Indie Press Round-Up: 10 Great New Releases for Summer

This collection of short stories combines realism and horror to explore fraught relationships. Many of the stories are about families, especially women struggling with lovers and husbands or examining their feelings about their children. One woman watches her husband quit his job, supposedly to become a carpenter, and then become obsessed with noisy upstairs neighbors to a bizarre degree. Another learns disturbing information about her fiancé after meeting his friends. A mother agonizes over memories of her daughter a year after losing her in a terrible fire. Another story is told from the perspective of a person who has drowned. The stories’ characters and settings are varied, but together they form an eerie, disturbing, fascinating whole.

I feel a special connection to this essay collection because many of the pieces discuss living in Rochester, New York, which is where I grew up. This book also impressed me with its insightful, personal exploration of race, culture, family, and writing. Shah writes about joyful dancing at weddings and about moving around the country following jobs and then returning home again. She writes about food, travel, studying creative writing, and what it was like to grow up in a small Gujarati community in a predominantly white suburb. Her essays are sometimes like prose poems and other times more focused on narrative. They are warm, wide-ranging, and a pleasure to read.

A Fish Growing Lungs is a linked essay collection about Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s diagnosis of Bipolar I at 18 and her later realization that this diagnosis was a mistake. Sawchyn writes about her experiences with mental illness and drug use. She explores relationships with doctors, struggles with medications, and complicated inheritances from both sides of her family. She also writes about her slow movement toward a more stable place. The essays are often inventive in form, searching for new ways to describe inner states. Their range of tones and subjects—she also writes about music and friendship among other things—keep the book lively and varied. This is a powerful, nuanced, honest take on struggle and growth.

Marcia Trahan found herself watching true crime television shows with an obsession that made her wonder why she needed them so badly. This memoir is an account of that obsession and her exploration into a series of difficult medical encounters that left her feeling violated. After battling thyroid cancer and dangerous blood clots, she knew that doctors were there to help her and that they had saved her life, but she felt a level of anger toward them that didn’t make logical sense. The only thing that soothed her were those violent true crime shows. Trahan’s journey toward understanding how these threads connect makes for fascinating reading. Mercy is a sensitive, wise look at the unexpected ways our bodies and minds make sense of trauma.

This is a novel about work, feminism, travel, and disasters. Yona’s job is to create travel packages for people who want to tour disaster zones: sites of earthquakes, tsunamis, sinkholes, etc. Yona has done her job effectively for years, but now her boss is sexually harassing her and her work is getting undermined and ignored. She’s worried about losing her job. Her boss suggests that she take a “vacation,” which is really just a working trip to the island of Mui to assess its value as a tourist destination. Once she arrives there, things start to go very wrong. This is a quick, enjoyable read that deals with serious questions about the value of work, of workers, and of humanity.

Set in the Colombian jungle, this novel tells the story of Damaris, a woman in her 40s who adopts a puppy to ease her loneliness. Her relationship with her husband is uneasy and they were never able to have children, so she hopes the puppy will provide some companionship. As the puppy grows and becomes aware of the wider world, however, it runs away, and its relationship with Damaris is never the same. The Bitch is a short novel but it beautifully captures the eerie, wild setting near both the jungle and the ocean. The characters are unforgettable, both the people Damaris interacts with in the surrounding towns, and Damaris herself with her combination of loneliness and hope. This is a gorgeous heartbreak of a novel.