A yearly snapshot of the small press ecosystem at work, where a lot of the interesting writing actually happens.

This 2014 edition pulls together fiction, essays, and poetry selected from hundreds of independent journals, giving you a cross-section of what was being written outside the commercial centre.

Writers in this volume include names like George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Roxane Gay, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Denis Johnson alongside lesser-known voices, which is part of the point. The range is the thing here: tight short stories, strange fragments, political essays, formally odd pieces that wouldn’t survive elsewhere. It’s a browsing book as much as a reading one, something you dip into and come out of with a handful of writers you didn’t know you needed.