Independent presses are used to adversity. It’s a good thing, too, because tariff uncertainty, canceled NEA grants, and author visa issues have created anxiety and increased financial pressures. These challenges came up in PW’s conversations with 10 indies, but hardly dampened the sense of excitement around their eclectic fall titles, which range from deeply researched histories to the strange tale of a restless corgi spirit, whose premise makes one wish Queen Elizabeth II was still alive to read it and smile (or gasp).
A Dark Turn
Indies are embracing the popularity of genres like romantasy and horror. Soho Press executive editor Mark Doten says Soho has long published literary fiction “with a foot in a different genre,” and that its Hell’s Hundred imprint, which debuted in 2024 with E.K. Sathue’s youthjuice, explores the boundaries between literary fiction and horror as well. “Our goal,” he adds, “is to be open within Hell’s Hundred, but still publish books that true horror fans are going to be excited about.”
Out from Hell’s Hundred this September, The Captive is Ned Beauman’s first book under his Kit Burgoyne pseudonym. Beauman has written several well-received, genre-bending novels, among them the Arthur C. Clarke Award winner Venomous Lumpsucker. Doten explains that while Beauman’s previous books were “novels of ideas” with strong genre elements, he was “interested in writing more squarely in the horror fiction tradition” under the Burgoyne pen name. The Captive opens with an anticapitalist group’s kidnapping of the secluded heiress of a family as sinister as they are wealthy.
Ova Ceren’s The Book of Heartbreak (Aug.), which reworks a Middle Eastern legend, fits nicely into Crooked Lane’s romantasy-heavy Alcove Press imprint. Senior editor Jess Verdi says she doesn’t stay up to date on all the “bookfluencers,” but she knew about Ceren, “the duck lady with the garden library.” A Turkish-born writer and software developer, Ceren shares book recommendations and idyllic scenes from her house in Cambridge, England, specifically its impossibly charming garden studio and plentiful waterfowl, with her 600,000 Instagram followers. “There’s been so much emphasis on platform lately in publishing, but we often get in projects by authors with huge online platforms, and the book doesn’t hold up,” Verdi says. Not so with Ceren’s tale of a 17-year-old afflicted by a generational curse.
While romantasy remains popular, Verdi thinks “that bell curve is working its way down a bit.” She hypothesizes that a shift toward dystopian romance is on the horizon, as well as a continued interest in body horror. “A deep anxiety with current events is all feeding into fiction,” she says.
Sara Levine’s The Hitch (Jan. 2026) is a wry, off-kilter take on body horror from Roxane Gay’s eponymous imprint at Grove Atlantic, which published its first title last year. Having loved Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, a comedic homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Gay telephoned Levine out of the blue to see what she was working on. Turns out she was writing a novel about a bizarre babysitting mishap: while in the care of his aunt, a boy becomes possessed by the soul of a recently deceased corgi. “It was exactly what I was looking for in terms of something odd but beautiful, really funny, and a little uncomfortable,” Gay says. Reflecting on her second year at the helm, she says she’s learned that “the idea of an imprint and the actuality of it” are very different. “Getting a book into the world is very humbling and edifying.”
Star Power
“You want it all, but you can’t have it” goes the refrain to “Epic,” Faith No More’s biggest hit. Luckily, when a memoir from Roddy Bottum, the alternative metal band’s keyboardist, came across the desk of Akashic publisher Johnny Temple, he wanted it and could have it. As a musician himself, Temple was struck that Bottum, who is gay, was still not out during the height of the group’s success in the early 1990s. “I would have assumed that anyone in a San Francisco band wouldn’t feel stuffed in the closet,” Temple says. “It was eye-opening to me that the rock and roll world was more macho than I had even realized.” Bottum’s The Royal We (Nov.) has some “juicy rock and roll tidbits” about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, but according to Temple, it’s less a tell-all than “a coming-out story, a coming-of-age tale, and a love song to San Francisco.”
Akashic is also publishing actor and novelist David Duchovny’s first collection of poetry, About Time (Sept.). “As a reader, the poems felt more intimate than his fiction,” Temple says, especially in their handling of Duchovny’s relationship with his father.
Speaking of Hollywood stars, House of Anansi’s big fall title is a biography of Canadian comedy legend John Candy. Over the 2019 holidays, editorial director Douglas Richmond and his family had a Candy movie marathon, which gave him a greater appreciation for the comedian’s screen presence in roles large and small. Richmond called up Paul Myers, whose 2018 biography of the sketch comedy group the Kids in the Hall he had edited, and floated the idea for a new Candy biography. “He was immediately on board,” Richmond recalls.
Myers’s John Candy: A Life in Comedy (Oct.) chronicles the actor’s career from his earliest roles through his work on John Hughes hits like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to his early death in 1994 at the age of 43, revealing an immensely talented and generous man whose Falstaffian exterior masked his deep anxiety. With a preface from Candy’s longtime friend Dan Aykroyd, the book spotlights the close-knit 1980s Canadian comedy scene, whose ranks included Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, and Martin Short, and “the cultural exchange” between Toronto and U.S. comedy hubs like Chicago and New York. Richmond says Myers has a “secret weapon” that makes him ideally suited for celebrity biographies. “Paul has this great way of getting famous people to talk about a famous person.”
Novel Challenges
Restless Books fortunately received its 2025 NEA grant, a significant source of funding, before “the big wave of cancellations came through,” says managing editor Lydia McOscar. Still, with the press’s focus on immigrant literature, she is under no illusions about grant chances for next year. Two titles on Restless’s fall list are Serge (Aug.), from French novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza, and Unexploded Ordnance (Oct.) by German-born biologist Catherine Coenen, winner of the press’s prize for new immigrant writing. “Immigration is just a massive, massive topic and generator of stories,” McOscar says. “It’s something that we do that not many other presses really focus on.”
Reza’s Serge, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, follows adult siblings on a road trip from France to Auschwitz shortly after the death of their Hungarian Jewish mother. Senior editor Jennifer Alise Drew says this is a personal work marked by Reza’s “trademark wit and acerbic, volleying dialogue.” In Ordnance, Coenen grapples with her German family’s experiences in World War II. “She can seamlessly blend her own personal history with complex biological topics and issues like Nazi Germany’s approach to wheat monoculture,” McOscar says of Coenen’s alternately lyrical and scientific approach.
The Trump administration’s visa policies have complicated the marketing of works by international authors. “I’ve never had to work on a book tour where there was a very real fear of ICE agents showing up at an event and arresting my author,” says Interlink co-owner Hannah Moushabeck of Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey’s anthology, We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, out this September from the publisher’s Olive Branch Press imprint. “As a marketer, this is a whole new territory for me.” Separated into pre– and post–October 7 sections, the collection gathers 70 pieces from the 700 published on the website of We Are Not Numbers, which pairs emerging Palestinian writers with experienced English-language writers for mentoring and was founded by Bailey and Alnaouq in 2015.
Alnaouq has had his visa repeatedly denied, and some of the collection’s contributors currently living in the U.S. are fearful of attending readings. Consequently, Moushabeck is working with activists and organizers to put together “solidarity kits” so that bookstores, libraries, and organizations can host an event without the contributors present.
On the trade war front, Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells is anxious about tariffs because the U.S. is an essential market for the Canadian press. Nonetheless, Bibliosias is coming off two of its best years, and Wells is excited about new books from its international roster of authors, including Irish novelist Elaine Feeney, author of the Booker-longlisted How to Build a Boat, and Russell Smith, “one of Canada’s sharpest cultural critics and novelists,” per Wells. Forthcoming in November is Benbecula, the third title by Scottish novelist Graeme Macrae Burnet that Biblioasis has published in four years. It’s a “natural follow-up” to Burnet’s His Bloody Project, Wells says, as both ruminate on a historical murder investigation. Benbecula explores a case Burnet found in a rare compendium of crimes in the National Records of Scotland: in 1857, Angus MacPhee murdered his father, mother, and aunt on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. “In his slant way,” Wells says, Burnet tells “the story of how madness pervades and haunts this community.”
History Matters
Turning from present-day political struggles to historical ones, McNamara at War: A New History (Sept.) is the kind of ambitious nonfiction project Norton is known for. Vice president and executive editor John Glusman, who worked with political scientist William Taubman on his 2017 biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, was intrigued when he learned that Taubman and his brother Philip, a former New York Times journalist, were working on a joint biography of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who oversaw the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War.
“The Taubmans are trying to understand this brilliant, deeply flawed man who was in an extraordinary position of power,” Glusman says. The biography draws on previously unavailable material, such as the secret diary of John McNaughton, McNamara’ s Pentagon aide, and letters between Jacqueline Kennedy, who harbored deep reservations about the war, and McNamara, her closest friend in her husband’s cabinet. “Ultimately, this is a book not only about power but about decision-making and transparency,” Glusman says. “So, it is enormously relevant to what is happening in this current administration and has happened in many administrations past.”
David R. Godine, another indie stalwart with a strong nonfiction tradition, is coming out with Mark Kurlansky’s The Boston Way: Radicals Against Slavery and the Civil War this October. Editor Celia Johnson says it’s the kind of work owner William N. Thorndike Jr., who bought the press in 2019, loves: “books that are passion projects for authors, that cover anything that someone is incredibly curious about.” Kurlansky, author of the wide-history-through-a-narrow-lens bestsellers Cod and Salt, has long been passionate about nonviolence and the story of Lydia Maria Child and David Lee Child, early-19th-century Boston abolitionists. Johnson worked with Kurlansky to expand the scope of the book to include the so-called Boston Clique, a larger group of abolitionists who met to discuss the most effective means—persuasion or violence—of ending slavery.
Other passion projects on Godine’s list include art historian Nicholas Fox Weber’s cultural history of pickleball’s neglected cousin, The Art of Tennis (Nov.), and retired English professor Philip Weinstein’s meditation on growing old, Time’s Bounty: Rethinking Aging (Nov.). The latter is the kind of concise and exquisitely designed work at which Godine excels. “The beauty of the books we produce is still a core value,” Johnson says, echoing a common sentiment among these meticulous and committed indies.
Matt Seidel is a writer and translator living in Massachusetts.
Read more from our fall indie books feature.
