Forthcoming Release, October 22, 2024

Praise for Devil Take It

“The devil is very much in the details of this acute satire of the vagaries of culture and the evolving norms of our times. With a truly Faustian bargain hanging in the balance, Daniel Nossiter’s unlikely protagonist leads us through a very funny, ever more existential few days of life, politics, journalism, epistemology and perhaps love in the nation’s capitol.”
— Robert Hurwitt, longtime theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle

“Devil Take It reads like Rabelais pulling a Tocqueville on the Trump years — it’s that good, that wild, that incandescently honest. Nossiter is as demented as he is brilliant and has written one of the funniest books I’ve read in years.”
— Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Not since John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces have I had such a good time with a theologically-inflected comic novel. Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also came to mind. Devil Take It is erudite, cleverly plotted, and funny as Hell.”
— James Morrow, award-winning author of Blameless in Abaddon and Galápagos Regained.

Daniel Debs Nossiter:

The author in front of a statue honoring Cervantes

Heresy Press: What was your inspiration for writing Devil Take It?
Nossiter: I was living in Washington, D.C., when I first went to work on the story, considering the city in the way a foreigner, a resident alien might think about it. I’d gotten into the habit of looking with foreign eyes as a boy, a young American, growing up in Paris and New Delhi. The stranger gazing out with varying degrees of comprehension had become a pastime. For example, there was nothing unusual about the number of people who have an inflated sense of their own importance in Washington. But, it seemed to me, that the Parisians hid it better or, at least, carried it off with more style. I began to wonder how Washingtonians might behave if Satan came to visit and took a more direct hand in things. I decided to find out.

Read the full author interview here.

Pre-order Devil Take It.

News:

Deadpan by Richard Walter will be re-issued by Skyhorse on December 10, 2024.

For this year’s holiday season, consider the gift of comic relief, with Walter’s exuberant humor serving as a potent antidote to bigotry and prejudice.

On November 12, 2024, Richard Walter and Bernard Schweizer will conduct a virtual “fireside chat.”

Sign up here for this live webinar about Deadpan and the mission of Heresy Press.

“An enchanting story about the unlikely bond between an aging US Navy commander in the nineteenth century and the feral child that he picks up on a deserted island in the South Seas, informally adopting her and attempting to “re-civilize” her while hoping that she’d alleviate his loneliness and ennui. Alice takes the reader on a journey in multiple senses of the word, starting out with Melvillian touches in faraway South Pacific locales, then moving on to dry land, with engrossing scenes set in antebellum Virginia, followed by Dickensian narrative segments that play out in a bustling, chaotic frontier town named San Francisco. This masterfully written novel is steeped in cultural and historical period detail, shot through with fascinating thematic threads, and enriched with layered psychological and emotional nuances.”

Projected Publication date: September 9, 2025.

Flash Fiction

Brighton Beach

by Steven Volynets

Katyusha turns six months today, and I am late. I wanted to be there when she wakes up. But when I come home it’s almost nine in the morning. I lock my badge in the desk drawer and hang the uniform in the closet. It still smells like the precinct. In the bathroom next door, the pipes groan to life. Now that she is older, the baby can be left alone to play, at least long enough for her mother to take a shower.

Katyusha sits quietly on the floor surrounded by cheerful toys. With all the overtime I’m clocking, I can afford them now. When I come in, she stirs, gurgles, and smiles, then goes back to banging a star-shaped thing against a plastic hippo. She is pudgy and cute and, with every passing 10-hour shift, looks more and more like her mother.

The sun is up and the shadows have retreated to the living room furniture, to Rachel’s house plants, to the grey condos outside our windows, rising in awkward angles over a patchwork of trees and storm-beaten rooftops, past the Q train, all the way to the sandline that marks the end of Brooklyn.

I sit down beside her and she looks up at me with unblinking eyes, lips slightly parted – a look that isn’t glassy or surprised but something else – something with a question at the end of it.

“What?” I whisper.

She keeps looking and waiting.

“What do you want from me?”

And just when I’m about to sob, she lets me off, back to the world of play, where she is my child and I am her father.

Bio:

Born in Kharkiv (Ukraine) and raised in Brooklyn, Steven Volynets is the First Prize winner of the 2016 Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation international award for fiction and a finalist for the 2022 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. His prose is widely published and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and listed in Best American Short Stories 2022. Steven had spent more than a decade as a reporter, starting out at PC Magazine and later covering crime and other news in Brooklyn.

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Call for Flash Fiction and Guest Essay

• Please submit your flash-fiction (up to 500 words) for consideration, to be published in the Speakeasy newsletter. Submit your story to bernard@heresy-press.com. Submissions are considered on a rolling basis.
• If you would like to contribute a short, 800-word critical essay on any aspect of the literary craft or the world of publishing, please submit the article to bernard@heresy-press.com. Submissions are considered on a rolling basis.