March 6, 2025, 9:28am
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:
The Bear by Andrew Krivak
published by Bellevue Literary Press (2020)
Not enough people have read this achingly beautiful novel about the last man on earth and the final journey he takes with his daughter to the sea. Told as a mesmerizing fable, with all the poetry and none of the melodrama, The Bear comes to terms quickly with its own premise: someday, we too, will go extinct, and all of human history will blink out as our distant descendant, our endling, takes her last breath.
Krivak, it is clear, has spent a lifetime making his way through forest and field, and his descriptive prose is deep and rich, without being showy—much like the very old eastern mountains in which the novel takes place. During a trip to the coast to gather salt it soon becomes clear that the father is dying; as such, he makes sure to leave his daughter with the skills she’ll need to carry on living, the last of her kind in a world that will go on without her, without us.
The concept of “the endling” (the last of a species) is as heartbreaking as it is deeply poetic, which of course renders it artistically perilous in the hands of a sentimentalist. But Krivak understands that we’re living through a great and terrible era of endlings RIGHT NOW (a new species disappears from the earth every 15 minutes), and brings a pragmatic clarity to what amounts to the coming-of-age story of the last human alive.
While that might strike most of us as a dark and tragic fate, there is something rather more elegiac than harrowing in the way Krivak winds down the existence of humanity, the daughter in solitude but far from lonely. Not quite hopeful—because how could there be hope without human consciousness?—but a clear-eyed recognition that in the absence of hope, there is at least something like peace.
–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief
