Entry No. 025 — Meet the Famous Orphans
The Famous Orphans Short Book Series features strange and wonderful books under 150 pages by exciting new voices. When we started Famous Orphans, we said we were looking for short books that didn’t fit anywhere particularly well.
We found three to bring home.
Seeing the Elephant by Thomas Rooz Bazar
(coming Winter 2027)
In 1851 San Francisco, gay moneyman Henry Codhill Evers journeys from man to beast as he navigates the rough and tumble birth of San Francisco post gold-rush. Real-life figures from the world of theatre mix with commerce, violence, and expansion in this visceral historical-horror story.
Thomas Rooz Bazar is a writer and theater maker. His novel An Expectation of Plenty was published by Atmosphere Press in 2020. Involved in the world of theater for the past thirty years, he has written a series of works for the stage. Thomas has taught acting, theater, and creative writing to all ages. He lives in the Bay Area, California.
Filthy Rich, or Average Life Expectancy at the End of the World by Terra Travis
(coming Spring 2027)
An unconventional family–two brothers and one immaculately conceived daughter–journey through a surreal and dilapidated landscape, intertwined with the diary entries of a black-hole dwelling demigod, known as Primpy Steven, whose drool contains the whole world. Filthy Rich is a road trip fable and mutated, queer bildungsroman.
Terra Travis is a writer of fiction, video games, journalism, and diary entries. Her work has appeared in Tilted House Review, ANTIGRAVITY Magazine, and the MMORPG Guild Wars. She holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Terra lives in New Orleans.
Beyond the Pull of Gravity by Sarah Tavis
(coming Autumn 2027)
Max is dead. The baby growing in Stella’s belly is Max. Her daughter Wren already knows this. Organized alphabetically from Absence to Zero-sum, this hybrid lyric novel mixes reality, fantasy, dream, and memory to explore grief, single motherhood, drug abuse, and the space occupied by a lover/parent after suicide and before rebirth.
Sarah Tavis, a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, co-writes The Scrap Heap, a weekly newsletter with Jennifer Berney about healing and creative process, as well as The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times (forthcoming). She is a founding member of The 3rd Thing, an independent publisher. She lives by the Salish Sea in Olympia, WA.
We will be launching Adopt an Orphan in the coming months. If you’d like to help bring one of the Famous Orphans into the world, you can “adopt” it by sponsoring a book. Your name will be printed in the book as part of its acknowledgments. This is a simple, direct way to stand behind independent publishing and become part of the strange little book itself.
More about that in coming newsletters. In the meantime, if you want to join the waiting list and tell us which book you’d like to adopt, reply to this email or shoot us a message.
So excited to be part of this first Famous Orphans cohort!