New Release:

Heresy Press publishes a book of boundary-pushing short fiction by some of today’s most celebrated voices.

In these daring tales, nothing is as it seems. Joyce Carol Oates reveals the dark roots of genius, while Sherman Alexie charts a Native scholar’s mystical return to his heritage. Bradford Morrow turns inheritance into horror; Lionel Shriver and David Sedaris skewer modern taboos, and Chuck Palahniuk exposes the dark seamy side of child sex trafficking. Jonathan Santlofer’s seductive thriller and Andrew Doyle’s hallucinatory farce explore deception and madness; Alice Walker and Elizabeth Hand deliver haunting explorations of death and grieving, while Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, and James Morrow expose beauty, compassion, and absurdity in equal measure. Provocative, poignant, and richly imaginative, these thirteen stories dare to tell uncomfortable truths.

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.

→ Order your copy of Axe: Stories That Cut Deep here.

Why Axe Matters

An essay by Bernard Schweizer

The idea behind this book of stories traces back to its title—Axe, which had been determined even before the first story in it had been written. The short, cutting word—axe—is resonant with multiple meanings, one of them being the expression “taking an axe to something” which can have destructive connotations but sometimes also carries the meaning of demolishing an old, decrepit structure in order to make room for something new, bold, and transformative.

This constructive implication is suitable for our endeavor because I feel that the world of publishing, at large, has become timid and over-regulated by unspoken laws to mitigate the “risk” of offending anybody. At Heresy Press, we don’t follow that logic, taking an axe to the notion that literature should tread carefully, should be circumspect, and should be soft. As it happens, this assessment dovetails precisely with the way Franz Kafka wielded the axe analogy in his famous dictum:

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Here the Kafka skewers the notion that books (and by books he really meant works of fiction) should make us feel safe, flatter us, make us happy, and confirm our preconceptions. Instead, he offers the astonishing advice that good books must go beyond merely entertaining us but should do a bit of violence to us, putting us on edge. Good books should trigger responses that span the gamut from joy to alarm, from delight to horror, and from agreement to revulsion. The frozen sea of certainties, assumptions, and settled mental states within us needs to be broken up by a literary shock delivered to the reader’s system via a bold and untamed book.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of today’s general publishing climate than to advocate for books that “affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply.” Nothing, indeed, could be less germane to the fear that is going around in publishing about triggering this or that trauma, annoying this or that constituency, or conjuring up this or that -ism. Sensitivity readers are engaged across the publishing industry to eradicate any trace of offensiveness, to remove emotional distress, to tamp down moral ambiguity, and to eliminate traces of fierceness that occasionally creep into works of fiction.

But Kafka’s dictum goes against current trends in publishing in other ways, too. Today’s mainstream publishing industry panders to identity politics in ways are both overt and subtle. Editors, publishers, and publicists now presume that any book, whether it be a novel, a short story, a poetry collection, or a memoir narrowly speaks to one specific “audience,” i.e. that a book needs to be tailored to a Black, Hispanic, gay, trans, neurodiverse, female, etc. demographic and that authors belonging to one of these identity groups are allowed only to create characters and thematics that exactly reflect their own profile. By contrast, Kafka was interested in the universal, in the human (and all-too-human) dynamics that are found in individual and group psychology across times and cultures. His lost and bedraggled protagonists are versions of Everyman who struggle against both their inner demons and against the pitfalls and snares that are laid by modern bureaucracies and authoritarian powers. We read Kafka nowadays—and always will—because he appeals to profound emotional and psychological desires and anxieties across racial, gender, cultural, age, and other divides, not because he speaks about the experience of a white, male, cis, German speaking, Czech Jew living in Prague during the early twentieth century.

With this being said, I want to be clear that Axe is precisely not an axe-grinding enterprise. This book came into existence for the simple reason that we want to offer robust and discerning readers vivid stories that satisfy lofty standards of literary merit. Heresy Press doesn’t pursue an agenda and doesn’t enforce a particular perspective, whether progressive or conservative, except that we stand for artistic integrity. Our only objective is to offer a book of scintillating narratives by today’s master storytellers. If in the process of reading, some discomfort arises, then so be it—unbounded literature, in Kafka’s spirit, can be discomfiting at times.

But we are confident that our Heresy Press readership will recognize the superior artistic merit of these stories, despite their sometimes provocative content. They will be happy to take the ride and venture forth into the territory of daring, unapologetic, and occasionally heretical literary creativity.

Bernard Schweizer, professor emeritus of English and Director of Heresy Press.

News

Imagine My Surprise! by K.S. Haddock gets off to a roaring start

At a well-attended book-launch party at Bird & Beckett Books in San Francisco, author Keith Haddock and audio-book narrator Chris Zegri, brought the novel to live before a rapt audience.

In the clip above, voice actor Chris Zegri is reading the opening chapter.

→ The whole launch event is available on video here.

Haddock participated at the Bay Area Book Festival:

• Below is an excerpt from a recent book review of Imagine My Surprise! on Calcopia:

“Haddock’s spitfire writing style and commitment to his outrageous setup turn what might have been a one-note joke into a mostly sympathetic look at how addiction and apathy can break down and weaken those who let the demons in.

After gaining a little mobility, baby Keenan is able to sneak around his new home, and quickly figures out he was murdered by his double-crossing lieutenant, Franks, an Irishman with designs on his fledgling criminal empire. Now he’ll do what any murdered drug dealer reborn as a baby would do: track down his killer and get revenge. He’ll just have to get through toilet training and daycare first.”

• K.S. Haddock recently gave a podcast interview on Salt Lake Dirt. The host,Kyler Bingham, introduced the novel for his listeners as follows:

“I was totally in from page one of K.S. Haddock’s Imagine My Surprise! It’s a hilarious, fascinating thriller with a wild reincarnation revenge premise that I’ve never seen pulled off anywhere else. If you are looking for an incredibly unique and satisfying read, you need to check this book out.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

→ Buy your copy of Imagine My Surprise!—either in print or as audiobook—here.

The Girlie Playhouse by V.N. Alexander is making waves

• V.N. Alexander’s novel is the subject of the longest, most detailed book review of any Heresy Press book to date:

The excerpt below gives a flavor of the approach:

“What does the reader expect from the description of a strip joint? Tawdriness, of course. Think of recent depictions of strip joints in film. In “The Sopranos,” e.g., in “Anora.” Low-class and sordid, dark establishments, reeking in lewdness. The dancers working there are underclass, lascivious, as are the people running the place: base, disreputable, sleazy. [….] How does the more-than-unreliable narrator of this novel, Pixie, describe her workplace, The Girlie Playhouse? As not tawdry.”

Read the whole review here.

In addition, The Girlie Playhouse attracted attention from multiple podcasts. Below is a sampling:

• The podcast episode on Beyond the Zero is available here.
• The podcast interview on Third Paradigm can be downloaded here.
• The podcast program on Ripple Effect can be accessed here.

→ Click HERE to buy your copy of The Girlie Playhouse.

Full-cover reveal of Heresy Press’s upcoming fiction offering: Porn Again by Scott Tuoty

Porn meets religion—what could possibly go wrong . . .

Ethan Essig wakes up every morning disappointed to find he’s still him-self—a bitter, burnt-out pornographer running a company on the brink of collapse with a soul teetering on the edge of immolation. 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.

• Porn Again will be published on November 10, 2026.

→ The book is available for pre-order here.

Director’s Recommendations

• Liza Libes writes perceptively—albeit polemically—about the pitfalls of the current mainstream publishing industry. In her most recent piece, she tackles the scourge of literary gatekeepers’ wishlists (and anti-wishlists, aka “Anti-MSWL”). To illustrate her point, she publishes scores of those wishlists. Look at just how narrowly these literary gatekeepers define what is allowed to pass through the gate! It looks like a parody but is real.

Below is an excerpt from Libes’s Substack post that chimes with the mission of Heresy Press, i.e. to counter soft-censorship while practicing real diversity of viewpoints (by including the whole spectrum of ideas and perspectives, not just left-progressive ones).

Excerpt:

“This is soft censorship at its finest—and it defies literature’s very purpose to portray a diversity of characters and convictions.

It is true that some of our culture’s greatest authors have been devoted leftists—Jean Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, to name a few—but it is also true that many others have produced great works of literature—Crime and Punishment, Brideshead Revisited, Anna Karenina—with more “traditional” takeaways. Both are equally valid, and both deserve to live on our shelves. At the end of the day, a healthy literary ecosystem should welcome a variety of viewpoints, featuring novels that sympathetically portray Christians, Republicans, police officers, soldiers, stay-at-home mothers, and traditional families—as well as socialists, atheists, progressives, feminists, environmentalists, and leftists. One need not come at the expense of the other.”

→ I couldn’t agree more. Take a look at the whole article here.

• Despite the hyperbolic headline, “Reading Is Dead,” Leonora Barclay’s argument—that AI merely accelerated anti-literary trends that took hold of our culture long before the advent of AI—deserves to be heard.

Excerpt:

“Unfortunately, we didn’t need AI to do this. Literature has been functionally artificial for a number of years now, since long before ChatGPT came on the scene. It wasn’t computers that did this, it was us—publishers, agents, writers, and readers. Over the last 20 years, modern novels have become shorter, with simpler language and shorter sentences. At the same time, people are reading less. In 2023, the number of Americans aged 15 and older who read for more than 20 minutes a day was 15 percent, compared to 22 percent in 2003. In some ways, shorter novels can be a blessing (I know it’s supposed to be Charlotte Brontë’s best novel, but I spent most of Villette wishing the main character would just get on with it), but it’s worrying that authors are now writing for diminished attention spans.”

→ Read the full article here.

Heresy Press is here to uphold exacting literary standards, to celebrate stylistic
sophistication, and to preserve the freedom of both the imagination and its expression.