MER Bookshelf – March 2026
Date: March 19, 2026
In this rich new collection, Molly Fisk braids together the ordinary tasks of love and work in 1875, a century we’ve almost forgotten but whose human concerns are universal and […]
News & Reviews
News:
Molly McCloy talks about her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES, on KJZZ Phoenix!
Date: March 17, 2026
Tucson storyteller Molly McCloy loves telling stories about hard things. She’s done it on stage and in print. Her memoir, “Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on […]
Maurya Simon interviewed by Sean Singer on his Substack, The Sharpener!
Date: March 17, 2026
Maurya Simon’s The Blue Bridge, her twelfth volume of poems, will appear in 2026 (Etruscan Press). Her earlier volume, The Wilderness: New and Selected Poems, received the 2019 Independent Booksellers […]
Amy Pence discusses her upcoming novel YELLOW in an interview with ArtsATL!
Date: March 12, 2026
During Hurricane Irma in 2017, a 90-foot oak tree split and fell into the middle of Amy Pence’s cottage in the old fishing village of Pine Lake, Georgia. A beam […]
Luke Goebel’s KILL DICK featured in Our Culture Magazine’s list of most anticipated books of spring 2026
Date: March 11, 2026
It’s finally warming up here in Washington, DC, and earlier this month was the first instance I was able to comfortably sit on our roof and read. With a coffee […]
April Ossmann interviewed on the Derate the Hate podcast!
Date: March 3, 2026
April Ossmann discusses poetry collection, WE with Derate the Hate podcast.
Amy Pence’s YELLOW listed on Bookstr!
Date: March 3, 2026
Yellow is a slow-bloom speculative novel and quietly cosmic. It’s a book about how long childhood wonders and wounds can linger, how the universe keeps whispering even when we stop […]
Molly McCloy interviewed on The ARTWIFE Podcast!
Date: March 3, 2026
Molly McCloy discusses her upcoming memoir, NINE GRUDGES: THE SPITEFUL ORIGINS OF THE HAPPIEST DYKE ON EARTH with Hannah Harlee.
Amy Pence’s YELLOW listed in Deep South Magazine!
Date: March 3, 2026
It’s 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab’s launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence […]
Luke Goebel’s KILL DICK listed in the New York Post!
Date: February 24, 2026
This satirical literary thriller has shades of Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis. A 19-year-old NYU dropout returns home to Brentwood to laze about and enjoy popping prescription pills. But […]
Reviews:
World Literature Today describes Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS as “incredibly moving, disheartening, disturbing, violent, and playful”!
Date: October 2, 2019
The island, from a distance, looks like almost anything other than what it actually is: a place where the world’s detritus washes up, a place where a handful of children […]
Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS reviewed by Booklist!
Date: September 15, 2019
In Stoberock’s extraordinarily imaginative novel, four children live on a desert island where all the world’s waste washes ashore. They are tasked with the arduous, abject, and unrelenting work of […]
Wisconsin Bookwatch calls PIGS by Johanna Stoberock “a superbly crafted and thoroughly reader absorbing novel”!
Date: September 10, 2019
Synopsis: Four children live on an island that serves as the repository for all the world’s garbage. Trash arrives, the children sort it, and then they feed it to a […]
The Rumpus calls Johanna Stoberock’s PIGS a “beautiful and unsettling novel”!
Date: August 28, 2019
In the popular imagination, pigs simply exist to consume and to be consumed. We revile them because they are seen as gluttonous animals, indiscriminate in their pursuit for satiation, and […]
PIGS by Johanna Stoberock reviewed by Foreword Reviews!
Date: August 1, 2019
Six giant pigs, four kids, and a gang of adults on a magical island maintain a tenuous balance of power until two castaways show up in Johanna Stoberock’s probing literary […]
2018 Fall/Winter Reading List
Date: October 3, 2018
It’s 1923 and 19-year-old Dara falls in love with her best friend, who happens to be a girl. To avoid a bleak, terrifying future in their small town, Dara takes […]
Interview with Cai Emmons, Weather Woman
Date: October 3, 2018
Andy Davis from Eco-fiction recently interviewed Cai Emmons author of Weather Woman. Davis asks Emmons about her inspirations and knowledge needed to write about the character in the story. Davis […]
Review: Weather Woman is a fantasy about control and illusion
Date: October 3, 2018
Weather Woman is best read as a story about a twenty-something who can’t make lemonade out of life’s lemons. Life is often a journey from crisis to crisis, and our […]
Asterix Journal reviews Gabriel Jesiolowski’s ‘As Burning Leaves’
Date: October 2, 2018
"…Jesiolowski has crafted a book of movement and landscape, in which individuals quietly but significantly consider what it is to move and transform from place to place" Thanks, Asterix Journal! […]
10 Great Resons To Read Fiction In October 2018
Date: October 2, 2018
Oakland Public Library has complied 10 ficiton books that everyone should read this October! Read the full article here