New this week
The latest additions to The Library's collection
A Call for Poetry Collections
This week, we’re searching for Poetry Collections to fill our stacks. If you have one or know someone who does, send them our way. We want to highlight your work!
If you have a complete or in-progress work you’d like added to The Library or an indie-published book to include in the Buy Indie section, follow this guide, and we’ll help spread the word.
And thanks again to everyone for helping us support indie authors!
In the stacks
Historical
Behold a White Horse | Aesop | Historical Fiction (NA) (C) (F)
BEHOLD A WHITE HORSE is an original story based in part on the life and career of Flavius Belisarius (c. 500-565 CE), a prominent Roman general who lived during the so-called "Dark Ages," an era traditionally marked to begin with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Gone are Caesar and the legions of the Rome of old. The Roman Empire of this era is not a superpower, but a nation in decline; not a conqueror, but the target of conquest. And Belisarius, thrust into the middle of world affairs at just 25 years old, must find a way to manage the worst outbreak of war in years.
Literary
My Alien Life: A Novellete | J. Martain | Literary Fiction (NT) (C) (F)→($)
1st Chapter is FREE, remaining 3 chapters are PAID - includes professional narration
A heartwarming, speculative tale of an unusual child who finds a home—and love—with her feisty Great-great-aunt Magnolia Rose McClellan. Set in rural North Carolina, this Southern fiction "novelette" is short enough for a lunch break—though you may want to have some tissues handy!
Speculative
Gaseous Girl and the Winds of Time | Michael S. Atkinson | Super Hero (NA) (C) (F)
She's a flying brick with the power to control one of the fundamental states of matter, but no one takes her seriously. That's about to change.
Captain Happily Married: The Serial | Michael S. Atkinson | Super Hero (NT) (C) (F)
In this nine-episode serial not only does our hero face a challenge to his very life, but also, his marriage. Will Captain Happily Married and Super Soccer Mom's relationship survive the attack of Professor Irreconcilable Differences? Will the city? Maybe not, because this time, Professor Irreconcilable Differences has the one thing that might take them down: The Kaboominator.
Quarks of the Heart: A Meg Atomic Serial | Michael S. Atkinson | Super Hero (NT) (C) (F)
Meg Atomic must choose between her responsibilities to her cape, her family, and her city, and her growing feelings towards the Malevolent Med-Student, while he is forced to make a similar choice between her and his desire to be accredited by the Committee of Calamity. Hearts, not to mention femurs and the occasional small building, will almost certainly be broken.
2.17 Seconds Into Never | Michael S. Atkinson | Super Hero (NT) (I) (F)
Meg Atomic is lost in the swirling vortices of time! Her family attempts a rescue but can they find her before she runs afoul of history’s many innumerable perils, or worse, changes history itself?
Forgetting the Lost | J. Martain | Supernatural (NA) (C) (F)→($)
First TWO Chapters are FREE, remaining are PAID - includes professional narration
Six-year-old Madeline Galloway knows she's unlikeable. Unlovable. Uncanny. But when she encounters a strange man she believes to be a fallen angel, will her abilities save her life—or ruin it? Set in the 1940s, this Southern gothic style novella can be read as a standalone, or as a prequel to the paranormal-meets-science-fiction novel, "Daughters of Men."
Daughters of Men | J. Martain | Science Fiction (N) (C) (F)→($)
First SEVEN Chapters are FREE, remaining are PAID
(Book #1, Daughters series) For thirty-eight years, Lila Givens has hidden her extrasensory abilities, creating a small life in the same coastal North Carolina city where she was born. But her nightmares have grown worse, her angels still haven’t learned Morse code, and raising a thirteen-year-old genius requires the kind of mental focus that Lila has never quite mastered. Still, the abnormal seems fairly normal—until a strange young man appears and a new friend confides a shocking truth about her pregnancy.
Like Moonlight on Water | J. Martain | Science Fiction (N) (I) (F)→($)
(Book #2, Daughters series) Unable to ignore the booming echoes of another reality's tragedy, Sal compels Lila to explore her alternate lives for clues—but every life she dreams means waking to powerful new memories of the one man she can’t allow herself to love. Yet there’s no time for her paltry human drama—not with entire realities at stake, a genius child to protect from meddling aliens, dark energies crowding out her angels…oh, and a clothing store to manage. Because, you know…real life. But is this her life?
Are you publishing a book, comic, or story/poetry collection on Substack that you’d like to add to The Library? Send it our way!
Buy Indie
Can readers buy your indie book from your author's website or favorite online bookseller? Provide us a link and some details about your book, and we’ll help get the word out!
From the Archive
Featuring a different, randomly-selected book every week. This week, we have three!
1853 | J. Purcell | Historical Fiction (N) (I) (F) →($)
Free for first half of novel/paid for 2nd half of novel
In early 1853, New Orleans is the center of the arts, opera, and culture, and the home of a young, respected medical center, and a menagerie of people living with joie de vie. But by the fall, 8,000 New Orleanians—nearly 10% of its residents—would die, swept away by yellow fever, a gruesome disease that killed so many people so quickly, corpses were left rotting in the street—there was simply no one left to bury them. And as the city falls to its knees that summer, four different people face the plague and the city’s prejudices: James, a young doctor from Philadelphia, driven to live up to his family name; Sophie, the spoiled young French girl he grows to love, despite her hostility; Sila, the slave who rises up against her owner, the monstrous Monsieur Dubois, to work side by side with James, nursing the dying and dreaming of freedom; and Victor, a musician and member of a prominent gen de couleur libre family, who having returned home from Paris to take stage at the Orleans Ballroom, is confronted with his growing love of Sila and the deepening, dangerous racism of his homeland.
Thanks so much for curating and sharing! ✨