March 11, 2025, 9:30am
Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.
The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.
Today, we’re recommending:
That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction
published by Two Lines Press (2020)
I had not known about Two Lines Press or the Center for the Art of Translation until late 2019/early 2020, when I saw the announcement about their Calico series: a run of collections that would be based around an intriguing theme and bringing largely new-to-English authors into English translation. Two Lines publishes plenty of other great international literature in translation but these Calico books are a total joy, both in form and in content. The books come in a curious trim size (or rather a couple curious trim sizes, although I think they’ve stabilized in their square format now after a few larger-sized volume) that fits nicely in the hand and every single one of them promises a wealth of discovery for the internationally-curious reader: Ukranian poetry, Swahili fiction, queer Brazilian stories, Latin American horror, and so much more.
It was the first Calico book, though, that hooked me forever: That We May Live, a collection of Chinese speculative fiction. I had just read Yan Ge’s Strange Beasts of China and was looking to find more stories from China—and Yan Ge was actually the only writer in this collection whose name I already knew. I was excited by the idea that these stories were, in most cases, an English debut and in those early days of the pandemic, I was stoked to travel far and wide when I couldn’t leave my house. Chinese SFF is a different beast (pun kind of intended) from English SFF and each of these stories pushed me to go explore farther, which is exactly what an introduction ought to do. I’ve been a devoted Calico reader ever since, and even when I know the field a bit better as with the Latin American horror collection Through the Night Like a Snake, I’m still always discovering something or someone knew through their curation.
–Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor