Independently Published Books I Own

A Newsletter Post

My mother used to buy books of poetry from her friends. She even once bought the mystery novel of a daughter of a friend of hers. I, a judgmental teen, once snootily asked her, “How do you know the books are good?”

She responded, “Of course they’re good.”

Well, now that I’m a snooty, judgmental adult, I have this to add to the conversation: I own a pile of books friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, and I actually insist they are good.

A key attribute here is that as I’ve grown and seen some of my own friends come into their own as artists, and befriended artists who’ve already come into their own, I’ve learned that knowing them as a person adds an additional, interpersonal layer of meaning to their work.

I while ago I was re-organizing my bookshelves and realized I have a nice pile of independently or self-published books from people I’ve met in some fashion or another. I decided I’d share these books here.

Note that I haven’t read all of them — I was going to wait until I did, but I realized that by the time I’m finished with all of them I will have acquired more, and so on. Rather than wait, I figured I’d just pitch them as my relationship to them are.

One bookkeeping note before I continue: I will link the books to places you can purchase them in the titles. I do not get paid for those links. Not one of the writers featured asked me for this shilling. I do this entirely out of my own enthusiasm for my community.

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Books I’ve Read

The Secret Side of Empty — Maria E. Andreu

Maria is the sister of my friend Pablo, who is also a writer and the writer/producer of a webseries called Stray that he and I worked on together. When The Secret Side of Empty came out, Pablo performed his brotherly duty and shilled the book on social media, where I picked it up and was immediately blown away.

The Secret Side of Empty is a semi-autobiographical telling of a high school senior named M.T. who is trying to navigate American culture and dating while also hiding the fact that her family are undocumented migrants from Argentina. The quality lies in the constantly percolating stress M.T. always feels and how it translates to resentment from her family and occasionally acting out with boys and staff at school.

Maria Andreu also has another book called Love in English that I have also read and is also good. It is a more young adult oriented novel about navigating dating in a English-as-Second-Language class. And she has a new one that just came out this last May called Julieta and the Romeos.

Boobs Gone Rogue — Kaet McAnneny

Kaet is a production designer I met on the feature film 37, which to date was one of my favorite features to work on (and looks absolutely amazing). For you indie film buffs out there, she was also the production designer on Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin.

Anyway, Kaet McAnneny published this memoir which covers a period of time where she trained for a marathon and left a bad long-term relationship with an addicted partner all while diagnosed with breast cancer and eventually getting a mastectomy. All of this set on the backdrop of any artist professional’s stresses of trying to hold down a Greenpoint apartment and take care of her dog Dashiell Hammett.

What really keeps this book rolling is her sarcastic, dry sense of humor and her strangely methodological memory for details — almost like, you know, a production designer would have. One strange spell of vertigo in a hospital is more visual most movies muster and has lived in my head ever since reading.

Inconvenient Daughter — Lauren J. Sharkey

Shortly after I moved to New York, a television producer I know asked my help in recording a sizzle pitch for a show about first generation Asian Americans dating. She also brought in Lauren Sharkey to provide commentary. She said, “This writer Lauren, I found her through some of her articles, and she’s hilarious and insightful.”

So we kept in touch after that production and later Lauren published Inconvenient Daughter. Much like The Secret Side of Empty above, it’s a semi-autobiographical fiction, this time about transracial adoption rather than undocumented migration, and this time set in Long Island rather than New Jersey.

The comparisons end there. This book is, frankly, harrowing. The topic of transracial adoption is only one layer of several levels of teenager rage and self-punishment Rowan fails to contain, and which her exasperated adoptive mother fails to understand and prevent. At first what seems like burgeoning daughter-mother alienation spirals out of control and the two end up in a self-defeating pattern of attrition.

All that said, it’s necessary to recognize that the book also offers understanding and redemption. It’s worth the journey.

Somewhere in Brooklyn — Heru Ptah

I am not friends with Heru Ptah, but I bought this book from him personally. He was selling it on the L train, and I was completely charmed by his sales pitch. He is a writer, artist, filmmaker, and overall community leader who does everything himself and shows up on the street level to get his work out there.

Here’s the weird thing: Somewhere in Brooklyn is really good, and after I read it I was excited to see him again on the L train a few weeks later so I could tell him myself.

Somewhere in Brooklyn is about a father who kidnaps the police officer who accidentally shot his son to death and holds the police officer in a basement, causing a citywide search.

It’s a noir thriller set in the world aware of George Floyd. As a genre thriller, it’s quite simply an irresistible page turner. As a political fiction, it is highly nuanced. John Bishop is not heroized for kidnapping a police officer. Brian McNally is no mustache-twirling racist. The two of them are stuck with each other at the razor edge of mutual empathy and pain, but their conflict sets off outside forces that truly want to create carnage.

I feel honestly lucky I got a chance to read this book and glad I have a copy.

Heads — Mark Klink

This is an art book curating some very nicely printed versions of Mark Klink’s 3D glitch heads. I’ve been following Klink for a long time and have been linked up with him in various glitch communities, and it’s always a pleasure when he publishes a head.

One of the key things here being how richly detailed they are. You can just sit and look at a render for a long time, and it’s breathtaking to do it in a book format rather than in its digital native format.

Mob Treasure / Puzzle Rap Star — Crux Club

Crux Club is the publishing outfit of my friend Jan, who loves escape rooms, game design, and video game art. Jan used to run a video game gallery for Bushwick Open Studios and even created a Bushwick historical game, so his puzzling and gaming can also be very community and local history based.

Out of that research and fandom he’s created these puzzle books. I’ve played Mob Treasure, haven’t yet worked my way through Puzzle Rap Star. The puzzles are very well balanced and game-tested: they should give you a pause and take some time to solve but if you get too lost there are hints in the back that don’t give them away.

And they have narratives! Mob Treasure is a classic noir where you have to navigate the black market and legal underground, and Puzzle Rap Star uses rap music history to bring you through the narrative of rising to the top.

The Shadow of Death: From the Case Files of Matt Spike, PI (The Dead End World Book I) — R. E. Sohl

^ This picture is not my own, but a friend’s of Robert’s. My copy needed to be exchanged and I haven’t yet received the replacement. Is one of the risks of self-published works.

Anyway, Robert is an Internet friend I met through a book club with this other Internet friend I’ve known for a very long time. The book club was even able to read this as one entry, as he wrote and published it during the period the club was meeting.

For me to describe Shadow of Death, listen… there’s this book by Lloyd Kaufman of Troma Productions called Make Your Own Damn Movie! that I one day snowcloned to a post that said “Make Your Own Damn Cinematic Universe!” and this book is very, very, very, very, very, very much Robert’s internal cinematic universe. As he likes to put it, he had a lot of these ideas bouncing around his head for a long while and finally just sat down to bang them out. From that cerebral black hole he’s been ejecting creative radiation in the form of short stories, drawings, and full ass novels at a clip ever since.

So what’s Shadow of Death about? A guy who wanted to be a detective to go on televised serial type fantastic adventures actually becomes a detective, then after realizing detecting has nothing to do with going on fantastic adventures, ends up in a fantastic adventure. Which is one half of the thing, because yes he’s happy to be on a fantastic adventure, but it turns out that when you’re on a fantastic adventure, people can die. Or they can get hurt. Including the hero. Including you!

This thing is just adventure rollicking through secret societies and space ships with shapeshifters and witches and large intergalactic battles featuring ape men and nuclear explosions — it’s nutty. And super entertaining. That last part being the real sell, it’s easy to be random and wacky but it’s difficult to sustain it and Robert kept escalating and surprising.

In the Desert of Mute Squares: Errors; or, Dreams I Never Had; or, Late Capitalism by M Kitchell

Yeah, I don’t know M Kitchell, but this is still an indie published gem. What type of gem is a little hard to describe. M Kitchell calls it a “Text Object.”

Think House of Leaves written by e e cummings in his later career. And with a lot of provocative, graphic content and angst.

But I actually respect the “Text Object” label because it’s a very pretty piece of art to own and look through. I’ve ‘read it’, if you could call it that, twice. There’s lots to love and lots I dislike about the experience, but I can never get rid of this book. It feels like a precious artifact.

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Books I Haven’t Yet Read

These are from members of The Soaring Twenties Social Club and one reason I haven’t read them yet is because I purchased them all within the last few months. In all cases I can full-heartedly recommend the writer even if I haven’t yet finished the text.

Principles of Contemporary Home Cooking — Olli A. Ruotsalainen

Olli is a Soaring Twenties Social Club member who endeavored to learn how to cook with as little food waste as possible and ended up getting deep into how all types of ingredients truly work together. He now operates a restaurant and has shared his self-teaching in the form of this book here, which frankly I need to read soon because I fry everything and am developing the dad bod to show it.

The City Mother — Maya Sinha

A Catholic novel about a crime reporter dealing with post-partum depression after moving to a new city. Sort of sounds like Se7en from Gwyneth Paltrow’s perspective, or as if written by Virginia Woolf.

Anyway Maya is another STSC member and runs the Substack Creative License:

The Portrait of a Mirror — A. Natasha Joukovsky

A satirical novel of memetic desire as two couples, one from NYC and one from Philadelphia, cross and entangle with each other, from the author of the Substack quite useless.

Emelia — gkgaius

gkgaius publishes the Substack The Words Whispers and that title is how this novella Emelia describes itself, ‘a story that has whispered in his ears for many years.’ I haven’t read it all but I did glance through it for the purpose of adding a bit more meat, only to be met with text containing the slipperiness of a dream, even visually and typographically.

Dream House — Brady Putzke

Brady is an amazing guy. Thoughtful, philosophical, considerate, this man will sit down and passionately discuss almost any topic with an attempt to understand nuance and work through all aspects of his thoughts on a thing. This is why he has a Substack called Think on These Things.

Anyway I relate to him a lot on those measures, which is why he and I are both infamous for walls of text. But homeboy then went off and banged out a gothic horror novel about a guests trying to disentangle themselves from a web of lust and violence. Early feedback sez this book is a banger.

A Fistful of Demons — An Anthology of the Weird West

This anthology contains one short story by STSC member Jim Carran entitled “Call Me Rex.” Jim Carran is the pen name of a writer who goes on Twitter as GetPaidWrite, you can follow.

This one I definitely picked up because, well, I don’t have enough Weird West under my hat, basically outside From Dusk Till Dawn. So this was a twofer, support a friend and get a digest of a subgenre I’m curious about.

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I have more small press books but the M Kitchell one was the only one I could find cause to mention without having engaged with the writer in some way personally, because of its peculiarity and hand-made qualities.

There are also many other publications by friends and members of STSC and other community I’m involved with, that I do not yet own.

I also own art prints, paintings, photographs, photobooks, chapbooks, indie comic books, zines, and other associated little ‘art objects’ that it would be too overwhelming to include here. Perhaps as a follow-up sometime, if I can figure out a way of organizing them.

The point is to put out there that some of the best art is your friends’ art, and they need your support. You are basically one of their first customers and whether they get published or self-publish (or get distribution or self-distribute, or get in a gallery or hold open studios), they sharpen their craft under your supervision.

As mentioned, the above list contains links in the titles to buy these works. But also consider how often your own community has reached out asking for your engagement with their work. I encourage you follow up and put your support where you can.

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Shill Away!

The comment section is open and this post, since it is created for the purpose of promoting people’s work, will remain free: shill your work below!

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