Thornwick Press is a new independent publishing house in Portland, Oregon. We acquire fiction novels that combine literary craftsmanship with the magnetic pull of genre storytelling. Because the best books don't ask you to choose between beauty and a plot you can't put down.
Big Five publishers force books into neat boxes. Literary fiction goes here. Genre fiction goes there. But the novels readers actually love, the ones that become word-of-mouth sensations, tend to live in the space between. We publish those books. Fiction with prose you want to underline and stories you stay up too late finishing.
"We're not interested in literary fiction that bores people or genre fiction that insults them. We want the ones that do both things at once."
Fantasy, science fiction, and weird fiction with literary ambition. World-building that serves character, not the other way around.
Love stories with teeth. Romances where you fall for the writing as hard as you fall for the characters.
Horror, gothic, psychological suspense. The unsettling stories that crawl under your skin and stay there.
Novels about the world we actually live in. Clear-eyed, emotionally honest, impossible to forget.
New voices are our specialty. We invest in first-time authors the way the Big Five used to, before they stopped taking risks.
Outstanding fiction from other languages. Stories the English-speaking world hasn't heard yet, but should.
Portland has always been a writer's city. Home to the world's largest independent bookstore, a thriving workshop and residency culture, and a writing community that spans literary fiction to speculative worlds. Thornwick Press is rooted here because this is where the authors are, and where readers still believe in the power of a physical book.
We read every submission personally. No algorithms, no interns skimming query letters. If your fiction lives in the space between literary and genre, we want to see it. Debut authors especially welcome.