One last plug for Bratwurst Haven,
two friends' personal essays, and small press gift ideas
Hello all,
Bratwurst Haven has been out in the world over a month now! Thank you so much to everyone who has bought a book and/or attended an event.
If you’re interested: an interview, a Kirkus review, and a video of me at a bookstore.
If you’ve read and enjoyed the collection, please consider writing a review of it on Amazon or Goodreads.
If you have a friend or family member who enjoys realistic short stories in the vein of Alice Munro and/or Tobias Woolf, please consider buying them a copy as a gift this holiday season.
If you’d like other recommendations from small presses for gifts, a few I read this year:
For someone who liked People Along the Sand:
Joey Hedger’s Deliver Thy Pigs, a novel somehow both lighthearted and serious, also focuses on a close-knit community and moves in third person between several characters. Two of the scenes, one of a character smelling bread and another of one character saving another from drowning, mirrors my own novel almost eerily. The plot is more streamlined, however—in that way, it reminds me of a screenplay.
For someone who likes imaginative, clever prose poetry:
Your Favorite Poet by Leigh Chadwick: I don’t have patience for most cleverness in poetry, which I think often tries to highlight the supposed superiority of the author, but this cleverness is in service of rage, confusion, imagination, experimentations, and beauty, and I loved it.
For someone who is investigating their relatives and/or ancestors (or themselves!):
The Body Family by Hope Wabuke: Poetry that chronicles the narrator’s family, who fled from Uganda to the United States. The narrator can be ruthless in her reckonings, both at the familial and societal level, but the poems also contain a lot of beaty and tenderness.
We Are Bridges by Cassandra Lane: The narrator reimagines her great-grandfather’s lynching while pregnant with her first and only child in her mid-thirties—but I think my favorite sections were her honestly portraying and grappling with her younger self.
For someone who likes Edna St. Vincent Millay and/or Emily Dickinson:
The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall: Written by an Oregon poet who died in her late thirties and was housebound much of her adulthood. Beautiful, compact, sharp poems.
For someone who likes good sentences and quick-moving literary fiction:
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor: I love stories of unexpected and unorthodox friendships. This one is between an older lady and a young man she meets one day on the street.
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors, translated by Misha Hoekstra: A middle-age woman learns to drive in Copenhagen while reflecting on her rural upbringing and family of origin. I’m reading this one right now, and am enjoying the narrator’s idiosyncratic perspective and how quickly but fluidly she moves between topics.
Sometimes I miss editing literary writing, but fortunately I have friends who allow me to read drafts of their work. Two wonderful pieces I read in the early stages this year, both essays later published, are now available online:
“Hey, Man” by John Paul Scotto, Issue 561, The Sun Magazine: The narrator wanders in a graveyard thinking about his high school friend who recently died way too young.
“What Else Can I Give You?” by Kasia Nikhamina in The Audacity: The narrator reflects on her relationship with her mom, and her mom’s death from COVID (she also took that photo above of my book in Brooklyn!).
Looking forward to promoting their future books.
I hope you all have a good holiday season.
Rachel