Two Great New Books and One Awesome Christmas Sale from BCC Press

Oh boy, have we been busy at BCC Press. Here it is December, and we are proud to present two more amazingly awesome, incredibly relevant, and deliciously readable new books just in time for Christmas shopping and Christmas-break reading. And, trust us, you will want them both.

First up is Emily January’s phenomenal memoir Home Yesterday. This memoir tells Emily’s coming-of-age story as she realizes that her Mormon parents divorced in the 1980s because her dad is gay. With unfailing honesty and good humor, Emily explains how she struggles to reconcile her strict Mormon upbringing with her profound love for her father. Further complicating the story is the fact that her father is safe, loving, and trustworthy, while her mother and stepfather are abusive and unsafe. Through all of this, Emily learns that she must move past the ideologies of her childhood and church in order to fully embrace a relationship with her father as a loving parent.

Emily’s story is naturally compelling, but it becomes even more so through her gorgeous writing. She processes her story as a thoughtful adult able to bring a powerful mind to bear on her childhood emotions. The result is spectacular, and we could not be prouder to present it to you. Here is a sneak peek made up of the introduction and the first two chapters, because we couldn’t resist letting you read a big chunk of this beautiful book.

Next on the list is something very rare and wonderful: a genuine (and genuinely funny) Mormon comic novel. Theric Jepson’s Byuck. The title, you can probably guess, is a portmanteau of BYU and yuck. But the novel itself is heavy on the BYU and very light on the yuck. But it is full of the kind of humor when you combine the comic possibilities that inhere in every BYU single’s ward with a writer whose own humorous view of life—sprinkled with postmodern experimentation and plenty of strange and wonderful literary conceits—takes him to some of the most unexpected places in Provo.

The actual Byuck of the title is the name of a Rock Opera that is perpetually being written by the main characters David Them and Curses Olai. Throw in a women’s lacrosse player named Referee, a weirdly uptight roommate named Peter, a cast of supporting characters that can legitimately be called “zany” and “madcap,” some sophisticated experimental writing with a variety of perspectives, genres, and discovered texts, and you get, well, a really funny book. Here is just a brief sample from the twenty-third chapter, “Peter Doesn’t Date.”

Home Yesterday and Byuck are the 16th and 17th books that BCC has published this year. And that, friends, is an amazing accomplishment for an all-volunteer, completely non-profit publishing venture that doesn’t even have an address. We are celebrating like crazy, and that means we are having a pull-all-the-stops-out till-they-call-the-cops-out sale on our first 13 titles of the year