Catch the Small Press Flea This Saturday!

This Saturday, August 14th Brooklyn Public Library presents SPF21: Small Press Flea, in collaboration with BOMB Magazine. More than 20 different publishers will join us this year! 

Small presses are publishers who release a limited number of new titles per year. They often focus on niche subjects and bring local voices to a larger audience. While small presses represent only 20% of the publishing market, they potentially outpace their larger counterparts in creative and thought-provoking content.

Ted Dodson, Director of Circulation at BOMB, thinks of small press publishing in NYC as “a vital piece of the culture of our city” and of the Flea as a celebration of that phenomenon. This annual event, he goes on to say, while neither strictly literary nor strictly visual art book publications, “is very NYC, which is the heart and soul of BOMB.” And this is what makes BOMB’s collaboration with BPL so exciting–matching BPL’s capacity to gather a book-loving public with BOMB’s network of amazing, hyper-local publishers. We hope to get y’all excited about new and noteworthy books, introduce you to new authors and encourage you to check out titles that appeal! 

I was particularly drawn to these short story collections from Verso Books and Soft Skull Press. I love short stories, I love writing that travels across genres, and I really, really love reading works by Japanese writers. Three of the four authors are Japanese, all are women, and each pulls you through to a looking-glass world of the fantastic and absurd. Whether you like tree books or ebooks, we’ve got an exciting array in our collections. 

The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya is a collection of oddnesses interwoven with relationships between lovers, friends, and strangers. A housewife and her husband go full-ouroboros on one another. Umbrellas become skeletons or help you fly (although they don’t seem to help you land). Pareidolia majorly derails a work meeting. At the heart of all this strangeness lies the very human need for connection, whether or not a character is actually human. [Soft Skull Press] 

Terminal Boredom is a collection of speculative short stories written by Izumi Suzuki in the ‘70s and ‘80s and only recently published for an English-speaking audience. Whether men are alien in a society of only women or actual aliens are imitating human lives through imperfectly-understood mafia movies, each story is a complex world of its own, full of tangled relationships, yearning, and failure. You can read one of her stories, “The Walker,” here. [Verso Books] 

Meet hungry ghosts, meddling ghosts, Sapphic ghosts, and the ghost-adjacent in Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda. These interlinked stories draw on classic Japanese ghost stories and folktales while placing characters in the modern world. Despite the presence of death, suicide, and other tragedies, many of these stories have a tenderness and sweetness to them. (You can also read something a little softer and sillier here!) [Soft Skull Press] 

Stream-of-consciousness is the warp and absurdity is in the weft of Nicolette Polek’s well-woven collection, Imaginary Museums. In dreamlike prose where narratives have a middle or a start but seldom a definitive end, the author creates compellingly chaotic vignettes. A velvet rope is protection, then a prison. There are melancholy lists of girls she no longer knows and pets she no longer has. And when a museum is imaginary, sometimes you must make your own. [Soft Skull Press]

We look forward to this exciting edition of the Flea and hope to see you there!

Check out other ebooks and print editions published by small presses.

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Djaz Frederick Zulida is a dapper librarian, avid reader, and avocado afficionado. When they’re not slinging resumes and answering reference questions, you can find them reading queer romance, listening to astrophysics audiobooks, and zipping through Prospect Park on their ebike.