I discovered Object Press via this entry on Chad Post’s Three Percent blog, and Post’s enthusiasm for the press and its latest book, a reprint of Christian Oster’s In The Train, convinced me to contact Richard di Santo, the founder. He sent me review copies of the two books he’s published so far and agreed to answer a few questions by email, which you can read below this introduction.

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Sarah Falkner wins the 7th Starcherone Prize for her novel Animal Sanctuary, selected by Stacey Levine. It sounds quite look-forward-to.

Last year’s winner, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by our own radical Alissa Nutting, selected by Ben Marcus, is coming out October 1st! It’s going to eat your hair. You can preorder it now from Starcherone or wherever great books are. Here’s a taste, from Fence.

Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.

For a limited time only, Keyhole Press is offering both Matt Bell’s How They Were Found and Aaron Burch’s How To Predict the Weather in a package deal for $19.99 including shipping. Can’t wait to have these monsters in my hands.

Compelling format from BookThug’s new literary journal, The Coming Envelope:

The Coming Envelope is BookThug’s new publication of experimental prose fiction edited and designed by Malcolm Sutton. Every issue features work from five writers. It accommodates hard-to-classify work by those already treading various precipices: uncomfortable here, courting the perverse, typographically observant, exposed to the elements, politically not unaware, falling alongside language.

Issue 1 features work by: Jacob Wren, Sheila Heti, Lily Hoang & Debra Di Blasi, John Goldbach, and Lee Henderson.

$10, on sale now.

There were 127 respondents to my survey about publishing, but the free account at Survey Monkey limits results to 100 people. All the other responses are sitting behind some Internet wall, trying to get me to spend $19.95.

So, below, are the responses I got for free. A very hearty thank you to everyone who participated. I won’t argue that this survey was perfectly-composed, but it was at least anecdotally helpful for me, and thought provoking. I assume I’ll be honing these questions over time and coming back with more questions.

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A great tradition would be to make Independence Day into “Independent” Day. Buy one book from an independent press today, I ask you. I went with Pathologies by William Walsh. Keyhole Press. You?

Introducing Blue Square Press, who will release their first title, Ben Spivey’s Flowing In The Gossamer Fold, in August.

Here’s what Gary Lutz said about it: “Ben Spivey’s alluringly melodial debut novel of a marriage gone asunder unreels itself with the indisputable logic of dreams and delivers, along its phantasmagoric and dazing way, emotional clarities that feel entirely new.”

Preorder now!

Catalpa: This Is Not True
by Amanda Goldblatt
50 pages. Tape-bound.
Book design: William Todd Seabrook
Cover photographs: Amanda Goldblatt

We can not know what presence is until we know how to punctuate it. We cannot know how to punctuate it until we admit the truth. We cannot admit the truth until we know what words we need to hide. Catalpa is an essay on scrims and landscapes. It’s a poem, a redaction, a confession, at least once a recipe. Here one wants to know: what if animals die and it might not mean anything? Here one is given: an essay that builds sandcastles on the floor. It’s the best kind of nonfiction: the kind that isn’t true.

BUY IT FOR ONLY $5
OR, BETTER YET
GET A SUBSCRIPTION (which includes this book and three more) FOR ONLY $15

Post-Apollo Press was founded in Sausolito, CA in 1982. They’ve published a number of poets, including Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, Tom Raworth (one of my faves), Leslie Scalapino and recently, Demosthenes Agrafiotis (translated by John Sakkis, an always level-headed htmlgiant commenter, and his uncle Angelos Sakkis). This description of how the collaborative translation worked is beautifully written, very California, which is where these guys are from. What’s most compelling to me there is how Angelos confronted the poetry. He writes, “I take a look and I am completely nonplused perplexed bewildered not the kind of thing I usually read by choice still the specificity of the language keeps me hooked I struggle with it word by word line by line all the while thinking hey I can read Greek but what is this guy saying here where is he going with this the ellipticity of it,” which is about how I feel as I encounter the poems. READ MORE >

MLP has officially acquired the Pindeldyboz print archives – all remaining copies of pboz print can now be purchased from mlp.

They have also officially struck a deal with Blake Butler to release a two-volume set of the Lamination Colony Archives – including both a wealth of the online issues and the ebooks.

They have contracted for a re-release of Ken Sparling’s DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL slated (tentatively) for 2012.

They have contracted for a re-release of Norman Lock’s GRIM TALES in a new stand-alone version slated (tentatively) for 2011.

They have re-started our previous stamp stories project and now, with associate editor Andrew Borgstrom at the helm of that beast, we are planning to reach 100 authors / 100 stamp stories and then, down the line,
release those 100 pieces in a new mlp anthology titled { C. }

Visit the MLP site for more details.

Ok, the book length interview was interesting, and the uncompleted final novel in near-form makes sense (and is compelling, even in its incompleteness), but this, this, is exploitation, and a bad idea:

Columbia University Press is publishing David Foster Wallace’s undergrad thesis next year? [more info at GalleyCat].

Undergrad thesis? I’m sorry, I love the man, and I am interested in marginalia of great minds, but this to me seems not only too much, but just incorrect. Undergrad papers, particularly ones called things like Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, are almost always embarrassing, and even if they have some merit, don’t really belong in a body of work, unless, you know, the author is alive and willing to OK that thing to come into the world. It hadn’t cropped up since his college years for a reason.

Though I am sure I will purchase and read it (as seems their point here), I think this is a big shame on you waiting to happen. God knows if anyone ever saw what I wrote as undergrad I’d want a fork in the eye, even if I was gone. I can’t imagine that there are many who wouldn’t. Clearly, from the design of the cover of this, these people have no taste. Let a man rest.

Action Books releases Don Mee Choi’s first book, The Morning News is Exciting. What a title, what a cover, I’m really looking forward to reading this book.

Also, according to Johannes Goransson’s blog, Action Books is looking at submissions from June 1-July 15. You have ten days to get that ms polished! Go!

Wonderfully lucid and idea-rich post by AD Jameson at Big Other: Alternative Values in Small Press Culture. This is one for bookmarking. Jameson looks at three values that small press culture inherits somewhat lazily, Jameson claims, from culture-at-large: celebrity, youth, and money. Then he says: “What values might replace these? What else could writers and presses be prioritizing, and pursuing? And what would that look like?” In answering these questions, Jameson throws out a ton of practical and exciting suggestions. Cool stuff.