News:

Heresy Press releases The Girlie Playhouse, a deliciously risqué novel by V.N. Alexander.

“Alexander’s beautiful style with flowing sentences and delicious phrasing glorifies female beauty in a society which often finds it threatening and, in turn, threatens it. She writes with a light touch, apparently following Nabokov’s dictum to caress the detail. Despite danger and tragedy in the background, this is a humorous and satirical novel, highly entertaining and thought provoking. I haven’t enjoyed reading a novel this much since I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal (2007).”
— Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool’s Day

Alexander’s erotic tale was published on April 7, 2026.

→ Read a highly perceptive review of the The Girlie Playhouse by Charles Holdefer here.
→ Enjoy a video interview with the author of The Girlie Playhouse. The video is available on Instagram here.
→ V.N. Alexander appeared on the podcast Salt Lake Dirt for a wide-ranging conversation about The Girlie Playhouse. Listen to the episode here.

→ BUY the hardcover edition of The Girlie Playhouse here.
→ BUY the audio book here.

Excerpt from The Girlie Playhouse

By V.N. Alexander

The light, white and clean, enveloped the pirouetting Trixie. Her skin lit up like a blue flame. She smiled at a pretty thought. Audrey tried to complain to someone at the bar, “God, I can’t believe they’re leaving the door open. It breaks the mood.” No one was listening. We were watching Trixie dance.

Max had gotten up and was walking to the stage. He watched, with dry-mouthed awe, the sway-backed girl. Something was happening. The hair on the back the neck bristled. She just kept dancing in a stream of light from the open door, exposed to passersby. At first, I was slightly embarrassed for her, then I was embarrassed for myself. In darkness or in full light, she was the same girl dancing. At this realization, I was a dandelion scattered at a wish. She was by then naked, except for a navy blue thong. Max stood by in a smoky stream of daylight. Seconds passed.

I should explain something about the way Trixie looked in that little thong. Most thongs, Andie’s for instance, disappear between pressed cheeks somewhere below the tailbone and don’t reappear until after they’ve reached under to the front side. Trixie’s thong did not dive in between her cheeks. Instead her full, plump buttocks lifted up and separated, and the dark strip of material was clearly visible as it ran along, covering the easy-to-imagine tender pink button, then cupping her conspicuous full, fleshy vulva underneath. And though Trixie stood with her feet together, a large triangular gap of light shone in between her thighs. As she glanced over her shoulder, her blameless sway-backed posture and upturned butt, gazelle-like, seem to invite the males to mate—right there in front of everybody.

Try to imagine now that thong, only a thong, a light scrap of thong, hardly concealing the target of every male ambition, as she had ceased to dance and merely stood on the edge of the stage, backside to the audience, undulating ever so slightly. Then she looked over her shoulder at Max, looked him straight in the eye. As he came nearer, gawking at her upturned butt, he bumped into a table. Wineglasses fell to the floor, and his cosmos followed.

He stooped without looking away from Trixie to pick up the mess. The porter intervened. Max, still squatting, smiled up at Trixie, and she laughed down at him. But then, mercifully, her smile faded, and she considered Max with a grave expression that implicated him, for everybody to see.

When the song ended, Trixie stood looking at him; the DJ let the silence hover, until it was shattered by a throat being cleared. Real time and place reasserted itself. In the still bright room, she gathered her things to her breast and ran off stage. Max immediately left, shaking his head. The thongéd creature turned and murmured to his receding silhouette, “See ya.”

When Max went back to his office he didn’t think about Mazdas. Quite against his will, his preoccupation with Trixie began. He told me how he had sat at his desk, receiver in hand, finger on the hookswitch, considering whether he should check to see if she was listed: T. Nichols. He also thought perhaps he might follow her home after work one day. No, that was madness. Later, while on the phone with a potential lessee, he was plagued by an ache in his groin. He closed his eyes and let the receiver fall from his ear. Startled, Max decided, for the sake of his business, if nothing else, to forget about that stripper.

But when he thought of her as “that stripper,” his excitement would reconstitute itself anew. All the marks he could count against her were truly part of her charm. He started to come to the cabaret more often. He stood in the back and quietly watched her dance. He rarely spoke with the other dancers. He was becoming cynical about Sammy’s too-friendly greeting. Andie’s tight, measured step began to make him bitter about the exorbitant price of his drink. Perhaps Trixie was just another Audrey or Sam after all. He tried to convince himself that the Playhouse was just one of the cool places that lay along the path from office to home.

From a self-imposed distance, Max was left to imagine the warmth of Trixie’s cheeks, the coolness of her hands. With bright eyes and a curiously shameless grin, he anticipated her movements. He was almost sure that she looked at him in an exceptional way, that she indulged him more than any other. Indeed, everybody could see she danced for him alone, pretty much. Sometimes, when she leaned down from the stage to greet him, her bluish white face would be aureoled in sapphire light, and he could perceive a hint of her perfume mingled with perspiration. He practically loved her prominent rib cage. She laughed like his neighbor’s little boy. But more than anything, he enjoyed her mercurial legs that kicked and swung and did the splits. My, she was limber. The things she could do! And then there was that free way she said hello and smiled. That was it. It was the way she managed to appear pleasant in seedy candlelight.

He would try, as I have tried, to find words for her appeal. None would be satisfactory. In the morning, the lovely phrase he composed while falling to sleep would prove to be trite or simply untrue. Welcome, Max, to the world of meretricious charms.

V.N. ALEXANDERis an award-winning fiction writer with three prior novels to her name—Smoking Hopes, Naked Singularity, and Locus Amoenus.

More News

Heresy Press and Heterodox Academy look back on an exciting book-launch party in New York City.
There was standing room only for the attendants at the largest book lanch to date for a Heresy Press title. Wine, hors d’oeuvres, conversations, a book talk, and entertainment were the ingredients of this memorable event on the rooftop at Grammercy Park.

John Tomasi participated in a lively dialogue with Michael Strambler (Yale University) about the current state of viewpoint diversity in the academy, followed by a spirited Q&A session. The evening was rapped up by a thudding rap-version about the book and its theme, masterfully delivered by Baba Brinkman.

Controversy erupts at Inside Higher Education over Heresy Press’s viewpoint diversity book.

John Wilson wrote not just one but TWO negative reviews of our book for Inside Higher Education—clearly the work has struck a nerve. The first of the two reviews ostensibly addressed the book as a whole, but it mainly fired polemical shots at individual sentences and contributors in the book, while ignoring the very breadth and diversity that is the book’s hallmark. The second review targeted specifically the lead essay by John Tomasi. Tomasi then wrote a spirited response, which IHE published. You can read both the original review and the response here.

→ Show your support by recommending the book to others interested in viewpoint diversity and by buying the book here.

The Washington Free Beacon publishes a rave review of Max Watman’s epic novel Tomorrow, the War
Excerpt:
“The subjects of Watman’s [previous three] books have included horse racing, small-scale farming, and moonshine-making. His books are loaded with facts and help readers see, hear, smell, and taste reality. Watman is a man who lives to experience things, which he has done as a farmer, silversmith, tutor, greenskeeper, warehouseman, cook, and musician.

So I was a little skeptical when I heard he had written a novel, and my dubiety rose higher when I learned it was historical fiction.… How could his fact-focused, contemporary reality-explaining brain imagine people who never existed living in antebellum America?

And yet somehow Watman has done just that. Tomorrow, the War is a nearly 400-page epic filled with fine grain details that pull the reader into a world that was as imagined by Watman. Mostly it is the tale of two young men from Virginia forced to find their way.”

→ Read the full review here.

→ Order a copy of Tomorrow, the War here.

Half-Jew—Full Life by Georgette Bennett adds new format and new audiences.

Georgette Bennett is the first Heresy Press author to go on an international book tour. She was speaking about Half-Jew—Full Life at the Oxford Literary Festival, and at events in Cambridge (UK) and at the London School of Economics. The UK audience avidly embraced the book.

→ The audio book of Half-Jew—Full Life is now out and can be purchased here.

→ Half-Jew Full Life will be discussed at the upcoming meeting of the Heresy Press Book Club. That meeting is scheduled for Friday, May 8, from 8 pm-10 pm. The first hour will be dedictaed to a book discussion led by Book Club facilitator Britt Buttrill. During the second hour, the author herself will come on for a book talk and Q&A.

Those interested in participating at this book club meeting (via zoom) can write an email to Britton Buttrill (brittonbuttrill.creative@gmail.com). We look forward to seeing you there!

Book jacket reveal of K.H. Haddock’s new novel Imagine My Surprise!

“Imagine My Surprise! is hard to put down, and it entertainingly pushes the crime genre to new possibilities. Mr. Haddock has written an edgy morality tale, a surreal existential crime novel that fuses comedy and tragedy in a surprisingly delightful way.”
— Jeffrey Weissman, Writer/Actor/Director

This remarkable “reincarnation thriller” will be released on May 5, 2026.

→ Pre-order your copy of Imagine My Surprise! here.

Publishing Fun Fact

Publishing fun fact: The world’s biggest book market is…?

The USA! But China is number TWO. China’s core reading public is huge—an estimated 500-700 million Chinese read books in various formats on a regular basis. That’s several times the size of the US book reading public (although per-capita consumption of books is lower than in the US). The biggest growth segment in China is in digital reading. Even on the ubiquitous WeChat app, books can be accessed through a dedicated service inside the app, for a fee. Whether the predominance of digital reading is a welcome development remains to be seen, but at least people ARE reading. And while conventional print-book sales are declining in China, the fiction sector, overall, is still growing, which is quite amazing, considering the plummeting fiction reading public in the United States.

Heresy Press’s director, Bernard Schweizer, is currently in China to explore possible licensing deals, working hard to bring Heresy Press books to Chinese audiences in translation. He is meeting with multiple publishers in Nanjing and Shanghai to pursue collaborations in this attractive—though not easy-to-navigate—market. At one such meeting, in Nanjing, he met the editor of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Them, who oversaw the book’s translation into Chinese in 1998.

Vivian Zhao, Director of International Cooperation at Yilin Press, with the Chinese version of Joyce Carol Oates’s Them, (winner of the National Book Award)

Director’s Recommendations

Jesse Singal strikes back: In Inside Higher Education, John Wilson accused Singal of “breathtaking indifference to censorship” because Singal had said in Heresy Press’s viewpoint diversity book that introducing more viewpoint diversity into the academy, “some way or another,” could hardly make things worse than they are. Singal looked closely at Wilson’s hyperbolical claims and defused them with dexterity.

→ Read Singal’s response here.

K. Riva Levinson is releasing a ten-year anniversary edition of her acclaimed book about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia and a Peace Novel Prize laureate.

“A wonderful book about the extraordinary camaraderie between Africa’s first woman president and her loyal friend and political ally, Riva Levinson. A must-read for all those interested in Liberia’s recent history and the immense power of friendship and loyalty.”
—Johnnie Carson, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs

→ To order the book, go here.

A list of thought-provoking books was put together by Craig Gibson at Heterodoxy in the Stacks. Remarkably, TWO Heresy Press books made the list—The War On Words and Viewpoint Diversity.

Heterodoxy in the Stacks