A new publishing imprint, BLUE BOOKS, is a home for high-quality fiction and nonfiction that reveals the friction, as startling as it is inevitable, when people and cultures find they have outgrown their past but can’t make sense of their future.

"A fascinating and cathartic read about an experience that is not over, but keeps getting weirder and more dangerous."

Dean Kuipers in Red Canary Magazine

All day long, the phone rings and buzzes. Friends checking in to take the

temperature of our emotional lives. Asking if we need masks or whether

we will add their grocery requests to our delivery lists. We give someone

a bag of rice from our stock; another friend texts to say she’s on her way

to drop off some muffins that she’s baked. I stand on the porch, she in the

driveway. The plan is to talk from that distance. What I’m not anticipating

is my bursting into tears upon seeing her bright, cheerful face, at the sheer

normalcy of a friendly visit.

Thrity Umrigar, An Epidemic of Love and Worry

Hundreds of Portland women linking arms to defy law enforcement called themselves The Wall of Moms as a direct tribute to the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, silent witnesses who gathered for 29 years in front of Argentina’s presidential palace to demand that the government account for their sons and daughters who had been “disappeared” by the Argentine government during the U.S.-backed “Dirty War” of the 1970s.

State-sponsored terrorism by Argentina’s military junta was thought to

be responsible for 30,000 deaths and decades later, many of its leaders are in

prison for crimes against humanity and genocide. Certainly a few unmarked

cars and riot cops aren’t equivalent.

Are they?

Tom Henderson, Fear and Loathing in Portlandia