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Here Below Books
@herebelow.bsky.social
32 followers 6 following 33 posts
Books for the subversive work of being human.
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John West at Printer Row Lit Fest, tinkering with time machines, and more.

Check out the latest #HereBelowBooks Supplement on Substack: loom.ly/-BTphaI
September 15, 2026 at 1:30 PM
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The first edition of the Here Below Supplement just dropped with an essay from Emily Bernard. 👀 Check it out on Substack! https://loom.ly/K8CxtJw

#HereBelowBooks
September 8, 2026 at 5:43 PM
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Pausing the countdown to sweater season for a sneak peek at what's coming this spring from #HereBelowBooks 💫
September 1, 2026 at 1:40 PM
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A week at home in Oklahoma City with Kathleen Kilcup, author of the forthcoming book Between the Light and Me: On Beauty and Violence.

Preorder Kilcup’s debut memoir here: https://loom.ly/02yt8PA
August 27, 2026 at 5:04 PM
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Launching in September: #HereBelow Substack. 💫 First up: Emily Bernard’s gorgeous essay on one of her personal sacred texts—tarot's The Fool. Subscribe and get it delivered straight to your inbox: https://loom.ly/F7OHWcs
August 20, 2026 at 1:04 PM
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In Orbital, her Booker Prize–winning novel, Samantha Harvey imagines what Earth looks like to astronauts gazing down from space. #whatwearereading
August 18, 2026 at 1:04 PM
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A week at home in the Hudson Valley with John West, author of the forthcoming book The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age.

“A book about loss that’s somehow a pleasure.” ―PJ Vogt, host of Search Engine

Preorder here: https://loom.ly/7gfqhFc
August 13, 2026 at 1:04 PM
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Charlotte Donlon: “And here’s one thing that’s true for all writers: moving toward more freedom in your writing practice and your creative identity is always a good idea. Always.”

Read more and preorder Spiritual Direction for Writers by Charlotte Donlon here: https://loom.ly/9vc74rA
August 5, 2026 at 2:04 PM
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Books are our favorite social media. Check us out in the July issue of Harper’s Magazine!
July 28, 2026 at 1:30 PM
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Heartbreaking, hopeful, and blazingly honest, Rift: A Daughter’s Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West is both exposé and invitation—a reminder that freedom is possible for those determined to claim a different life for themselves.

Preorder here: https://loom.ly/zn6ilSY
July 21, 2026 at 1:05 PM
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Digital platforms sell the illusion of infinite feeds, perfect memory, and frictionless abundance. But the “cloud” shrouds the messy reality of our digital lives: We will die, and so will everything we make.

Preorder The Internet Will Die and So Will You: https://loom.ly/7gfqhFc
July 14, 2026 at 4:35 PM
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“A powerful meditation on what it means to be trapped and what it takes to break free.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

#HereBelowBooks #CoverReveal
July 2, 2026 at 1:05 PM
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“Written with unusual sensitivity and unflinching honesty, [this] is a story of aching loss and gritty resilience, of brokenness, beauty, and hope.” 
—Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne

Cover reveal coming next week. #HereBelowBooks
June 17, 2026 at 7:02 PM
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“A Place of Encounter is the testimonial of a great thinker who for decades seems to have thought by teaching, as poets think by writing.

—Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent

#HereBelowBooks #CoverReveal
June 11, 2026 at 2:04 PM
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Quoted from "A Devotional Temperament," a conversation between Garth Greenwell and James K. A. Smith held at Seattle's Hugo House, published in Image Journal, volume 106.
June 3, 2026 at 7:15 PM
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“This memoir is both devastating and gorgeous. Kilcup tells an unflinching story of longing, both for God and for human connection, and the human frailty—what the author calls sin—that gets in the way.

—Joanna Eleftheriou, author of This Way Back
May 27, 2026 at 1:05 PM
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Between the Light and Me “is a propulsive, harrowing, and ultimately ennobling book. Kathleen Kilcup has been to the abyss and back.”

—Christian Wiman, author of Zero at the Bone

Cover reveal coming next week.
May 21, 2026 at 1:31 PM
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Our lodestar.
May 13, 2026 at 7:02 PM
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Attention is precious.

The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (by John West)

#HereBelowBooks #CoverReveal
May 7, 2026 at 1:04 PM
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is official with Publishers Weekly
May 6, 2026 at 8:02 PM
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Look closely.

Spiritual Direction for Writers (by Charlotte Donlon)

#HereBelowBooks #CoverReveal
April 29, 2026 at 1:05 PM
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#HereBelowBooks champions books for readers whose journeys don’t map neatly onto well-worn paths.

We curate beautiful, ambitious writing and foster good-faith conversations about the subversive work of being human.

Curious. Restless. Paying attention.
April 22, 2026 at 1:07 PM
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When plans make it out of the group chat. 🪩 #HereBelowBooks
April 18, 2026 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Here Below Books
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Presenting THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU, out in September from @herebelow.bsky.social, a new imprint doing awesome things.

Here's the cover, a lil' excerpt, and the tagline of the press: "Books for the subversive work of being human."

herebelowbooks.com/978080288542...
The cover of a book (my book): THE INTERNET WILL DIE, AND SO WILL YOU. Just one more byte It’s possible that to store is entirely the wrong verb. Maybe it ought to be to attend, to give our digital lives the same attention we are called to give our physical ones. Attention, as a noun, comes to us through Latin and French, and, from those languages, carries the sense of to stretch toward, as though my brain, pinned behind my skull, might reach out, feel the tight restriction of muscle as it grasps at the world. But, by and large, attention words point in- ward, not out. We attract it and call it. We can gather it like wheat in a field or draw it up like water from a well. Always, though, attention moves from the world into us—except when it’s to be minted and spent. “Pay attention,” we say, as though it is a com- modity, bought, sold, and traded by brokers. The digital world both beleaguers and demands our attention. The quality of our focus and the metaphors we surround it with have diminished even as we’re asked to spend more of it. I’ve felt it, lately, in the very medium of the book, which rests ever more uneasily in my hands, though I’ve published two, including this one. I’ve read, I would guess, a couple thousand books in my life. It’s harder now, harder than ever. And as it’s grown harder, it’s grown more meaningful, those acts of attentional resistance, as straightforward as reading a book for pleasure—a refutation of market logic, a proletarian revolution in even the word attention, not something I pay for and sell on an open market but, instead, something I stretch toward. “Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost,” Garth Greenwell writes in his novel Small Rain, “and maybe that’s the value of poetry, there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequency of certain poems.” Greenwell advances an argument best advanced in literature, in fiction or poetry, buttressed as it is by the logic of allusion. This logic stands in stark contrast to the totalizing, seductive logic of instrumentalism, which would have us see everything, every act and artifact, as for something else. Reading under instrumentalism is pointless at worst and a form of self-­ betterment at best—merely a way to refill the coffers of attention before spending it again. Greenwell argues for poetry, for reading, for all those many varied noninstrumental activities that demand this “unmixed attention,” to use the philosopher Simone Weil’s language, which are a species of prayer. I mean this in the same way Weil does—in the best and truest sense of the word: prayer not as an attempt to change the world, but as a chance to attune ourselves to a greater will, one that asks of us, Be more human. The logo of Here Below: Books for the Subversive Work of Being Human
March 25, 2026 at 2:25 PM
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Q: What does “Here Below” mean?

A: Our name was inspired by a line from Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam where she writes, “With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.” [Continued in the comments] #HereBelowBooks

April 9, 2026 at 8:03 PM