INTERVIEW WITH WARM MILK PRESS EDITORS
this is an interview with the editors of WARM MILK PRESS, ben spivey, jennifer whitley, and kyle whitley. their first title is MUSUEM OF FUCKED, by david peak, and can be pre-ordered now. interview after break.
Tyrant 7 Tyrant Books Throwdown + Baby Leg
If you are in New York and miss this, you’re nuts: This Saturday (November 21st) starting at 9:00 at Fontana’s Bar (Eldridge between Broome and Grand), a party for the new 7th issue of New York Tyrant, as well as the release of the first edition in Tyrant Books, a limited edition hardback book called Baby Leg, by the master Brian Evenson. Hardback, linen cover with bronze emboss and Brian has also dipped his hands in blood and fingerprinted the covers.
If that wasn’t enough, there is an open Bar (tequila and beer), plus two bands (Doppelganger and Dead Sparrows).
Black Lawrence Press tries to sell me (i.e. you) “tips for getting published by a small press”
I can’t decide where I think this falls on the lameness scale. On the one hand, it’s cheap to join, you get a book for your trouble, and Black Lawrence (a Dzanc imprint) seems reasonably cool. On the other hand, I am instantly and deeply suspicious of anyone claiming to offer advice to “novice, mid-career and seasoned authors alike.” Especially when their leading examples of this “advice” are “what editors look for in cover letters” and “how to choose which conferences to attend.” At the risk of cutting in on BW’s action, let me save you a lot of time- 1) Editors don’t look for anything in cover letters; they don’t read them until after they’ve looked at the manuscript, and if they don’t love that, they’re not reading the letter. Period. So yes, you do need to have one, but as long as it’s less than a page long, and that page isn’t smeared in feces or syrup, you’re probably fine. 2) I’m not sure what the difference between a “mid-career” and a “seasoned” author is, but I can tell you one thing they have in common– neither takes her career advice from a pay-to-play email newsletter, even a cheap one offered up by seemingly decent people. I don’t want to come off like I hate Black Lawrence. I really don’t. But I do hate that whole “secrets of publishing” sales pitch, and the tone that goes along with it. It just grosses me out. After the break, the full commercial from Black Lawrence. Decide for yourself what you think.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 4: The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real
We began Ariana Reines week with AR’s original translation of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published through her own press, Mal-o-Mar Editions. Now, after two days cavorting with Dan Hoy and Jon Leon, whose split book (The Hot Tub / Glory Hole) is also new from MoM, we return to Reines-as-translator, and consider a new book from Semiotext(e), The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Here (from the site) is the briefest of introductions to Real:
Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”
The main action of the Semiotext(e) volume is a series of lengthy interviews between Real and Jean-Luc Hennig (a professor at the University of Cairo) but the final section, a hearty selection of entries from the titular Little Black Book are not to be missed. They are the concise, practical, hilarious, and delightfully NSFW. Click through to read some of my favorites.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 2: The Hot Tub / Glory Hole Part 1
Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 1: My Heart Laid Bare
All this week I’ll be posting small chunks of the thousand and one new books translated and/or written and/or published by Ariana Reines. We begin with Reines’s new translation of Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published in newspaper format by her own Mal-o-Mar Editions.
In a brief introduction to the work, Reines explains: “The text of My Heart Laid Bare consists of notes toward an autobiographical work that Baudelaire did not live to complete, according to Poe’s dictum ‘If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment the opportunity is his own–the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple–a few plain words–“My Heart Laid Bare.” But–this little book must be true to its title.’ […] None of these fragments was prepared by Baudelaire for publication, and though they appeared posthumously under various expurgations, their intimacy and ultimate incompleteness will make misprision and outright error, with respect both to interpretation and to translation, more or less inevitable.” What else could you ask for, really? Below the fold, I pick out some favorite fragments.
Janaka Stucky’s Your Name is the Only Freedom
Brave Men Press is pleased to announce the release of
YOUR NAME IS THE ONLY FREEDOM
by Janaka StuckyCover is letterpressed with gold ink on red paper.
Printed in a limited edition of 60.
23 pages.$9
Janaka Stucky has had poems appear in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. He is the publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome.
READ SAMPLE POEMS – http://bravemenpress.com/stuckysample.html
Warm Milk Printing Press
Warm Milk Printing Press is live out of the hands of Atlantan Ben Spivey and crew, dropping their first joint in February 2010 via David Peak’s quite excellent Museum of Fucked.
Warm Milk Press is the publisher of handmade chapbooks. We publish 1- 2 books per year. At this time, we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts, but you can submit to our online literary journal here.
Check these fresh heads out, and preorder David’s chapbook. It’s a real faceeater. 7 blurbs on the site agree.
See also David’s recent interview with Keith Nathan Brown at his blog.
