Small-Press-Club

Featuring one of the least-relatable, most annoying protagonists of a book that I’ve read in recent memory! The story follows a therapist in the wake of her mother’s death by, more or less, assisted suicide in her terminal illness. I do not understand the title, because there are not a lot of ghosts (maybe two) and none of them are at any point vengeful. Basically, the woman buys a model house and it is full of problems. Also, she starts to hallucinate her dead mother. (Mild spoilers below.) ...

I read this for our July Small Press Book Club, pairing it with Math for the Self-Crippling, with this book being suggested by Math’s author, Ursula Villarreal-Moura. I often feel unqualified to evaluate poetry, and that feeling persists. Though, the visual layout decisions and the sense these give appeal to me. Perhaps more to me than to the others in my club. Poem Cardinals, A Novena enters to bracketed segments, weaving across the page before eventually resolving outside of those brackets. My favorite of the layout experiments is on page 34, which features a blank page tailed by a footnote that can only be explained as a typographic panic attack. ...

Theodoridou’s recent book is my small press club’s pick for June, and what a strange little book. It is a retelling, kind of, of the Bluebeard story. I think I first encountered the Bluebeard story in Stephen King’s The Shining, but probably before in some form as well. In general, I think the book is quite good. Theodoridou’s framing device for Sour Cherry features an unnamed narrator reciting the events of the tale as though they are a ghost story, presumably to “you” the reader, who also may or may not be a child. ...

Quincy’s Absence was my book club’s pick for May, and it’s one of the books we’ve read that I’ve appreciated (enjoyed might not be the right word) the most over the past year. I was sad to miss the group’s discussion; I finished the book around 9pm in an ER with a fractured fibula. For a short book, Absence does read longer, probably because of Quincy’s very (occasionally very) long and sometimes meandering sentences. Though, as someone known to word-count sentences and to go through and circle the number of commas in a passage, I never felt the need to do so while reading. Only in transcribing the notes below did it occur to me how long they sometimes are. The bigger contributor to the elongated feeling is probably the darkness; it feels that there is a suicide or death besides every few pages. The book is really about our narrator encountering different people who have lost others, who are soon to loose others, or who in their distant past have lost them and continue aching across the years. ...

My review will be shorter than the average paragraph in this book. The paragraphs are so long and so punctuated by ellipses that after a time my eyes began to slide across the pages and shift up and down and all around trying to track the internal monologues of our characters. I resisted this at first, feeling that I was losing some sense of coherence. Eventually, I gave up on this and understood that the impression of scattered internality is at least a part of the point. These characters are all wrapped up in themselves, and in how their expressions of self communicate status and prestige. ...

Preparing for my small press club this past week, I stood around and scanned titles. A person came up and picked this off the turning rack and recommended it. “It’s tiny!” I said, referring not only to the thickness but the form factor, which reminds me a bit of the Archipelago books. The person that handed me the book turned out to be the author. It is probably fair to say I bought the book 33% out of a sense of social obligation interior to myself (the same voice in my head that tells me I can’t walk into a store and then leave without buying something), and 67% out of curiosity. The back flap notes that it is the winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition, and chapbooks are something I’ve been curious about without having ever read. ...

This will be a short note. Ana Simo’s Heartland was my small press book club’s March pick, and wow! Unfortunately, I did not like it. I found it so grating to read that I couldn’t finish it, despite getting about 90 pages into its 200something pagecount. I felt the use of slurs so over the top that it smelled like an amateur novelist trying to scare the reader, to tell them, Hey, this is Serious Stuff. But it did not work for me, and only made me roll my eyes. ...

February’s book club pick. I felt excited to vaguely engineer the polls such that we could finally cover a Semiotexte title, not to mention one that I was certain would be weird and gay. The certainty proved well-founded, because I more or less am not sure what happened in the book, but I enjoyed every page, such that some of these very sad paragraphs can be enjoyed. Gary Indiana’s book is at least faintingly autobiographical, though whose to say just how much. Some parts seem so clearly translated from real people that I refuse to believe their synthetics. I did not read the introduction before reading the book so became educated that at least one character seems to be directly inspired by Susan Sontag, which I found just delicious. ...

1/2026 Review John William’s Stoner is the January 2026 selection for my Small Press Fiction Book Club. My history with the book is intertwined with that club; initially a fellow member recommended it to me back in probably early 2024, and then the my friend and the club’s first facilitator let me borrow her copy of the book. I found a lot of kinship in Stoner (in my first review I use the words ambivalent and aloof, two words that a therapist once used to describe a younger version of myself). ...

This was the November pick for our Small Press Fiction Book Club. I liked it! I wish I could say I loved it, but that’s not quite true. I found it really challenging to read. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, paired with very long sentences and a myriad of commas and semicolons and parentheticals takes a lot of effort to hold through. You can almost feel yourself running out of breath; I have to imagine that’s intentional. ...