News:

Heresy Press launches Imagine My Surprise!, a daring reincarnation thriller with a large dose of hilarity.

A drug boss is killed by his henchmen. Imagine his surprise when he wakes up fully conscious inside a wriggling newborn. But payback will have to wait until he learns to navigate suburbia and outsmart his dysfunctional parents.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “an engaging, amusingly crude must-read.”

→ Read the complete Kirkus review here.

BookLife/Publishers Weekly comments:

“Haddock creates a truly unique premise and somehow pulls it off. As the concrete questions of a murder investigation are finally answered, issues of morality and personhood emerge, culminating in a story that readers will have trouble putting down.”

→ Read the review in its entirety here.

→ The audio book of Imagine My Surprise! is a work of art in its own right. The narrator, Chris Zegri, triumphantly meets the challenge of narrating the lives of two different adults and a baby from the perspective of a seven-year-old!

→ Enjoy this superb audio book by ordering it here.

Excerpt

[From the beginning of Imagine My Surprise! by K.S. Haddock]

Imagine my surprise—I was dying!

I remember the lovely prick of the needle in my arm. It was a clear January night, and I was slouched on my black leather sofa watching the distant, twinkly lights of downtown San Francisco—watching them fade. Franks had come by with a birthday bag of really good heroin, and I fixed on my couch in front of those twinkly lights like I’d done so many times before. And mmmm, the Pavlov prick of the needle is exciting in its own right—you almost don’t need what follows. Unfortunately, what did follow was an overdose. A murder-dose. I didn’t see it coming.

But that moment—that rush. It’s like . . . love ascending. Then after you’re an addict, it’s like a glancing moment of love quickly plummeting into spiritual disappointment. Like an entire relationship in one shot. Exhilaration and heartbreak. One second, you’re on top of the world; the next second, bitter, inevitable loss. And then you need more.

So, there I am, dying, and my heart is breaking—literally—under the weight of a heavy overdose of some very fine Afghani white heroin . . . cut with fentanyl. First of all, that anyone would sully such a high-grade narcotic with crap like fentanyl was a crime unto itself. Second, this was my unfortunate introduction to fentanyl. I was unable to move. Not twenty feet away in the kitchen drawer was a lifesaving dose of Narcan.

I remember the feeling of liquid on my chin, dripping down my gray goatee onto my chest, ruining my expensive Brunello Cucinelli button-down. I had vomited: so rookie, so preschool.

But if you’re on your way out, overdosing on smack is probably not the worst. (I’ve heard drowning, just before the end, is quite pleasant.) All my anger had vanished, even my anger toward Franks for murdering me. Heroin being heroin, it was hard to give a shit why, hard to care that I was dying at all.

And so I slipped down a rabbit hole, and with me went reality, the world, and the aforementioned beautiful prickly lights of downtown San Francisco. I slid comfortably back into the womb of creation, its arms enfolding, drawing me back into the birth canal of existence, back to the atoms, to Adam, to the beginning, and I didn’t care because I was full of careless heroin love. I was either going to wake up in the hospital or not wake up at all, and either seemed a perfect outcome.

Happy birthday to me. I was fifty.

~~•~~

Imagine my surprise—and my dismay—to find out I didn’t exactly die. After a brief period of the most ravishing, rhapsodic blackness, the rabbit hole appeared again and was coming back toward me. I couldn’t breathe. I was cramped and wet. I was sure I was regaining consciousness in a giant pool of my own vomit. And the smell! Hard to describe, like fish and feces and gut-stink, and it took my breath away. My lungs seemed filled with fluid. And there was a taste, a taste of bile and something else, something indescribable yet somehow familiar.

Also, I wasn’t approaching the rabbit hole—I was being squeezed out of it. Slowly. I was losing patience, my careless heroin love vanishing. I thought, Whatever bad trip this is, I’m going to kill someone, someone like Franks, that halitotic Irish motherfucker.

To make matters worse, I couldn’t move. I was bound in a wet sleeve with no muscles. A kind of goo gummed my eyes; my hearing was a sluiced white noise. It would suck if the heroin had left me too brain damaged to personally kick the shit out of Franks.

The warm fuzzy of the heroin vanished. My senses were a disquieting swirl, like a really bad acid trip. Then—I was suddenly out of the hole and into the daylight. Yay!

Hold it. No—not daylight—it was surgical light! I’d made it to the hospital! It’s just like I said, you either wake up dead or in the hospital.

I was freezing and everything was a blur, both sight and sound. Air filled my lungs, and I screamed like a baby. I was alive!

~~•~~

Imagine my surprise when I realized what the fuck was going on.

“Holy Christ!” I shouted. But what came out was more like a squawky rattling shriek. I couldn’t control my mouth and tongue, and I had no fucking teeth! I had no fucking teeth!

The world was a cold, blurry cacophony. I bawled like a—yes—baby. I was uncontrollably angry, having a tantrum. Something was tugging on my stomach. Latex fingers passed me around.

I was insane.

Somehow, I found a moment of focus. I obviously was not a screaming gore-covered nine-pound baby boy. I was a boy, right? What was probably happening was that back in the real world I was in my death throes on my leather couch, puke running down my face and ruining my expensive shirt. I was not being wiped clean of a thick coating of placental goo and being swaddled in a warm blanket like a full-body tourniquet. I was not being weighed and measured; I was not being nestled into someone’s warm, protective arms.

I was clearly in the throes of a full-blown drug psychosis.

Perhaps it was some new designer drug with a name like Womb or Rebirth, and it made you feel like you’d died and been reborn into a little bitty baby. That had to be it.

~~•~~

K.S. Haddock was born in Seattle and raised in the Bay Area. A three-time winner of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, he’s a novelist, playwright, theater director, and musician. K.S. works as a digital artist and art director in San Francisco.

News

Max Watman’s epic novel Tomorrow, the War received an in-depth, favorable assessment from The Metropolitan Review:

Excerpt:

“Tomorrow, the War is, ultimately, a wonderful mix of propulsive plot and historical enlightenment, an old-fashioned yarn with more going on than just the momentum of the story, which nonetheless crackles with energy. Watman has clearly done his research, which he’s used to create a believable and humane portrait of a barbaric time.”

→ Read the entire review here.

A terrific book review of Half-Jew—Full Life by Georgette Bennett appeared in the New York Sun.

The reviewer, Carl Rollyson, draws on his expertise in biography and on his deep knowledge of history and culture to deliver a fascinating commentary on Half-Jew—Full Life: The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream.

Excerpt:
“Pips, as he is called throughout Georgette Bennett’s extraordinary biography of a Dickensian character right out of Great Expectations, had an affectionate Jewish father and a rather cold German gentile mother. At 13, to her dismay, Pips declared his attachment to his father’s people, around whom he had always felt at home.

Pips escaped four times from the Nazis and certain doom: Auschwitz, which he barely avoided by coming under the protection of a Nazi official. Pips promised after his final recapture not to escape again. He was bold to the point of recklessness, but he was also a charmer — not only seducing his way to safety with women, especially nurses, but even with Nazi officers.”

→ Read the complete review here.

On May 4, 2026, Georgette Bennett participated in a spirited conversation with the great historian Sir Simon Schama, at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

Bennett and Schama explored themes of identity, memory, resilience, and belonging, brought to life through Bennett’s deeply personal story and Schama’s incisive historical perspective.

→ Buy Half-Jew—Full Life: The Unlikely Journey of a Voluntary Jew from Nazi Persecution to the American Dream here.

Two contributors of Heresy Press’s book on viewpoint diversity, were featured in a dynamic webinar on the topic, expertly moderated by Suzanne Nossel (past CEO of PEN America). Heresy Press authors John Tomasi (President of Heterodox Academy) and Nadine Strossen (FIRE Senior Fellow and Heresy Press Advisory Board Member) spoke forcefully on the merits of viewpoint diversity, even—or especially—at a time when the concept of viewpoint diversity is wielded as a cudgel by the current administration to beat universities like Harvard and Columbia into submission, as pointedly asserted by Gregg Gonsalves. Nadine Strossen made a great argument that the project of viewpoint diversity in higher education doesn’t boil down to hiring more conservatives—rather, the existing faculty can be encouraged to diversify THEIR OWN views by admitting viewpoints into their thinking that are not congruent with progressive orthodoxies, thereby enriching the intellectual classroom atmosphere. John Tomasi, on his part, lucidly explained the three aspects of viewpoint diversity that are laid out in his lead chapter for Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It, i.e. the “scholarly sanctification view,” the “political representation view,” and the “heterodox view,” the latter being the preferred approach. All presenters agreed on the extreme relevance of the topic but were at variance on some aspects of it, which is, all considered, one of the virtues of viewpoint diversity.

→ A YouTube video recording of the whole fascinating debate can be found here.

→ To read more about this flashpoint topic, Heresy Press’s pioneering book contains a wealth of ideas:

Foreign Rights

Heresy Press Director Bernard Schweizer explored publishing partnerships in China during the month of April.

Schweizer met publishers in Nanjing and Shanghai who specialize in translated literature. He was pleased to learn how outward-looking China is and eager to enrich its literary landscape with voices from abroad.

Some snapshots from the tour:

Preview

• Heresy Press’s star-studded short story anthology Axe: Stories That Cut Deep will be released soon!

Here’s the jacket reveal:

→ Don’t wait—pre-order your copy of this stunning collection now.