March is National Small Press Month. In recent years, the major publishing houses have consolidated into what’s known as the big five: Penguin/Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan, but there are hundreds of smaller, independent presses putting out great books each year, including some of the best new poetry, experimental works, and books in translation. This month, I want to feature two of my favorite small presses: Scablands Books and Two Dollar Radio. 

Scablands Books is a Spokane-based boutique press founded by Sharma Shields, author of The Cassandra and The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac. They specialize in “strange, smart, innovative writing,” according to their website, and primarily publish authors from the Inland Northwest. 

Two Dollar Radio was founded by a husband-and-wife team in Columbus, Ohio, in 2005. On their website, they write that their books are for the “disillusioned and disaffected, the adventurous and independent spirits who thirst for more.” Two Dollar Radio published one of my very favorite books of the past few years, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, a gorgeous essay collection on music and American culture by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Here are two more books I cherish from these great independent presses. 

Evergreen: Grim Tales and Verses from the Gloomy Northwest Ed. by Sharma Shields & Maya Jewell Zeller, published by Scabland Books

Some of the stories, essays, and poems in this anthology reminded me of fairy tales—the old-school Brothers Grimm kind with plenty of murder, mutilation, and a general undercurrent of dread. In “Digging,” by Erin Pringle, a brother and sister dig up the bodies of their dead siblings and dress them in the living children’s clothes. In “A Real Man” by Alexander Ortega, a young boy is kidnapped by the Coco Man—a monster who delivers bad children to the Devil. 

Other pieces are grounded in realism but are still informed by mythology—by the stories the writers were told as children and never forgot—like “Coyote Story,” by CMarie Furhman, an essay about finding a coyote caught in a trap and shooting it to end its suffering. When she encounters the coyote, Furhman thinks about all the coyote stories she’d been taught by her Native American elders. Coyote as trickster. Coyote as protector. “Coyote made human.”

The anthology is, as the title suggests, grim. Shields writes in the introduction that she can’t help being drawn to the “literature of despair.” But Maya Jewell Zeller, also in the introduction, complicates this despair, writing, “There is hope, and hope comes in literature, in telling the stories, as in the ongoingness of an evergreen tree: That which survives the drought and the cold and the heat and the drenching rain…and remains green.”  

Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich, published by Two Dollar Radio

Virtuoso opens with a mystery. A woman is dead. But who is she? From there, the novel takes you many places you wouldn’t expect. To Prague, Paris, and Milwaukee. Into online chat rooms and mysterious bars and dreams. 

The Guardian’s review of Virtuoso notes that the book contains a “hint of [David] Lynch,” and it certainly does. Not the least in its depiction of the Blue Angel, a bar in Paris where most of the characters end up at some point, where all the decor is blue, the music is always sad, and the rules of reality seem to bend. 

The heart of the book is the friendship between Jana and Zorka, two girls growing up in Prague at the end of the Soviet era. Jana is scholarly and serious, spending all her free time studying foreign languages. As an adult, she becomes a translator. Zorka is a strange, uncouth rebel who picks her nose and chastises Jana for not being more revolutionary. Meanwhile, in Paris, a teenage girl named Aimée goes to a lesbian bar and falls in love with Dominique, a charming older actress who is unsatisfied with her career. 

I didn’t know what to expect when I started Virtuoso. I don’t think anyone could expect this intricate, weird plot, this beautiful language, the odd and fascinating character of Zorka, who seems to exist on a different wavelength from everyone else and says surprising, profound things like, “I don’t know what to do with History, the big one that belongs to all of us and my small one, like a keychain.”

This is one theme of the book: how people carry the burden of their capital-H History and their smaller, personal histories throughout their lives. Moskovich came to the US with her family as a Jewish refugee from Ukraine, so she understands this well. But History haunts all of us, and we’re all trying to figure out what to do with it.