Melville House Publishing

Melville House Publishing Melville House Publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Founded in 2001 by Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians.

The company was founded in 2001 and was named winner of the 2007 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing, popularly known as the "indie publisher of the year" award. In January, 2008 Melville House moved to a new location in DUMBO, Brooklyn that combines a bookstore with an event space as well as their offices. Events will be held regularly and will feature Nobel Prize winners, a "lunch-time" lecture series, and younger fiction writers. For more information go to their Wikipedia page, their official site, or (for a complete listing of books they have published) their Goodreads page. (See above)

Information about a recently published book will appear in the "Notes" section, which will be updated biweekly or monthly.

NEW ON RED PEPPER: Red Pepper Media’s Summer Reads ☀️🥵♨️🌴The summer’s not over til it’s over! Our co-editor David Matthe...
08/26/2026

NEW ON RED PEPPER: Red Pepper Media’s Summer Reads ☀️🥵♨️🌴

The summer’s not over til it’s over! Our co-editor David Matthews shares his pick of the best books upcoming and hot off the press - perfect for holidays, sunny day reads and even sunday scaries.

Including:
🌟 We Were Here: A History of Black People in Alternative Music by Stephanie Philips (Faber, 2026) Faber Books
🌟 The Return of the 90s: A Cultural History of the Present edited by Madeline Lane-McKinley and Sean O’Brien (Pluto Press, 2026) Pluto Press
🌟 Come What May, We’re Here to Stay: The story of South Asian resistance in Britain by Taj Ali Taj Ali (Manchester University Press, 2026) Manchester University Press
🌟 Trash! A Garbage Man’s Story by Simon Paré-Poupart (Melville House, 2026) Melville House
🌟 Taking Up The Spear: Shadrack Maphumulo’s Struggle Against Apartheid by Joe Pillay (Daraja Press, 2026) Daraja Press

David Matthews is a Red Pepper Media co-editor, a lecturer in Health & Care at Bangor University and the author of The Class Struggle and Welfare: Social Policy under Capitalism (Monthly Review Press)

🌶️ Read his full range of reading selects on the Red Pepper website now, and subscribe today to support independent media!

07/16/2026

🚛❤️: “The Invisible Heart of Modern Life Is the Garbage Worker” Alex Press, Jacobin /  “A Close-Up Look at the Waste of Modern Live” Lily Meyer, The Atlantic / “The garbageman philosopher behind the best-selling book” Joe Keohane, The Boston Globe …

The headlines say a lot about the moving nature of Simon Pare-Poupart’s memoir, translated by the talented Pablo Strauss. Read some of the really thoughtful pieces that engage with the book, linked in our bio.

❗｡‧˚˚‧｡｡⋆⋆｡🗑️｡⋆⋆｡‧˚˚‧｡ ❗

“Imagine if Anthony Bourdain were your garbage man.” —Los Angeles Times

Trash! is a fascinating no-bullsh*t account of twenty years in waste managementpaints a vivid portrait of the heroic labor, anarchic spirit, and grueling conditions of the people who keep our cities clean. Paré-Poupart argues, convincingly, that we must “stop imagining that our garbage magically disappears.”

His story is atypical: he started working as a garbageman to pay for school, and after earning graduate degrees, he is still on a truck — out of love for the physical rush, for his colleagues, and for an honesty and freedom that no other job has yet given him.

Sensitivity and sociological know-how guides his inquiries into collective wastefulness and individual failure to confront the trash we produce. Every abstract observation comes with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the collection route to his days off, spent hunting down furniture and toys for family and friends.

This memoir was a bestseller in its original French. Includes eight black and white photographs of the author on the job.

Short clips from interviews by KERA, Think with Krys Boyd, Radio-Canada, and CBC News The Sunday Magazine.

Aftertaste: A Novel 🍒June, 2027. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s third book after Sunburn and Heap Earth Upon It is on the hori...
06/02/2026

Aftertaste: A Novel 🍒June, 2027. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s third book after Sunburn and Heap Earth Upon It is on the horizon 👀

🌆 Readers will follow ’s impassioned imagination to urban London in the Y2k era, where the atmosphere is a mix of strict class systems, upper echelons, lush descriptions of cities and countrysides, the nosiness of small towns, the precarity of family businesses—and what it feels like to be next door neighbors with your parents.

💘 Aly is wealthy, spoiled, and initially wary of commitment. Meadhbh is Irish, working class and striving for privilege. They meet in London and fall quickly into a situationship, before situationship was even a word. Love is at the heart of Aftertaste, as is the question: is it truly enough to conquer all?

🎭 It’s also an epic story about class, queerness, family and home, spanning from the optimism of the new millennium in 2000 to the aftermath of the financial crash in 2010. The prose as searing and visceral as ever, conjuring the heat between bodies, and the heat of an unforgettable UK summer.

We can’t wait to share more about U.S. publication (and the final cover!) soon 🍒

05/26/2026

⚽️📚 Since the sport’s beginning in 1848, echoes of global conflict have reached the soccer field in unthinkable ways. It can spark a war but it can also have the opposite effect: interrupting conflict, even just for a few hours or days.

For example, when French, Belgian, English and German World War I soldiers climbed out of their foxholes to kick the ball around with their enemies for a brief few hours during a Christmas Truce. This is just one of 12 matches the book covers. Others include the game between Dinamo Zagreb and the Red Star Belgrade in Croatia in 1990, when clashes between fans and police made it clear that Yugoslavia was about to have a split. Or Chile vs. the USSR in 1973, held in Santiago, Chile, shortly after Augusto Pinochet took over in a bloody coup.

With first-hand accounts and incisive journalism, Stefano Bizzotto explores how soccer’s role in major international conflicts, and brings to light a new perspective on the importance of the game. Include 8 full spread photos.

The FIFA World Cup is coming up fast, and this book is the perfect primer on how politics tangle with the world’s most popular sport. Shout out to and for the recent reads! Featured in , , and more.

🕯️💋 “‘My best-friend is like a candle that always burns. She is a constant source of energy and inspiration for me and s...
04/08/2026

🕯️💋 “‘My best-friend is like a candle that always burns. She is a constant source of energy and inspiration for me and she says I am the same for her’. Testimony about friendship’s power danced across the pages of Shere Hite’s Women and Love.”

“It was an ambitious book. It ran to nine hundred pages and the print was small. Shere asked four thousand women about their love lives and relationships. She had intended to include women’s reflections on love in the first Hite Report but had run out of space.

“She used the same method as in the first two books. She developed a lengthy questionnaire. She asked women everything from ‘Are you in love?’ to ‘Have you ever felt you were “owned” or suffocated, held down in a relationship . . . ?’ to ‘What is your favourite way to waste time?’ and ‘Was your mother affectionate?’

“The book was one of the first to ask a large group of women about love and relationships since the upheavals of the women’s liberation movement. Shere argued that the movement had done wonders for women’s friendships.”

Rosa Campbell’s debut, The Book that Taught the World to Or**sm and Then Disappeared is out next week! Featured in , among other there, and named a book to read this month by and .

📸 Photos courtesy of Mike Wilson, photographer and friend of Shere Hite.

📚❔Are there stories you re-read❔📚 Written after release from a N**i asylum in 1947, and in just 24 days, Hans Fallada’s...
04/07/2026

📚❔Are there stories you re-read❔📚 Written after release from a N**i asylum in 1947, and in just 24 days, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone is on the “books I go back to all the time and reread” list for Louise Erdrich.

The novel it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right—even against impossible odds.

Erdrich, who just released her new collection Python’s Kiss, spoke with about texts that keep on giving.

“One that I hope people read during these times is Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A real story, but it reads like a novel, [it’s] about a couple whose son is killed in World War II. They live in Germany, and they decide to do what they can to resist what’s happening. It is a true story. It feels like what they do is so small, but it’s enough to get them killed. I think it’s really important to read that book.”

LOUISE ERDRICH was born in Little Falls, Minnesota. She’s an American author known for her rich, immersive storytelling on the Ojibwe people of the northern Midwest as well as other subjects. Among her acclaimed novels are The Round House (2012; winner of the National Book Award) and The Night Watchman (2020; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction).

HANS FALLADA was a German novelist who was one of the most prominent exponents of the realistic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). His depiction of social misfits, which was influenced by his personal experience, resonated with readers at the turn of the 21st century as much as it did with Fallada’s contemporaries.

🫦📚 3 copies of The Book that Taught the World to Or**sm and Then Disappeared are waiting for you :) Featured in , , and ...
04/03/2026

🫦📚 3 copies of The Book that Taught the World to Or**sm and Then Disappeared are waiting for you :) Featured in , , and starred by . Shout out to for the early read, too!

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3 winners selected at random after Apr, 7 2026, 11:59pm EST.

The Book That Taught the World to Or**sm and Then Disappeared • April 14

Author Rosa Campbell says: “In this book, I examine the worldwide impact, blind spots and furor over the now all-but-forgotten 1976 bestseller by ex-Playboy model Shere Hite. The Hite Report was the first book in the English speaking world to ask women about their s*x lives and publish the explosive results in their own words. It is the 30th bestselling book of all time, but has all but disappeared. This book explains why through tracing the celebrity rise and dramatic fall of Shere Hite.”

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