Joshua Rothes
@joshuarothes
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Following
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Worker. @sublunaryeds , @empyreanseries , @hanumaneds , @asterism_books , etc.
Seattle, WA
Joined September 2015
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Sorry everyone.
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Mallarmé, via Borges, that, “There is no such thing as prose; the moment you care about rhythm, it becomes verse.”
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Hi. It's been a weird few days. Please buy books from small presses. Please defend what "independent" actually means, instead of its use as a marketing term. And did I mention buy books from small presses?
(Back for an indeterminate period of time.)
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Still can’t believe this is real and happening. All the close reads of the manuscript confirm her prowess as a poet.
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This is the 30th book Sublunary has published in 2022. That just hit me.
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Sublunary will be looking to engage a copyeditor next year (and beyond) on a per-title basis. Let me know if you've got interest/qualifications, or know someone who'd be a good fit!
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“Write the novel of nothing. Let everything play out in such a way that the reader senses that the horrible theme of the work is that of not having one.”
Julio Cortázar, Diary of Andrés Fava (tr. Anne McLean)
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“I’m suffering from a headache and the universe.” —Pessoa (tr. Zenith)
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I leave the house for one little errand and wind up with this...
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Small presses deserve a nice warehouse, don’tcha think?
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In a very weird time for small presses, we're relaunching Asterism. I have no idea how this will go, but I really hope this can be a viable alternative in a landscape that is increasingly being consolidated.
We're excited to throw open the doors on Asterism (v2)! We aim to be both an online storefront and distribution hub for small presses of a literary bent. For launch, we have titles by
@KERNPUNKTPress
@1111Press
@FumdEstampa
@SpurlEditions
@WhiskeyTitBooks
@_contramundum_
...
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I have seen the best minds of my generation read Thomas Bernhard and think, "I could do that adequately."
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Beckett, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
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Heartened that every single one of these covers features the translator’s name.
The finalists for the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize are Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar Ali, Natascha Bruce and Dorothy Tse, Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon, Todd Fredso and Azo Vauguy, Maureen Freely and Tezer Özlü, and Tiffany Tsao and Norman Erikson Pasaribu.
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Inordinately fond of the books from this year with my name on them. Wrote little, but made much literature.
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Personal opinion, but there's very little about the contest model of small press publishing that feels good.
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Paralysis often turns to paroxysm, and it is in such a spirit that I give you A STATIC ATLAS, a book of sorts, a book about the unraveling of books, the never-bornness of books, the diary of a discontinuous man.
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Uninterested in self-justifying literature or literature as vaguely spiritual self-help.
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"True poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. It is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter." —Francis Ponge
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We’ve reached the lockdown phase wherein a local secondhand bookseller is texting me pictures of new arrivals. The result of today’s:
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All, I am delighted to share this with you: Hanuman Editions, a spiritual successor to the old Hanuman Books, re-imagined for our time. I am forever grateful to
@BelliappaShruti
, one of my dearest friends, for inviting me to be a part of this years-in-the-making project.
Welcome to Hanuman Editions, a new series of small books featuring the most provocative and urgent voices of our epoch. We launch this autumn, and will announce our first six titles in late summer. Read more at the link below and help us spread the word!
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Happy birthday to me! (Literally, it’s out on my birthday.)
Here is the final cover spread for WE LATER CITIES by
@joshuarothes
, the 2019 Castle Freak victim.
"...an unnamed narrator makes his way through a disorienting cityscape that is constantly in the process of rebuilding itself..."
Available November 24!
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Passive reading, as I see it, is a cluster of behaviors… reading quickly but not deeply, “reading” via reviews or articles about books, the incessant drive to shear passages of context to make for better quotes, and, yes, literature that reads like self-affirmation.
AI fills the need for ambient consumption, which is a thing we don’t talk about nearly enough. We’re already deep in an era of passive listening, watching, and, dare I say, reading, which doesn’t exactly privilege the human behind the art, which is not about filling silence.
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You guys probably don’t wanna know how I wrote this 100k-word novel in 5 days…
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AI fills the need for ambient consumption, which is a thing we don’t talk about nearly enough. We’re already deep in an era of passive listening, watching, and, dare I say, reading, which doesn’t exactly privilege the human behind the art, which is not about filling silence.
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Hit two used bookstores today and ended up with this nifty little stack.
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Borges, that, “No real writer ever tried to be contemporary.”
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If you ask me, novels are mostly a bunch of short stories wearing a trench coat anyway.
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Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of starting
@sublunaryeds
, I am just realizing (bleary-eyed from working on the next two years).
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On Dostoevsky's birthday, reminded that his first name was for a brief time Anglicized as Theodore, and that some might have even called him Ted or even Teddy Dostoevsky.
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Delirious from jetlag, booze, sleep deprivation, overstimulation, etc., but so glad I made the trip to
@SmallPublishers
and grateful for seeing so many kindred spirits in such a short amount of time.
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Called a bookstore that had a rare title I needed to see one page from. Title was listed at $350. I offered $100 for them to keep the book and send me a photo of that page. They were offended and called my request an "imposition". Am I the asshole here?
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Thrilled to announce the upcoming launch of Firmament, a quarterly magazine from
@sublunaryeds
, edited by
@jess_sequeira
and designed by yours truly.
The big news: Starting next year, we will be publishing a quarterly magazine, Firmament, featuring interviews, columns, excerpts from upcoming books, and, of course, new writing from around the world, much of it in translation.
More info in thread...
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Putting these to good use…
And finally, two of the most radical collections of modernist poetic writing, the mystical, dreamlike stylings of transition editor Eugene Jolas—I HAVE SEEN MONSTERS AND ANGELS (1938) and SECESSION IN ASTROPOLIS (1929).
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I will write more next year, and not start any new businesses.
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"Many times it has occurred to me—that every novel was first conceived by a title, an episode, a sentence, a gesture. And every novel is therefore liable of condensation into a poem."
Emanuel Carnevali
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Pent-up opinions:
People do Bernhard’s schtick because it’s easy.
Non-profit is a tax status. That’s it. Not an ethical choice, not an editorial position.
Stop charging submission fees, grifters.
Critics spend most of their time on this site undermining their credibility.
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This June, I'm going to print a small run of a collection of novellas written over the last several years. There will be 60 copies available of SIX NOVELLAS, collecting work written over the course of the last five years.
You can buy one here:
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An all-timer. I’ve been waiting to do this one for a couple of years. Think late Nietzsche writing a bildungsroman.
A novel, a memoir, the ravings of a sociopath, Giovanni Papini's THE FAILURE (in Virginia Pope's 1924 translation) is an intellectual autobiography of a complicated figure in 20th century Italian letters. Forceful.
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Gary Lutz, “There are books I’ve enjoyed page by page without having any idea of what they were about.”
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“We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol. The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word. Philosophy is actually philology, the deep, creative exploration of the word.”
—Bruno Schulz (tr. Walter Arndt)
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If I was an author and my publisher was always publicly complaining about being unable to sell any books, I’d probably just ask to get out of my contract.
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We couldn't be prouder of Series Two of Hanuman Editions, the first to feature newly commissioned works from contemporary figures.
@BelliappaShruti
's vision is unmatched, the books are incredible, and the journey is only just beginning.
The Hanuman Series Two pre-orders are here! We are excited to finally reveal new writing by Bora Chung, Vivek Narayanan, Raymond Pettibon and Mike Topp, Enrique Vila-Matas, and McKenzie Wark, plus a Cookie Mueller reissue. All info at
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It brings
@BelliappaShruti
and I great pleasure to share with you the first six titles from
@hanumaneds
. New writers join the fold in the Spring, but we want to make sure the past stays a part of what we do, even as we look forward.
Here it is folks, our first series of Hanuman Editions.
Ahead of our second series with new contributors in Spring ‘24, we are reissuing six titles as a tribute to Hanuman Books, featuring John Ashbery, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Max Beckmann, Cookie Mueller, and René Daumal
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Fascinated by ungrammatical sentences that nevertheless work.
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This will never not be surreal. Sublunary No. 12 is in the world today
Welcome to the world, THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS OF THOMAS PILASTER! Éric Chevillard's latest is officially published, and we're offering it for just $14 from the website today (and of course, it comes as part of a new subscription):
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Your daily reminder that independent publishing is possible.
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Message from a translator: “Kind of a shame that there’s so much grotesque necrophilia in this book that no one’s gonna read it”
So, um, coming soon.
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This, folks, is what it’s all about. 91 years between these editions.
A little before and after, our new edition of Karl Kraus’s Poems with the source text.
Pick up a copy here:
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Today I started work on transcribing the notebooks (previously unpublished) of one of the great unsung modernist poets. This will be a big one for Sublunary/Empyrean down the line.
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In good news...
Good (and big!) news, friends.
@BOMBmagazine
is now available through Asterism, starting with the Summer 2024 issue, which is out this Friday!
Snag your copy here:
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When Indeterminate Inflorescence took off last fall, we didn’t even have it on Amazon. All of those sales came straight to Sublunary. That’s the difference between having some extra cash, and funding future translations. Buy direct when you can!
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It will destroy some of you to know that my bookshelves have almost zero organizational system beyond keeping an author’s books together.
Our books are kind of like Jell-O. There’s always room.
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One of the most delusional aspects of the right is thinking we actually have something approaching a major “far left” media outlet in this country.
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Please consider that self-checkout may not be right for you.
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There is, by the way, a novella by Italo Calvino, "The Argentine Ant", just sitting there online, waiting for you:
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2021 in cover design for
@sublunaryeds
.
Really my favorite part of the job, especially getting to work with writers and translators as part of the process.
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Please take a moment to enjoy this photo of a 7-year-old Pessoa.
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That’s two shelves just about done. Still need to make an “overstock” sign for the top.
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I don’t have a SoundCloud, but I do have a press that puts translators’ names on covers
@sublunaryeds
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I read Pessoa like some people read the Bible: never all the way through, but allowing divinely ludic forces to guide me to verses that suit my condition.
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Running a press just so I can design book covers…
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The real deal. This is what
@jsief
and I have been hard at work on for the past couple of months. And this is only the tip of the iceberg!
Announcing the launch of the Empyrean Series, our line of fresh printings of out-of-print/hard-to-find works from the annals of literary history.
We'll break things down for you here, but get the full scoop here:
And follow
@EmpyreanSeries
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“We usually regard the word as the shadow of reality, its symbol. The reverse of this statement would be more correct: reality is the shadow of the word. Philosophy is actually philology, the deep, creative exploration of the word.” —Bruno Schulz
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There’s something that feels wonderfully illicit about small books.
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Look what just arrived! I’ll be shipping out orders later this week. If you want one of the 24 remaining copies, you can still grab one here:
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Me, anxiously planning ten titles for 2021: "Hey
@jsief
, want to start an imprint with me for out-of-print books?"
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Org with submission fees, a business development role, no contrib payments… is seeking unpaid labor. Makes ya think.
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Nietzsche: "The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole."
Me: (Backing away slowly with plunder...)
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I understand the allure of making a living at writing-adjacent activities, but I feel like the timeline between publishing something and then teaching others how to write is getting, perhaps, a little too tight.
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Bookstores, this applies to you, too. If you only order from Ingram, congratulations, you are, in fact, dependent.
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This has been by far the most arduous and rewarding editorial project I've taken on, an obsessive search to bring to light as much of the work of a mysterious, ephemeral figure in modernist letters. A thread on Kathleen Tankersley Young...
And finally—and at long last—No. 20 is THE COLLECTED WORKS of Kathleen Tankersley Young, one of the great lost voices of American modernist poetry.
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I've been working on this since last fall, and I'm thrilled it evolved from a design project to something that will be coming out via Sublunary.
Coming in February! The Voices & Other Poems collects a vital and unusual series of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke in a crisp new translation by Kristofor Minta, published as a joint venture with
@lamplightedit
Preorder:
Subscribe:
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