Weekend greetings, friends.

Even amidst all the other unsettling things going on in the world, the sudden (I might say callously abrupt) closure of Small Press Distribution was a big blow to the small press ecosystem where so many of our contributors, colleagues, and friends do their publishing. It's going to take time to work out next steps for those presses, and they'll face challenges as they try to reclaim their own books and pursue money owed and develop alternative networks. It is, in other words, a great time to support them by purchasing books directly from impacted presses so they keep the maximum amount of the sale. It won't solve the problem of rebuilding a distribution infrastructure — though good folks are working on that — but it may help them get through. And maybe in an era of newspapers and magazines and publishers being squeezed and stripped down for salable parts, it's a good time to think about what a sustainable, collaborative literary culture might look like instead.

But you aren't reading this to hear me complain on a Saturday morning. So here's what we published on the website this week:

 On Monday, Catherine Gammon reviewed What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, a story collection by Jody Hobbs Hesler. Catherine has written for us numerous times, both as a reviewer and sharing research notes about her own fiction, and we're always honored to feature her work again.

Then on Wednesday our featured fiction for the week was "The Girls Go to Van Nuys" by Lauren Barbato, a writer we're very pleased to be publishing for the first time.

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In contributor news, congratulations to Agnes Chew, whose collection Eternal Summer Of My Homeland has been longlisted for the Asian Prize for Fiction 2023. We published her story "Letter To My Unborn Child" last year.

And we're also thrilled to share that Ethel Rohan, one of our earliest contributors, has a new novel forthcoming on April 15. Sing, I (Triquarterly Books) is available for preorder now and we encourage you to give it a look.

Thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer