynthia gets a tattoo at a block party in 1991 Flatbush, she doesn’t realize she’s embarking on a life-changing romance with an immortal Ghanaian vampire.”
Tupelo Press | March 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961209-16-9
Featured in 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 (Literary Hub)
This book-length essay in verse is “inspired by mycelia, the fungal networks thriving beneath us, exploring how the processes of grief nourish new life.”
When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton
Harbor Editions | 2024
ISBN: 9781957248431
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Anthology
According to Subhaga Crystal Bacon, these poems “are diverse in style and form, but all speak to the tireless pressures of fitting into a heteronormative world before we are awake to our queerness.”
No Credit River by Zoe Whittall
Book*hug Press | October 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781771669078
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Poetry
According to Ali Blythe, this memoir in prose poetry “is a testament to our queer and artistic communities—profoundly thoughtful, coursing with intelligence.”
The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow
Milkweed Editions | June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781571311627
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction
Featured in Best Books of 2025 (The New Yorker)
Set in Vermont, Whybrow’s book is “a profoundly moving meditation on the lessons and wisdom that come from raising a family, tending sheep, and living close to the land.”
Four Way Books | 2024
ISBN: 9781961897168
Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry
In this poetry collection, Williams “writes equally riotous and vulnerable poems, penning a love letter to trans people and their audacity to exist in a world that constantly endangers them structurally and individually.”
Spiegel & Grau | February 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781954118027
Featured in Best Books of the Year (Kirkus Reviews)
Set near Yellowstone National Park, this novel “explores the bonds between brothers, the natural world versus society, and what happens when everything you believed to be true is turned on its head—for worse and for better.”
Translated from the French by Una Dimitrijević
Seven Stories Press | March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781644214053
Winner of the ALA’s 2025 Alex Award
This collection of graphic essays compiled by Marjane Satrapi features activists, artists, journalists, and academics working to depict the present Iranian revolution “in solidarity with the Iranian people, in defense of feminism.”
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuang-zi
Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Graywolf Press | November 12, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64445-315-5
Winner of ALTA’s 2025 First Translation Prize and longlisted for ALTA’s 2025 National Translation Award in Prose
This novel is “a bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power.”
