The small queer press is a continuous 2025 book club at The Pond aiming to uplift queer published works from smaller -mostly indie- presses focusing on diverse stories of LGBTQIA+ life and people.
The book club will run in 2-3 month cycles, each quarter focusing on a different press.
May through June we are exploring the works from Cipher Press. For July we are reading : “Bone Horn” by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain:
A newly licensed Private Investigator, grieving her partner’s death and desperate for work, takes on a bizarre case: to track down the legendary horn of Alice B. Toklas. From London to Paris to San Francisco, the search pulls her into a surreal literary underworld, tangled with grief, queerness, and absurd academia.
Bone Horn is a sharp, sexy, and poignant detective novel that reimagines the lone wolf PI while playfully unraveling the myths we build around love, loss, and who gets to tell the story.
Cipher Press is an independent publisher of queer fiction and non-fiction. Their aim is to amplify queer voices and to champion LGBTQIA+ writers in the UK and beyond.
They publish authors who are creating a new literary canon by disrupting existing narratives and retelling them in new ways. They want to publish the many different stories that make up our community. ( https://www.cipherpress.co.uk/ )
*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
- facebook events will be available
- the books are available at The Pond at a -10% discount
- the books are in english, mostly fiction
If you want to join the bookclub remotely, or track your reading for these books by joining the Storygraph challenge for funsies.