 $24.95 | May 2025 196 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-84-4 The Hopefuls
Elizabeth Oness
From award-winning writer Elizabeth Oness comes a new collection of rapturous and compelling stories about ordinary people and their joys, slights, families, and failures.
---
“In Oness’s hands, even the smallest, most ordinary lives loom large.”
—David Jauss author of Glossolalia
| .png) $24.95 | May 2025 180 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-83-7 Never Stop Exiting
Michael Hopkins
Michael Hopkins’ dazzling mix of stories helps us see the world as if through beginner’s eyes, a prism where the refractions usher in light and life..
---
“A reason for readers—lovers of literature—to celebrate.” —Charles Johnson National Book Award Winner
|  $24.95 | May 2025 212 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-81-3 Broken Heart Syndrome
Anne Colwell
Death doesn’t end relationships in Broken Heart Syndrome but transforms them. Colwell's characters live lives haunted by ghosts, and yet they all eventually choose to suture up their despair for a chance at restoration.
---
"Nothing less than thrilling."
—Liam Callanan author of When in Rome
| $24.95 | May 2025 168 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-82-0 The Mexican Messiah
Jay Kauffmann
Stories of faith, chance, and haunting grace from a striking new voice, The Mexican Messiah glows with life and darkens with shadow.
---
"A work of wonderment."
—Vanessa Blakeslee author of Perfect Confition
|  $24.95 | Mar. 2025 182 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-65-3 Close to a Flame
Colleen Alles
Finalist, Short Fiction NIEA With her radiant stories, Colleen Alles wants to tell you it’s often the case that deep connections to other people—sometimes friends, sometimes sweethearts, sometimes spouses—help restore what’s broken.
---
"Subtle and piercing."
—Nathan Gower author of The Act of Disappearing
|  $24.95 | Mar. 2025 228 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-71-4 American Animism
Jamey Gallagher
Veering between realism and magical realism, each story in American Animism, the astonishing debut collection from Jamey Gallagher, illuminates something necessary, something true: these are stories of transformation and becoming.
---
“A triumph. Jamey Gallagher is a major talent.” —Andre Dubus III National Book Award Finalist
|
 $24.95 | Feb. 2025 198 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-74-5 Soaked
Toby LeBlanc
One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc’s people, do best.
---
“Deeply intimate and significantly important.” —Southern Review of Books
|  $24.95 | Feb. 2025 230 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-64-6 The Continental Divide
Bob Johnson
Ferocious and real, the fourteen tales in Bob Johnson’s blistering debut The Continental Divide explore the undertow of violence and sin along the St. Lawrence Divide in northern Indiana.
---
“Think Flannery O'Connor meets Quention Tarantino.” —New York Times Book Review
“Pulses with tension.” —Foreword Reviews
|  $24.95 | Feb. 2025 208 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-63-9 Keeping What's Best Left Kept Secret
David Ricchiute
Stirring and elegant, Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret probes the force of untold secrets on the daily business of making do. In these stories, David Ricchiute uncovers deception teeming with self-deception, and the final returns have much to do with the accidental chemistry of fate.
---
“Rich and enigmatic.” —Barbara Shoup author of A Commotion in the Heart
| .jpg) $22.95 | Feb. 2025 146 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-73-8 Shocker in Gloomtown
Dan Libman
Bursts of humor, pathos, and absurdity people the tales in Shocker in Gloomtown, as Dan Libman continues his exploration into the strange fissures of Midwestern surrealism.
---
“Quick, funny, touching, serious, sometimes surreal, with a distinctive colloquial voice.” —Stephen Dixon National Book Award nominee
|  $24.95 | Feb. 2025 174 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-52-3 The Correct Response
Manfred Gabriel
In The Correct Response, Manfred Gabriel artfully blends the fantastic and the real, culminating in surreal but heartfelt tales of longing, love, and loss against the backdrop of modern America.
---
“A short-story collection with characters so real they might just grab you by the shirt collar.” —Jim Guhl author of South of Luck
| $24.95 | Feb. 2025 198 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-70-7 The Path of Totality
Marie Zhuikov
United by the power of appearances to deceive and captivate, Marie Zhuikov’s tales glisten with the magic and menace of everyday lives.
---
“Love, in its numerous forms romantic, parental, devotional, inspirational, and desperate has a lingering presence in Zhuikov's collection of tales.” —Booklist
|
$24.95 | Jan. 2025 182 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-62-2 The Three Devils
William Luvaas
With grit and grace, chaos and compassion, angst and absolution, The Three Devils makes us reckon with the maelstrom, all while wrestling with the longings of the busted and beautiful human heart.
---
“As human as it is haunting . . . mesmerizing and deeply unsettling.” —Necessary Fiction
| 
$24.95 | Nov. 2024 244 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-48-6 Welcome Back to the World
Rob Davidson
Winner, Short Fiction NIEA In stories of finding life anew in ever-changing circumstances, Rob Davidson’s soaring prose reminds us that hope is visible in the darkest of times.
---
"An impressive set of stories from a skilled observer of the human animal."
| 
$24.95 | Nov. 2024 240 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-39-4 Greyhound Cowboy
Ken Post
In his perceptive debut, Ken Post peeks into frailty, confrontation, and friendship, illuminating the fascinating and fragile details that make up our lives. --- “This little book is big in many ways .” —Kim Heacox
author of Jimmy Bluefeather
| 
$26.95 | Nov. 2024 244 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-48-6 Signs of the Imminent Apocalypse
Heidi Bell
.png)
Runner-Up, Short Story/Anthology
Midwest Book Awards
Finalist, Short Fiction NIEA 
Finalist, First Horizon Award, Eric Hoffer Awards
---
"Part Neil Gaiman and part Donald Barthelme, with a touch of Joyce Carol Oates.” —Booklist, starred review | 
$24.95 | Oct. 2024 164 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-42-4 The Waterman
Gary Schanbacher
With powerful and salty prose, Gary Schanbacher shows how the decisions we make reverberate through the decades of our lives and affect not only our destiny but also the destinies of those around us. --- “Imaginative and evocative . . . an engrossing reading experience.”
—Rocky Mountain Reader
| 
$24.95 | Oct. 2024 208 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-46-2 Close Call
Kim Suhr
Carefully crafted, surprising, and humane, the stories in Kim Suhr’s Close Call unveil emotion in tight spaces, hearts in turmoil, and the searching soul of the Midwest. --- “A fresh take on love, hate, jealousy, faith, loss, fear, conformity, and disappointment.” —Wisconsin Writers Association
"Close Call gets us close—we slip in and out of various bodies just in time to start squirming." —Maggie Ginsberg author of Still True
|
$24.95 | Oct. 2024 176 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-45-5 The Silver State Stories
Michael Darcher
Amidst the casinos of Reno, Nevada, the “Biggest Little City in the World,” Michael Darcher introduces us to the dealers, workers, and patrons of the Aces Oasis Casino. Steady, assured, and compassionate, he shows us more than high rollers and underbellies. He gives us real people. --- “Exquisitely funny, wry, and tender. This book is hard to put down.” —Corrina Wycoff author of Damascus House
| 
$24.95 | Oct. 2024 184 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-44-8 What We Might Become
Sara Reish Desmond
Winner, Short Story Collection Storytrade Book Awards Bronze Medal, Short Story - Fiction IPPY Awards Deft and moving, What We Might Become shares the uncertainty about how we ought to live in transitional moments and, perhaps more desperately, forever.
---
"Desmond's stories are so real, so painfully true."
| .png)
$24.95 | Aug. 2024 252 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-41-7 An Instinct for Movement
Michael Mattes
From a blighted Mid-Atlantic city to pre-millennium San Francisco to the hills of California pot country to a woodland outpost in the Pacific Northwest: with each new dislocation, Michael Mattes strives for clarion, momentary truths born of human comedy. --- “One of the best collections of riveting, character driven short stories I’ve ever read.” —Robert Dugoni New York Times Best-Selling Author
| .png)
$24.95 | Apr. 2024 200 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-20-2 The Machine We Trust
Tim Conrad
.png)
Winner, Short Story/Anthology
Midwest Book Awards
In The Machine We Trust, narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape—sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Tim Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away. --- “Gloriously imaginative and utterly compelling.” —Thisbe Nissen
author of How Other People Make Love | $26.95 | Apr. 2024 242 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-34-9 Salt Folk
Ryan Habermeyer
Association for Mormon Letters Awards Melancholically absurd, the salty women and foolhardy men in Ryan Habermeyer’s reimagined American West confront catastrophes large and small, magical and mundane, with grotesque optimism and quixotic tenderness.
---
"Habermeyer writes with the existential despair of Samuel Beckett, the nightmarish humor of Franz Kafka, the discomfiting imagination of Ben Marcus, and the dark precision of Gordon Lish and his acolytes."
| 
$24.95 | Apr. 2024 192 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-19-6 The Commission of Inquiry
Patrick Nevins
Eclectic in its breadth and startling in its power, The Commission of Inquiry investigates life, death, and other matters, as Patrick Nevins delivers twenty stories built to surprise, challenge, and even change us. --- "Nevins moors his impressive range of subjects with profound insights into who we are.” —Jennifer Wortman author of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.
|
$24.95 | Apr. 2024 190 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-21-9 Gridlock
Brett Biebel
There’s a 200-mile long traffic jam on I-94, and people are going to be stuck there for days. Maybe weeks. Told in striking, kinetic flashes, Brett Biebel’s Gridlock explores the event, its origins in American political, athletic, and romantic institutions, and its impact on all the individual lives that go on in its shadow. --- “Dazzling.” —Chris Bachelder National Book Award Finalist
| 
$24.95 | Nov. 2023 178 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-09-7 Maximum Speed
Kevin Clouther
Maximum Speed moves across time and point of view to dramatize youth’s aftershocks. The unifying presence in three characters’ lives is Billy, an apprentice drug dealer in South Florida. His improbable appearance twenty years after his death reconnects Nick, Andrea, and Jim with each other and with the shared sacred of their past. --- “Wonderfully evocative.” —Booklist
| 
$24.95 | Nov. 2023 184 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-13-4 Reach Her in This Light
Jane Curtis
Four women living in Madison, Wisconsin. Four lives woven together by Jane Curtis, in her vibrant and explorative debut. Told with flashes of song, sensuality, and sincerity, Reach Her in This Light unfolds as a fiery and empathetic mosaic of lives lived, as four women each search for their own kind of freedom. --- “Despite upheaval, these women are centered and true, never bitter or jaded.” —Indianapolis Star
| 
$24.95 | Nov. 2023 208 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-10-3 The Spirit in My Shoes
John Michael Cummings
In tales that conjure comparisons to John Updike, Raymond Carver, and William Gay, The Spirit in My Shoes tells the truth about loneliness, relationships, and the common struggles we all face with prose both precise and vibrant. --- "Funny, touching, and at times surprising.” —Kali White author of The Monsters We Make | 
$24.95 | Oct. 2023 212 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-08-0 The Effects of Urban Renewal on Mid-Century America and Other Crime Stories
Jeff Esterholm
Wisconsin Library Association On the Third Coast, the shores of Lake Superior, Jeff Esterholm explores what happens when people slip their moorings and are set adrift. --- “Compact and succinct, fresh and interesting.” —Wisconsin Writers Association | 
$24.95 | Oct. 2023 184 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-12-7 Fugitive Daydreams
Leah McCormack
Blending elements of fiction and nonfiction, Fugitive Daydreams dares to challenge the boundaries of the short story by blurring the lines between convention and experimentation. With power and stylistic inventiveness, Leah McCormack embraces the absurd while refusing to look away from painful truths. --- "Furious, melancholy, and tender.” —Leah Stewart
|
$24.95 | Oct. 2023234 pp | Paperback 978-1-960329-07-3 What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better
Jody Hobbs Hesler
Told with restraint and deep compassion against the backdrop of Virginia back streets and small towns, Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection shines with its portraits of longing, disconnection, and the ache for renewal and redemption that comes from our own frailties. ---
"Thoughtfully crafted and skillfully realized." —Necessary Fiction
| 
$24.95 | Apr. 2023 204 pp | Paperback 979-8-986966-35-9 Hoist House
Jenny Robertson
With power and compassion, Jenny Robertson weaves tales that explore the precarity of immigrant life, worker exploitation, the tensions and dangers inherent in growing up, and the ephemeral nature of the American Dream. ---
"Stories driven by muscled, energetic prose, the sort of prose honed by years of manual labor. ” —North American Review
| 
$24.95 | Feb. 2023 192 pp | Paperback 979-8-986966-33-5 Finding the Bones
Nikki Kallio
Longlist, Edna Ferber Fiction Award Wisconsin Writers Awards
Finalist, Short Fiction American Book Fest
Finalist Cygnus Award in Science Fiction
Nikki Kallio establishes herself as a fresh, innovative, and compassionate voice in speculative fiction and magical realism.
--- "Kallio is well on her way to seating her short fiction among the greats." —Wisconsin People & Ideas | 
$24.95 | Feb. 2023 200 pp | Paperback 979-8-986966-36-6 Where Are Your People From?
James B. De Monte
Spanning ninety years, Where Are Your People From? explores the fellowship and hardship of Midwest Italian-Americans in the post-industrial Appalachian region of Ohio through the eyes of a son of immigrants. With authenticity, humor, and grace, De Monte delivers a truly American story. ---
"Elegiac and brimming with vivid, immediate life." —Varley O'Connor author of The Master's Muse
| .png)
$21.95 | Feb. 2023 146 pp | Paperback 979-8-986966-34-2 Self-Defense
Corey Mertes
Crackling with lyricism, hard-bitten truths, and soaring prose, the twelve stories in Corey Mertes’s Self-Defense follow their down-on-their-luck protagonists through life’s narrow passes to its snow-covered valleys below. ---
"The stories are as addictive as the throw of the dice or turn of the cards that Mertes' gambling addicts can't resist." —West Trade Review
| 
$24.95 | Jan. 2023 234 pp | Paperback 979-8-986144-76-4 Sometimes Creek
Steve Fox
Winner, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award Wisconsin Writers Awards
Winner, Short Fiction American Book Fest
Finalist, Indie Fiction Chicago Writers Association Awards
Fox's clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm
--- “Grim but entrancing.” —Kirkus Reviews
|
 $24.95 | Jan. 2023 184 pp | Paperback 979-8-986144-77-1 The Plagues
Joe Baumann
Frogs, flies, blood, and boils descend upon a cast of primarily young, LGBTQ+ characters, all searching in some way for love and acceptance amidst burgeoning sexual awakenings. Equal parts playful and personal, Joe Baumann’s The Plagues does more than recast the past; it charts a way forward. ---
"Imaginative, heartfelt, and brilliant." —Aura Martin author of Butterflies Over Flame
|  $21.95 | Nov. 2022 220 pp | Paperback 979-8-986144-72-6 Kind of Blue
Christopher Chambers
The stories in Kind of Blue juke and jive in an unpredictable voice-driven romp. With the sound and rhythm of language driving each tale, Christopher Chambers gives voice to the working- and middle-class worlds of the American Midwest and the South. ---
"It’s the kind of book best read out there in the world, amongst the commotion of life." —Wisconsin People & Ideas
| .png) $28.95 | Nov. 2022 374 pp | Paperback 979-8-986144-73-3 The Clayfields
Elise Gregory
In The Clayfields, Elise Gregory’s powerful debut, the lives of three women are threaded together through the changing backdrops of farming communities in the twenty-first century. Where country churches are closing and old man bars are turning into wineries, an eclectic mix of characters must decide to evolve with new forces or leave their settler roots for new lives. ---
"Gregory offers hope for rural life. . . . An unforgettable, subtly powerful portrait." —Wisconsin People & Ideas
| $21.95 | Mar. 2022 148 pp | Paperback 978-1-7377390-4-3 Evangelina EverydayDawn Burns
Mixing humor and sincerity, Dawn Burns roots her debut collection firmly in the minutiae of Midwestern life, focusing on the inner life of one who suffers the annoyances of a Midwestern lifestyle in a manner all her own, a manner filled with anxious contemplation of the worth of her life. ---
"Evangelina is the kind of book you want to curl up with. . . . Many Midwestern women can relate to Evangelina and her hopes and desires."
—Memoirous |  $21.95 | Jan. 2022 268 pp | Paperback 978-1-733308-67-0 TownshipJamie Lyn Smith
With honesty and empathy, Jamie Lyn Smith closely examines the strains that intimate family ties put on lives worn raw by collective history. Ultimately, the nine stories in Township interrogate the notion of reconciliation, examining whether people can truly change and if forgiveness is possible. ---
"Township leaves readers considering their own existence—their purpose, their failures, and the vulnerability required to find fulfillment." —Prairie Schooner
| $18.95 | Dec. 2021 202 pp | Paperback 978-1-733308-64-9 Responsible AdultsPatricia Ann McNair
Distinguished Favorite, Fiction Independent Press Awards In Responsible Adults, farms fail, families break apart, and work is hard to come by. The characters in Patricia Ann McNair's fictional Midwestern towns are fueled by grief and hope, loss and desire.
---
"Edgy, empathically imagined, and strongly crafted." —Booklist
|
$17.95 | Dec. 2020 236 pp | Paperback 978-1-733308-61-8 Great Escapes from DetroitJoseph O'Malley
In Great Escapes from Detroit, Joseph O'Malley tells stories of families living in Detroit. In an imperfect city that beckons and repels, these characters probe the ever-shifting terrain of the human heart, where the tenacious pull and push of love, trepidation, and occasional joy plays out as they navigate the opposing impulses that exist in all families: to embrace their circumstances, or to escape. ---
"Luminous with what lesser writers miss: the magic and the splendor of the commonplace come alive." —Lee Martin Pultizer Prize Finalist
| 
$18.95 | Dec. 2019 242 pp | Paperback 978-0984673-97-1 Nothing to LoseKim Suhr
Next Generation Indie Book Awards Personal and powerful, Kim Suhr's Nothing to Lose shows us a region filled with real people: less than perfect, plagued with doubts, always reaching. ---
"It seems as if Kim Suhr doesn't invent characters; rather, she channels them." —Sandra Scofield National Book Award Finalist
| 
$18.95 | Dec. 2018 200 pp | Paperback 978-1-733308-94-0 The Appointed HourSusanne Davis
The luminous interconnected stories in The Appointed Hour shine a compassionate light on a changing rural America, spanning generations and locations by exploring the emotions that accompany life's trials. The heart-wrenching challenges draw Susanne Davis's characters together in feelings of love, loss, hope, and community, united throughout history by the place they call home. ---
"These characters are astonishing and distinctive, and the situations, settings and narratives are haunting, vibrant and irresistible." —The Day
|
|
| |
Skip to main content
