By Bookshop.org
What a year! We’d like to dedicate a moment to appreciating the work of independent presses, publishing incredible books even as the world falls apart. Here is just a small sample of our favorite indie press books published in 2021.
—The Bookshop.org team
Mohamed Kheir,
Robin Moger
Paperback
$16.95
$15.76
“A novel of the strange spaces in the folds between magic and reality, the in-between places in every city, the stories that fog and change as memory erodes. . . . Strange, beautiful, challenging, and perfect for fans of Kathryn Davis and Carmen Maria Machado.” —Josh Cook, Porter Square Books
Alex DiFrancesco
Paperback
$16.95
$15.76
“Alex DiFrancesco has written stories here that are so unearthly they feel as if they have gossamer wings, characters lifting off the page to hold court in startling three-dimensional life. . . . Transmutation is the kind of story collection that will stick with you for days after reading.” —Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things
Maria Stepanova,
Sasha Dugdale
Paperback
$19.95
$18.55
“A daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis. . . . A kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.” —John Williams, The New York Times
Iván Monalisa Ojeda,
Pedro Almodóvar,
Hannah Kauders
Hardback
$21.00
$19.53
"Iván Monalisa Ojeda brings to life a breathtaking world of camaraderie, beautiful messiness, pain, and resilience in Las Biuty Queens. He/she offers us captivating snapshots of Latinx trans sex workers living, working, and loving in New York City, telling a story close to my heart: that of keeping one another alive, fed, bailed out, and in deliciously deviant company amidst the harshness of criminalization. This book is like the money a friend slips in your pocket when they know you can't make rent: a fortifying whisper to carry on, and carry each other with us." —Tourmaline, filmmaker and activist
Larissa Pham
Hardback
$26.00
$24.18
“Larissa Pham combines the thrilling and agonized travails of her young narrator with the lucid and steady eye of a born critic. The combination is a compelling portrait of one artist's development through the mirrors of her favorite artists.” —Melissa Febos
Shiori Ito,
Allison Markin Powell
Paperback
$17.95
$16.69
“The vital urgency of Shiori Ito's record forces us to recognize the existence of the many similar cases that have gone unrecorded. Behind her words are the cries of countless others who did not speak up because of the intense pressure against them.” —Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Paperback
$16.95
$15.76
“A mesmeric journey into the lives of two remarkable women—their art, suffering, sacrifices, ecstasies, transcendence—bound together across time.” —Literary Hub
José Vadi
Paperback
$16.95
$15.76
“This is a must read book, it must be read to yourself, aloud to your friends, and to strangers on the bus. . . . This collection showcases a voice keenly aware of how history is alive both in the landscape as well as inside his own writing body.” —sam sax, author of Madness and Bury It
Jackie Wang
Paperback
$16.95
$15.76
“With Wang's poems' suggestion that not much is worth saving in a world that values all the wrong things, perhaps a single sunflower sprouting from the rubble is all we need to be guided toward the light.” —Hannah Treasure, Akimbo Books
Kaveh Akbar
Paperback
$16.00
$14.88
" Pilgrim Bell is a book that chooses honesty over beauty, which makes it a breathtaking text." —Hanif Abdurraqib
Andrea Gibson
Paperback
$18.00
$16.74
“Andrea Gibson seamlessly spins hopelessness into hope, fires back at social norms, and challenges what it means to be alive and to be human.” —them
Caconrad
Paperback
$18.00
$16.74
“CAConrad’s . . . kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence.” —Eileen Myles