In May of 2024, the Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative revamped our book club, and started the Indie Press Book Club. ​We meet the first Wednesday of the month, every other month, at 6pm. All of our book selections are published by independent (indie) presses. We'll read one poetry collection a year, one nonfiction selection, and the rest will be fiction (most likely).
January 2026 Book
The Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative is happy to feature Melville House Books for November and December!
On January 7th at 6pm we'll discuss We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose.
From their website: “Melville House is an independent publisher founded in 2001 in order to publish Poetry After 9/11. The book, an anthology of poems written by New York poets, was inspired by poems sent to the book blog, MobyLives, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The book was widely successful, and Melville House soon expanded its list to include books of literary fiction, political and activist nonfiction, cookbooks and books on food, and a classics line called The Art of the Novella. The company has published two Nobel Prize winners — Imre Kertész and Heinrich Böll — and numerous New York Times bestsellers. It particularly prides itself on the diversity of its list, and on the publication of debut authors.
Melville House UK was founded in 2011.”
Be sure to explore the various collections they have and browse our selection of their books over the next two months. We had a really difficult time choosing only a few!
Our book club pick: We Live Here Now by C.D. Rose.
Join us on January 7th at 6pm to discuss this novel, described as “DeLillo meets Kafka in a wickedly smart novel that explores the boundaries between art and life, vision and reality, beauty and commerce.”
Synopsis: When visitors to a famous conceptual artist's installation start mysteriously disappearing, the aftershocks radiate outwards through twelve people who were involved in the project, changing all of their lives, and launching them on a crazy-quilt trajectory that will end with them all together at one final, apocalyptic bacchanal.
Mixing illusion and reality, simulacra and replicants, sound artists and death artists, performers and filmmakers and theorists and journalists, We Live Here Now ranges across the world of weapons dealers and international shipping to the galleries and studios on the cutting edge of hyper-contemporary art. It spins a dazzling web that conveys, with eerie precision, the sheer strangeness of what it is like to be alive today.
The book is available in store now, and is 10% through January 7th!
November 2025 Book
The Narrow Gauge Book Cooperative is happy to feature Coffee House Press for our featured independent press for September and October!
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Our book club pick: We’re Safe When We’re Alone by Nghiem Tran
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Join us on November 5th to discuss this novella, which has been called “A haunting and mesmerizing debut. Part parable, part fairy tale, and part nightmare, it all seems distilled out of the deepest longing. Nghiem Tran is a powerful new voice.” —Dana Spiotta
It was an NPR best book of 2023, a Kansas Notable Book of 2024, and a USA Today bestseller.
Synopsis: Son has lived his entire life inside the mansion. He is a good child. He reads, practices piano, studies, and watches ghosts tend the farmland through a window in the attic. When Father decides it is time for Son to venture outside, Son’s desire to please Father overpowers his fear, and he must contend with questions he never wanted to face. What are the relentlessly grinning ghosts hiding? Has a ghost taken control of Father? What answers or horrors lie in the forest? And who will stop the mysterious encroaching shadows? Nghiem Tran’s debut inverts the haunted house tale, shaping it into a moving exploration of loss, coming of age in a collapsing world, and the battle between isolation and assimilation.
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About the Press:
From their website: “Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.
Following the small press movement of the 60s and 70s, the 80s saw an emergence of professionalization among small publishers. Coffee House Press's late founder Allan Kornblum saw an opportunity to create the sort of publishing house that he wished existed in the world.
Since Coffee House Press's founding, our authors have received and been finalists for numerous nominations and prizes, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
With your support, we’re able to make experimental, creative choices rather than react solely to sales algorithms and trends."
Coffee House Press creates new spaces for audiences and artists to interact, inspiring readers and enriching communities by expanding the definition of what literature is, what it can do, and to whom it belongs.”
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September 2025 Book
Our featured press for July and August is Milkweed Editions, and our book is The Science of Last Things by Ellen Wayland-Smith. We'll discuss this book at 6pm on Wednesday, September 3rd!
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About the Book:
The Science of Last Things by Ellen Wayland-Smith. In this luminous collection of essays, Ellen Wayland-Smith probes the raw edges of human existence, those periods of life in which our bodies remind us of our transience and the boundaries of the self dissolve.
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From the Old Testament to Maggie Nelson, these explorations are grounded in a rich network of associations. In an essay on the postpartum body, Wayland-Smith interweaves her experience as a mother with accounts of phantom limbs and Greek mythology to meditate on moments when pieces of our being exist outside our bodies. In order to comprehend diagnoses of depression and breast cancer, she delves into LA hippie culture’s love affair with crystals and Emily Dickinson’s geological poetry. Her experience with chemotherapy leads to reflection on Western medicine and its intolerance of death and the healing capacity of nature. And throughout, she challenges the false separation between the human and the “primeval, animal mode of being.”
At once intimate and expansive, The Science of Last Things peels back layers of human thought and behavior, breaking down our modern conceptions of individuality and reframing us as participants in a world of astounding elegance and mystery.
About the Press:
Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They believe that literature has the potential to change the way we see the world, and that bringing new voices to essential conversations is the clearest path to ensuring a vibrant, diverse, and empowered future. Their mission is to identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.
On their website, they state, “We publish literature that transcends boundaries and fosters transformation. We identify and nurture outstanding literary voices, connect readers with our publications through innovative engagement, and cultivate a vibrant supportive community around their organization.
Milkweed is a site of nurture and metamorphosis for monarch butterflies, and Milkweed Editions seeks to honor their namesake by serving that same purpose in the literary ecosystem. They seek out debut and experimental writers and invest significant time in the editorial process. As a nonprofit, they are not focused on making money, though they do focus on helping their authors succeed.
Since their founding in 1980, they’ve published over 350 books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and now have over four million copies in circulation.
July 2025 Book
Our featured press for May and June is The Feminist Press, and our featured book is the novel, The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy. We’ll discuss this book on July 2nd at 6pm! You can get this book in store for 10% off up until our book club meeting!
Indie Press Book Club meets on the first Wednesday of the month, every other month. Check our website for dates! We announce the upcoming book at each book club meeting, and explore fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, all from independent presses.
About the Book:
In the gripping first novel in the Daughters of the Empty Throne trilogy, author Margaret Killjoy spins a tale of earth magic, power struggle, and self-invention in a powerful story of trans witchcraft. Lorel has always dreamed of becoming a witch: learning magic, fighting monsters, and exploring the world beyond the small town where she and her mother run the stables. Even though a strange plague is killing the trees in the Kingdom of Cekon and witches are being blamed for it, Lorel wants nothing more than to join them. There’s only one problem: all witches are women, and she was born a boy. When the coven comes to claim her best friend, Lorel disguises herself in a dress and joins in her friend’s place, leaving home and her old self behind. This read sounds thrilling, and we’re excited to explore it together!
About thePress:
The Feminist Press has a mission to publish books that ignite movements and social transformation. Celebrating our legacy, they lift up insurgent and marginalized voices from around the world to build a more just future. Their vision is to create a world where everyone recognizes themselves in a book.
Founded in 1970, they began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies. They publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. They have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones.Feminist Press publishes twelve to fifteen books a year and specializes in an array of genres including cutting-edge literary fiction, activist nonfiction, literature in translation, hybrid memoirs, and more.
They are seeking political and cultural activist nonfiction that furthers our understanding of intersectional feminism. They gravitate toward voice- and vision-driven stories as well as genre-defying texts. Other topics of interest include feminist dystopia, environmental justice, and immigration stories.
May 2025 Book
Our featured press for March and April is Interlink Publishing, and our featured book is the poetry collection, Almond Blossoms and Beyond, by Mahmoud Darwish. We’ll discuss this book on May 7th at 6pm! You can get this book in store for 10% off up until our book club meeting!
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About the Book:
The first English translation of recent poetry by the late Mahmoud Darwish, the most important Palestinian contemporary poet. Almond Blossoms and Beyond is one of the last collections of poetry that Mahmoud Darwish left to the world. Composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained Exile cycle, Almond Blossoms holds an important place in Darwish’s unparalleled oeuvre. It distills his late style, in which, though the specter of death looms and weddings turn to funerals, he threads the pulses and fragilities and beauties of life into the lines of his poems. Their liveliness is his own response to the collection’s final call to bid Farewell / Farewell, to the poetry of pain.
About the Press:
Established in 1987, Interlink Publishing is a Palestinian-owned, Massachusetts-based independent publishing house that offers a global perspective to readers. Interlink publishes works of literature-in-translation, history, activism, politics, art, cultural guides, award-winning cookbooks, and illustrated children’s books from around the world.
Interlink publishes approximately 90 titles each year and has an active backlist of over 1000 titles under the following three imprints.
Interlink Books publishes a general trade list of adult fiction and non-fiction with an emphasis on books that have a wide appeal while also meeting high intellectual and literary standards.
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Olive Branch Press publishes socially and politically relevant non-fiction, concentrating on topics and areas of the world often ignored by the Western media. Titles also include works on a wide range of contemporary issues such as Middle East studies, African studies, women’s studies, religion and translated works by academics of international stature.
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Crocodile Books publishes high-quality illustrated children’s books from around the world. Titles published under this imprint include quality picture books for preschoolers, as well as fiction and non-fiction books for children ages 3-8.
March 2025 Book
For January and February our featured press is Torrey House Press, and our book is Playing with (Wild)Fire by Laura Pritchett. We'll meet to discuss this book on March 5th at 6pm. You can pick up the book in store at a 10% discuount for January and February!
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A special treat for this club meeting: Laura Pritchett will join us on Zoom for the first part of the discussion!
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About the Book:
When a wildfire bears down on a mountain community, residents are forced to gather for safety—resulting in a tangle of love and lust that pulls people from their isolation, friendships that form across political divides, and a new hope for rethinking the ways humans inhabit the burning planet. Playing with (Wild)fire is a literary landscape that is an experiment in form: an astrology report; a grant application-turned-love-story; a phone call from Mother Earth; an obituary for a wildfire; a burned mountain’s conversation with a lone woman and an injured bear.
Every story captures how fire affects the human psyche and life, and how destruction can lead to renewal.
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About the Press:
Founded in 2010 and a nonprofit since 2015, Torrey House Press is the only nonprofit publishing house in the Intermountain West. With more than 70 titles to date, THP seeks to inform, expand, and reshape the dialogue on environmental justice and stewardship for the natural world by elevating diverse perspectives through the literary arts.
Torrey House Press publishes books at the intersection of the literary arts and environmental advocacy. THP authors explore the diversity of human experiences and relationships with place. THP books create conversations about issues that concern the American West, landscape, literature, and the future of our ever-changing planet, inspiring action toward a more just world.
THP believes that lively, contemporary literature is at the cutting edge of social change. They seek to inform, expand, and reshape the dialogue on environmental justice and stewardship for the natural world by elevating literary excellence from diverse voices.
January 2025 Book
For November and December, our featured press is Heydey, and our book is The Forgetters by Greg Sarris.
We'll meet to discuss this book on January 8th at 6pm.
About the Book:
Perched atop Gravity Hill, two crow sisters—Question Woman and Answer Woman—recall stories from dawn to dusk. Question Woman cannot remember a single story except by asking to hear it again, and Answer Woman can tell all the stories but cannot think of them unless she is asked. Together they recount the journeys of the Forgetters, so that we may all remember. Unforgettable characters pass through these pages: a boy who opens the clouds in the sky, a young woman who befriends three enigmatic people who might also be animals, two village leaders who hold a storytelling contest. All are in search of a crucial lesson from the past, one that will help them repair the rifts in their own lives.
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Told in the classic style of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories, this book vaults from the sacred time before this time to the recent present and even the near future.
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About the Press:
Heyday was founded in 1974, and is an independent, nonprofit publisher founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California. They are a diverse community of writers and readers, activists and thinkers. Heyday promotes civic engagement and social justice, celebrates nature’s beauty, supports California Indian cultural renewal, and explores the state’s rich history, culture, and influence. Heyday works to realize the California dream of equity and enfranchisement.
Heyday publishes around twenty books a year, founded two successful magazines—News from Native California and Bay Nature—and has taken a lead role in dozens of prominent public education programs throughout the state.
November 2024 Book
For September and October, our featured press is Spiegel and Grau, and our book for our November 6th meeting is Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir by Lola Milholland.
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About the Book:
“Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life.”
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About the Press:
Spiegel & Grau began as Riverhead Books, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2005. In 2019, Penguin Random House closed the imprint, despite commercial success. The co-founders, Celina Spiegel and Julia Grau, founded Spiegel & Grau in 2020. They publish 15-20 books a year, along with original audiobooks and podcasts.
From their website:
“We are an independent multi-platform publisher. We understand the power of stories to enhance meaning, deepen understanding, engage emotions, effect change, and enlarge our sense of humanity by connecting us to people and places we may never experience in our lifetimes.”
Stories come in different forms. At Spiegel & Grau we take a holistic approach to content. A book might find new life in film or television; or a podcast might later become a book. Books are at the center of our business, but through strategic and collaborative partnerships and with the experienced guidance of our multi-media team, we are able to amplify writers’ and creators’ voices across a range of platforms that best suit a story’s message, enlarging the very definition and scope of publishing.
We have helped shepherd into the world such groundbreaking and transformative books as Just Mercy, Orange Is the New Black, The Kite Runner, Between the World and Me, Born a Crime, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and The Color of Water.”
September 2024 Book
On September 4th at 6pm, join us to discuss An Elderly Lady Is up to No Good by Helene Tursten, published by SoHo Press.
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On September 4th at 6pm join us to discuss An Elderly Lady Is up to No Good by Helene Tursten.
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Synopsis of An Elderly Lady, from the book cover:
About the book: “Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and… no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home.”
About the Press:
“Soho Press is based in Manhattan. Founded in 1986, Soho publishes 80-100 books a year across its Soho Press, Soho Crime, Soho Teen, and Hell’s Hundred imprints, and is known for introducing bold literary voices, award-winning crime fiction, and groundbreaking young adult fiction.
Soho Press is not only the name of our press; it’s the imprint within Soho dedicated to literary fiction (and the occasional memoir). The Soho Press imprint publishes bold literary voices—authors who craft new and powerful stories and offer us fresh ways of seeing the world.
For more than twenty years, Soho Crime has been publishing atmospheric crime fiction set all over the world. Some of Soho’s most popular stories will whisk you away to France, China, England, Laos, Northern Ireland, Thailand, Australia, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Italy, Denmark, India, Cuba, and Palestine, to name but a few. Soho Crime’s list runs the entire range of crime fiction—detective fiction, police procedurals, thrillers, espionage novels, revenge novels, stories of thieves, assassins, and underworld mob bosses—but you can count on an immersive adventure steeped in cultural and setting detail.
Launched in 2013, Soho Teen’s select list (7-10 titles a year) began with YA mysteries and thrillers. Over the years, we’ve broadened this niche to allow for novels of adolescent identity and self-discovery, particularly those with a unique format or narrative structure. Our diverse authors include acclaimed YA icons, filmmakers and screenwriters, rock stars, and New York Times bestsellers—and above all, debuts from exciting voices.
July 2024 Book
On July 3rd at 6pm, join us to discuss Found Audio by N.J. Campbell, published by Two Dollar Radio.
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Synopsis of Found Audio, from the book cover:
"Amrapali Anna Singh is an historian and analyst capable of discerning the most cryptic and trivial details from audio recordings. One day, a mysterious man appears at her office in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, having traveled a great distance to bring her three Type IV audio cassettes that bear the stamp of a library in Buenos Aires that may or may not exist.
On the cassettes is the deposition of an adventure journalist and his obsessive pursuit of an amorphous, legendary, and puzzling "City of Dreams." Spanning decades, his quest leads him from a snake-hunter in the Louisiana bayou to the walled city of Kowloon on the eve of its destruction, from the Singing Dunes of Mongolia to a chess tournament in Istanbul. The deposition also begs the question: Who is making the recording, and why?
Despite being explicitly instructed not to, curiosity gets the better of Singh and she mails a transcription of the cassettes with her analysis to an acquaintance before vanishing. The man who bore the cassettes, too, has disappeared. The journalist was unnamed.
Here—for the first time—is the complete archival manuscript of the mysterious recordings accompanied by Singh's analysis."
About Two Dollar Radio:
Two Dollar Radio is a family-run press founded in 2005 by Eric Obenauf and Eliza Wood-Obenauf, who now live in Columbus, Ohio, with their two children and their brick-and-mortar indie bookstore & cafe, Two Dollar Radio Headquarters.
Their mission is to “reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.”
Two Dollar Radio was longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize (US & Canada); honored by GLIBA and MIBA with the "2020 Voice of the Heartland Award"; named "INDIES’s Publisher of the Year" by Foreword for the year of 2020. Two Dollar Radio's archives are housed at The Ohio State University’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library.
Past Book Club Titles
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023