Dead Letter Office, for BABEL Working Group
Series Editor: Eileen Joy (eileenajoy@gmail.com)
Dead Letter Office publishes small chapbook-style works, of anywhere from 30 to 80 or so pages, representing work that either has gone “nowhere” or will likely go nowhere, yet retain little inkdrops of possibility and beauty and the darkling shape of a more full-bodied form and structure — to whit: the conference or seminar paper that will never become an article, the stray pages for a half-baked article that will never become the full-baked article, the half-finished chapter that will never make it into the book or the dissertation, the outlines and notes and semi-polished pages for manuscripts that are simply unfinish-able, the essay that can find no welcoming harbor (and that you half-suspect is ill-conceived but likely isn’t), the prospectus for the project you can never seem to find your way to start, the prolegomenon and preamble without follow-up, the stray children of your pen, the letter you wrote then tucked away in a drawer, fearing to mail it, or the one you sent and received again, with the stamp, “return to sender,” or which was never received nor returned, that you perhaps lost (then re-found). We seek, also, experiments in whimsy, in over-reaching, in idle speculation, in prospecting for fool’s gold, in working mountains into molehills, in marking and then forgetting a path in a wild wood of visible darkness. In short, the Dead Letter Office invites you to take those letters out of the drawer or shoebox, to re-visit and re-polish them, without worrying about conclusions or ultimate destinations, and send them to us. We will also consider actual letters to the dead: belated eulogies, posthumous transmissions to the underworld, love (and hate and other) missives to the departed, funerary telegrams, and various notes and commentaries to be used as devices to water the graveyards where, to cadge from Walter Benjamin, some of the dead are turning by a strange heliotropism toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history.
Go HERE to read more about Dead Letter Office and its titles.
eth press: postmedieval poetries
Editors: David Hadbawnik, Chris Piuma, and Daniel C. Remein (ethpress@gmail.com)
eth press is a parascholarly poetry press interested in publishing innovative poetry that is inspired by, adapted from, or otherwise inhabited by medieval texts. eth [ð] is a letter that was once part of the English alphabet, which lives on in other alphabets (Icelandic, Faroese, the International Phonetic Alphabet). It is a reminder of a piece of language (a technology of expression) that English cast aside. It marks a sound that is rare in other languages, that causes trouble when others try to learn it. We are interested in the possibilities of poetries written under this sign.Following punctum‘s lead, most of our books will be published as open-access and print-on-demand; we are interested in the wide distribution and dissemination of this poetry. But we are also interested in connecting medieval publishing technologies to contemporary texts, and so we plan to explore the possibilities of scribal editions as well.
Go HERE to follow eth press: postmedieval poetries and its titles and follow eth press on Twitter HERE.
Oliphaunt Books, for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, George Washington University (GW-MEMSI)
Series Editor: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (jjcohen@gwu.edu)
Our admittedly immodest motto “The Future of the Past” encapsulates our mission: to create and sustain lively scholarly conversations on topics of wide interest across time periods and specialties. In these conversations, we hope, the best traditional methods for understanding historical and literary texts meet innovative modes of analysis, argumentation, and publication. Oliphaunt strives to develop what the poet Wallace Stevens called a lingua franca et jocundissima. We are against the partitions that would separate the study of the past from an understanding of the present, the lines that cordon disciplines from each other needlessly, the ghettos that unnecessarily compartmentalize cultures, and the separations that attempt to obviate the hybridities that arise when differences meet. We are proponents of collaboration, risk-taking, diligence and creativity. We attempt a capacious exchange of ideas which while attentive to the violence and injustices through which history has been shaped remains affirmative, provocative and experimental.
Our publishing projects typically proceed from GW MEMSI endeavors, but we are always open to proposals. Please contact the institute’s director, Jeffrey J. Cohen, if you would like to develop a project.
Go HERE to read more about Oliphaunt Books and its titles.
Director: Valerie Vogrin (valerie.peanutbooks@gmail.com)
A literary offshoot — a rhizomatic and wayward meandering of punctum books. An offshoot in that it shares absolutely the adventurous mission of the plant from which it grows — to foster ‘writing-as-opening’ and writing as risk and adventure, a going-forth without ‘papers’ or guarantees: falling through the hole/punctum, falling down, freefall. We believe it is possible to create a lively community of readers for each and every Peanut Book by taking creative advantage of the ways in which the marriage of open-access and print-on-demand publishing fosters more accessible archives while not in any way compromising that thing that is the printed book. We still believe in the printed book as an art object as well as a portal to hidden planets. For those who want to hold it in their hands, we’ll provide the card catalogue and the map; for those who want to beam in virtually, we have the code for that. We believe that developing a community of writers, readers, and archivists is an act of love and attention rather than one of commerce and public relations. Editors (not members of a marketing department) will be the arbiters of editorial decisions, the caretakers of authors, and the curators of artworks. Let it be said that Peanut Books is and will remain an imprint-in-progress, a press in the act of becoming. We hope to specialize in rambunctious, adventurous, bent, slant, and eccentric works of fiction and poetry, as well as theoretical inflections thereof, to be the imprint of the throwback and the flash-forward. We want work that seeks to connect, but also to disconnect, to inspire but also to deflate, to illuminate, to frustrate, to console, and to rebuke. In considering Peanut Books, you might well consider our namesake which, despite its name and appearance, is a legume, not a nut. Legumes are pods, split on two sides. You never know what might spill out. We might well be that which we do not appear to be.
Go HERE to read more about Peanut Books and its titles.
Glossator Special Editions, for Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary
Series Editor: Nicola Masciandaro (glossatori@gmail.com)
Glossator Special Editions will publish book-length commentaries and aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work. While the distinction between commentary and other forms of writing is not an absolute one, the following may serve as guidelines for distinguishing between what is and is not a commentary: 1. A commentary focuses on a single object (text, image, event, etc.) or portion thereof; 2. A commentary does not displace but rather shapes itself to and preserves the integrity, structure, and presence of its object; 3. The relationship of a commentary to its object may be described as both parallel and perpendicular. Commentary is parallel to its object in that it moves with or runs alongside it, following the flow of reading it. Commentary is perpendicular to its object in that it pauses or breaks from reading it in order to comment on it. The combination of these dimensions gives commentary a structure of continuing discontinuity and a durable utility; 4. Commentary tends to maintain a certain quantitative proportion of itself vis-à-vis its object. This tendency corresponds to the practice of “filling up the margins” of a text; 5. Commentary, as a form of discourse, tends to favor and allow for the multiplication of meanings, ideas, and references. Commentary need not, and often does not, have an explicit central thesis or argument. This tendency gives commentary a ludic or auto-teleological potential.
Go HERE to find out more about Glossator Special Editions and its titles.
