Available for preorder now, Michael Jarmer’s novella, Submarine Stories, comes out into the world officially on April 3, 2026. As it is an unusual device, rarely employed here on the blog, to write about oneself in the third person, Michael Jarmer has chosen this particular strategy for this announcement. He hopes that you will be somewhat fooled by the distance created by the third person point of view into thinking that someone other than the writer himself is promoting his new work of fiction. How’s it going so far?
Submarine Stories is a novella borne out of, or inspired by a sequence of songs written by Michael Jarmer and his partner René Ormae-Jarmer for their band Here Comes Everybody. In 2005, they released this song sequence on an album called Submarines, and in 2025 they released for the first time on vinyl the 20th anniversary remaster of the album. The Submarines album would be Here Comes Everybody’s first concept album, telling a story, somewhat obliquely, about three characters whose lives had become intermeshed in a very strange but intimate way. Years after the release of this song sequence into the world, Michael began wondering if he might be able to take these lyrics and the story implied by them and flesh these out into a work of fiction. Over some number of years, nearly a decade, he worked on this idea. The result was the novella Submarine Stories. In case you might have listened to the music, or in the event that you would like to listen to it, Michael Jarmer wants you to know that the album Submarines by Here Comes Everybody contains no spoilers. The album and the novella are companion pieces that can be enjoyed independently of one another.
In the spirit of the poetic/literary device known as ekphrasis (the strategy of creating art that is about or describes another work of art), found most commonly in some very famous poems about paintings, Submarine Stories also takes inspiration from a group of paintings, some of which found their way into the CD art and the album cover art for the Here Comes Everybody album, and one of which graces the cover of the novella. So, in this unusual stew of art coming from other art, one of the main characters in Submarine Stories is a painter, and the narrator of the novella is her neighbor, a young man who has suffered a terrible industrial accident that robbed him of his left arm, who becomes fascinated by and drawn into the art and the life of his painter-neighbor friend. In the beginning, it appears that our narrator is telling his neighbor’s story, but ultimately he becomes unexpectedly drawn in, so that her story becomes his story–a story that he is uniquely qualified to tell.
Advance praise for Michael Jarmer’s Submarine Stories:
Submarine Stories is a deep meditation about everything that matters: desire, woundedness, art, failure, silence, human miscommunication, the relationship between life and art, the relationship between generations, sadness, godlessness, death, despair. Utterly, impossibly great.
–David Shields, author of Remote and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
Ever find yourself lost in a painting? In Submarine Stories, the calm and utterly reliable one-armed boy telling us his story finds himself and helps save his neighbor’s marriage through a series of paintings that you’ll see on the insides of your eyelids long after you’ve finished reading Michael Jarmer’s beautiful, moving and often funny novella. The surreal becomes real, and then, before you can blink, it all just makes sense. Brilliant, and oddly cleansing—this book made me feel more at peace than I’ve felt in a long time.
–Mimi Herman, author of The Kudzu Queen
Michael Jarmer would be ecstatic if readers would preorder his novella. Here are some links where one might procure a copy of the book.
For friends and family and the curious who live in or around the Portland metropolitan area, Michael Jarmer will announce the official book launch release party soon.
michael jarmer 
Woot! Great news!
Woot woot! Thank you, David!