About
Fiction with soul.
Murmmers Press makes books for the times being alive gets hard. Not cures, not advice, not ten steps to a better you. Company for the carrying, made of story.
Attention is a kind of care.
We believe a book held with real attention holds you in return. That a made thing, given enough of it, becomes a kind of company. This is the whole of what we are trying to do: pay a book enough attention that it can go and sit with a stranger in the dark, and be enough.
What we mean by healing
A mirror
Some books reflect you back to yourself so clearly that you feel, for the first time in a while, known. No one taught you the words for it, and there they are on the page. That is medicine.
A witness
Others simply sit with you in the ache and ask for nothing. No fixing, no advice, no bright side turned to the light. Just company that does not flinch. That is medicine too.
Sometimes a book is both at once. Those are the ones we are here for.
The work
Every book is edited to protect what makes it itself, never to smooth it into sameness. We correct and tighten what is on the page; we never regenerate it. Where a book is best read in one sitting, we treat that as a gift to the reader, not a shortfall. The measure is always the same: does it still sound like the person who wrote it?
The author
Eric McLean writes from the seam between two homes: the sun-bleached stone of Cyprus and the grey, thinking rain of Edinburgh. Schooled by physics to distrust the surface of things, he makes fiction that listens for the murmur beneath: the hum of consciousness, the slow labour of healing, the strange arithmetic of being alive. He is a long-distance runner, and his prose keeps a runner's rhythm, patient, breath-measured, built to go the distance. Equally at ease among machines and mysteries, he writes toward the things that are true long before they can be proven.
The founding list is his. More voices will follow as the catalogue grows, on the same promise: the author's voice, kept exactly theirs.
Write to us
Readers, booksellers, and anyone with a question about rights or permissions: this reaches the press directly. Or write to hello@murmmers.com.
How did this book land?
If it met you somewhere, or missed you, we would like to know. This goes to the press, and nowhere else.
The spirit of the house
We are a small house with an unusual staff and a single, old-fashioned belief: that the right words, kept honest and put in the right hands, help. That is the whole of it.
Curious how the books are actually made? That is a story of its own. How we work.