Autumn House Press’s 2025 Gift Buying Guide

“Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life.”
—Annie Dillard

 

This holiday season, AHP wanted to share some recommendations just in case you’re looking for a last-minute gift for your favorite reader or simply want to change someone’s life (for the better)!

 

Bestsellers with Mass Appeal

We were the first press to publish a book by Ada Limón, former Poet Laureate of the United States and recent recipient of the MacArthur genius grant.  Filled with the author’s trademark mix of accessibility, humor, and humanity, the poems in Lucky Wreck are about best laid plans and what happens when they go wrong.  Looking at shipwrecks on television, road trips ending in traffic accidents, and homes that become sites of infestation, the author finds threads of hope amid an array of small tragedies and significant setbacks.

 

 

If someone you know is interested in nature, human nature, and humor, check out Laura Jackson’s essay collection Deep and Wild, which won our 2023 nonfiction prize.  Jackson is a research writer who lives in West Virginia and approaches the land and people with curiosity and generosity.  This collection offers a wonderful opportunity to explore the landscape of Appalachia—and to learn a thing or two about our nation and ourselves in the process.

 

 

 

 

The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe by Lauren D. Woods, winner of our 2024 Fiction Prize, contains a feast of 28 delightfully unpredictable short stories: a wife finds herself literally shrinking in her house, day by day; a mother recalls the surreal day when her infant daughter survives a close encounter with a bear; and, inside her lover’s heart, a woman discovers a secret nightclub populated by all the women he’s loved and left.  As the title suggests, the characters in these stories often test the limits of their self-created realities, urging us to contemplate how we can escape loneliness and heartbreak to live on our own terms.

 

The new flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection. Flick’s evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor.

 

We’ll let the reviews speak for themselves: Another Chicago Magazine wrote, “Cameron Barnett’s second poetry collection, Murmur, is sharply focused and unified, comprising a wide range of forms while never losing sight of its titular conceit: exploring various types of murmurs—anatomical, astronomical, familial, societal, and historical—and how they appear as ghosts throughout his life.” 

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette praised Murmur’s technical prowess and clear-eyed examination of race in America: “Open Murmur and be prepared for its thoughtfully crafted forms, sparkling enjambments, and searingly true lines. It is clear why Barnett’s first book made him an NAACP Image Award Finalist and why this one cements him as a voice of his generation, calling attention to the “fear, like too many Black men, that a heart is not enough / to keep me alive.”

 

For the Film Buffs

AHP author Salvatore Pane loves movies, especially the love and drama and absurdity that go into both creating and consuming them.  In the eleven short stories of The Neorealist in Winter, characters grapple with life that has gone suddenly off-script: at a decadent house party in Rome, a struggling director ponders the awful sacrifice that might save his career, gangsters chase a low-level lottery runner in coal valley Scranton, a woman contemplates experimental surgery to purge memories of her childhood trauma in Minnesota, and writers for a doomed TV sitcom called Monkey High School decide the show should pivot to a more serious approach.

 

For enthusiasts of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, or Cormac McCarthy

 

The prose and imagery in Kevin Honold’s novel Molly impressed Sam Sacks, who wrote in his review for the Wall Street Journal, “natural spectacles are uppermost in [young protagonist] Raymond’s memories, from the ‘great gothic drama’ of a desert sunset to an otherworldly image of a July monsoon: ‘The thunderclouds, steeped in livid dust, drift at the horizon line—a chain of magic islands trailing torn roots of rain that never touch the ground.’”

Like the vast desert in which the novel is set, Honold’s sentences are deliberate and expansive and beautiful, a product of intense observation and distillation.  What’s the book about, though?  Sam Sacks might have put it best: nine-year-old Raymond and his uncle live in a remote town in New Mexico with Molly, the uncle’s girlfriend.  After Raymond’s uncle joins up with a firefighting crew battling wildfires in the region, “Molly and Raymond find themselves thrown together, a pair of desert castaways. This gives [Molly and Raymond] a wild kind of freedom, and chapters follow their untrammeled explorations into the mountains and down the Santa Juana River, sometimes accompanied by other desert eccentrics. It also leaves them unprotected from the violent town sheriff, whose designs on Molly set the novel’s plot in motion.

 

For the bold and adventurous

Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell stories in order to live.”  In order for Jasmine Reid, a queer black trans woman, to tell stories, first she needed to create a new language, formed in a state of exile, a state of “ecstatic grief.”

At its core, Interlocutor Goddess is an act of transfiguration, a celebration of girlhood, and a reclamation of wholeness for all who exist beyond imposed boundaries.  Reid’s experimental work challenges societal norms, particularly the family as a political construct, while reflecting on her unique experience outside of mainstream labels. The poems grapple with oppressive systems of separation and colonial legacies.  Within her collection, Reid envisions alternative, ethical ways of being, rooted in unity and wholeness, and finds kinship with the rhythms and lifeways of the natural world—soil, stars, and water.

 

If someone you know has what Wallace Stevens called “a mind of winter”—or at least winter in mind, they may like In the Antarctic Circle by Dennis James Sweeney.  In his “must-read poetry” section in The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone writes,

Appropriately enough, I settled into this book during a storm that dropped three feet of snow. The mood was externally set, but Sweeney’s book will get you there in any weather. In these prose poems, an unnamed narrator and a companion, Hank, exist in some ethereal plane in Antarctica. “The bed yawns under us,” Sweeney writes, on the introductory page. “He and I grip fingers. Thighs on thighs like batons.” We might consider this a prose-poetic play, discovered in scorched fragments. Each poem has coordinates as its title, leaving us somehow both exact and dizzied. Where are we? Hints of Samuel Beckett and William Gass (snow, wind, eternity, terror) haunt this book. “You will learn,” the narrator warns, “In a whiteout you cannot see shadows, but that does not mean the edges are not there.” Sweeney startles with the precision of his figurative description: “Harpoons loll in our arms like children too old to be held. Along the horizon animals run, disappearing over the brink of snow.” The narrator and Hank might be in love; they might simply be among each other, as we tend to gravitate toward what is warm when we are freezing: “Our rites of love and boredom circle each other, waving their leather whips.”

 

For the history lovers

Michael X. Wang was five years old and living in Beijing during one of the most consequential events in the twentieth century.  He reflected on it during an interview: “On the night of the [Tiananmen Square] massacre, my father ran up the stairs at around midnight or one a.m. and stormed into our apartment and said the soldiers started firing.  My mother didn’t believe him, and she said, “Be quiet, or else you’re going to wake Michael up.”  Stories about that incident sparked a lifelong interest in research, history, tragedy, and immigration.  His collection Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival.  After publication, the collection won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the 2022 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award.

 

For the runners in your life

Emily Pifer’s debut memoir The Running Body wrestles and reckons with power and agency, language and story, body dysphoria and beauty standards, desire and addiction, loss and healing. Pifer employs multiple modes of storytelling—memoir, meditation, and cultural analysis—interweaving research, argument, and experience as she describes how, during her time as a collegiate distance runner, she began to run more while eating less. Many around her, including her coaches, praised her for these practices. But as she became faster, and as her body began to resemble the bodies that she had seen across start-lines and on the covers of running magazines, her bones began to fracture. Pifer tells her story alongside the stories of her teammates, competitors, and others as they all face trouble regarding their bodies.