FrizzLit Editions Is Here to Save Your Brain

If Christopher Frizzelle has anything to say about it, the future of literature will look a little like the past: intimate, weird, vivid, fiercely independent, and published by people who actually love books.

His new small press, FrizzLit Editions, just reached its ultimate Kickstarter goal of $38,440, which means it is set to publish three books in 2025. The first book—Nobuko, a hybrid novel by author and psychologist Trisha Ready—will publish on August 22. A second book, a collection of essays by beloved Seattle writer Rebecca Brown, has also been funded. And now a third book, by longtime Stranger writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede, will also hit the streets before the end of the year. The funding of the three-book inaugural season proves there’s a place—and a need—for artful, brainy writing in 2025 and beyond.

Frizzelle, editor-in-chief of The Stranger from 2007-2016 and founder of the popular FrizzLit Book Clubs, says this new publishing venture is partly personal. "I missed editing features for The Stranger,” he says. “For many years of my life, that was my reason for getting out of bed in the morning. I really do miss that, and I need to get that itch scratched in some other way.”

But FrizzLit Editions is also a fight—against fascism, against corporate publishing homogeneity, and against what Frizzelle calls “the stupidity crisis.”

“Dorothy Parker, George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, all these people did things material things in their life to fight fascism, and I'm like, I'm not doing fucking anything," Frizzelle says. "So let’s make works of art that someone in the middle of Iowa could pick up and read and it actually could change their life. I know, that's hypothetical. But if you put out things in the world that can do that, they can have downstream effects. So, this is how I'm going to fight back, by putting new works of art into the world.”

FrizzLit’s approach is old-school in the best way. Like Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf with the Hogarth Press, or Hemingway’s early books published by friends, this is a hands-on, community-driven operation—designed for art, not algorithms.

“There’s this misconception that a good book has to sell like Harry Potter,” says Frizzelle. “But To the Lighthouse lost money. It was a financial loser. And it’s the best book of the 20th century.”

So what happens to those kinds of books today—books too strange or subtle for Big Five publishing? “How does that kind of book enter the world now?” Frizzelle asks.

“It doesn’t anymore, if it has to go through Random House, because they need to sell 100,000 copies.”

“I know a lot of writers who have really worthwhile projects that are works of art that are not commercial. But they deserve to be published,” he adds.

Ready’s Nobuko is a brief novel told in 108 compact chapters, none more than 150 words. Frizzelle calls the structure a “Ready Sequence,” a new form he says other writers might want to adopt.

Set in 1980s Japan, the story follows a young queer American woman who falls in love with Nobuko, a mysterious woman who lives in a rustic cabin and makes dentures. There are samurai swords, yakuza, food, art, and love in various unruly forms.

Ready, a poet, psychologist, and former managing director of Hugo House, was once a regular contributor to The Stranger; her 2015 essay on Susan Sontag and chemotherapy was named a Longreads “Best of the Year.” With Nobuko, she’s created something strange and beautiful that—in a better world—might already be on every indie bestseller list. Until then, FrizzLit is stepping up.

“I'm against stupidity in the world,” Frizzelle says, “and I think if you're just, like, drooling and playing video games and looking at TikTok all day long, you're not actually thinking, you're just sort of being marketed to. But if you're picking up a book written by someone you don't know, you have to use your brain. Not that that's going to solve the stupidity crisis, but I do think [we need] less of this idea in our culture that that the good life is, like, kicking back and watching a movie and drinking, and, and more, like the good life is thinking and creating and being in community.”

In keeping with that idea of being in community, FrizzLit books will be printed in Seattle by Pioneer Square Press, run by the owner of Arundel Books. Even the distribution company, Asterism Books, is local.

Each title will also include original illustrations, and be designed by Corianton Hale, FrizzLit’s art director, The Stranger’s Art Director at large, and longtime friend of Frizzelle. The two met at Kinko’s back when Hale was “making zines and being a punk,” in Frizzelle’s words, and long before either joined The Stranger.

The second FrizzLit book will be a collection of animal-themed essays by the legendary Rebecca Brown. Known for her fierce, elegant writing and her Lambda Literary Award-winning novel The Gifts of the Body, Brown’s new collection will include stories about squirrels, dogs, and human tenderness, told with the clarity and compassion that have made her a Seattle icon.

Book three will be a reimagined memoir by writer and Stranger staffer Charles Mudede. It’s based on his 2009 feature about living in an elevator shaft in Seattle’s Pioneer Square—and one unforgettable night walking through the Great Northern tunnel beneath the city.

Ultimately, FrizzLit Editions is animated by a love of literature, and by the idea that the Seattle literary community needs a booster. “I think people in the center of publishing kind of look down on Seattle or think that they're better than us, and I actually think we're just as good. We just don't have anyone fighting for us,” Frizzelle says.

The venture is also about people—writers who need to be read, editors who need to edit, and readers who need more than TikTok, Netflix, and a nightly scroll through despair.

“It’s not about downloading my political views into someone’s mind,” Frizzelle says. “It’s about waking up people’s imaginations and their desire to create.” ◼︎

Trisha Ready w/ Christopher Frizzelle at Elliott Bay Book Company on Friday, August 22, 2025 at 7:00 p.m., free.

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Bess Lovejoy is the author of Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses and Northwest Know-How: Haunts. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in The Ghastling, Happy Reader, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She lives in Seattle.