Archive for the ‘words’ Category

Thursday, September 30th

On Small Press.

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Peter Cole of Keyhole Books has been showing his concern here and there over the last week about the state of small press publishing. Brief summary:The last two discussions I’m aware of concerned two things 1) the support structure of small press books, how it’s the same people buying the same things and how eventually this structure could collapse and the multitude of small press imprints out there will get washed away and 2) authors using small press imprints as stepping stones to bigger publishing houses instead of growing with the small press.

Pete, I feel you. The limitations of a small press are often frustrating and disappointing. But there’s a reason they call it small press. We don’t have marketing and publicity armies at our disposal that can go out and find an audience for a new title. Usually it’s just one dude working on it in his spare time, wearing all the hats.

Regarding the support structure, the problem is us small press publishers looking at the online writing scene and seeing it as a viable market, instead of looking for an audience outside of that scene. Regarding the stepping stone effect, Annalemma is in a somewhat different position. Traditionally, lit mags have functioned happily as a conduit for writers to travel beyond small press land. I’m hard pressed to find a problem with this. The reason small presses publish someone is because they love the writing, not because they think it will sell 10,000 units. If it sold a shit ton of books then they’d cease to be a small press. And if there’s a writer you publish that goes on to the bigger houses that wouldn’t be a boon for all parties involved?

Big time publishing works just like Hollywood. They spend a lot of money on a lot of titles (most of them garbage) in the hopes that one of them is a hit and can pay for the ones that flopped. By that point it’s just gambling, hedging bets, fully diluting that feeling that a small press gives you of presenting work to the world that is worth reading.

The point: There comes a time when you need to embrace where you’re at. Small press publishing will always be hard and never lucrative. To fight against that is a recipe for burnout. But there’s advantages to small press. We’re agile. We can shift course and pivot focus almost effortlessly. We’re able to experiment at relatively low risk. The prospect of something we put our hands on hitting the Bestseller list is laughable, but never impossible.

The greater point: you keep trying until it works or you run out of gas.

Thoughts?

Wednesday, September 29th

Words/Flesh.

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After interviewing Justin Taylor earlier this year, I learned about The Word Made Flesh book he was working on. I got a Bible verse cut into me a while back so I took a pic and sent it his way and it made it into the book. I got a chance to see an advance copy last night and it looks amazing. There’s a running tumbler here, but if you’re into tattoos, books and hope to merge the two somehow, you’re gonna want to purchase this. It’s also going to be required material for every tattoo shop coffee table from now on. Well done, Justin and Eva, you put together a fun one.

Tuesday, September 28th

News.

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Ever wanted to know what it’s like to run a lit mag in an age when doing such a thing is considered neither popular nor wise? Sign up for the Annalemma newsletter by typing your email address in the field at the top of the right hand column of this page to receive monthly emails on the business of small press publishing, discounts on print issues/subscriptions, and a genuine opportunity to connect with a genuine human being.

Thursday, September 23rd

120 in 2010: Sleepingfish 8.

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The perfect place to keep Sleepingfish 8 is on the top of the toilet tank. That sounds like an insult but it’s not.

Avant garde fiction, experimental fiction, fucking weird fiction, whatever you want to call it, no one does it better than Calamari Press. Show Calamari an edge and it will hold you over it. Show them an envelope and they will push it. On the one hand it’s very respectable to say you’re the best at what you do, that no one does it quite like you. On the other, when you take things to the very cutting edge, you please the hardcores and alienate the majority. Calamari publishes a writing style that doesn’t pander to the casual observer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the latest release of Sleepingfish 8, its sporadically published journal.

Another virtue of the writing styles within is that they question what a short story even is. The pieces are presented without bylines, you get the title then you go. It’s a discomforting experience not seeing the name of the author before you delve into something they’ve written. You’ll want to force yourself to flip to find out who it is but you realize this is not the intent of the publisher, so you roll with that discomfort, as it’s all part of the show.

In Bathhouse in 5 Senses, Tim Jones-Yelvington traces the experience of a trip to a gay men’s bathhouse, not through any characters, but through tastes, colors, smells, sounds and textures. Matt Bell unleashes more grotesque children from his forthcoming collection Cataclysm Baby. Ryan Call’s story about an embittered, deceased farmer, told through the behavioral patterns of tornadoes. in The Lonesome Deaths of Bud and Sandy Dennis Cooper phones it in with two chunks of glib, admittedly funny, dialogue about a father murdering his children. Amelia Gray tells the story of a woman who eats literally everything in the house to cope with the disappearance of her man.

The most respectable thing about the writing is the out and out rejection of traditional narrative style. This is why the top of the toilet tank is the best place for it: Each piece requires such a drastic recalibration of your senses, that it’s best to take a step back after reading each story. Say, in between bowel movements. Each piece is one to two pages long, adding up to about 115 pages. If you go one piece at a time you’ll realize that it took you over 50 dumps to get through the issue, then you start to think about how many times you’ve moved your bowels in your lifetime and then you will realize the effect Sleepingfish 8 has had on you: it causes you to look at your life in a different way, which is when fiction is doing its job best.

Buy it here from Calamari.

Friday, September 17th

Cover Songs.

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Behold, the cover of Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance. The image was excerpted from the photo essay ZORA! by Ted Hollins. Ted’s been photographing the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities since its inception 21 years ago. The essay focuses on some of the highlights of the event taking place annually in Eatonville, FL, where Zora Neale Hurston was raised. Ted is an incredible photographer and we’re very pleased to have his images grace our pages.

Going to print on Monday! More details to follow.

Thursday, September 16th

With Love from Chicago.

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Chicago’s Gabriel Levinson (of Book Bike fame) is trying to earn his place in my books as raddest dude ever.

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He’s coming pretty close to it too.

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Thank you Gabe. You are a gem of a human.

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Tuesday, September 14th

We Are Having a Party.

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Anna is teaming up with La Petite Zine to throw a bitchin’ rager in Brooklyn next month celebrating the cool shit we’ve been up to over the last couple months. Won’t you come join us?

Friday, September 10th

Eff Yeah, Bookstores!: Pilot Books.

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Very few book stores in the world are dedicated exclusively to independent presses. The number is something close to none. That’s what makes Seattle’s Pilot Books an amazing store. Co-creative director, Tom DeBeauchamp, took some time from helping proprietor Summer Robinson (pictured) to answer a few questions via email.

What’s Pilot’s origin story?

If you wanted indie-lit in Seattle two years ago you would have had to have driven to Portland. A few stores carried a few books, a few zines, but none in a really meaningful way. People in town asked themselves, “why don’t we have something like the Independent Book Room at Powell’s?” One of these people was Summer. She started Pilot as a few shelves in the window of the Anne Bonny (a sadly defunct oddity shop). When they moved into a smaller space, Pilot moved into a larger one. We’ve been open now for over a year.

What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?

Out motto is 100% indie-lit, so everything we sell in the store and online is independently produced. We tend to stock new releases, typically produced by small houses in small runs, but that’s definitely not a rule. We love selling local work, but that’s not necessarily a rule either. We try to stock to our tastes, and, once upon a time, every book we sold had been read by one of us. Basically, we sell the most interesting fiction, poetry, and comics we can find in whatever language we find it in.

What’s the arts/literature scene in Seattle like and what role does Pilot play within it?

Hard to say what the arts/literature scene in Seattle is like: inter-flowing tribelets? The particles of one tribelet moving freely into the gases and matter of others? A lot of works are made in metal and fire. Readings happen often in many venues, a lot of them free. There’s a very strong book arts community, one of the largest Zine Archives in the world, and many active arts organizations and grant-granting organizations. There’s a feeling that we’re moving toward a more crystallized literary “scene”, but I’m not sure where we’re at in that transition, or if it’s over and we’re the cut gem we always hoped to grow up to be. Pilot, for our part, hosts about four readings a week, a writer’s group. In March, in honor of Small Press Month, we hosted a reading every single day. This summer we’ve hosted more than a dozen Micro-Residents. We will be publishing chapbooks for each of them this fall.

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What helps a book sell? What’s been the most successful book at Pilot?

Readers with money and a sense of direction, and the willingness to use them. Having more than one of something in stock also seems to help. People don’t like to buy your last copy. I think saying, “Oh my god! You have to buy that book! It’s amazing” would help, but the data’s inconclusive.

How does a brick-and-mortar store not only survive, but maintain relevance in the age of Amazon?

By doing things differently, catering to a different kind of audience. The big companies do a good job of selling you exactly what you want, but I like to think Pilot provides an introduction and a context to something at least as meaningful and vibrant as Dan Brown’s fine novels. It’s hard to believe the death of Books, death of reading, death of bookstores Chicken-Littleing when you see the passionate work produced everyday. Selling those works, and championing them, helps us to stay relevant alongside Amazon. Really, you could probably start calling this the age of Pilot.

Please describe the cat that lives in your store. If you don’t have a bookstore cat, please explain why.

No cat, sadly. Pilot’s too small a space to keep a shop cat happy and healthy. Besides, kitty wouldn’t get a lick of toilet-time privacy.

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Thursday, September 9th

120 in 2010: How They Were Found.

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When reading a lot of small press authors you don’t always get the feeling that you’re reading something that will stand the test of time. You don’t get the feeling that what is happening on the page is something that could possibly measure up to the writers that you read when you were younger, the ones that made you fall in love with the form. Often times, books on small presses feel like writers are just spreading their wings, a first attempt after years of formative writing, the first step in a long journey of book publishing and storytelling. They’re still experimenting and mostly failing. That’s why it’s a jarring experience to pick up How They Were Found and find yourself in the hands of a storyteller as gifted and dedicated as Matt Bell.

The shorter pieces in Bell’s collection are are wildly imaginative, slightly dark, with a hint of humor to them, calling to mind the better films of John Carpenter and the twisted detective stories Brian Evenson. A cartographer charts the path of his wife’s disappearance, a group of soldiers isolated in an arctic outpost are slowly driven mad by memory loss, a young man preserves the dead body of a girl as he searches for her killer, a religious zealot beckons his community to build a massive engine to facilitate the second coming. The longer stories are where Bell spreads his ambition. Wolf Parts is the Little Red Riding Hood tale thrown in a blender and show through a gory lense reminiscent of Todd McFarlane. The Collectors, probably the most stunning achievement in the book, shows the demise of two hoarders populating their estate house with possessions until it buries them alive in a dark green decay akin to David Fincher. The names of graphic artists and film directors immediately come to mind when drawing comparisons to Bell’s writing, simply because of his dedication to evoking visceral imagery.

Bell attempts and succeeds at a crucial, yet risky, concept that’s essential to great writing: the concept of fusion and hybrid. First and foremost is the magical formula that most young writers have a hard time grasping, the fusion of style and substance. The style in this case being the fantastical elements of each story and the substance being the human connections and emotions that Bell endows his characters with. While most all of the stories in HTWF could easily be filed under the fantasy section, don’t let the nerdish connotation of the genre fool you. Bell’s characters are undoubtedly human, dealing with everyday feelings of loss, change, heartbreak, hope, ambition and discovery.

How They Were Found is a triumph of a debut collection. Bell has a command over story far surpassing anyone else in his league. Don’t miss this book.

Pre-order here from Keyhole Press.

Matt Bell web

Tuesday, September 7th

Eff Yeah, Bookstores!: Ada Books.

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As if Rhode Island couldn’t get any more radder, it’s home to one of the best indie bookstores in the country, Ada Books. Humble owner and proprietor, Brent Legault, was kind enough to answer some questions over electronic mail.

What’s Ada’s origin story?

It started with the publication of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969 (which is, coincidentally, the year I was born).  The book was not a hit with critics but it hit home with me after I first read it twenty-five or so years later. If I were the type to maintain a mountain of my favorite novels (I am not), Ada would likely sit at its summit. It seemed logical and fair-minded then to name the shop after it. Originally, I planned on calling it Ada or Ardor: A Family Bookshop but my wife wisely put a stop to that. (We’ve saved a bundle on signage.)


What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?

The process, if you can whatever it is I do a process, is simple: I choose the books and magazines that I like or think I’ll like and hope that others agree with me. They don’t, usually, in spite of my excellent taste.

What’s the arts/literature scene in Rhode Island like and what role does Ada play within it?

The scene here is mostly serious, or artists taking themselves seriously. Humor comes in smirks rather than guffaws. My role in it is a minor one. I host a reading series, which is run by Kate Schapira (an excellent poet), where I often drink a little too much beer. I also eat more than my share of cashews or almonds and clap, politely but genuinely, when others clap.

What helps a book sell? What’s been the most successful book at Ada?

Though I’ve been selling books for more years than Justin Bieber has been alive, I still have no idea how to make a sale. I know that “weird” works, as does “obscure.” But those things sell themselves. I’m no salesman. I never “upsell” anything. I just put it on a shelf or a table and see what happens. (I will give out opinions when prompted.) The most successful book at Ada has been. . . oh, I don’t know. I don’t keep track. But I’ve probably sold more copies of Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights than anything else. These days, it is shamefully out of print.

How does a brick-and-mortar store not only survive, but maintain relevance in the age of Amazon?

I don’t think my brick-and-mortar(and-paint-and-plaster) store is at all relevant “in the age of Amazon” except perhaps in a negative way. That is, I think that my customers reject or at least look down upon the Kindles and the iPads and ordering books online in general. Or perhaps they do those things but also feel a kinship with books and booksellers and want them to stick around for a little while longer.

Please describe the cat that lives in your store. If you don’t have a bookstore cat, please explain why.

My shop cat is a pure white American short hair with a pink nose and mismatched eyes. Her name is Paper and she is imaginary. I’m only at the shop 7 or 8 hours a day and I feel it would be neglectful to leave her alone for so long. Therefore, Ada Books is catless, although my wife and I have three cats at home named Ratsy, BeeBong and Pancake. They are adorable.

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