Third Circle Press is an independent publisher rooted in the hills of middle Tennessee and open to the wider world. We publish literary fiction and nonfiction by writers whose sentences earn their keep, and whose questions stay with the reader long after the book is closed.
We publish literary fiction about the intersections of life: the places where one person meets another, where one idea crosses another, where a memory collides with a moment. We are drawn to novels and stories that take seriously the strange weather of a single mind and the quieter seismology of the rooms two people share.
We welcome work rooted in Tennessee and the broader South, and we welcome work that begins elsewhere and ends here. What we ask of a manuscript is only that its sentences have been considered, and that its questions have been earned.
Our nonfiction exists to help Tennesseans, and anyone else who picks up one of our books, live a better and more fulfilling life. We are not interested in quick fixes or borrowed formulas. We are interested in thoughtful, honest, and useful books about how to work, how to think, how to make, how to rest, and how to be in relation to others.
This includes memoir and personal essay, books on craft and vocation, field-tested wisdom from practitioners across the state, and accessible writing from scholars who still believe that a good idea deserves a good sentence.
The first circle is the self. The second circle is the people immediately around us. The third circle is the wider world we reach by writing and by reading: the circle that lets a life in Tennessee touch a life anywhere, and an idea from anywhere take root here.
A young Québécois man leaves his father's farm with an envelope of his mother's savings, and in a cathedral in Poitiers his life splits in two. A literary novel in five musical movements about art, desire, grief, and the slow work of becoming whole.
Read MoreFull-length fiction in which people, ideas, and places meet and change one another. We publish two to three novels a year.
Linked and unlinked collections: work we return to because a single image, sentence, or turn of mind continues to repay attention.
Essay collections and memoirs with something useful to say about living well: craft, vocation, place, relationship, and time.
Short, beautifully produced guides on subjects our readers actually live with: working, parenting, aging, grieving, gardening, reading.
An ongoing line of books by and about Tennesseans, in the belief that a region writes itself most truthfully when it writes slowly.
A small, intentional list of translations, because the wider world is part of our reading, and ought to be part of our publishing.