Our Second Book!
And the launch of our "insider" emails
We’re excited to announce the second book in our Fall 2025 line-up: Robyn Ryle’s collection of linked short stories, SEX OF THE MIDWEST. In this group of stories set in the fictional town of Lanier, Indiana, things get rolling when everyone in town receives an email titled “Sex of the Midwest”. What that email is about, how various key characters respond to it, and what dreams and hopes and behaviors it elicits in them: this all makes for a compassionate and witty rendering of a small midwestern community grappling with current issues. At Galiot Press, we’re drawn, as well, to the fact that the book is neither a novel nor a collection of stories, but something in between that ends up being more than the sum of its parts. We loved tracking characters from one story into the next, moving as they do from protagonist to secondary character as the narrative develops.
Robyn is the author of three non-fiction books, and a professor of sociology and gender studies at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, where she has been teaching sociology of gender and other courses for 20 years. She went to Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, for her undergraduate degree in sociology and English with a concentration in women’s studies. She received her PhD in sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington and is originally from northern Kentucky. You can read more about her and her work here.
Read on for a discussion of Robyn’s book title, as well as that of Emily’s SWALLOWTAIL. And our new “insider” sneak peek into the production of our first books.
Classes and workshops
This week we’ve been running the first sessions of our free feedback workshops (one series for query letters, one for first pages). It's been a delight to spend an hour offering a critique of these crucial pages. All the participants have been wonderfully insightful and respectful, and we've received lovely private notes from some of them. One wrote "I am in absolute awe of your generosity and that of the other participants. The feedback is tremendous." Aw, thanks! We'll be posting new series of this type in the New Year, so do keep an eye out for them. (And of course we'll announce them here, too.)
Come write in Greece!
As winter settles in here in New England, we’re already thinking about our summer workshop in Greece. Picture an old stone house, a table under the olive trees, dappled sunshine, the mountains in the near distance, opportunities to workshop your writing, time to generate new writing or revise what you have, craft sessions, and excellent food. You'll find all the information here.
Past attendees have had this to say about the workshop:
“There's nothing like being immersed in your work in this way, if you're ready to propel your writing to the next level.”
“I’ve attended the Krouna workshop three times and would love to go again. Henriette builds a welcoming, productive, and creative atmosphere that’s irresistible and unique.”
On book titles
Today we want to talk a bit about fiction book titles, both in general and specifically about the titles of our first books. I (Anjali) was at Belmont Books recently with my fourteen-year-old and they were remarking on book title trends they've noticed. We discussed how The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time sparked a spate of long titles along the lines of The Something Something of the Such and Such. I think the winner for length might The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Or wait! The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window and Disappeared.
Sometimes the last Something is replaced by a So-and-so. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, for example, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka. (What’s with seven?) Some titles are a full sentence. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Eleonor Oliphant is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman. And then there are all the Wives and Daughters, which I think really began in the early 2000s with Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), and Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter (2005). Goodreads has a list with 165 titles The Blank's Wife or Daughter! (I won't comment on the fact that there are FAR fewer books with Son or Husband, and when there is a Husband, it's often a romance book. Well actually, I will comment: the men get their own names and roles, the women are subservient to them.)
What's with these trends? Is it laziness? Brilliant marketing? Do they tap into something in our brains? Personally, I find that such formulaic titles make my eyes and attention go blurry. I'm a big fan of titles that juxtapose words in unlikely combinations, or one-word titles where the word itself conjures up images or feelings. Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi, for example. Or Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy.
Or here's a title I've always found alluring (although it's also long): First Darling of the Morning, by Thrity Umrigar. There's a story right there in the title. Or All My Rage, by Sabaa Tahir, in which the reader is drawn in to the immediacy of a voice. [Henriette: My own favorite long title comes from Christina Thompson’s amazing and beautifully written contact history of New Zealand: Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.]
Do you have a favorite book title? Tell us about it!
Now that we have two titles of our own at Galiot Press, we'd like to share with you a bit about how we (together with the authors) arrived at them. What we considered, what we intend, other ideas we nixed and why, the conversations we had internally about them, that kind of thing. This segment is the first of our now monthly "insider" email for which anyone can subscribe and pay. A little extra that will provide you with some insights into the nitty gritty of producing Galiot Books. (We apologize in advance if it looks like free subscribers aren’t able to comment. We are working on it!)