Someone gets murdered. A marriage detonates. A woman's body becomes a battleground. Fish disappear from an Oregon lake. Voices start coming out of the plumbing. And apparently, you're all very interested.
We've finished reviewing Unsolicited Press's recent sales, and the results tell us something about the people buying our books: you appreciate a good story, you aren't afraid of difficult subjects, and you have a healthy appetite for the strange. We can work with that.
Our fifteen bestselling books span literary fiction, memoir, poetry, short stories, mysteries, and whatever the hell Nick Gregorio is doing with quantum physics and romance. Some of these books are unsettling. Others are hilarious. Several are furious about the state of the world, and for good reason.
What they share is an insistence on saying something worth saying. Here are the fifteen books readers bought most from Unsolicited Press recently. These are our own sales rankings, not a national bestseller chart. Every title earned its place.
1. BLACK RIVER
Yvonne Osborne
Family feuds. Environmental destruction. Forbidden love. Murder. Small-town America is doing great, thanks.
Two farming families go to war over land, ethics, and the future of their community. Their children fall in love, because apparently nobody in this situation has enough problems. Osborne delivers rural noir with teeth, examining what happens when greed, tradition, and violence become impossible to separate.
Think beautiful Michigan landscapes, deeply questionable human behavior, and a plot that moves like a river in flood.
2. GETTING DRESSED IN THE DARK
Gabriella D’Italia
How do you rebuild a life after the person you built it with blows it apart?
Gabriella D’Italia writes about the collapse of a decades-long marriage and creative partnership with the kind of candor that makes tidy narratives about personal growth seem dishonest. This is a memoir about betrayal, art, polyamory, identity, and the messy business of figuring out who you are after the life you knew disappears.
It's about starting over without pretending the destruction was necessary or beautiful.
BUY GETTING DRESSED IN THE DARK
3. YOU MAY FEEL A BIT OF PRESSURE
Amy Gallo Ryan
The medical establishment has some explaining to do.
The title alone should make anyone who's navigated reproductive healthcare wince. Amy Gallo Ryan's award-winning memoir-in-essays examines infertility, medical interventions, grief, and the peculiar cruelty of a culture that expects women to suffer gracefully.
Ryan writes about a subject routinely buried beneath euphemisms and unsolicited advice. She's precise, unsentimental, and willing to say what people would rather not hear.
BUY YOU MAY FEEL A BIT OF PRESSURE
4. TSUNAMI
LeeAnn Pickrell
The disaster ends. The surviving doesn't.
LeeAnn Pickrell was in Thailand when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on December 26, 2004. Her account confronts the catastrophe and the emotional aftermath, where memory, trauma, and survival remain tangled long after the world has moved on to the next headline.
This book asks what it means to live through something that changes your understanding of life itself.
5. PARTED GODS
Alfredo Félix-Díaz
Art, obsession, mythology, and the magnificent wreckage of being human.
Moving through Berlin, Sicily, and New Orleans, Parted Gods follows the complicated lives of a painter and her twin brother. It's a novel consumed by questions of identity, ambition, memory, and the strange power of art to both expose and conceal the truth.
Félix-Díaz doesn't hand readers easy answers. He gives them something more interesting to think about.
6. ESTUARY
Josh Rank
Your dead child comes home. Now what?
That's the devastating premise at the center of Estuary, a novel about grief, memory, and the possibility that reality isn't nearly as stable as we'd like to believe.
Josh Rank builds an unsettling world around an impossible reunion. It's a story for anyone who has wondered how far love might reach if the rules of the universe stopped making sense.
7. THE LEG IN QUESTION
K.W. Oxnard
Your body has plans. You weren't consulted.
Sixteen stories about the inconvenient, frightening, sometimes ridiculous experience of having a human body. Doctors, patients, obsession, illness, mortality, and the occasional truly bizarre decision collide in Oxnard's collection.
It's darkly funny, sharp, and deeply attuned to how little control we have over the flesh we're stuck living in.
8. MOUTH
Kerry Donoghue
We are hungry creatures. Some of us just have stranger appetites.
Competitive eaters, pearl divers, rodeo clowns, and assorted human oddities populate Kerry Donoghue's fiction. But the real subject is hunger: for intimacy, recognition, belonging, and whatever else might fill the holes we carry around.
Donoghue is interested in the things people consume, the things that consume them, and everything they get wrong along the way.
9. THE MECHANICALS
Trevor Payne
Love is complicated. People make it worse.
Trevor Payne's unconventional romantic comedy takes on relationships, adulthood, family, and the ridiculous expectations people carry into love. Philosophical without being precious and funny without becoming frivolous, this is a book about the strange machinery of human connection.
Anyone who has ever loved another person and wondered what the hell they were doing will find something familiar here.
10. THIRSTY CREEK
Jennie Bricker
The fish are disappearing. Somebody's dead. Welcome to Oregon.
Biologist Jess MacKinnon investigates an ecological mystery in the Oregon mountains, where a suspicious death turns an environmental problem into something considerably more dangerous.
Jennie Bricker knows the landscape she's writing about, and it shows. The result is a mystery rooted in the politics of land, conservation, and the people who depend on both.
Fifty percent of the book's proceeds support Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland.
11. SAD MAN HAPPY HOUR
Aileen Keown Vaux
Existential dread, but make it a little funny.
Aileen Keown Vaux writes about grief, queer alienation, memory, nature, and the deeply absurd business of existing in the world. Her poetry is wry, observant, occasionally devastating, and entirely uninterested in making discomfort more comfortable.
A collection for people who can laugh at the absurdity of life without pretending everything is fine.
12. BONE DEEP
Julie Akins
American healthcare is a disaster. Julie Akins has the receipts.
When her husband suffers a devastating stroke and her own health begins to fail, former Ashland mayor Julie Akins confronts the extraordinary difficulty of getting care in a system supposedly designed to provide it.
Bone Deep is part personal reckoning, part indictment of institutional failure. It's also a love story about caregiving, endurance, and what people are forced to become when the systems around them fall apart.
13. THE GIRL IN THE PIPES
Megan Mary Moore
The plumbing is talking. Naturally, it has opinions about women's bodies.
Megan Mary Moore's surreal, feminist body horror begins with mysterious voices emerging from household drains. What follows is an examination of bodily autonomy, illness, identity, and the impossible demands imposed on women.
It's disturbing. It's inventive. And some of the most frightening parts have absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural.
14. MOTHER!
Summer Stewart
Motherhood. Womanhood. Unpaid labor. The endless bullshit of being everything to everyone.
In poetry and essays, Summer Stewart examines the expectations placed on women, the emotional and domestic labor so often taken for granted, and the complicated terrain of motherhood and identity.
It's personal, political, confrontational, and unwilling to offer a comforting explanation for why women should keep accepting arrangements that leave them exhausted.
15. JEN & GARY'S INFINITE (QUANTUM) ENTANGLEMENTS
Nick Gregorio
Love is hard enough in one universe. This guy made more.
Nick Gregorio delivers a multiversal romantic comedy involving alternate realities, outrageous circumstances, and the questionable decisions people make in pursuit of love.
It's strange, funny, occasionally filthy, and far more interested in emotional truth than obeying the usual rules of romance. Or physics.
BUY JEN & GARY'S INFINITE (QUANTUM) ENTANGLEMENTS
Good Books Need Readers. That's Where You Come In.
Independent publishing survives because people buy books. That's the transaction. But what happens after the purchase is what makes this work worth doing. You finish a novel and immediately text somebody about it, or you buy a second copy because you know exactly who needs to read it. A book moves through the world because somebody gives a shit about it.
So here's our request: buy a book from this list. Tell us what you think. Recommend it to somebody. And if you already own one, find out what else its author has written.
We're proud of these fifteen books. We're even more interested in who reads them next.
SHOP THE UNSOLICITED PRESS BESTSELLERS
Unsolicited Press. Good books. Bad manners. Fifteen years of doing this our way.
