News:

Alice, or The Wild Girl was released to wide acclaim!

A well-attended book launch party took place in Frenchtown, NJ, on September 9. Heresy Press’s Director, Bernard Schweizer, was in attendance, as author Michael Liska read from his debut novel.

Kirkus gave Alice a very favorable review, noting that “Steeped in loneliness and 19th-century grandeur, the novel is a remarkable meditation on our unlikely migrations through space and time. A rich and memorable story of exploitation and reinvention.”

Further publicity include an author interview on the Dad Lit podcast, a book club discussion on Dad Lit, an excerpt published in the Cleveland Review of Books, a Book of the Week pick by RealClearBooks, and an excerpt in the same venue.

→ Buy Alice, or The Wild Girl here.

The War on Words makes waves

Since the book’s release on July 22, The War on Words has been consistently ranked in the top-ten for two book categories on Amazon.com, making it Heresy Press’s most successful book to date!

Greg Lukianoff was interviewed on C-SPAN by Peter Slen, and The War On Words was repeatedly displayed on screen!

→ Watch the wide-ranging and astute interview here.

Nadine Strossen gave an interview about The War On Words on Joel Cohen’s podcast Talks on Law.
→ Listen to Nadine Strossen’s podcast interview here.

Heresy Press’s first Audio Book is now available!
→ Order The War On Words as audio book here.

Book Club News

Heresy Press’s book club, Speakeasy, continues to delight attendants at each meeting. On August 4, 2025, we discussesd Alan Fishbone’s novel-in-stories Animal: Notes from a Labyrinth. In the second hour, the author himself joined the discussion, and it was fascinating to peek behind the curtain and be privy of the author’s own thinking about aspects of his work.

→ Listen to a brief audio take-out from the animated 2-hour discussion of Animal. In this clip, Heresy Press author Alan Fishbone addresses the fragmented structure of his novel.

→ Sign up for the Heresy Press Book Club here

Provocative new acquisition—a novel titled Porn Again

Heresy Press acquires Scott Tuoty’s provocative fiction debut titled Porn Again, a book certain to ruffle feathers, unleash debates about the limits of decency, and upend the literary status quo (just kidding…).

Synopsis of Porn Again:
“Ethan Essig wakes up every morning disappointed to find he’s still himself—a bitter, burnt-out pornographer running a company on the brink of collapse with a soul teetering on the edge of immolation. Over the course of one surreal week, Ethan will gamble everything on salvation: paging through the Awesome Bible (the Bible, but awesomer), seeking redemption from a Baptist pastor, and trading insults with a foul-mouthed portrait of Jesus himself.

Meanwhile, his studio, Slippery Slope, is one film away from ruin. To save it, Ethan enlists a washed-up porn queen, a stunning transgender escort, and a male porn-star with Tourette’s for one last, ill-fated production. But the most beguiling wildcard is Nancy, an aspiring starlet who insists she’s a virgin—and who just might be his best friend’s daughter.

Consistently hilarious, occasionally cringe-inducing, and unexpectedly heart-wrenching, Porn Again is a darkly comic descent into the contradictions and similarities of pornography and religion—two forces bound by shame, spectacle, and the promise of ecstasy. In the tradition of Chuck Palahniuk, it’s a novel that shocks, unsettles, and ultimately redeems.”

Cover Reveal

Presenting the jacket design of The Girlie Playhouse, V.N. Alexander’s new novel, forthcoming from Heresy Press in April 2026:

The Girlie Playhouse presents a woman’s take on exotic dancing that boldly reimagines the dynamics between the sexes.

Heresy Press will again be represented at the Frankfurt Book Fair this fall

This year, too, Heresy Press’s director, Bernard Schweizer, will travel to Germany to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair looking for additional licensing agreements to expand Heresy Press’s international footprint.

The complete Foreign Rights Catalogue can be viewed here.

Interview

Friend of Heresy Press, Adam Szetela, has just released That Book is Dangerous! How Moral Panics, Social Media, and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing. He gave Heresy Press some answers to pressing questions about the book business.

Q: Congratulations on publishing That Book Is Dangerous!, which strikes me as a long-overdue reckoning with unhealthy trends in the publishing industry. What reactions have you received so far? Did you get an outpouring of gratitude for the courage to pull back the curtain on the malaise?

A: I’m sure there will be a scathing review in my future. If there isn’t, I will reread my book to see what I did wrong.

But so far, the reviews—from Publishers Weekly to The Economist and the Washington Post—have been positive. This may be the only book that got praised by both The European Conservative and Counterpunch.

Q: Tell me about one or two particularly egregious examples from your book that stand symptomatic for what has gone wrong in publishing in the last 10 years?

A: On page 1, I begin with the cases of Blood Heir and A Place for Wolves. Even as someone who has to a certain degree been inoculated by these idiocies, owing in part to how many of them I have been exposed to, these were particularly remarkable deviations from thoughtful behavior.

From the introduction:

In 2019, Penguin Random House planned to publish the debut novel of young adult (YA) author Amélie Wen Zhao. A few months before the publication date, there was an uproar on Twitter. People who had never read Blood Heir proclaimed that it was racist because it was set in a fantastical world where oppression was not based on skin color. According to Zhao’s critics, it was “cultural appropriation” and “antiblack” to depict slavery that was not African American slavery. The uproar was so loud that Zhao canceled the publication of Blood Heir. In a statement posted to Twitter, she apologized for the “pain” and “harm” her unpublished novel had caused the “readers” who never read it.

Later that year, the New York Times reported that Blood Heir would be published after all.

However, it would first be sent to sensitivity readers. These beta readers would help Zhao rewrite her book by vetting it for potentially offensive material. Around the same time, YA author Kosoko Jackson canceled his own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after people on Twitter and

Goodreads protested the inclusion of a Muslim villain. They claimed this fictional character was “offensive.” He was “harmful.” He was “dangerous.” In an ironic twist, Jackson was one of the people on Twitter who went after Zhao. He is also a sensitivity reader for Big Five publishers. Literally, his job is to ensure that books are not offensive.

Q: I founded Heresy Press in 2023 to provide an alternative to what I saw as an industry been co-opted by identity politics and cancel culture. What is your stance on this topic?

A: People laughed at The New School when it was founded in 1919 by a group of intellectuals who were frustrated by the status quo. Now it’s a place that most intellectuals would be honored to teach at. It’s really, really difficult to carve out a new—and profitable—space in the monopolistic landscape of American publishing, but I’m enamored by those who try, especially those who share my commitment to literary freedom.

Q: Do you sense that a reaction—or vibe-shift—is underway and that the influence of identity politics and cancel culture within the publishing industry is waning? 

A: In the first episode of their new season, South Park declared that “woke is dead.” I think it’s dead in certain corners of America—most notably, the Oval Office. But it survives, and it continues to thrive, in the places that have long been most congenial to it, including American publishing.

In fact, it’s not unreasonable to think that it will get worse in these spaces. Just look at what happened to Sparrow and Vine a few months ago. You might not be able to do anything about the Oval Office, the Supreme Court, the House, or the Senate, but you can fight the “racism” in that fantasy novel. In the ashes of political defeat, the left has no war to win but a culture war. Put otherwise, cancel culture flourishes in the ashes of political defeat.

Q: If you had a magic wand that granted you one wish, what problem would you first tackle to return publishing to a healthier state?

A: I would use my magic wand to disconnect Roxane Gay’s internet connection.

More seriously, I would alter the political makeup of the people who work inside these institutions. We know that when people who hold the same views come together their views only get more extreme. That’s why forums like 8chan have produced so many extremists on the right. It’s also why literary culture has produced so many extremists on the left. If you had political diversity inside publishers like HarperCollins and review outlets like Kirkus, and MFA programs like Iowa, much of the damage done to our most important institutions for the production and reception of literature might have been avoided.

Director’s Recommendations

Szetela’s interview with Coleman Hughes is brilliant all the way through. It’s a refreshing and engaging conversation about what ails the publishing industry!
→ Access the podcast episode (with video) here.

I highly recommend Junot Diaz’s beautiful and lucid meditation on the genre of the short story.
→ Read his Substack here.

The Heresy Press newsletter#14 featured a guest essay by Jasper Ceylon (pseudonym). The Free Press has since brought out a feature on this poet and shed light on his unusual story of exposing the rot caused by identity politics at the heart of literary publishing.

→ Read the article in The Free Press here.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article about the way literature has lost its way. Unwittingly, Brooks mentions all the principal reasons why Heresy Press exists.

→ Read “When Novels Mattered” here.