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:
The President’s Room by Ricardo Romero, tr. Charlotte Coombe
published by Charco Press (2017)
I got serious about translated literature around the same time that seemingly everybody else did, in the mid-2010s. I’m sure I was reading books from other presses but Charco very quickly became my north star for Latin American fiction in translation—specifically fiction that I wouldn’t see anywhere else, authors who hadn’t yet been translated into English. So it was that I was introduced to Ariana Harwicz, Daniel Saldaña París, Fernanda Trias, and so many others who have made the jump to English-reading notoriety.
But the book that I think about most frequently from Charco so far is a slim novella from their original run of books in 2017 (yes, reader, I did order it from the UK at the time, because borders cannot and shall not stop me from my literary enjoyments), The President’s Room by Ricardo Romero, translated by Christina Coombe. The last line of this book has lived in my head since I read it, and it only gets more relevant as I get older and as these days get stranger. It starts with a simple and strange premise: in every house in this unnamed country, there is a room kept empty and reserved for the President. Things get stranger from there, as though the book is trying to capture the feeling of walking around a darkened house late at night, a house you think you know but also one that seems (by virtue of what you can’t see) somehow wrong. Why are the basements sealed off? What is going on with this kid who is narrating the book? And what happened, exactly, in this country? What makes a house a home, and can we define such things? And how do all of these slightly sinister moments shed light on human behavior, particularly under autocratic threat?
There are, of course, no answers. Or rather, no definitive ones. The book leaves so much room for the reader and that, too, is a hallmark of the work coming out of Charco’s Edinburgh headquarters. I see one of their covers now—and my god, these covers, some of the absolute best ongoing design in the business—and I’m drawn to it with unwavering certainty that I will find something unusual, strange, confusing, fun, and world-expanding. All the stuff we like to say about the possibilities of literature, that’s what Charco is getting up to.
–Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor