Indie Recommends Indie: Dale Stromberg

Hello friend. Today’s Indie Recommends Indie post features author Dale Stromberg and he shares his favorite indie reads. His spotlight book, Melancholic Parables, is a collection of short stories exploring the questions “Are we the same person we were last year? Or last week? Or last story?”. Learn more about it at the end of the post. 🙂

Dale, welcome to Armed with A Book! Please tell me and my readers about yourself!

I grew up in California, spent 12 years in Tokyo playing in bands, then moved to Malaysia, where I live and write now. I’ve been writing for many years but only recently ventured into independent publishing with Melancholic Parables, a collection of short fiction and prose. My debut novel, a high fantasy called Mæj, will be published in 2024 by a very cool micropress called tRaum Books.

Do you primarily read indie books or big publishers books as well?

I’ve had a slow reading year; my Goodreads says I’ve only read 21 books so far. One was from a Big 5 imprint (Del Ray); the other 20 were either self-published or came out of fine indie and micro presses like Coffee House Press, tRaum Books, The Cupboard Pamphlet, Mason Jar Press, Lower Decks Press, Kernpunkt Press, and River Glass Books.

The handful of books from big publishers I’ve read in the last few years have left me dissatisfied; I find less messy creativity, less eccentric audacity, as though the sums of money invested incline the publishers to play it safe. Part of the appeal of indie books is that they feel closer to my world, the way indie bands felt more accessible than major label bands back when I was a kid living and breathing underground music. To me, these words are more alive.

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Dale’s Indie Recommendations

I first encountered Tucker Lieberman’s writing in his sprawling philosophical hybrid novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time, which is a gonzo tour de force of ideas. It turns out Lieberman writes a little bit of everything—biography, journalism, legal guides, criticism, memoir—including poetry. 

Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está is a bilingual poetry collection with Spanish and English versions of each poem on facing pages. The poems form a grand narrative around Enkidu and Gilgamesh, figures of legend and avatars of intense male bonds.

The book’s subtitle is “An Origin Myth of Grief / Un mito de origen de la pesadumbre”; in the same way that a novel unfolds to reveal its plot, these poems reveal and chart the evolution of the churning emotions of bereavement, recounting the grief and longing Gilgamesh feels for his lost bosom friend, his heart’s companion, who will never return. The language of the poems is straightforward, honest, open—Gilgamesh calling out into the universe.

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The world and vision of this novel are imbued with an astonishing and immersive originality, and a tenebrous surreality. No book I’ve read so far this year has impressed me quite like this one.

One of Kaschock’s remarkable achievements is in convincing us of the possibility of an antipossible performance art in a tale where reality and unreality rub against each other. Hungering to alter, hurt, waken, and free his audiences, troupe director West arranges a sleight performance of unprecedented originality, calling upon the revolutionary talents of otherworldly sleightists Lark and Clef as well as the haunted wordsmith Byrne. In charting the emergence and reception of this sleight, the novel descends most thought-provokingly into a meditation on atrocity, on art, and on family.

The prose of the novel, lapidary and ruthless, urges lingering reading, sometimes repeated reading: verisimilar and poetic detail kaleidoscopes across the page, bewildering but captivating, challenging us to relish linguistic surprises and ambient undertow.

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These five stories link blood ties and blood stains, the bondage of family and the baiting of flesh. Hunger, in various forms, dissolves family ties and fellow-feeling; it is a compulsion to consume absent of nourishment; while inheritance, and in particular the legacy passed from mother to daughter, can be troublous, even toxic, even deadly.

Gifted with a confident voice, a dexterity with symbolism and imagery, an exquisite precision of detail, and a penchant for the discomfiting, aberrant, and monstrous, Lei writes prose with the intensity of a Cathy Ulrich or a K-Ming Chang. Her worldview in these pieces edges along the impossible, sometimes slipping into zones of ominous magic, other times dwelling in darknesses of the known world.

Hallucinogenic imagery abounds: a house is built already in a state of decay; a woman, python-like, swallows apples whole; a girl is fed feathers to keep her perpetually a hatchling; another eats camera film, eats lip gloss, eats voices and songs. Throughout are undertones of body horror and affectless melancholia.

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In these pieces—whose prose is pretty and dark, a mood which recognises that in beauty there is strangeness, in pain there is beauty—Palaces does not flinch from unflattering revelations in the course of exploring personal turbulence and the not irreproachable conduct it can precipitate. 

She muses on romantic infatuation driving one to deception; on the maturation of infatuation into lust which, its flowers blown, soon decays; on the romance of pain given and received; on loving someone who is cruel, who is flawed, who is impossible; on obsessive paranoia and the way friends can be driven off by one’s habit of imagining enemies on every side; and on lines which blur, between suicidal and sexual impulses, between genders, between pleasure and pain.

The attractive visual aesthetic of the chapbook’s cover continues within its pages, which feature etchings, illustrations, and a full-colour frontispiece for each essay. This is a book made to be held in the hand and lingered over.

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This recommendation is especially for my fellow writers. While Zilla Novikov may be best known for co-authoring The Sad Bastard Cookbook with Rachel A. Rosen, she also wrote this wickedly funny epistolary novella.

The book, told in the form of query letters entreating literary agents to consider a manuscript, captures the maddening frustration of begging the impassive gatekeepers of a shambolic industry—one which seems actively haughty about its ossified, opaque, esoteric and byzantine business practices—to please, please let my writing reach the world.

Before long, the exasperated letter-writer grows ironic, passive-aggressive, absurd, obscene. She trolls agents, thirst-traps agents, queries irrelevant agents with malice aforethought. She learns to love the hopelessness.

Novikov’s brilliance is in how she ties this exercise in fruitless absurdity to the theme of climate change activism: yet another form of screaming into the void. The novel does not end with any kind of naïve hope, either for aspiring novelists or for environmental activists. What it offers instead is a chance to redefine hope: not as optimism that good things will come, but as willingness to believe that we, taking what action is within our reach, may do good things.

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Readers who enjoyed Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Franz Kafka’s microfiction (such as “A Little Fable” or “Poseidon”) would like this book. Buy the book at this link or on Amazon.

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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!

Thanks for hanging out with us today! Connect with Dale on BlueSky, Medium and Goodreads.

If you are an indie or small press author who is an avid reader and wants to be featured, sign up using the form on the Indie Recommends Indie home page. This is a fantastic way to bring attention to fellow indie authors as well as your own book. 🙂