OCTOBER 31, 2024: HAPPY HALLOWE’EN!

Due to circumstances beyond both our control and comprehension, the publication date for All the Quiet Hours has been pushed back five weeks. The new release date is Dec 21. The audiobook is nearly finished and while $29.99 does seem exorbitant, we did our research before arriving at that price point. Most independent Canadian publishing houses charge that amount for their Audiobooks, some of which barely crest 300 pages. AtQH is nearly 800 pages. The MP3 is over ten hours long. We’re not trying to gouge you, we promise.

In other news, we just acquired the Canadian publishing rights to an absolutely fantastic non-fiction work titled The Making Of America (we adore the cheeky reference to Gertrude Stein) by Neebin Armstrong, a talented young writer from Saskatoon whose first name is the Ojibwe word for summer. The closest literary companions we can think of for The Making of America are Louis Menand’s American Studies and Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, a landmark interdisciplinary work encompassing a social history of Paris’ famous indoor arcades, Benjamin’s own personal musings, and pertinent quotes from obscure works of philosophy, historiography, fiction, and even scripture.

Armstrong’s book is a secret history of America, starting with a geological prelude describing the majestic Missoula Floods that scoured and formed the central Washington scablands. What follows is a profile of Moncacht-Apé, a Yazoo explorer from the present-day Natchez area of Mississippi who was one of the most well-traveled human beings of his time. He traveled north from Natchez to present-day upstate New York where he saw “the Great Waters” of the Atlantic Ocean. He spent the winter with the Abenaki people, where he met an old man who told him of a waterfall one could hear a full day before seeing. This old man took Moncacht-Apé to Niagara Falls the following spring. The traveler was astonished by what he saw, writing in his diary “I had never been able to believe what the old man had told me, but when my eyes and my senses beheld, I saw that he had not said enough for that which my eyes saw. This river does not fall. It is as if it is cast, the same as when an arrow falls to the ground. The sight made my hair stand on end and my flesh creep.”

After that the two men killed a bison, smoked it and split it before parting ways. Moncacht-Apé then headed to the Pacific Northwest where he saw the other “Great Waters” of the Pacific Ocean. In less than four years, Moncacht-Apé travelled 13, 000 km, saw the Atlantic Ocean, Niagara Falls, and the Pacific Ocean. And yet his story is never taught in history classes. From there, Armstrong writes about migrant Chinese and Japanese labourers who helped build both Canada’s and the United States first transcontinental railroad.

As the book moves forward into the twentieth century, she shifts her focus to outsider artists like Eldren Bailey and Consuelo González Amezcua, obscure film directors of the ‘30s and ‘40s to musical artists like Jandek and Daniel Johnston, to obscure self-taught writers like Malcolm McKesson and Sister Gertrude Morgan. By the end of the book, you’ll be amazed by how much history has been hidden from us. Hopefully works like The Making of America will help to shine a light on artists, musicians, writers, and travellers whose names would be lost to the mists of time if not for dedicated historians and writers like Walter Benjamin and Neebin Armstrong.

Armstrong is currently hard at work completing her final draft. “The writing is finished but the editing is not,” she told us in a recent email. We have tentatively scheduled her book’s release date for July 4, 2024. What better time to unleash upon the world a book about the secret histories of America than Independence Day?

The Making of Americans has been called “a landmark in 20th century literature.” We might be a micro-press run by two Luddite librarians out of our apartment, but we think Neebin Armstrong’s The Making of America could - nay should - one day be called “a landmark in 21st century literature.”

Whether you’re dreaming or reading or writing, go big or go home.

Danny Lindsay’s All the Quiet Hours will be published December 21, 2024. Neebin Armstrong’s The Making of America will be published July 4, 2025.

We could not be prouder or more excited to help guide these books to publication. To bestow them upon the world. As a writer once wrote, “fiction builds muscle. The human muscle.”

Touché, young scribe. Touché.
- Liz & Sharon