On a daily basis, we’re inspired and influenced by every other indie press around: it’s a lot of hard work to run a press—often thrilling, but frequently full of difficult and thankless tasks—and I admire everyone who is doing this, who is giving of themselves to help facilitate the continuation of independent literature, all the other editors and publishers working hard to bring new books out into the world.
Transitory Poetics is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here. This month, I reviewed two chapbooks by poets who work in New…
She is a foodie, I am not. She picked the place, I complied. My appetite was wet for the mystery of who and what she was. The food, an afterthought.…
Europa was founded by Italian indie publishers Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri in 2005. Following 9/11 they began asking themselves what, as publishers, they could do to address the communication breakdown that was happening between cultures and nations. They also saw a business opportunity in the scarcity of foreign works being published in the US. They founded Europa in response both to what they saw as cultural imperative and to an opening in the market.
You know, the typical publishing story. I was sitting in a bar in the year 2000 with some freak I knew from a miserable job I had at the time and he turned to me and said, “I want to start a press and you should be the editor because you are very outgoing.” I downed my tenth or so beer and told him that was a great idea and he could count me in. At this miserable job, I had written a novel called For Fucks Sake, and we decided to launch the press with my book. At the same time, I started dating my future wife Elizabeth, who already worked in publishing, at a literary agency. The three of us spent the next two years meeting at the freak’s apartment with occasional assorted other freaks making detailed plans on how we would publish our one book; after the meetings, we would all go to dinner and get drunk.
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Times of Joseph Cornell Other Press, 2015 – reprint (originally published in 1997) 592 pages – Other Press / Amazon What do we make…
Most places that publish both fiction and criticism seem to favor the fiction. They might have a print magazine that publishes fiction, and a web site that publishes more fiction, and then somewhere on the web site they’ll make a little space for book reviews. These publishers seem to believe that great fiction will emerge from a crowded field of lesser fiction. That’s not what works for us. We believe that great fiction emerges from a field of great criticism. The lesser stuff gets mowed down, recycled. To write something great you have to be thinking deeply and arguing passionately with a diverse group of friends.
The idea of a set mission might rankle the three of us a little, despite our Olson-influenced name. But we do have goals—one of those, which is surely true of all small presses, is to participate in and encourage the growth of the poetry community. Another is to insist on the value of the “small” in small press. We value the handmade, the patience and attention to detail that the crafts of printing and sewing require. As objects, the aesthetic of our chapbooks lies happily between the DIY aesthetic of zines and the gorgeous history of book art and fine press. In content, we look for work that is formally experimental, but we try not to fall too firmly into one aesthetic niche. We don’t want everyone to write the same way! So some of our books will be austere or minimal, while others will be manic and exuberantly expressive.
Tyrant stuff isn’t for everyone, but nothing should be for everyone. Or at least nothing that’s worth anything. You know what’s for everyone? Water. Water is for everyone. And if you’re publishing something for everyone, well, you’re publishing water.