Forthcoming
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant St., #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
413-203-1636
info@smallbeerpress.comTweets
Tweets from @michaeljdeluca/sbp-authors
The Privilege of the Happy Ending
Preorder
Kij Johnson October 24, 2023 Small, Medium, and Large Stories trade paper · 304 pages · published simultaneously in trade paper (9781618732118), ebook (9781618732125), and a limited hardcover run (9781618732163) · Edelweiss A surprising and exciting new collection of fourteen speculative and experimental stories that explore animal intelligences, gender, and the nature of stories.
Kindling
Preorder
Kathleen Jennings January 16, 2024 trade paper · 288 pages · published simultaneously in trade cloth (9781618732170) & trade paper (9781618732132 · $18) Ebook · 9781618732149 | Edelweiss A fabulous debut of folk tales and fantasies by an award winning author and illustrator.
Current BooksCurrent Zine
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OKPsyche
Anya Johanna DeNiro“A lyrical, emotionally powerful . . . tale of queer parenthood, of the reality of the sharp fear of trans lives, and of complicated self-discovery.” — Booklist (starred review)
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Lost Places
Sarah Pinsker“Queer, hopeful, and eerie, celebrating the rebellious spirits of both immortal-feeling youth and resilient elder protagonists.”
— Booklist (starred review) -
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 47
Once upon a time words were gathered, organized, punctuated, and distributed.
Chuntering On and On
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Elegant, Lyrically Descriptive Prose Mon 11 Sep 2023
I was writing a newsletter to go out tomorrow in celebration of Anya’s novel coming out and I realized I’d never posted that the first trade review for Kathleen Jennings’s Kindling had come in from Lucy Lockley in Booklist: “Following her debut, Flyaway (2020), Jennings here compiles a collection of 12 of her previously published […]
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Love to Open Up a Newsletter/Newspaper Fri 8 Sep 2023
. . . and see OKPsyche. First this morning in the Boston Globe Nina MacLaughlin included a lovely write up of Anya’s novel and then in this week’s Consortium Communiqué newsletter, there was Sam Edge’s lovely write up! 1) Boston Globe: In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, “OKPsyche,” published by Small Beer […]
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One Week to OKPsyche Thu 7 Sep 2023
Come out Twin Cities — or, order your signed/personalized copy from Moon Palace: One week tonight: Anya Johanna DeNiro launches her new novel, OKPsyche 9/14/23 6 p.m. Moon Palace Books (FB) 3032 Minnehaha Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55406
Latest Eruption of Fiction Into the Universe
OKPsyche
trade paper · 160 pages · $15 · 9781618732088 | ebook · 9781618732095 | Edelweiss
A new short novel from Anya Johanna DeNiro
Listen to an excerpt, “Take Pills and Wait for Hips” on WNYC’s Selected Shorts read by Pooya Mohseni.
In this playful and aching short novel, an unnamed trans woman is on an epic journey to find the place where she belongs. As she navigates her many realities, she must wrestle with anxieties and fears about the world. Her son and her ex live in another state. Environmental disasters are being outsourced to the Midwest. She can’t decide whether or not to unbox the companion automaton under her bed. And some of her friends may not just be ghosting her, they might not even be real.
OKPsyche is a fever-pitched odyssey through the joys, fears, and weirdness of trans adulthood, parenthood, and selfhood in the contemporary world.
Read
Read a short excerpt, “Take Pills and Wait for Hips,” on Catapult.
Events
Sept. 14, 6 p.m. Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Minneapolis, MN 55406 (FB)
Oct. 14, Twin Cities Book Fest, Minneapolism MN
Oct. 27, 7 p.m. Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA
Reviews
“In Anya Johanna DeNiro’s slim and shining new novel, ‘OKPsyche,’ published by Small Beer Press, based in Western Mass and run by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, is an exploration of ensoulment and embodiment, and the search for both, told by a trans woman in lush sink-into-it prose. Old snow takes on the look of “the coat of a cocker spaniel who needs a bath.” And “time compresses into apple seeds.” DeNiro, a trans author based in Minnesota, writes with vulnerability and force, looking at fear and shame, other people’s and the narrator’s own, looking at courage, at trans parenthood and love-finding, at the way reality and the people in it shift and bend, moving forward and backward at once. “Venus is clearly cis (myrtle, rose, apple, poppy). Venus is vengeful, unknowable (dove, sparrow, swan, hare, goat, ram) . . . Venus is able to make it up as she goes along.” In our world of violence and fires and floods, of hatred born of fear, of the regular messy tasks of living, DeNiro writes of what it is to locate, again and again, the deepest part inside oneself, with bravery, humility, and grace.”
— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe
“DeNiro’s novel is a lyrical, emotionally powerful story about what it means to try and find a place for yourself in the midst of a hurricane of climate disaster, violence, and fear. It’s a story told through weird, ghostly, haunting fantasy. Fans of enigmatic speculative fiction like Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (2022), will enjoy this tale of queer parenthood, of the reality of the sharp fear of trans lives, and of complicated self-discovery.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Beguiling. . . . a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly
Early Reader Reactions
“OKPsyche is a spectacular novel, like a shard of stained glass in brilliant reds and greens and purples. DeNiro shows us the impossible and the possible with equal honesty. The book is a chronicle of hope and hurt and freedom, suffused with anxiety and grace, and told in prose that just won’t quit. It’s major. You’ll remember where you were when you read it.”
— Isaac Fellman, author of Dead Collections
“Tense and funny, heartfelt and uncanny, Anya Johanna DeNiro takes us on an hallucinogenic tour through the mind of a woman on the edge. Guided by strange angels or losing touch with reality — either way, it’s happening to you!”
— Morgan M. Page, screenwriter of Framing Agnes
“DeNiro has done something beautiful here, weaving a luminous lament for a ruined world with the simmering pain of a woman finally coming to life. Delicate, lovely, and ultimately full of the impossible hope that shines forth in trans lives.”
— Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing
“An allegorical and lyrical short novel about a transgender woman struggling to belong in a near future populated by emotional support robots and a ceaseless slew of environmental disasters. DeNiro writes with a complexity that reflects the internal emotional struggles of her unnamed protagonist as she fights for happiness and a better relationship with her young son. A uniquely told and refreshingly weird story of self-realization and the courage it takes to love.”
— Sam Edge, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews, Chapel Hill, NC
“DeNiro (City of a Thousand Feelings) offers a beguiling if somewhat opaque glimpse into a trans woman’s journey to find safety, acceptance, and love in a near-future Minnesota. . . . this is a fascinating and often lovely weird fiction character study.”
— Publishers Weekly
Reviews of Anya DeNiro’s books:
“That trust in emotional urgency over conventional logic to guide a story is, for me, a critical part of a queer aesthetic. Coming out is about obeying an interior, often inarticulable emotional push over majority logics. . . . DeNiro’s gorgeous and emotionally flawless navigation . . . is masterful, cerebral but full of complex feeling, and nothing short of word-magic.”
— Theodore McCombs, Fiction Unbound
“Surreal and lyrical.”
— Publishers Weekly
“What makes the story even more compelling, is that DeNiro gives you all this, allegory and action, without ever losing sight of the heart of the story: the fundamental bond and evolving relationship between two characters who choose different ways to survive, and yet find a greater power, and maybe even a new kind of salvation, when they come together.”
— Maria Haskins
“Strange, menacing worlds whose contours only gradually become clear (or, perhaps, more complexly mysterious).”
—Dylan Hicks, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Minnesotan DeNiro gives us large hunks of riveting weirdness.”
—Mary Ann Grossman, St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Wildness, fierceness, and anarchic imagination are traits, then, to be prized in this book, above beauty, order, and sense—or, in classical terms, the Dionysian over the Apollonian—and process.”
— Strange Horizons
“Each story feels new, unique, and important.”
—Leah Schnelbach, Tor.com
“There’s no other writer like DeNiro working today.” — Tim Pratt, Locus
Earlier
May 2: MIBA Spring Tour, Des Moines, IA
Cover Art
“Psyche Asleep in a Landscape,” Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola, 1837, metmuseum.org.
About the Author
Anya Johanna DeNiro is a trans woman and a speculative fiction writer living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of City of a Thousand Feelings, which was on the Honor Roll for the Otherwise Award. [website | twitter]
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Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea
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Earth Logic
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—Booklist (starred review) -
Fire Logic
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Terra Nullius
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