News:

Just published: Max Watman’s searing debut novel Tomorrow, the War

At once a frontier odyssey and a liberation narrative, Tomorrow, the War stands as a bold, deeply humane portrait of resilience in the face of history’s cruelty.

Advance Praise:

“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

→ Buy Tomorrow, the War HERE..

Half-Jew—Full Life by Georgette Bennett receives a string of prominent endorsements.

Here is a blurb from the great historian Simon Schama:

“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, hiding pillar-to-post including in a brothel run by a giantess; protected as the “pet Jew” of an SS officer, somehow walking away, leaping off a train, doing whatever it took to make it through the war. 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, broadcaster, historian, and author of many ground-breaking books, including Rembrandt’s Eyes and Landscape and Memory

Publication date: January 27, 2026.

→ Pre-order Half-Jew—Full Life HERE.

Cover reveal of Heresy Press’s pioneering book on viewpoint diversity, issued in partnership with Heterodox Academy:

Viewpoint Diversity is filled to the brim with contributions by today’s leading heterodox thinkers. For a look at the list of contributors and the table of contents, click here.

Advance Praise:
“Viewpoint Diversity is the handbook we’ve been missing: rigorous without being preachy, pluralistic without being naïve, and unapologetically pro–free speech. It makes the case—patiently and persuasively—that intellectual humility isn’t a vibe; it’s a practice, and institutions need rules and norms that reward truth-seeking instead of tribal applause. If you’re tired of outrage-as-a-personality and ready to trade reflexes for curiosity, this book lays out a real path back to open inquiry—and a liberal democracy that can handle disagreement again.”
— Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE and co-author of The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail

Publication date: March 10, 2026.

→ Pre-order Viewpoint Diversity HERE.

The Heresy Press Book Club continues to meet regularly. Author appearances with open Q&A sessions are a highlight!

The next meeting of ‘Speakeasy: The Heresy Press Book Club’ will be Tuesday, January 20th at 8:00pm EST, via Zoom. Our book club selection is Max Watman’s novel, Tomorrow, the War.

Watch two video clips of the most recent Book Club meeting, discussing Michael Liska’s novel Alice, or The Wild Girl.
→ In this video Liska addresses the question whether novels ought to carry a moral lesson.

In a second clip, Liska gives a lucid answer to the million-dollar question: What motivates writers to continue churning out creative work in an era of shrinking audience pools and dwindling attention spans.

To sign up for the Book Club and receive all relevant notifications, go here.

Submissions for fiction are PAUSED while Heresy Press is working through the backlog of unread submissions. But a new submission portal for NON-FICTION has just been opened!

For the first time, Heresy Press actively solicits submissions in the non-fiction sector, for the 2027-28 publication window.

For more details, go to the Heresy Press submission portal.
What we are looking for:

• Works specifically related too free speech issues, open debate, and heterodoxy
• Narrative non-fiction and biographies with a controversial, unusual, or daring slant
• Creative non-fiction that is surprising, heretical, and challenging
• Critical analyses of the publishing industry and nonconformist takes on today’s literary and artistic culture

Guest Essay

By Max Watman

One of the most fascinating things I’ve ever heard is that wasps recognize almost as many faces as we do, and this is useful because they are helpful to the wasps who live in their own colony and defensive against the wasps of other colonies. For a long while I wanted to write about an illness which might disrupt this ability, and spread to people, who would then act selfishly. It’s a deeply flawed foundation for a story, at least in part because it hardly takes a mind virus to atomize people. We are already unrecognizable and separate from one another.

I’m often wrong about what a good basis for a story might be, and the embryonic beginnings of Tomorrow, the War, are no different. I had sketches about a western gunslinger who had learned to disappear. His ability would, ironically, draw attention to him. What he wants is to travel through the world without anyone noticing, like all the wandering heroes on television when I was a kid, but what he gets is nineteenth century paparazzi. (Naturally, I want write the things I enjoyed when I first came to narratives: Kung Fu, BJ and the Bear, the Incredible Hulk, Gulliver’s Travels, Two Years Before the Mast, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court.)

At some point my gunfighter fell in with some river pirates, and it was while sitting on a little island in the Ohio River after a shipwreck that he and I met Jed Stokes, who became one of the main characters of Tomorrow, the War. (The river is still in the story, the pirates, alas, are not.) I felt that I knew Jed immediately, and when he waved to me from that little island, I knew I had met my protagonist. This kid is a Jewish teenager from the Shenandoah Valley—ahem—who, inspired by The Three Musketeers, leaves home at 17 in search of adventure. This is pretty close to my own experience, except it’s the middle of the nineteenth century, and any pretense of connection is silly, although he lives as we all live: he leaves home looking to assert his agency and gain autonomy, and ends up struggling to survive. He looks for paths which will lead him to something “real,” without realizing that what he wants most of all is a friend. Jed learns, as we all learn, that most of the world doesn’t give a shit about him. He does make some friends, though, and then some more.

It seems clear to me that the difference between good books and bad books—beyond the initial questions of whether or not the writer is capable of doing the work—is that good books are asking questions to which the author did not know the answer. It’s the opposite of that old chestnut that we should write what we know. We should write what we don’t know. To write only foregone conclusions is a direct path to kitsch. Kitsch doesn’t create sympathy, it creates redundancy. It doesn’t create worlds, it creates, at best, ambiance.

As I wrote about the conflict between agency and restriction in Jed’s life, and the conflict between freedom and containment, between what he wanted and what the world wanted him to have, I made notes about other people, and the ways they might be constrained.

Folks have ideas about what they deserve. Some are self defeating, some are self aggrandizing. Some are thwarted by poverty. Women in the middle of the nineteenth century were the property of their husbands unless they got lucky and their husband died, which, of course, would happen all the time because they had lots of risk and no antibiotics.

One of the key conflicts in Tomorrow, the War, involves young Oliver Bodkin, who wants to stay in Boston and hang around with his salon friends, talking to and about the Transcendentalists, but his father dies, and duty calls him back to the farm. Meeting Oliver Bodkin was as much of a revelation as meeting Jed. Oliver would want to free those who were enslaved at his father’s plantation. He would insist that they, too, participate in this American prime time adventure of searching for agency. He would be self congratulatory, completely unaware that his gesture was an exercise in saviorism. At which point I realized that at least half the story was there. For how could I possibly write about agency in America without confronting one of the key American tragedies?

I am constitutionally against the idea of monolithic regionalism. A population is always made up of individuals, and it is the individual experience, rather than the generalized one, that interests me. I love an adventure story—give me a ship, give me a big rig and a chimpanzee, but give me people. Hopefully lots of them. Of all types. Some of them awful, some of them kind, some of them misguided. (I think often of that wonderful scene in Anna Karenina, wherein Levin reflects upon how much he misunderstood about marriage, and how watching marriage from afar is like watching a boat on a lake. It looks smooth, but when you find yourself sailing in a boat on a lake, you learn quickly that it is all chaos and work.)

So that’s what I wrote. I can’t imagine a world without heteroglossia, without variation, without questions. I’m not interested in stories that don’t tax the limits of an author’s imagination. What would it be like if a Connecticut yankee was transported to Arthurian England? What would it be like if a Shaolin monk wandered around the West? What would it be like if a Jewish kid from the Shenandoah Valley found himself befriending a formerly enslaved man, and felt compelled to help him restore the freedom of his sister?

They would be connected, for one thing. Less atomized.

Which is the goal, after all.

Which would you rather read?:

Literary Fun Fact–“Over the transom”

When authors don’t stick to official channels of submission or use a literary agent, instead trying to pitch their work directly to an editor through personal channels, that is referred to in the industry as “over the transom.” Have you ever stopped to wonder how this expression originated?

Let me unpack it: A transom is a horizontal window placed above a door or large window, like this:

Metaphorically, the term “transom window” dovetails with another architectural publishing metaphor, i.e. “gatekeepers.” In days gone by, authors who couldn’t fathom an official way past the gatekeepers of publishing houses would toss their manuscripts through the transom window—kept open to provide ventilation inside the editorial offices— in hopes that somebody inside would pick it up, read it, respond to it and, ideally, accept the manuscript for publication. Hence, the full expression “throw it over the transom and see what happens.”

There’s both a stricter and a looser application of this phrase: In the looser sense, any unsolicited submission that comes directly from an author is considered “over the transom.” But in the stricter sense—which is the sense I use—it only applies to unsolicited submissions which come to Heresy Press via personal email and thus are not following the standard protocol spelled out in the submission guidelines. If this happens, I ask writers to go back and use the online submission portal. This facilitates the submission management and makes the process more transparent, which is to the author’s advantage. Since Heresy Press’s online portal is equivalent to an invitation to submit, only the “wild” submissions coming directly to my email inbox are considered “over the transom.”

Director’s Recommendations

Heresy Press book club facilitator, Britton Buttrill published an excerpt of his Southern Gothic historical romance, For This is Sacred Ground, in The TONIC Journal.

Told as a prayer to his unborn son, For This is Sacred Ground, follows John Byron, a poor white son of a marble miner, as he comes of age in Appalachia, falling in love with Sistine Young, a Black preacher’s daughter, amidst the racial violence of 1950s Georgia. This sweeping love story portrays one man’s fight against the Powers & Principalities upholding hatred, in an effort to claim his family’s right to the American dream.

Read the excerpt here.

Author website: www.brittonbuttrill.com

“Literary Identitarianism” by Michael Mohr is a poignant short story about the travails of a budding writer who, trying to find a publisher for his manuscript, butts his head against the restrictive norms and taboos that pervade mainstream publishing these days. But there’s an unexpected twist in this story—you’re advised to find out by reading the story.

Excerpt:

“The literary agent Manuscript Wish Lists … were absurd and sounded like Orwellian jokes. Agents said they wanted ‘non-white and minority novels,’ ‘Stories about marginalization,’ stories focused on ‘LGBTQ-IAA, asexual protagonists, novels with lesbian and trans heroes,’ ‘white heroes or heroines who understood their white privilege,’ novels with disabled but strong central characters, ‘books with an anti-capitalist message, historical novels focusing on the trenchant horror of American slavery and the effects downstream from that even today, trans love stories, anti-Christian tracts, and much more.

…. How had everything become overtly political in book publishing? Art wasn’t supposed to be inherently and obviously political. Why were they so focused on only ‘minority’ writers? Why the obsession with trans?”

Read the story here.

In his recently published article “Making Fiction Boring,” Adam Szetela displays his knack for uncovering the malaise at the core of mainstream publishing in the “Sensitivity Era.”

Excerpt:

”Submission guidelines give the impression that trigger warnings are exactly what these readers need, despite the reality that, as Lukianoff and Haidt point out, ‘avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.’ They also give the impression that publishing poems, plays, and short stories is like working at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Whereas this government agency is charged with ‘protecting the public from unreasonable risks,’ these journals charge themselves with protecting readers from the ‘risk of harm.’ The ‘risk of harm’ includes anything that ‘could be hurtful to any specific segment of the population.’ To be ‘safe,’ today’s writers should stick to stories about playing with kittens, watering organic vegetable gardens, and hosting Fairtrade potlucks in the park. Notwithstanding all the blather about ‘resistance,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘revolution,’ if I were to pick one word to describe the literature published in the Sensitivity Era it would be ‘anodyne.’

→ Find the article here.