Small presses have had a rough year, but as the literary world continues to conglomerate, we at Literary Hub think they’re more important than ever. Which is why, every (work) day in March—which just so happens to be National Small Press Month—a Lit Hub staff member will be recommending a small press book that they love.
The only rule of this game is that there are no rules, except that the books we recommend must have been published, at some time, and in some place, by a small press. What does it mean to be a small press? Unfortunately there is no exact definition or cutoff. All of the presses mentioned here are considered to be small presses by the recommending editors, and for our purposes, that’s going to be good enough. All of the books mentioned here are considered to be great by the recommending editors, too. If one intrigues you, consider picking it up at your local bookstore, or ordering through Bookshop.org, or even directly from the publisher.
Today, we’re recommending:
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
published by Milkweed Editions (2013)
Is Braiding Sweetgrass Milkweed’s best-selling book of all time? I have no idea. But I’d wager it’s up there among the best-selling independent press titles of the 21st century. Though sales don’t often tell us much about the merit of a book, when an ecological memoir from a small (but wonderful!) Midwestern press makes it onto the NY Times bestseller list seven years after it was published, you know it’s because literally everyone who’s read it could not shut up about it. Not to mention it was one of the most borrowed library books of 2024, all thanks to people—actual readers—telling other people to read it. And yes, I am one of those proselytizers.
Though I have spent most of my life going into the woods and trying to notice things, Braiding Sweetgrass changed how I do that. Not because Robin Wall Kimmerer offers any particular proscriptive formula for seeing the natural world, but rather because she models the kind of vulnerability—a benign erosion of the self—that reveals new and different apertures, both internal and external. Her writing is an invitation, and a very generous one at that.
The book itself is built loosely around the traditional Anishaabe process of husbanding sweetgrass, with sections called Planting, Tending, Picking, Braiding, and Burning. Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, is a botanist, but rather than placing Indigenous ways of seeing the natural world in opposition to Western scientific perspectives, she allows them to coexist in, well, a braided narrative.
As Kimmerer takes us through the significance—both mythic and practical—of sweetgrass to Anishaabe life, she reveals the story of her own life and its sometimes precarious balancing act between scientist and mother. As we learn about the deeply symbiotic relationship between the eponymous plant and its Indigenous harvesters—sweetgrass grows better when it’s systematically picked for basket-making—we learn too that we are most ourselves when we exist in the natural world rather than against it. If only we could just see that.
–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief