The Small Queer Press Book Club is a continuous 2026 book club at The Pond aiming to uplift queer published works from smaller -mostly indie and micro- presses focusing on diverse stories of LGBTQIA+ life and people.
The book club will run in 2-3 month cycles, each cycle focusing on a different press.
In March to May we are exploring the works from Nightboat Books. For May we are reading “Nothing at All” by Olivia Tapiero:
From deep inside a black hole comes Nothing At All—a space where form, genre, gender, and being collapse. In poetic, essayistic fragments overflowing with apocalyptic beauty, Olivia Tapiero explores how history, illness, and desire intertwine amid personal and collective the betrayal of a tainted blood transfusion and its ramifications throughout the family tree; the brutality of colonialism and the cold comfort of diaspora in its aftermath; the wormholes opened by acts of violence across space and time.
But even as decay and perversion manifest at every stop from the bottom of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, Tapiero resists letting this become a mere document of misery. Implicit in her vivid, visceral imagery of disintegration is the opportunity for renewal and rebirth—a balm for our wounded era, the hope amid ruin that something can come from nothing.
Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk. They focus on poetry and unconventional works.
Read more about them here: https://nightboat.org/
*no reader commitment!*
- read the book, or start reading it
- show up to the discussion
- no sign ups needed
- you can go to one, or some, or all
- book club is held monthly
- 2-3 month cycles highlighting a different queer press
- the books are available at The Pond
- the books are in english, mostly fiction
There are copies of the book available at The Pond for a 10% discount!
If you want to join the bookclub remotely, or track your reading for these books, you can joining the Storygraph challenge for funsies.