We're accepting pitches for a new book series, For What It's Worth: short (25-30K words) works of creative nonfiction that have some pop-cultural "thing" at their center and combine elements of memoir and cultural criticism. Essentially, we want you to write about your pop-cultural obsession, but in a way that ultimately helps to illuminate something about your own life experience.

The first book in the series, which came out in May, was Andrew Bertaina's Ethan Hawke & Me: The Before Trilogy, which explored the author's lifelong obsession with Richard Linklater's Before series of films, while considering how the arc of those movies mapped onto (or didn't) his own shifting attitudes about love and relationships over the years. You can learn more about that book here.

More on what we're looking for:

• The books will be novella-length (roughly 25-30K words), but for now we just want a pitch and a sample of roughly 1K words.
• We're defining "pop culture" pretty broadly to include things like movies, music, art, music, but also topics like "suburban mall culture of the 1990s" or "weird Facebook groups about GenX nostalgia.
• We really want to know what your angle on the material will be. Ideally, this should be a subject on which you have a unique perspective, a book that will feel uniquely yours (i.e., we're not really interested in an academic treatise on reality TV, or your hot political take about how The West Wing is to blame for our current political environment).
  

What we'd like for the pitch itself:

• A 1-2 paragraph description of the proposed book, one that can give us a sense of your unique relationship to the pop-cultural "thing"
• An excerpt or sample of about 1,000 words. If you've published (or just written) an essay on the topic in question, one you'd like to expand into a book, you can send us that. Or just draft some pages you can send along that will give us a sense of the project.

NOTE: When filling out the form below, you can either upload a sample or link to a published piece. But please make sure you do one or the other! We won't consider any pitches that aren't accompanied by an excerpt. 

Barrelhouse loves to celebrate books just like you do, so let's do that thing together! We're interested in running reviews of books that fit Our Whole Thing. You read Barrelhouse, so you know what we're about. Let that be your guide. And also, these:

Book Review Guidelines:

• Please send us reviews of books other than your own.
• No self-published titles.
• Do not submit work to the Reviews section that is meant for another section.
• Do not submit excerpts or essays based on your own work.
• We prefer reviews that focus on recent titles, meaning books that came out within the past six months or that are upcoming in the next six months. That guideline can stretch to about a year, but not much farther. (Our Reviews Editor has a pretty good record for response times.) We do not run retrospective reviews.
• We have a strong taste for small-press titles, especially books that might not be reviewed anywhere else. We love weird books, hybrid work, and other rare birds. We are extremely unlikely to accept a review of a book by a major publisher (Harper, Random House, Riverhead, etc).
• We're interested in full-length or chapbook-length collections of poetry & prose. We're open to memoirs and story or essay collections.
• Include publisher, page count, and date of book release. Include a link to the publisher's website for purchase.
• Word docs preferred but RTF is OK. No Pages, dear Lord.
• We are open to non-standard reviewing forms, as long as it doesn't distract from the book in question. We do not want book essays.
• If you've previously spoken to our Reviews Editor, Katharine Coldiron, please indicate that in your cover letter.
• Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please let us know and withdraw your submission if your work is accepted elsewhere.
• All accepted reviews are subject to editorial suggestions.
• We love you but we do not pay for book reviews at this time. Reviews run online only.

If you are an author or a publisher who wants your book reviewed at Barrelhouse, you can query, but be advised that we almost never assign books pitched to us in this way. Your best bet is to find a reviewer and ask them to submit a finished review to us here, through Submittable.