Summer Preorders Are Open: Horror, Love, Rivers, Memory & One Very Restless Poet
Summer reading should have teeth and grit, don’t you think? This season’s preorders are open, and the list is doing what we like best: refusing to show up all neat and tidy. We have Northwoods horror, a modern love comedy, a river-soaked novel of romance and violence, a tender sequel about family and mortality, uncanny short stories, a memoir of survival after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and a poetry collection built from fifty years of walking New York City.
In other words: not beach reads in the flimsy sense. These are books for porches, cabins, late nights, stormy afternoons, and the kind of summer day when you want the book in your hand to make the rest of the world hush for a minute.
Preorders help independent books more than most people realize. They give authors momentum before publication day, help small presses plan smarter, and tell the wider book world that these titles have readers waiting for them. If one of these books calls to you, preordering is one of the best ways to back the author before the noise of release week begins.
THE BURNTWOOD ANTHOLOGY by David Loring Nash
Minnesota Book Award Finalist David Loring Nash returns with a collection of six dark fiction stories braided through Northwoods horror, eerie introspection, subtle witchcraft, and self-proclaimed kings getting exactly what they deserve. The Burntwood Anthology moves through hubris, revenge, sexuality, dating in the digital age, and the strange little punishments people invite when they mistake power for permanence.
Publication Date: July 14, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Stories
ISBN: 978-1-963115-82-6
THE MECHANICALS by Trevor Payne
Publication Date: July 21, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Novel
ISBN: 978-1-963115-81-9
The Mechanicals is a modern-day love comedy about Jackie and Norman, a young couple pulled together by an unplanned pregnancy and held together by the strange, necessary machinery of family. Their twenties are wild, their thirties functionally alternative, and their understanding of each other deepens only after Norman’s friendship with Guy Roche, a world champion MMA fighter, brings them into the orbit of Guy’s widow, Natasha. Messy, funny, intimate, and deeply human, this is a novel about what love becomes after the performance ends.
BLACK RIVER by Yvonne Osborne
Publication Date: July 28, 2026
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-963115-75-8
Romance, deception, and murder collide in Yvonne Osborne’s Black River, a novel where farming, family, land, and violence are tangled beyond easy repair. One farmer holds fast to ancient husbandry. Another leans into chemicals, cruelty, exploitation, and shortcuts. Between them, a son and a daughter try to rise above a war they did not choose, only to be pulled into its current.
Early readers are already calling Black River part climate fiction, part mystery, part romance, and entirely gripping. Osborne, whose debut novel Let Evening Come became one of Unsolicited Press’s number one bestseller of the year, returns with a North Country love story that refuses to stay inside one genre. It is tender. It is turbulent. It has secrets in its teeth.
ACROSS THE ENDLESS NIGHT by Robert Crooke
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Novel
ISBN: 978-1-963115-78-9
Across the Endless Night is Robert Crooke’s moving sequel to Letting the House Go, returning to Richard Morris at the far end of his life. It is 2021, six years after the death of Richard’s ex-wife Irene, whose final counsel still guides him. Aging, fragile, and surrounded by the complicated love of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, Richard begins to understand family, memory, loss, and time in ways his younger self could not.
This is a novel about grief softened by grace, regret complicated by love, and the strange astonishment of being cared for after a life spent trying to control the story. Across the Endless Night stands on its own, but we strongly recommend beginning with Letting the House Go if you want the full emotional arc.
TSUNAMI by LeeAnn Pickrell
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Novel
ISBN: 978-1-969421-04-4
On December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra unleashed a tsunami that devastated coastlines across the Indian Ocean. More than 230,000 people were killed across fourteen countries. Tsunami is LeeAnn Pickrell’s account of that day and the long, uneven aftermath that followed.
Foreword Reviews calls Tsunami “impressionistic, sharp, and riveting,” and Pickrell’s prose holds both the terror of survival and the wider grief of a global tragedy. This is not disaster as spectacle. It is memory, trauma, luck, loss, and the impossible work of carrying on after the water recedes.
STEPDAD ON THE DANCE FLOOR by Timothy Boudreau
Publication Date: August 25, 2026
Genre: Fiction / Stories
ISBN: 978-1-963115-74-1
Stepdad on the Dance Floor is a collection of stories about people standing at the edge of change. Set in familiar American landscapes, these stories let the uncanny rise quietly through everyday life. Nothing has to explode for a life to be altered. Sometimes a brief encounter, an odd moment, or a small destabilizing grace is enough.
Timothy Boudreau writes the threshold beautifully: that strange space between who someone has been and who they might become next.
WHERE’S THE POET (NOW)? by Ron Singer
Publication Date: September 1, 2026
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-969421-07-5
Where’s the Poet (Now)? gathers Ron Singer’s New York City poems written between the 1970s and 2023. Singer’s work has traveled through mountains, deserts, and African nations, but this collection turns fully toward his home base: the streets, contradictions, beauty, noise, civility, inequality, and color of New York City.
Classical allusions meet gritty urban reality. Keats, Virgil, and Milton share space with construction cacophony and siren songs. The result is funny, poignant, sharp-eyed, and built from decades of paying attention.
These books are coming soon, but the work of supporting them starts now. Preorder one. Preorder a few. Send the link to the friend who likes their fiction a little haunted, their love stories a little complicated, their poetry city-worn, and their memoirs honest enough to leave a mark. Thank you for backing small press books before the rest of the world catches up.
With love and unruly gratitude,
Unsolicited Press