Emily Firetog

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.

Forty years ago, my not-yet-gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn had one bookstore, Mostly Books. When the owner retired, it became a video store (RIP Cousins). Then it was derelict, then it was councilman’s office, and now it’s (obviously) a real estate office. But in all those years, a neighborhood of a dozen square blocks and around seventy-five thousand people was without a bookstore.

Sometime around 2006, everyone in publishing began to lament the death of the book section. In the face of declining readership, budget cuts, and mergers, newspapers began to realize that book review sections did not bring in enough ad revenue to cover their costs and so cut and culled until there were only a handful of standalone sections in the country.