Dan Hill, host of the New Books Network's Great New American Essays podcast, writes that Steven Harvey finds an adept way around the dilemma of writing a political essay that isn't boring, obvious, or self-righteous "by finding moments where there’s an 'inwardness in the presence of a social wrong' that the writer can build on, an intimacy that allows for vulnerability, for doubt, for reflection, for one’s humanity to shine through nicely." Listen to their stimulating and enlightening conversation here, including Steven reading from his essay, "The Book of Knowledge,” about his mother’s suicide when he was 11 years old. When you're done, check out all the episodes as Dan Hill continues his exploration of what makes a Great New American Essay.

Our editors had a particularly tough time selecting the finalists and winners for this years Wandering Aengus Book Awards. We're excited to publish the poetry and prose of our three winners:
Barret Baumgart
L. Annette Binder
Majda Gama
(listed in alphabetical order by last name)

In the meantime, we encourage you to look up their works as well as the works of all our finalists:
Mary Block
Sarah Carey
Clayton Adam Clark
Elizabeth J. Coleman
Eric le Fatte
Justine Feron
Cate McGowan
Joannie Stangeland
Amy A. Whitcomb
Amelia L. Williams

As always, we are grateful to all the authors who have submitted manuscripts to our contest for entrusting us to read their writing and believing in the press. It means the world.

A big shoutout, too, to our editors for the massive amounts of time they volunteer to read submissions, edit manuscripts, and offer their literary expertise. The press couldn't exist without you!

During the last year of high school for her daughter, Indie, single mom Jill Talbot chronicled each each last before her only daughter went off to college. The Paris Review featured the essays over the course of the year, and Wandering Aengus has collected them in this poignant and beautifully written book. But don't take our word for it. Here's what others have had to say about Jill Talbot's The Last Year...

In The Last Year, Jill Talbot achieves that rare magic that can exist in the finest examples of the essay form: she captures the ecstatic, mysterious fullness of life in each moment. These missives are about so many things — parenthood, grief, fear, pain, joy, art. Every sentence carries the weight of the past, the breathless potential of the future. Every detail is loaded with honesty, introspection, and, above all else, care. To read it, to bear witness to this mother/daughter relationship as Talbot stands on the precipice of enormous change, is a gift.
— Lucas Mann, Author of Captive Audience and Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances
 
In The Last Year, Jill Talbot turns the small things sacred, distilling the quiet moments between a mother and daughter into something veering toward revelation.  Each page reminds us that the greatest dramas of our lives often go unnoticed—unless we do the noticing. Part epiphany, part elegy, all love.  This book is a small mercy. Its gift is grace.
— B.J. Hollars, Author of Go West, Young Man: A Father and Son Rediscover America on the Oregon Trail

The moments that change us, the ghosts that follow us, the memories that slow us down or keep us afloat – Jill Talbot has found the language for all of that. This is a book about the in-between time, when we look back at multiple beginnings as we brace for the good-bye. Talbot, a longtime single mother, hopes she was enough as she prepares to launch her daughter into the world. Anyone who has ever loved a child will recognize themselves in her mirror. I didn’t want this book to end.
— Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Daughters of Erietown.
 
Jill Talbot’s The Last Year is an evocative and heart wrenching portrait of her final days living with her daughter, Indie, who’s about to leave home for university – just as the world begins to shut down in the face of the Covid19 pandemic. With penetrating insight and raw honesty, Talbot explores the lingering absent presence of the relationships that shape our lives, from former lovers to deceased parents, as she questions ‘What happens after an ending?’ Across a series of deftly crafted essays Talbot’s prose draws lasting images of a precarious life of her and her daughter on the road as they relocate from one short term academic posting to another. Talbot proves to be a great American chronicler, like the passing moments of life caught by the Leica of beat photographer Robert Frank in The Americans, The Last Year elevates fleeting and ephemeral moments, a favourite booth in a bar, a view from a front doorstep, an empty flat left behind, to a profound view of what makes us who we are.
—Felicity Jones, Actress and Producer

Hello, Happy E-Readers!

Good news! Steven Harvey's award-winning essay collection, The Beloved Republic, is now available in ebook formats. You can purchase and download the book from Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and other ebook retailers.

Author Dinty W. Moore said about the collection, "Steven Harvey’s The Beloved Republic is a masterful collection of essays, provocative, always engaging, a compelling journey from page to page. Yes, our beloved republic is under siege, but these thoughtful “dispatches” ultimately offer hope and beauty."

The Beloved Republic won the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction. We hope you'll love this book as much as we do!

The 2023 Grammy Awards honored world-renowned choral group, The Crossing, for their performance of Born: Music of Edie Hill and Michael Gilbertson. The album features "Spectral Spirits," a four-part requiem to four extinct birds and based on Holly J. Hughes' poetry collection Passings. Originally published by Expedition Press, Passings won the American Book Award and was subsequently re-released by Wandering Aengus Press. Each poem in the collection is titled after and serves as elegy to different bird species that have gone extinct.

Ta da! We at Wandering Aengus Press are delighted to announce the release of Steven Harvey's inspiring essay collection, The Beloved Republic. In a guest review at The Humble Essayist, Sarah M. Wells, author of American Honey: A Field Guide to Resisting Temptation, "Steven Harvey’s collection of essays is one that considers thresholds, the limbic spaces of transition, as the republic seems to crumble, perspectives on race and sexuality evolve, the political becomes personal, and mortality looms." In a world at times beseiged by "tyrants, thugs, and loud-mouthed bullies," as Harvey describes them, The Beloved Republic is a peaceful and loving antidote to authoritarianism and the subcultures that facilitate it. The collection of personal essays takes its title from a term coined by E.M. Forster, who described it as "an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who “have the power to endure” and “can take a joke.” Two of the essays were published in the Best American Essays series, and the entire collection won the hearts of our editorial team as we selected it as winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction.

It's always an honor to read manuscripts for the Wandering Aengus Book Award, and always a challenge to select the finalists and winners from the stellar entries we receive. This year was no exception!

Please join us in congratulating these fine authors, winners and finalists, whose work left us in awe...

WINNERS:
Marcia Aldrich, Studio of the Voice (essays)
Amanda Hawkins, The Art of Articulation (poetry)

FINALISTS:
Michael Brosnan
Clayton Adam Clark
Maryah Converse
Michael Downs
Elizabeth Garcia
Bill Hollands
Kamal Kimball
Alyse Knorr
Peter Ludwin
Marianne Mersereau

If you also have a fabulous manuscript ready to submit, the 2023 contest opens for submissions in the summer, and Trail to Table Press' open reading period takes place during the month of March.

Lucy Ferriss shares the bizarre story of how her novel's release ended up being barely released at all and the “Strange Miracle” that 25 years later brought her novel, The Misconceiver, back. Read all about Lucy's saga of a book heralded by all yet virtually unavailable for a quarter century in LITHUB.

Publisher's note: It doesn't escape our notice the irony of how an unfounded legal threat could shelve a novel about women's loss of rights and personal autonomy (and written by a woman, no less).

Join Lucy Ferriss, award-winning author of The Misconceiver, and historian of reproductive rights Rickie Solinger for an important conversation on reproductive justice in the wake of the Supreme Court's rulings affecting Roe v. Wade. Ferriss' novel, originally released in 1997 and republished this year by Wandering Aengus Press, is a chilling tale of survival in a post- Roe v. Wade world. Ferriss is donating proceeds from sales of the book to benefit reproductive justice. Don't miss this crucial, pre-election conversation hosted by the Sister District Project. Registration is free, and with a $25 donation, you'll receive a signed copy of Lucy's "prescient, epochal novel."

Wednesday, October 19, 2022, 8-9:00 pm EDT
Click here to learn more and register.

After the Supreme Court's decision earlier this year regarding Roe v. Wade, several savvy readers, including The Washington Post's book reviewer Ron Charles, remembered Lucy Ferriss' novel, The Misconceiver, released in 1997 and set in a post Roe-v.-Wade United States. Praising it as a "startling novel," Charles writes, "As a consequence, The Misconceiver isn’t merely a polemical recitation of misogynist horrors – although it includes plenty of those horrors. Instead, the novel offers a challenging exploration of one woman's struggle to work through the profound moral dilemmas of her life."

The Times of London describes The Misconceiver as a tense thriller. "The Misconceiver is primarily a powerful novel of dystopia. Ferriss has taken seriously the threats of the religious fundamentalists, pessimistic economists and anti-feminists . . . living in the shadow of the backlash against feminism. How much support can women give to each other now? And can women be trusted to stick together in such a misogynist climate? Ferriss is a fine writer, and in this dark and starkly realistic tale, she answers all her own questions, pulling no punches."

Wandering Aengus Press is honored to re-release this title, which the editors feel offers an even-handed treatment of the personal, medical, and legal issues  surrounding abortion, and envisions a dystopian future that looms ever closer. A must-read, no matter where you stand on the issue of abortion.