Seriously hip

07 September 2006

"If I'm not getting heard then who else isn't getting heard, and what can I do about it? After complaining and moaning about this one day, Willy just looked at me and said, "Let's start a press." So we did it."

PopMatters talk to Jennifer Banash and Willy Blackmore of Impetus Press:

Tell me something about the authors in your catalog. What kind of work are you most interested in publishing?

[JB] There's no formula. We're looking for interesting creative work, and because we're so small we really have to love the books we choose, but our authors are all very different. Kate Hunter's novella, The Dream Sequence, is a psychoanalytic noir story about memory loss, addiction, and urban witch doctors. It's a serious novel about the self, but also an investigation of the strange techno-medical world we live in today. It's exactly the kind of book that's too experimental for the conglomerates and yet too engaged with popular culture to attract the interest of most small presses. In the fall we'll be publishing Jamie Clarke's novel Vernon Downs, a roman à clef about a man who moves to New York to work for Vernon Downs, a character loosely based on Bret Easton Ellis. Jamie Clarke was Ellis' assistant for a time, and without giving away the plot or the surprise of the novel, it's really about identity, as the narrator tries to take over Vernon's life by impersonating him. Fires is the next book, scheduled for release around Christmas. It's a novel by Nick Antosca about a young college student who discovers that his high school football coach molested and killed a young boy. He's then drawn back home to explore the events of his past at the same time that a fire rages on the boundary of his town. Basically the book explores the limits of pain, desire, and memory.

[via Largehearted Boy]