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:
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt
published by NYRB (2023)
It was hard to choose just one book from New York Review of Books’ lengthy and stupendous list, but Loved and Missed was my most recently beloved find from their collection. Finishing it gave me the same feeling I always have upon finishing a remarkable NYRB title: a total disbelief that I had never read it before, that this voice was just out there waiting for me, that anyone could mirror life in its absurdity and intricacies and poignancies, as accurately and incisively as this book in my hands could.
Many of NYRB’s publications are reissues of books that have long fallen out of print, but Loved and Missed is the first work released in America by contemporary British writer Susie Boyt: the great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and daughter of Lucian Freud, interestingly. Reading it gave me the unusual experience of being held by something very familiar and simultaneously being surprised by every word. For a while now, I’ve known I loved a certain niche subset of writing: grandmother/granddaughter lit. Where the young girl learns from her aging grandmother, her caretaker, her guide in the world. I’m thinking of Fight Night by Miriam Toews, or The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. And now Loved and Missed joins this canon. Except it is the grandmother learning too, always learning, from the grace and privilege of raising her granddaughter, a girl who she shouldn’t have had to raise, if all had gone to plan. Except it hasn’t, and she does, because her daughter, the girl’s mother, is a heroin addict.
The book manages to be many things: both horrendously grim and exceedingly hopeful. Both crushingly sad and resolutely heliotropic: life-giving, life-reaching. The grandmother in the book has to face the fact of her failure every day: her one daughter, the one life she created, has chosen to turn her back on life itself, to use heroin, to not eat, to not work, to not raise her daughter, to not take part in life and its many rituals, its many beauties, its many hardships. The grandmother gets a second chance at new life with her granddaughter and it’s almost overwhelmingly touching. The things they like to do together, the way they spend their time, the way they comfort each other, the way they talk. They are so sweet to one another, so tender, as they desperately try to make sense of their nonsensical lives, the hard cards they were dealt. The missing absence at the center of their connection: the woman who is supposed to be there, the daughter, the mother, they both are constantly searching for. They laugh about it together, they cry about it together. I was utterly destroyed by it. I would hope for anyone to get to dip their toes into this life and have the gift of being destroyed by it too.
–Julia Hass, Book Marks Assistant Editor
