Hello friend. Today’s Indie Recommends Indie post features author Amanda Pampuro. Let’s meet her and learn about the indie books she adores!
Amanda, welcome to Armed with A Book! Since it’s your first time on the blog, can you please tell me and my readers about yourself?
I grew up reading and writing in the backseat on long road trips around the U.S. Since debuting in 3:AM Magazine, my work has appeared in Write Launch, crag, Menacing Hedge, the Cabinet of Heed and Workers Write! I am lucky enough to make a living as a journalist in Denver and try to send good vibes into the void @Bright_Lamp.
Do you primarily read indie books or big publishers books as well?
My favorite way to check out new books is to go to the downtown branch of the Denver Public Library and grab books off the “new releases” and “newly returned” shelves in the foirer. When I worked downtown pre-Covid, I would bike the seven miles home with the zipper on my backpack barely containing all the indie novels, short story collections, cookbooks and histories I stuffed in.
If I’m reading a Big Five book, it’s probably one of the classics they own the rights to. Nintey percent of the fiction I read comes from indie presses; I love everything from stapled chapbooks to perfect bound Soft Skull and Coffee House Press works. Ninety percent of the nonfiction I read comes from larger indie publishers like Verso and Seven Stories, or university presses. I rarely read memoirs.
The way I devour books, each of these recommendations could have opened with “I had no idea what to expect when I cracked this cover and boy was I in for a surprise…”
Amanda’s Indie Recommendations
Damned Pretty Things by Holly Wade Matter
Urban Fantasy
Published Year 2020
Standalone
Fortune is an itinerant musician without a past who braids memories into her hair. Maud is a sheltered small-town girl and an unwitting heir to the notorious McBride family magic. The two young women meet when Fortune is commissioned to bring Maud to a rich man whose grandson she cursed. United by their love of music and their hunger for the road, Fortune and Maud form a friendship … one that is threatened not only by Fortune’s mission but by their mutual desire for a man called Lightning.
Pretty Damned Things captures everything I love about taking roadtrips: it moves at 90 mph on an open road that can seemingly wind up anywhere, with lyrical music on the radio and two women untangling their curses along the way.
Nothing is what is seems in the first verse, and as the song winds through the novel, folklore becomes reality, the past becomes present, and every mistake catches up. The small town characters are rendered as larger than life legends, each with a power of their own.
Young Maud’s coming of age arc follows her from the first time she wears a prom dress, to the first time she falls in love, kisses a boy, and leaves the small familiar town she grew up in. While Maud wants to get away and start living, Fortune is a wandering force, who just wants to go home—problem is, she can’t remember where that was or why she left.
Recommend to: People who love Carson McCullers, Thelma and Louise, Amanda Palmer or the Grateful Dead.
Toadstones by Eric Williams
Horror
Published Year 2022
Standalone
Sixteen stories from the Bowels of Hell. You can’t cheat death, but death can still cheat you. Gods are real. Monsters too. Like sheepoids, creepoids, and landlords. Take the ghost bus to a showing of a haunted film; it really is to die for. Keep your distance from the uncanny residents of a picturesque wasteland. If you forget your wallet at some sketchy jobsite in the middle of nowhere, just leave it. Some things are better lost.
Stepped in the history of Time, Earth, and B-Movies, Eric Williams creates worlds where nothing is what it seems, and be you graverobber, podcaster, or small-town veterinarian, there are no magic charms to protect you. A collection where Weird is the norm, where the unreal is all too real, Toadstones is a reminder that we don’t know everything, actually.
I have been corrupted by watching too many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and more often look for humor in horror rather than terror. That said, the 16 stories in Toadstones strike a balance between the wacky, the weird and the WTF. Each story leaves you with the unsettling feeling that you are being watched, and maybe you should check under the bed before you go to sleep.
Even when Williams hits on an age-old genre and you have a good idea of how that vampire story is going to end (not well for anyone), you get hooked in, and have to see where he cuts the camera in the final scene. The upside of following the B-Movie format in short story form is that a low budget doesn’t wreck the scene—the costumes and monsters and eerie music are all in the reader’s mind.
Besides being a short story junkie, I also have a soft spot for a good Posidian story, public transit adventures and ghosts from America’s nuclear legacy. Recommend to: People who love R.L. Stein, Roald Dahl’s short stories, Night of the Living Dead, Manos Hands of Fate, the Dead Boys or Rocket from the Crypt.
Zero Saints by Gabino Iglesias
Crime Thriller
Published Year 2015
Standalone
Enforcer and drug dealer Fernando has seen better days. On his way home from work, some heavily tattoed gangsters throw him in the back of a car and take him to an abandoned house, where they saw off his friend’s head and feed the kid’s fingers to … something. Their message is clear: this is their territory now.
But Fernando isn’t put down that easily. Using the assisance of a Santerian priestess, an insane Puerto Rican pop sensation, a very human dog, and a Russian hitman, he’ll build the courage (and firepower) he’ll teed to fight a gangbanger who’s a bit more than human.
From the get go, our narrator is clocked over the head, thrown in the back of a truck and hauled off to meet a demon. The breakneck pace only picks up from there, fueled by pure masculine adrenalin, oxy and tacos.
For the most part, Nando jumps between two emotions: the instinct to run away from his problems, alleviated only by the belief that his patron saint is watching over him. It doesn’t matter whether or not Nando’s angels and demons are real, because his battle between them is genuinely over life or death. This is not the Austin of SXSW gentrified by Californians, but a world away tucked inside dark allies and dirty clubs where a Mexican immigrant tries and fails to start over.
On the page, Igleasias never shoots blanks and always aims for the heart. Also, if you take your time, this bilingual book can help you learn all the Spanish you really need to know.
Recommend to: People who enjoyed Call of the Wild, Taken, Gogol Bordello, or Paco de Lucia
The Church of Wrestling by Emily Thomas Mani
Sports Literature
Published Year 2021
Standalone
Eleven-year-old Jenny Arsenault is an undefeated wrestler, thanks in part to the guiding principle her father has taught her—Strike First. But she’s eager to try another principle. At the 1992 Canada East Championship, she defies Strike First and loses the gold. It’s not the only loss that day. Her mother also dies, launching her father into an intercontinental search for the answer to an impossible question: How do you strike first at death? A bold, inventive novella with unforgettable characters, The Church of Wrestling shows grief and obsession are full-contact sports, and family ties—even when seemingly broken—bind more tightly than a half nelson.
This coming of age tale hinges on a pivotal moment in a young girl’s life: the first time she ever loses.
Having spent her whole life studying and training to be a wrestling champ, just like her single nearly-an-Olympian dad, Jenny takes the loss hard, and the moment is only worsened by the fact that her estranged mother died the very same day. While Jenny decides to swear off wrestling for good, her dad throughs himself into it—building a literal church around the sport.
Written in terse, tight prose, this compact novella is every bit as suspenseful as the final moments in a close match. Whether or not you’re “into sports,” great sports literature like this piece, teach outsiders about the art of the game while transcending the singular TV channel into something bigger than itself.
Recommended to: People who enjoyed the Domino Diaries, Million Dollar Baby, Survivor and Queen.
Iep Jāltok by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner
Poetry
Published 2017
Standalone
As the seas rise, the fight intensifies to save the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands from being devoured by the waters around them. At the same time, activists are raising their poetic voices against decades of colonialism, environmental destruction, and social injustice.
Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s writing highlights the traumas of colonialism, racism, forced migration, the legacy of American nuclear testing, and the impending threats of climate change. Bearing witness at the front lines of various activist movements inspires her work and has propelled her poetry onto international stages, where she has performed in front of audiences ranging from elementary school students to more than a hundred world leaders at the United Nations Climate Summit.
The poet connects us to Marshallese daily life and tradition, likening her poetry to a basket and its essential materials. Her cultural roots and her family provide the thick fiber, the structure of the basket. Her diasporic upbringing is the material which wraps around the fiber, an essential layer to the structure of her experiences. And her passion for justice and change, the passion which brings her to the front lines of activist movements—is the stitching that binds these two experiences together.
Iep Jāltok will make history as the first published book of poetry written by a Marshallese author, and it ushers in an important new voice for justice.
This thin poetry collection contains the fallout from 12 years of nuclear tests and just as many years of watching rising tides bite off pieces of the Marshall Islands; the poems span from the moment the word “bomb” entered into the Marshellese langauge to the birth of the poet’s daughter.
With cutting langauge, Jetñil-Kijiner weaves together stories of past, present and future, at once celebrating and mourning island life with the people of the Pacific, and sending a resounding message no one from a landlocked place can ignore. Embedded within the powerful call for action is the knowledge that people have been passified with as little as a case of Spam before, and that they will keep eating poison for as long as it makes them feel good.
Although it seems impossible that all of these things should be true at once, it’s even more miraculous how easily Jetñil-Kijiner packs them all into a basket.
I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone—those who understand what has been lost, and especially those who do not.
Amanda’s Book Spotlight
If Amazon could talk, what would it say about you? Wish List follows woman’s life through things she bought online, as told by the shopping algorithm that sold them to her.
ARgurl16 first logs onto Hermes as a teenager and the platform continues to watch over her throughout her life as she transitions from broke college student to single woman looking for love, and eventually into motherhood. Hermes is data-hungry and obsessive, as it struggles to understand its own identity alongside the wants of its millions of users so that it can suggest buying the very best earplugs and coffee mugs.
This concise novella is The Death of Ivan Ilyich for the reader with a guilty pleasure for Buzzfeed listicles. Readers haunted by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle or Niccolò Machiavelli will enjoy this slice of life.
Readers who enjoyed books Guy Dabord’s Society of the Spectacle and Changing Planes by Ursulea K. Le Guin would like this book.
Connect with Amanda on Twitter, Instagram and her website.
Did you add any books to your TBR today based on this post or did you see any you have already read? Tell us in the comments!
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Thanks for hanging out with us today!
Banner Photo of library by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
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