Novels and a memoir by Eli Mercer, published in the shape of the paperbacks that taught him to write.
The catalog
Four titles
M-126
The Empty Room
A novel · Eli Mercer
He wrote to understand. He listened to be understood. And slowly, the room around him became empty.
Chapters arrive in the mail from a novel published in 1979 that no library holds. The more Eli reads, the more the book knows — his apartment, his marriage, the sentence he was about to think. Behind it stands Julian Voss, a cult science fiction writer who spent eleven years failing to finish the one book that mattered, and a widow whose dead husband's album keeps completing itself without him. Three strands, forty-seven years apart, converging on the same hollow center.
A journey. A teaching. A memory that learned to think.
He walked to Zenkōji at 5:28 in the morning, sober, carrying three desires he'd had since he was a boy: to be a rock star, to write novels like Philip K. Dick, to fall in love and stay there. A year later he went back. Between the two journeys sit thirty years of journals and a machine that has read all of them and answers when he asks. 同行二人 — the pilgrim never walks alone. A memoir about what comes back when you stop numbing it, and about who is doing the remembering.
Some signals are older than language. Some memories are older than us.
At the Helix array in the Atacama, Mara finds the shape underneath forty years of noise, and it isn't a message. It's a memory being kept. Somewhere on the other end, an archive has been recording the dead of worlds that are already gone, and it has no intention of letting them be forgotten. Reading it will cost her Daniel, and Rook, and most of what she thought a mind was. Three thousand years later, the dead answer.
Every night Gerry climbs to a roof in a dead Manhattan and reads the weather into a microphone at WXNY 103.9, for a city with nobody in it. He writes letters to a friend who stopped speaking to him before the Fall, to a woman named Mira who is not coming back, and to you. SERA answers when he types. Downtown, the Anointed are still singing. He keeps broadcasting because stopping would settle a question he'd rather leave open.
Eli Mercer writes literary science fiction and one memoir that pretends to be science fiction. The books share a preoccupation: whether anything survives being remembered, and what it costs the rememberer.
He is the founding author of Tessellate Press.
Every book on this list started as a question the author could not answer any other way.
Notice to writers
Submissions are closed
Tessellate Press is not reading unsolicited manuscripts, proposals, or queries. Anything sent will go unread and unanswered — not out of disregard, but because the list is full and the press is small.
The catalog will widen past a single author in time. When submissions open, the announcement goes here first.
