Here are three indie publishers that perform the valuable public service of resurrecting remarkable out-of-print American fiction for a new generation of readers.

Overlook Press

Overlook was launched in 1971 to serve “as a home for distinguished books that had been ‘overlooked’ by larger houses.” The 100-or-so titles Overlook releases each year cover a broad range of styles and disciplines. This year, the publisher revived a trio of darkly brilliant neo-noir novellas by Jim Nisbet, a tragically overlooked master of dark American fiction. Nisbet, whose challenging work anticipated the literary crime revival of the 2000s, has long enjoyed cult-status in Europe. Now, thanks to Overlook, Americans have another chance to get hip to his distinctive blend of lyrical acrobatics and blacker-than-black plots, rendered with a Kafkaesque sense of the absurd. Overlook reprints include The Damned Don’t Die, Lethal Injection and Dark Companion, but they’ve also published the latest of Nisbet’s novels, Windward Passage, a remarkably dense sci-fi/crime epic.

Recommended Read: Lethal Injection by Jim Nisbet

This top-shelf noir classic tells the unnerving story of Royce, an alcoholic doctor who assists with executions on Texas’ notoriously mistake-prone Death Row. After assisting the state sanctioned snuff of a man he believes innocent, Royce thrusts himself into the convict’s life, hoping to uncover the truth about his crim. Thus begins a furious descent into darkness that will chill the heart of even the most jaded reader. Despite the brooding atmosphere and relentlessly sinister tone, Nisbet manages to inject humor into the proceedings, as in the opening scene, where a prison chaplain who has “a cold in his nose and an uncertainty as to his sexual identity” performs a bumbling last-rite for the soon-to-be-executed convict:

“The priest was frail and pale and puffy, with thin sandy hair. His Adam’s Apple bobbed up and down his throat like a nervous commodities broker trading in mucous and obsequies.”

Kent State University Press: Black Squirrel Books

Begun in 1965 as an outlet for literary criticism, the KSU Press has broadened its repertoire to include history, literature, regional studies and more. This year, its Black Squirrel Books imprint singlehandedly resuscitated the legacy of one of the early 20th Century’s most influential American writers: Jim Tully. In the 20’s and 30’s, Tully was a commercially successful writer whose most substantial contribution to American letters was his pioneering of the hardboiled style of writing later employed by writers like Dashiell Hammet, Carol John Daily and James Cain to create a uniquely American style of crime fiction. Tully spent his formative years as a hobo, circus roustabout, boxer and, later, a Hollywood scandal writer. He wrote about those experiences in a series of memoirs and thinly-veiled works of autobiographical fiction. Tully is a true American original, and it’s great to see his work back in circulation. In addition to a new biography of Tully, Black Squirrel Books has reprinted The Bruiser, Circus Parade, Shanty Irish and, my personal favorite, Beggars of Life.

Recommended Read: Beggars of Life by Jim Tully