The Book Bazaar 2026 is an exciting collaborative crowdfunding event on Backerkit of 39 indie authors who have come together to raise funds for their campaigns. In celebration, and to help promote these authors, we’ll be featuring spotlights through the fundraising period for you to check and out and support! Within The Book Bazaar, you’ll find a variety of genres, including fantasy, sci-fi, horror, queer, and romance, as well as a variety of formats such as novels, novellas, series, anthologies, and audiobooks. There’s something for everyone!
The fundraising period runs from October 29 – November 19. Back 3 or more projects to earn unique bookmarks, and 10 or more projects to receive an exclusive anthology. Want a taste of these projects? Check out the free sampler bundle on Itch.io!
Please welcome Attis & Aleph by Tucker Lieberman in the spotlight!
Attis & Aleph is a fable in poems. In suburban New York in the 1930s, Ned is researching a special topic in the history of gender. Something is making him scribble, interminably, forever. I want you — reader, writer, thinker — to avoid his fate.
True story: Ned was born in 1901 to a wealthy white family in New York. His father was a vice president of many railroads.
Ned was a bit “different.” He wasn’t interested in business, and he dropped out of Harvard. He tried to write a book about a topic related to gender diversity, and he collected over a thousand sources, but he couldn’t get his book past the Big Pile of Handwritten Papers stage. He died by suicide in 1940.If you’re having Big Feelings about your Deep Thoughts, but you have no guidance on how to write them out, you might be stuck. A malformed writing project can overtake your life until you can no longer see out of the box you’ve gotten yourself into. You want to ask better questions of life. You want to be seen.
Attis & Aleph is historical nonfiction with elements of speculative fiction.
It’s told through poems.
The cake is real.
I look at a strange object Ned’s father’s colleagues found in the desert and brought to his office, a decade before Ned was born (true). It was called the Nampa figurine. I consider that it may have had a magical influence (let’s speculate!). Maybe it’s something we’re invited to use in our own ways. Maybe we say “no.” But maybe we give ourselves permission.
In Attis & Aleph, I’ll tell you something you need to know: The story of how you are writing your book is a story that matters.
The author is raising funds for print copies of the book with a stretch goal to translate the work into Spanish.
About the Author
Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Tucker Lieberman has lived in Bogotá, Colombia for nine years. That’s a long time, but he’s been working on Attis & Aleph for longer.
It’s not his first poetry book. His first one was a bilingual collection, Enkidu Is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está. It was a finalist in the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Contest and was nominated for the 2022 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association.
He wrote four other books, none of which won any awards, but he’s glad he wrote them.
If you recognize his name, it’s probably because his essay on a horror film appeared in It Came From the Closet (Feminist Press, 2022) or because three other anthologies to which he contributed have been recognized by Lambda Literary. Non-famously, he reads nonfiction for Split/Lip Press and reviewed one hundred indie press books for Independent Book Review.
The cover of Attis & Aleph (with the Sphinx and the violets) was designed by Rachel A. Rosen.
- Website: TuckerLieberman.com
- Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/tuckerlieberman.com
