Redear Press publishes fiction and nonfiction in short runs on good paper. Independent, patient, and unhurried, we are a house for books that earn a second reading.
Iris Mellor spends a summer at her grandmother's fishing cabin in the Mississippi Delta, learning to read the water — and the woman who taught her father everything he knew about it. A first novel about inheritance, silt, and the small mercies of standing still.
“A debut of unusual patience. Vance writes the South the way the light falls on it — slantwise, and without hurry.” — The Paris Review
Iris Mellor spends a summer at her grandmother's fishing cabin in the Mississippi Delta, learning to read the water and the woman who taught her father everything.
Eleven essays on the hours that rarely make it into the record: the hour before dawn in a printshop, the hour after a funeral, the hour spent waiting for a kettle.
A civil servant in 1970s Edinburgh keeps two notebooks: one for the work she is meant to be doing, one for a private history of the city's vanishing tea rooms. A study in how small defections become whole lives.
A natural history of the sunfish, told through the life of one pond in east Texas and the people who have tended it for four generations — field biology, family memoir, and the quiet politics of water.
The Last Sunfish joins twelve debuts named this week. The judges praised “a first book that trusts the reader to sit still.” The shortlist is announced in July.
Read the note →On paper, patience, and the hour before dawn — a conversation with the author of A Chapter of Small Hours.
Read the interview →Four titles, hand-set in Spectral and printed in Somerset and the Carolina Lowcountry. Browse the season.
See the catalogue →Why a small press spends a disproportionate amount of its life thinking about stock, grain, and the weight of a page.
Read the essay →Ada M. Vance and Henry Thibault read from the Spring list, a short walk from our Broad Street office. Free; arrive early.
Details →We named the press for a fish — a small thing, a palm-sized panfish that lives in the shallow, warm waters of the American South. The redear has a red flap on its gill cover, roughly where an ear might be on a creature that had them. We liked the quiet absurdity of it. We liked the idea that a serious thing could be named for something small.
Redear Press is run from Charleston by editors working also in Galway and Hampshire. We publish fiction and nonfiction — six to eight titles a year, in short runs, on paper we have chosen carefully. Our books are typeset in Spectral and printed at small letterpress shops in Somerset and the Carolina Lowcountry.
We publish books that feel like objects — books you might keep on a shelf near the window, pick up on a winter afternoon, and find still alive ten years later.
Cavillon Editions is the imprint under which Redear Press brings neglected and out-of-print books back into print. Where the main list looks forward, Cavillon looks back — to the essay collection that fell out of the catalogues, the regional novel no one troubled to keep, the memoir or field guide worth a second life.
Each Cavillon title is reset from the ground up — not scanned and reflowed, but retypeset in Spectral, repaginated, and proofed against the best surviving edition. We add a short introduction on why the book still matters and who first made it, and print it to the same standard as everything else we publish: sewn, on good paper, made to be kept.
We reprint works that are out of copyright, and works whose rights we have cleared with the author or their estate. If you know of a book that belongs on this list — something quietly essential that has slipped out of print — write to us at [email protected].
We don't have Instagram, TikTok, or X accounts. We are not going to make any. We think people belong on social media — not brands.
A publisher's job is to make books. It is not, we think, to manufacture a steady drip of content about making books. Time spent in the feed is time not spent reading manuscripts, calling authors, or choosing paper. We would rather do the work.
If you want to tell the world about a book of ours — and we would love that — please post it from your own account. Tag #redearpress and we will find it. That is the social media we are interested in: yours.