News:

Cutting-Edge Anthology: Heresy Press is poised to publish a book of dazzling short fiction from some of today’s most acclaimed voices, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners.

Inspired by Kafka’s injunction that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” these twelve stories strike at complacency with audacity and style. Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Lionel Shriver, Andrew Doyle, Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, David Sedaris, and Alice Walker deliver tales of cruelty, compassion, delusion, and revelation—from gothic horror and biting satire to surreal fables and lyrical meditations. Bradford Morrow’s chilling inheritance scenario, Chuck Palahniuk’s harrowing tale of sexual exploitation, Jonathan Santlofer’s seductive con game, James Morrow’s heretical tour-de-force, and Elizabeth Hand’s wrenching portrait of a dying hedonist exemplify fiction that cuts deep and lingers. Across these pages, the familiar world cracks open to reveal what lies beneath: violence, longing, and the possibility of grace. In a spirited afterword, Junot Díaz urges readers to read “hungrily, adventurously, and blasphemously”—the perfect benediction for a compilation filled with trenchant, impactful stories.

→ Axe: Stories that Cut Deep will be released on June 23, 2026.

Pathbreaking Essay Collection: Heresy Press collaborates with Heterodox Academy to bring out a high-profile anthology of essays on one of today’s most important (and contested) ideas.

The book’s table of contents reads like a Who’s Who of today’s leading heterodox thinkers, including Jonathan Haidt, John Tomasi, Nadine Strossen, Bret Stephens, Jessie Singal, Jon Zimmerman, Mark Bauerlein, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Danielle Allen, and many others. Heresy Press’s director, Bernard Schweizer, also contributes a chapter. The book will be released in March 2026.

This will be the first comprehensive book on viewpoint diversity in higher education, politics, and the arts. Although viewpoint diversity seems to be on everyone’s lips these days, few can agree on what it actually means. Is it about confronting academia’s dearth of conservative scholars? Is it a political slogan or the equivalent of race, gender, and class inclusivity? Or is it something deeper — a commitment to intellectual freedom and open inquiry in an age of polarization? Our book will create much-needed clarity around this important concept.

Organized into three sections — covering higher education, public life, and the arts — the book’s distinguished contributors go beyond diagnosis of one of today’s most contested ideas of our time to offer solutions: how to foster real conversation, resist conformity, and create institutions that welcome a true diversity of perspectives. Defending pluralism across society, politics, academia, and the arts, this timely collection confronts the rise of orthodoxy on both the left and the right — and offers practical pathways for rebuilding dialogue across lines of difference.

→ The publication date of Viewpoint Diversity is March 10, 2026.

Tomorrow the War by Max Watman will be published on January 6, 2026.

Watman’s novel was favorably reviewed in Publishers Weekly, which calls it “an evocative panorama of the war’s prelude.”

→ Read the full review here.

Further praise for Tomorrow, the War:

“Tomorrow, the War is more than just a historical novel, it’s a meditation on America, history, racism, and perspective. In an age when authors are pressured into only looking at things from their own specific perspectives—a directive which makes writing a novel (or anything other than memoir) nearly impossible—Watman has deftly and defiantly dared to enter the perspectives of a broad range of characters whose identities he doesn’t share, and he has done so in a way that makes the characters breathe and sweat and think and feel. Max Watman is a master-storyteller, and Tomorrow, the War is a masterpiece.”

—Jonah Winter, author of My Name Is James Madison Hemings, a New York Times Notable Book

→ Pre-order Tomorrow, the War here.

Michael Liska’s national book tour brings Alice, or The Wild Girl to readers across different regions and literary communities

To promote Alice, or The Wild Girl, Michael Robert Liska conducted a six-state tour starting with a launch at The Frenchtown Bookshop in New Jersey on September 9th, 2025. He continued with appearances at various events in Brooklyn, Vermont, Washington DC, and California, where he read from the novel and engaged in spirited discussions with the audience. The tour also included participation at the Twentynine Palms Book Festival in California, and it will conclude on November 20th, 2025, at Tomorrow Books in Indianapolis, where Liska will participate in an “Indie Author Showcase” alongside other notable writers.

Check out this enthusiastic review of Alice in The Los Angeles Book Review.

Plus, Michael Liska was featured prominently in Brooklynrail

→ Order Alice, or the Wild Girl here.

Half-Jew—Full Life by Georgette Bennett is showered with advance accolades by celebrities and icons of intellectual life.

One of many spirited endorsements:

“This is the astounding story of someone who belonged to a group that seldom get their histories told—mischlings—in this case with an Aryan mother and Jewish father. Amidst terror and mass death “Pips” is always larger than life—choosing, out of love, to be Jewish rather than save himself from deportation, going underground and surviving Gestapo arrests and imprisonment…. Georgette Bennett’s jaw-dropping, page-turning book reads as comedy amidst horror, invincible life force against the odds of survival, and then, in America, an epic of genius chuztpah. And like all the most brilliant biographies it makes you wish you had known Pips in person. But by the end of the book you pretty much do.”

— SIR SIMON SCHAMA, historian, documentarian, and author of many groundbreaking books and TV series, such as A History of Britain, The Story of the Jews, and The Holocaust: 80 Years On

→Pre-order this deeply affecting biography of defiance, loss, survival, and resilience here.

Heresy Press is expanding its international presence

Director Bernard Schweizer once again flew to Germany to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. He met with publishers and agents from Australia, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Taiwan, and China, all of whom demonstrated lively interest in future licensing and translations deals. One such prospect has already panned out: The War On Words will be issued in Portuguese translation next year in Brazil!

Pictured here is Heresy Press director Bernard Schweizer at the stand of Mercier Press (Ireland), meeting with Mercier Press representatives Dee Collins and Carina McNally (note the three Heresy Press books on their shelf in the background). Mercier Press has licensed 5 Heresy Press books for distribution and sale in Ireland and the UK.

Guest Essay

How Messaging Ruins Poetry
By Phyllis Peters

The world would be a trivial place if the closest thing to truth in it were the most clever.
— Stanisław Lem

Everyone knows that literary heresy is born again, and again, wherever literature is stifled. These attacks are natural given the irrepressible power of ideas when expressed in words, those brave little vocables now running for their lives. Underground, where many of us have fled, we’re grateful for such lexical agility, cheer it on from the dugout, so to say, and recognize poetry as the premier domain in which words should reign agile. But poetic torque is not encoded in each—rather, it resides in their combining to conjure the holy grail: Revelation.

So incumbent is the tanglement of usage and revelation that it has staved off erosion in numerous domains, most obviously pop lyrics. Who does not recognize their perfect union of phrasing and rhythm, revealing findings just beyond the ken? The result is an experience, thrilled delight such as happens at raves or when drivers throw open a car window to sing or rap along as they go. And yet in the realm of published poetry, revelation has been unplugged from its music—that is, from language—often to promote political messaging.

A pause here for a couple of distinctions. First, messaging is the obsession of advertising. It hypes sheen while providing constant disambiguation. Its subject and object is the individual, who is made to feel whole, not part of a whole, and not by the ad itself but by the product, which is a thing external even to the message. The goal is transaction, where titillation ends in barter, and once the exchange is complete, no reflection required.

Poetry’s obsession, meanwhile, is obsession itself, and for all its obsession, poetry is not about product and therefore cannot tout. This fact, nodded to for centuries, today seems a surprise to many professors and industry professionals who tightly control the art then complain about its ghosting. Much has been written and undertaken to spotlight the problem (for an example, see Jasper Ceylon’s essay here), but the poetic establishment continues to appear only dimly aware of any symbiotic relationship between epiphany and limber language. How has this happened?

Since the mid 20th century, changemakers have been discovering that poetry is the most seated of ducks. Sporty killability in a world transformed by messaging. An easy target—no public outcry because the audience was discerning, smallish, and lacking a bullhorn. The best of the genre had been layered, deep and broad, and buoyed up through language, not simply clever like a sitcom or the Nike swish. But forward to our century, and clever has been cultivated so strongly that deeper has become unrecognizable, inscrutable, a liability not to be tolerated lest inklings outside the intended message creep in. In light of these societal changes, some editorial or publishing decisions might be justified if not for the gatekeepers’ strident complicity. The outcome has been the managed proliferation of a literary form few want to read.

This is a fallen state—stray words producing reams of legitimate personal feelings that mostly land flat of revelation; meantime, poets attend writers’ groups, work at literary magazines, teach poetry, and rally around it, thereby perpetuating an in-group popularity that mimics broader consequence. To be clear, not all contemporary poetry is inconsequential. Good and even great poets are writing today, but their work is consistently overwhelmed by an ever-swelling surge of messaging that dampens its own experience, alienating the very readers that make poetry so necessary. I implore in-group members to step out for one year and, please, come back to report—your findings will prove out-group readership nearly nonexistent.

Admittedly, poetry will never be popular and cannot actually be defined. Real poetry is its own glass jar, stuffed full but fragile, seen into but hardly through, the relationship of revelation to language so airtight its moisture perseveres. This pairing of the ages is in plain sight, its existence our singular master. True poets keep that jar on their desk because it is the unforgiving reminder to avoid stating their feelings in strings of personal emotion but rather to allow revelation to command the language for them. It is why some of the best contemporary poets are rappers. Rappers don’t state—they let language fly like a bat out of insight. It’s easier.

Once upon a time, Dustin Hoffman starred with Laurence Olivier in a difficult scene of psychological and physical torture. When Hoffman explained to his esteemed colleague the elaborate methods he’d used to achieve his performance, Olivier purportedly responded, “Why don’t you just act?”

We poets should just revelate. Step aside and allow our talent for sound and rhythm—that is, for language—to create a reading so captivating that personal feelings recede and sheer transcendence is had. In Our Eunuch Dreams below, as in all his work, Dylan Thomas writes in electric phrasings that urge our attention, create an experience. On the right I offer a version of the same ideas, but now unplugged from Thomas’s dynamic language—the result is a mere series of statements, the source of power gone like a cord detached from its outlet.

Which would you rather read?:

Phyllis Peters is a poet, author, and playwright whose work appeared in literary events and publications such as The London Magazine, Colorado Review, Columbia Journal, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, among numerous others.

Director’s Recommendations

The Free Press has a new podcast series titled “Old School” moderated by Shilo Brooks. He is on a mission to bring men back into the fold of the literary reading community (or, at lest, to have fewer of them abandon literature).

Excerpt: “Books invite us to feel unfamiliar feelings and think alien thoughts. They train us in empathy and make us feel less lonely. They help us to discover what we believe, what we value, and what we never imagined.”

→Read the article here.

Anyone who cares about the survival of the literary arts, ought to read “The Dawn of the post-literate society, and the end of civilization” by James Marriott, at once an enlightening and a disillusioning reading experience. You get the historical big picture—how the explosion of literacy among all social classes in the 18^th century changed the world—as well as a data-driven analysis of the current precipitous decline in literacy and literary reading, with dire consequences for multiple spheres of culture and society. We need to do all we can to stop our collective slide into a post-literate (and post-literary) society, and Heresy Press does its share to reverse the trend.

Excerpt: “If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the [smart]screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.”

→Read this brilliant and impassioned essay here.

In conversation with Yascha Mounk, the novelist George Packer discusses his latest novel The Emergency, a political fable with plenty of relevance to our current moment.

This lively conversation is an object lesson of the ways fiction can serve as a lens for thinking about politics—which is so much better than the reverse (i.e. using politics to think about literature).

→ Find the interview and transcript here.