Starcherone Books's mission is to publish new works of innovative
fiction and reprints of classic avant-garde works that have
gone out of print.
Innovative fiction. We've been asked
a lot (and have asked ourselves) what we are looking for when
we say this.
Innovative. Avant-garde. Experimental. Each
word brings baggage, different images to different minds.
What makes writing good? What makes Toni Morrison's
Sula good? J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace? Salman Rushdie's
East, West? Good - better than good - the thrill of a
reader's knowing it could have been done in no other way. A
gale of power rising from the work, where it takes us, where
we are tossed, disheveled. Ben Marcus's Notable American
Women. Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's. Arundhati
Roy's The God of Small Things. David Markson's Reader's
Block or This is Not a Novel. Italo Calvino's
Invisible Cities. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.
Michel Houllebecq's The Elementary Particles. Marilynne
Robinson's Housekeeping.
Other people's lists would be different. Ours
might be different tomorrow.
But this is our contention: GOOD writing is
innovative.
The innovative work embodies innovation. An
innovative work can be in a tradition. A young T. S. Eliot once
wrote that being new was the most traditional thing one might
propose. Traditional, then. It is, after all, 100 years since
Tristan Tzara pinned a fish to his coat.
But a tradition empties quickly unless it is
made anew. The tree of tradition is nourished by the blood of
avant-garde patriots.
We're open to everything. EVERYTHING.
Dear reader. Dear writer. Dear dead folks. We
love you. Write like you've always wanted to write.
If this all chafes you in just the right wrong
way, then the next place you should go is submissions.
To taste what we've done so far to date, download
our sampler.
