Following up on yesterday’s interview with Vanessa Carlisle, a self-published debut writer, I’d like to spotlight another young writer—on the complete opposite end of the country, in Florida to Carlisle’s California—who also opted to self-publish his first novel rather than wade endlessly through the conventional publishing hoops.

Raul Palma, Jr., a Miami native, was a student of mine while he was pursuing his MFA in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He was, in fact, a member of what was probably the best fiction seminar I’ve ever taught, where numerous students were completing highly publishable novels, and one student (current Chicagoan, Sheba White) was actually so insanely talented that I published her short fiction myself in the finale issue of Other Voices magazine.

Raul’s novel, Lole, focuses on five childhood friends whose mutual buddy, Thomas, has just been tragically and unexpectedly killed. Thomas’ friend, Gule, is the one obsessed with Lole, a married woman with whom he had a tumultuous, intense affair some time back, and though the novel is named after her, each of the five young men has a highly developed story of his own full of equal passions.

One of the great strengths of this novel, which is about many things—love, death, lust, male friendship, growing up, lost youth, lies, crime, nature—is the way young Latino manhood is portrayed so organically here, as a natural backdrop, a fact of life, rather than in a heavy-handed or didactic way. In fact, I might go so far as to say that Palma’s failure to use his characters’ cultural background as a more overt marketing tool may be part of why this novel wasn’t snatched up by corporate New York, but that in my opinion this is to the novel’s credit rather than its detriment. This is not a novel of the (make-believe) post-racial America we’ve heard so much about of late, but likewise it is not a novel of the racially obsessed 1970s-1990s America either. There is a racial/cultural ease and sophistication here that, ironically, belongs predominantly to the young, like Palma, who simply have come of age in a different era, and who juggle the multiplicity of identity without either trying too hard or breaking a sweat.

As is the case of any novel with a roving narrative, some characters here are more likable, compelling and well-drawn than others . . . though which those are may be so much a matter of subjective taste that to give my own opinions on the matter would be less relevant than to just say that one risk in such a novel is that it can feel a bit uneven, where the reader rushes through certain sections to get to others. Still, this is an accomplished first novel, and one that covers unusual terrain. I’m not sure what I feel about self-publishing as such a front-line choice (I believe Palma made some efforts to publish this conventionally, but he sure didn’t wait long after those initial efforts failed before bringing the book out himself), but I do feel like the Carlisle-Palma combo I’ve just read in the past weeks draws my attention very acutely to the fact that writers under 35 are increasingly unwilling to play the old industry game and feel more confident about and driven to forge out solo than they do inclined to sit around growing gray hair waiting for some editor to get approval from a marketing department (probably made up of 24-year-old business majors) before getting a book out into the world. Surely, these DIY writer are no less talented, have no less to say, than their peers, and they are courageously navigating a literary landscape where what it means to be “self-published” is changing by the day.

So to buy or learn more about Lole, go here .