the debut novel by
About the book:

I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer is an epistolary novel telling the story of a young Black student navigating campus politics, community tensions, and his own guilt over his past life as a drug runner. He finds space for atonement working at a beauty salon, but as scandal erupts fate takes a haunting, complex turn that encompasses radical politics, sexism, and racism. Contrasting campus satire with an ode to the working-class culture of a Black beauty shop, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer presents a complex parable on the question of grace, who needs it, who is scared of it, who runs from it, and who struggles to accept it. Drawing from Native Son, The Stranger, and The Sorrows Of Young Werther, I Never Dreamed You'd Leave In Summer is a protest novel that breaks every rule of protest novels and is a ferocious, irreverent, yet compassionate read.


Praise for the novel:

"Phenomenal!"
    — EJ Koh, author of The Liberators

"A complex and compelling coming-apart-of-age story"
    — New Books Network

"An author who knows the territory he maps"
    — Steve Potter, Raven Chronicle Press

"Your heart will rise and fall, soar and shatter, and all the while you will be astonished by the beauty and wit and steel of the words.  Robert Lashley guides you through this tale of a young scholar's journey toward love, wisdom, and self-definition with a poet's delicate eye and an activist's righteous power.   Only he could have created this one-of-a-kind book."
    — Shawn Levy, author of The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman:  A Life, and A Year in the Life of Death

“A select few writers can take you on a journey where there is no air in the atmosphere; however, those writers make you forget you need to breathe through passages written in a profoundly emotional essence where the writer's metaphors rise like roots to keep the reader on life supporting drugs.
    Robert Lashley pens a bottomless soul. Once you open this book, Robert grabs your attention and chains greatness between each line, each chapter in an unfettered rawness that allows us to see beyond our imagination.
   ‘I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer.’ The old Stevie Wonder line from a song of pain and loss - Robert Lashley has brought that into the feeling of survival amongst a wide range of men and women breathing amongst gangsters to educators - street and from the halls of higher learning.
    Robert Lashley is the painter of words. We are observers as he takes us to a literary stratosphere with fierce and sincere pain but ironic- hilarious obscene, and tender times.
    I say we stay tuned for more to come from Robert Lashley's greatness.”
    — Alvin L.A. Horn, NAACP Image Award Nominee, Essence Magazine and USA-TODAY best-selling author, 2012 Billboard Spoken Word Award Winner

“Taking on those Hotep to Frantz Fanon to Judith Butler to Gloria Naylor all in the Tacoma ghetto. There is no one writing like Robert Lashley and he may have enough Baldwin in him to save us all.”
    — Paul E Nelson, poet, interviewer, and author of A Time Before Slaughter: Featuring Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia

“Vital to contemporary literature, a poetic history of a rapidly changing place, a celebration of Black lives lived, and a tour de force critique of the exclusionary literary canon that seeks to marginalize art crafted outside white privilege and the ivory tower.”
    — Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics and Girl Zoo

"Albert and the other characters in Lashley’s novel ring as true as those in his poems. The conceit of letter-writing is delivered with an earnestness that elicits empathy. Albert’s voice blends street talk and literary references with a bit of endearing nerd-speak. [...] This slim volume is a fairly quick read, but it will move you and challenge you."
    — Neil Mckay, Cascadia Daily News

"A striking and poignant perspective on contemporary America [...] will undoubtedly become a significant part of the African American literary canon."
    — Alassane Abdoulaye Dia, Ph.D., Western Washington University

About the author:

Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow, and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017), and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s, and The Cascadia Review, among others. In 2019, Entropy Magazine named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer is his first novel.

Coming Soon...


the debut novel by
About the book:

Midlife crisis looms over the world of our unnamed protagonist: a thankless teaching job, failed writing career, a family pulling away from him, and a growing obsession with the music of his favorite pop idol. He pores over her lyrics, uncovering parallels to the disintegration of his own life. When he finally decides to reach out to her through fan mail, things take a turn for the strange… Will the object of his obsession recognize his true self when those around him don't? How far will he go to be heard?

Your Biggest Fan is the debut literary work by Jeremy Rosenholtz, a dark and often hilarious metafictional fable about celebrity obsession, growing older, and the search for meaning in a world where the glamor of pop culture can be incompatible with the harshness of everyday life.


Praise for the novel:

“DEVIOUSLY COMIC, WITH GLIMMERS OF MANIA”
    — Kirkus Reviews

“Wickedly funny and delightfully strange! Rosenholtz’s dazzling debut pairs a sardonic takedown of modern fandom and parasocial relationships with an astute meta-commentary on life and literature in the post-pandemic age. Your Biggest Fan is the Gen X midlife crisis novel we didn’t know we needed.”

    — Emily Holleman, author of Cleopatra's Shadows

“Rosenholtz will make you laugh so hard at your middle age self that you'll forget to feel bad about how embarrassed your kids are by you. But even as Your Biggest Fan is a hilarious romp, it's also an exegesis on life, family, disappointment and the power of music.”

    — Melissa Kantor, author of Maybe One Day and Confessions of a Not It Girl

“I laughed out loud reading Your Biggest Fan. Out of his mid-life crisis, Rosenholtz has created a narrator in a mid-life crisis who is obsessed with doubles of all kinds — doppelgangers, mirrors, fictions — and who seeks redemption from the culture’s current emblem of good fame. Are the people in this narrative mirror closer or farther than they appear? To borrow an idea from the novel, Rosenholtz has written an omakase of unreliability with a concentration on the funny fish.”
    — Benjamin Gantcher, author of Snow Farmer and The Coronation of the Ghost

“The word 'fan' is a light-hearted, even affectionate, term one applies to a love of particular people, places and practices. But it derives from 'fanatic,' one with much darker overtones. In Your Biggest Fan, debut novelist Jeremy Rosenholtz deftly maps the blurry border between them in a tour de force of insight, intertextuality, and hilarity...” 

    — Jim Cullen, author of Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century

“An intriguing investigation of obsession and parasocial connections that is both hilarious and unsettling.”

    — Independent Book Review

About the author:

Jeremy Rosenholtz grew up in Wyoming and currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, two daughters, and a Golden Retriever.
An award-winning educator, he has taught English in independent schools for over thirty years. When a midlife crisis smacked him upside the head like a proverbial ton of bricks, Rosenholtz resisted the urge to join a motorcycle gang or hurl himself out of airplanes. Instead, he decided it was high time to write his first novel, Your Biggest Fan.

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