(Every Monday in December, we're asking a local bookseller which books they'd like to receive for a holiday gift. Our first bookseller is Wesley Minter, who works at Third Place Books Seward Park. Wesley chose Proxies by Brian Blanchfield and In the Empire of the Air by Donald Britton.)

They're both by Nightboat Books, a publisher I've only been aware of for a little while. They started with the collected poems of Tim Dlugos. They're dedicated to lost queer writers with an emphasis on poetry and radical essays and things like that, especially by artists we lost in the AIDS crisis in the 80s. They're committed to the cause of illuminating what we lost in this giant tragedy. So far, every single one is just this previously unknown treasure, and the timber and the tone of each book is wildly different than the last. I'm a huge supporter of what they're putting out. The quality control of the work they're doing in that office — I'm sure it's a very small office — is really impressive.