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 (or indie) presses. We'll read one poetry collection a year, one nonfiction selection, and the rest will be fiction (most likely).
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