We celebrate two Apprentice House Press titles have been shortlisted for the Chanticleer International Book Awards. David Metz’s Nick and Lorraine Were Lovers and Brittany Micka-Foos’ It’s No Fun Anymore are 2025 releases.

The Collections & Anthologies Book Awards recognize emerging new talent and outstanding works in the genre of Short Story Collections. The Collection & Anthology Awards is a genre division of Chanticleer International Book Awards and Novel Competitions (The CIBAs).

Art Young’s Downeyoshun was named a semi-finalist in the Goethe Awards for Post-1750s Historical Fiction. Winners are announced mid-April.

Former victim’s rights lawyer Brittany Micka-Foos is releasing her newest release, It’s No Fun Anymore, a collection of powerful short stories, on June 17th, 2025.

Micka-Foos, a published short-story writer, stuns readers with her stories that survey the dark, but impactful, minds and issues faced by women. She weaves her stories in a way that makes you question your own experience and perspectives on topics you thought you were sure about previously.

“Alternating between poignant, grim, and sometimes haunting stories, It’s No Fun Anymore cuts to the core of all our deepest fears on being a woman in the 21st century. In stark prose, Micka-Foos makes you feel the immediacy of her characters’ experience as they navigate motherhood, career, love, and getting out of bed each morning. Every story invites you to wrestle with the choices you’d make in the same situation, and that’s where the real fun begins,” says Alexandria Faulkenbury, author of Somewhere Past the End.

It’s No Fun Anymore is available at your local bookstore, in addition to Amazon.

Description:

“It’s No Fun Anymore” is a collection of eight stories that explore the politics of victimization, the sites of trauma on women’s bodies, and their attempts to divine meaning from suffering. In “The Experiment,” the murder of a young girl prompts a stay-at-home mother to undertake a desperate bid for agency, drawing unlikely inspiration from a 1950s self-help book. An MLM saleswoman in “Border Crossings” is held captive at the Canadian border, and in her marriage. And “Thumb Stump” introduces a new mother, who worries her baby will inherit both her perceived deformity and generational trauma. These stories examine the double binds of motherhood, the sham of “having it all,” the daily struggles. The centralizing thread is the question: How can trauma be transformed?

About the author:

Brittany Micka-Foos is a writer and stay-at-home mom living in the Pacific Northwest. Her shortstories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Ninth Letter, Witness, Hobart, Literary Mama, CALYX Journal, Briar Cliff Review, and elsewhere. To read more visit: www.brittanymickafoos.com.

About Apprentice House:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process. As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion. Students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.

Richard Martin’s, I Inherited a Mixed Animal from Uncle Living in Woods, will be released June 10, 2025, on all platforms where books are sold. Martin is a second time author and will release this work after developing it for over a decade online. This exciting story has been developed bit by bit from an online forum to page, where Yonder and Lemuel travel through their journey at last.”Richard Martin’s, I Inherited a Mixed Animal from Uncle Living in Woods is strange, brilliant, unique, and hilarious. There are so many moments of brilliance in this book. Byway of Lemuel, Shane, Yonder, and the ragtag citizens of Hmm, Martin draws us in to a place we don’t recognize at all until we recognize it so completely we come to think of it as home. Somehow infusing beauty and humor into each page, if not every sentence, Martin reminds us the world is not to be taken lightly, except when it is. Simple and complex, ludicrous yet authentic, and utterly, painfully relatable, it reminds one of the old theatre of the absurd. Ionesco. Ibsen. A tale about finding our people in this often-lonely and messed up world, this book is nothing short of incandescent. I hope the Pulitzer folks take note.” said Gae Polisner, author of In Sight of Stars and Jack Kerouac Is Dead to Me.

“Brilliantly creative and utterly hilarious, Richard Martin’s I Inherited A Mixed Animal From Uncle Living In Woods is a masterpiece. This wonderful novel is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, but in a loving way. The author through his sardonic narrator, Lemuel, isn’t shy to point out that the human flaws and frailties we find amusing can be found in all of us if we look hard enough. The oddball yet incisive and warm humor make us care about Yonder and his bewildered keeper. Filled with colorful and memorably unexpected prose to match its characters, the novel’s humor is reminiscent of T.R.Pearson’s A Short History of a Small Place; its delightfully original settings and cast recalling Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; its gentle yet incisive satire resurrecting memories of the canon of Kurt Vonnegut; its homespun wisdom walking in the footsteps of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

However, it is by no means derivative. This book, like Dunn’s Geek Love, has no siblings. It is anonly child.” said, Steven Mayfield, award-winning author of The Penny Mansions.

Available wherever books are traditionally sold.

Description:

I Inherited a Mixed Animal is the story of a young misanthrope who is forced to decide if he will sell (for one million dollars) about the only thing he loves in the world, in order to save the same whole stinking world. It is a novel of wonder, happiness, joy, and rampant political village tyranny. Young Lemuel Washington is a self semi-educated fix-it man/inventor in the village of Hmm, where he resides in mutual deterrence with his fortune-telling mayoral candidate sister Shane. Hmm is aquaint, lazy, and idyllically corrupt hamlet located in the Distant Northern Parallel. Lemuel is a fellow at the height of his powers minding his own business and encouraging others tomind theirs. Fixing and inventing are his passions. He is working, for example, on a village-circling treadmill on which the population will exercise and simultaneously generate green power for Hmm. Furthermore, he rigs Lottie Engram’s tea kettle to mimic her dead husband Rudolph whistling their song, ‘You Give Me Fever.’ Keeping Lemuel company at night is his collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed World Literature. His favorite authors are Kafka and Lao Tzu. Still, something is missing from Lemuel’s consummate existence. Lem’s hermit uncle Leonard perishes under violently mystical circumstances in the Unconscious Forest and bequeaths him the creature in question. Lemuel’s nirvana is instantly upended. He is forced to caretake the inexplicable beast, root out its elusive origins, and safeguard it from its nemeses: the looming Strangitor, Mabelthe mountain woman, and Sister Shane, all while trying to make a dollar or two off the animal himself.

About the author:

Martin’s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Chicago Review, Night Train, Wind, Greensboro Review, Adirondack Review (Fulton Prize Winner), and elsewhere. Martin’s first novel, Oranges for Magellan, was published in 2022 by Regal House Publishing, an indiepress in North Carolina. He lives in Santa Monica with his wife Paris and their two abandoned cats, Slim and Martin, who wandered into their yard one day and adopted them.

About Apprentice House:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process. As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion. Students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.

Award winning writer, Alex Poppe is coming out with her next award-winning book, Breakfast Wine, a personal, enticing memoir with all kinds of emotional adventured.

A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages Alex to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq. One crazy event after the next, from being thrown off the back of a truck to working alongside Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders, she discovers colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn. Alex becomes educated in Kurdish culture and politics beyond the classroom and her experiences living in the Middle East before and during the COVID lockdown before her father’s passing. This is a story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.

“This is Poppe’s most enticing piece of work yet!” said Kevin Atticks, Apprentice House director.

This book is available on June 10th, 2025, on Amazon, bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, and wherever books are sold.

Description:

Dress-obsessed and directionless, 44-year-old Alex Poppe can’t get her life together. A business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher, she works a dead-end marketing job under a mammary gland-fixated man and still waits tables to make ends meet. A chance encounter with an acclaimed journalist encourages her to accept a teaching position in northern Iraq, which charms with a heart and a fist. Dining with a pistol-packing hitman, being thrown off the back of a truck during a humanitarian aid drop, and unknowingly working alongside one of Sweden’s most notorious sex offenders are colored-glass pieces of information that fall together in a turn, educating Alex in Kurdish culture and politics beyond what her students teach her in the classroom and what she experiences as a Western woman living in the Middle East. There are earthquakes and building fires and a small war juxtaposed against the senseless, drug-fueled death of a good friend and the bone chilling aftermath of the security police’s investigation. Alex navigates teaching online during the COVID lockdown with the help of WhatsApp before her father’s unexpected passing pushes her to return to the US. Blending memoir, personal essay, local topography, and culture, Breakfast Wine is a frank, human story of pursuing an unconventional life and finding a way home.

About the author:

Alex is a business analyst, turned actor, turned teacher/humanitarian aid volunteer, turned author. Living in places such as Iraq, the West Bank, and Ukraine shaped her understanding of privilege, hegemonic legacy, resilience, and the power of kindness. Her fiction illuminates fierce and funny women overcoming adversity in the aftermath of violence.

Three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly has praised Alex’s writing: “Care about these characters and you might help build a warmer world, a less predatory world. The stories seem to unfold effortlessly, but at a deeper level, Alex takes truths that everybody knows and makes them into truths no one can ignore.”

Booklist has called Alex’s writing “brisk, raw, and unflinching.”

Alex Poppe is the author of four works of literary fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019), and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Duende won the 2024 American Legacy Book Awards in the novella category, the 2023 International Book Awards in the novella category, and was a 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist. Jinwar and Other Stories won the 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Award in the adult book category and was a 2022 International Book Awards finalist. In 2018, Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and commended for the Baker Prize among others. In 2021, Alex was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where Breakfast Wine began.

About Apprentice House:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process.

As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion.

Students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively. 

New author Alexandria Faulkenbury is releasing her debut novel, Somewhere Past the End, May 20th, 2025

Somewhere Past the End offers a panoramic view of an intense cult and how one involved family and how the repercussions of their choices muddy the lines between truth, belief, and delusion.

“Written with sureness and visceral emotion, Faulkenbury gives us a tense, close up view of the formation of a cult and one woman’s courageous escape, all wrapped around a gripping mystery that will have you questioning what is real. Both a vivid page-turner, and a nuanced examination of human nature, Somewhere Past the End, is a nourishing read. I highly recommend it,” said Sara Read, author of Johanna Porter is Not Sorry and Principles of (E)motion.

Somewhere Past the End is available in your local bookstore, in addition to Amazon.

Description: Alice Greene knows it’s a hoax when the leader of the cult she’s been raised in announces the end of the world. She also knows it’s the perfect chance to escape before he finds out she’s pregnant with the baby she’s not supposed to have. But as she watches his prophecy come true and over 100 members of the group disappear into a plume of smoke and light, all her plans crumble. Still reeling from the disappearance, Alice finds the other survivors and reconnects with her childhood best friend, Edwin. He’s got a message from their vanished leader: He and Alice will shepherd the remaining members. Certain she’s the wrong person for the job, but terrified she’ll lose the only family she has left, Alice struggles to find a way forward until she discovers her mother’s hidden journal. In it, she learns the secrets and lies that built their community, including one that will change her friendship with Edwin forever. As the consequences of these revelations come to light and Edwin’s convictions grow feverish, she must confront the faith of her past or risk losing the future she longs for.

About the author:

Alexandria Faulkenbury’s story was inspired, in part, by her departure from evangelicalism and the deconstruction that followed. Her work has been featured in The Maine Review and Mom Egg Review, among others. She lives in South Carolina with her husband, two rambunctious kids, and one ornery dog. Read more of her work and stay updated on her writing journey atalexandriafaulkenbury.com.

About Apprentice House:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process.

As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion.

Students in these courses serve as staff in Apprentice House’s acquisitions, design, and marketing departments, respectively.

How Not to Fly an Airplane: A Female Pilot’s Journey, a memoir by Shirley Phillips, hits shelves on May 20th, 2025.

From former pilot and first-time author Shirley Phillips comes a thrilling memoir about life in the air, single motherhood, and never giving up, even when your dreams seem impossible. Join Shirley as she shares her experience and answers all those questions you didn’t know you had – why are there so few female pilots? What is it like to be on a plane when the engine suddenly gives out? What are pilots really thinking during those long flights? Is it possible to pursue a career, chase your dreams, and be a single parent? Filled with anecdotes – from her childhood in a small town, to being her airline’s first pregnant pilot, to becoming a single mother to two girls, to her own battle with chronic illness – Shirley pens a compelling picture that speaks to mothers, daughters, sisters, and any woman who dares to fly.

“Truly an inspirational story of courage and perseverance against all odds” said Laurie L. Gordy, PhD, Higher Education Administrator.

‘How Not to Fly an Airplane‘ is an exhilarating book… filled with white-knuckle moments and twists and turns” said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Professor of History.

How Not to Fly an Airplane: A Female Pilot’s Journey is available wherever books are sold.

Description:

Shirley M Phillips knew she wanted to be a pilot when she was fourteen years old, thanks to an introductory flight in a Cessna that her father gave her and her twin sister at their local airport. Living in a small New England town where no one in her family had aviation experience, and at a time when only two percent of professional pilots were female, her decision to pursue aviation from the moment she left the ground set her on an unexpected path. How to Not Fly an Airplane is about learning to fly before you are old enough to drive a car, and teaching others when you are nearly always mistaken for being the pilot’s girlfriend, wife, or daughter. It’s about the many mistakes you can make in an airplane, and what it’s like to solve them, thousands of feet in the air or just a few feet above the trees. It’s about finding a sense of identity as a twin, becoming the first pregnant pilot at an airline, and losing a friend and former student in an infamous plane crash. What happens when a student pilot freezes on the flight controls just a few hundred feet in the air? How do you deal with a flight instructor who takes out a runway light during a botched landing and then let’s go of the stick? What’s it like to have an engine failure when your airplane only has one engine? Told through Phillips’s wide-ranging experience in over four decades of flying, How to Not Fly an Airplane is a memoir for anyone who has ever wondered what it’s like to fly, and inspiration for anyone who has felt compelled to do something nobody thought they could do.

About the author:

Shirley M Phillips lives in southern New Hampshire so close to an airport she can critique all the landing approaches from her deck. She shares her home and keyboard with her cat, Amina. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Ravens Perch, and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Lessons Learned from My Cat, among other publications. More information can be found at her website at shirleymphillips.com.

About Apprentice House:

Apprentice House is the nation’s first and largest entirely student-managed book publisher. Students at Loyola University Maryland are responsible for every aspect of the publishing process, from acquisitions to design and publication of every book. Our mission is, first and foremost, to educate students about the book publishing process. As a program within the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, it is driven by student work conducted in four courses: Introduction to Book Publishing, Manuscript Acquisitions and Development, Book Design and Production, and Book Marketing and Promotion.