This past week was quite busy, so I didn’t get the chance to dive into the pile of deliveries until late Sunday night during an uneven episode of Game of Thrones.

From top left, we have Empty Words by Mario Levrero, the latest from And Other Stories, followed by Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon, from Two Lines Press. The remaining six arrived in one glorious bundle from Ugly Duckling Presse, who continue to impress the hell out of me with the quality and breadth of their offerings.

All of these books are part of subscriptions I have to the various publishers. While I will at some point create a lengthy blog post on the topic, I want to say that my several-year experience/experiment with subscriptions to publisher catalogs has left me thoroughly loving the concept. Open Letter Books, Deep Vellum, Restless Books, And Other Stories, Horse Less Press, Two Lines Press, and Ugly Duckling Presse all produce consistently good-to-superb titles which I would likely never have encountered had I not made a leap of faith and shelled out the money for a subscription.

[Side note: All of the above institutions are (mostly) publishers of literature in translation and/or or poetry.]

I haven’t had much time for reading in the past week. I closed out National Poetry Month with Gestures by Artis Ostups (published by Ugly Duckling Presse, of course), and am about 60% of the way through Ours is the Storm by D. Thourson Palmer. The current book of poetry is everything we met changed form & followed the rest by Jessica Comola, published by Horse Less Press.

Incidentally, Gestures is the twentieth book I have finished so far this year. At this pace, if I cut into my sleep schedule just a bit, I should be able to complete fifty by the end of 2019.