What I hope(d) to do through The Operating System platform is to aggregate and disseminate critically valuable resources that can amplify and assist creative individuals and organizations in their own process of evolution. This is why we’re called “The Operating System”: because we’re literally inspired by systems of social, cultural, bodily, institutional, network (etc.) operating, and we’re constantly searching for ways of improving those systems, for the good of all of us.
I like that the chapbook is flimsy, cheap, and limitless. I like that the chapbook is easy, and that it comes with possibilities. You can read it in a single sitting, you can share it with your friends, you can keep in on your bookshelf forever, you can toss it in the recycling bin.
We wanted to model the press after a public space and create an open dialog with readers and writers. Our vision was—and still is—to make beautiful, lasting books and offer an old-world subscription series by mailing books directly to readers’ doorsteps. We wanted to publish new work, but we’re also committed to the backward glance in that we frequently re-issue great work that has fallen out of print. We want lost and obscure—but deserving—books to enter back into the cultural fray.
Writing about Anomalous Press for Entropy‘s own small press database project, founding editor Erica Mena offers this summation of the press’ mission: “to create beautiful, strange little books that a…
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger Translated by Michael Hoffmann, Foreword by Karl Marlantes Penguin Deluxe Editions, 2016 320 pages – Penguin / Amazon I was surprised when I heard Ernst Jünger’s…
Recently Wiesiek Powaga, the translator of Polish author Andrzej Bursa’s powerhouse of a novel, Killing Auntie, spoke with me about the life of the young writer, the rumors surrounding his…
Transitory Poetics is a monthly review series by Toby Altman focused solely on current and upcoming chapbooks. You can read the introduction here. According to the University of Rochester, about 3% of all the books…
Cheer Up, Femme Fatale by Kim Yideum Translated by Ji yoon Lee, Don Mee Choi, and Johannes Göransson Action Books, 2016 80 pages – Action Books / Amazon This morning I finished…
Speaking At A Time by Amelia Díaz Ettinger Red Bat Books, 2015 96 pages – Red Bat / Amazon I did not expect to attend a reading by Amelia Díaz Ettinger…
I want the press to have a sense of immediacy vital to a small-ish, specific contemporary reading audience that seeks literature with a what I call a visceral-mystical aesthetic—work that seeks a way to engage the big questions by examining the particular leaky, fleshy, grotesque difficulties, embarrassments, and traumas of being embodied.
co•im•press’s closest influences are Action Books, Black Ocean, Noemi Press, Spork, Birds of Lace, Fence, and Tarpaulin Sky. The editorial perspective of the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas is also a significant influence (Roberto Tejada, Kristin Dykstra, and Gabriel Bernal Granados, editors). I worked on production and marketing/distribution for Mandorla from 2009 to 2013 via Illinois State University’s Publications Unit, and through that work, I also learned of its forerunner in spirit, El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn (Margaret Randall and Sergio Mondragon, editors; there is a really great documentary on The Plumed Horn, too). I admire the way Mandorla’s editors and contributing editors created an open, networked community of writers across languages, borders, hemispheres, which can be divisive elements if we let them. Working with Kristin Dykstra when she was at ISU, I learned: that publishing can be a political act, to respect translators as much as authors, and the importance of translation as an art and practice. I also became attuned to the shameful dearth of translated works published in the US.
Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood Princeton University Press, 2014 1344 pages – Princeton / Amazon Strictly…
Now and At the Hour of our Death by Susan Moreira Marques Translated by Julia Sanches And Other Stories, 2015 128 pages – And Other Stories / Amazon Portuguese journalist Susana…
The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz Translated by Adrian Nathan West Dorothy, 2015 144 pages – Dorothy / Amazon When reading The Weight of Things by Marianne Fritz, I…
What does small press publishing need most? Apart from many wealthy benefactors, small presses need more (reasonably affordable) venues to generate visibility for themselves and their authors. AWP, SPD, and bookstores are all great (most of the time), but their cost and cuts are often large enough that presses like ours can’t afford to take advantage of them. We could really use a soulful Amazon that doesn’t take 40% of the book price, which is sometimes the entire profit margin of our books. While small presses are trying to globalize the voices we represent, we also need a more localized book economy, including more readings and independent literary conferences, especially as AWP becomes more inaccessible and hostile to organizations and people who aren’t already in power in the lit world. We see small presses as a destabilizing and disruptive force, maybe even socialist in a way, and we would like to see that becoming more visible.