Small Press Points

Although the name of their new press, Solid Objects (www.solidobjects.org), hints at the substantiveness of the work they plan to publish, New York City–based poets Lisa Lubasch and Max Winter could offer no better proof of their intentions than the first title in their inaugural list. To launch a two-person indie publishing operation with Gojira, King of the Monsters, award-winning novelist Jim Shepard’s close-up portrait of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects director who created the monster for the eponymously named movie Godzilla, is ambitious work indeed. “Our initial idea in starting Solid Objects was to publish short, self-contained works that might not otherwise find their way into book form because of their length,” says Winter, a poetry editor of Fence and author of The Pictures, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press (www.tarpaulinsky.com) in 2007. Shepard’s book, which weighs in at fifty-six pages, is just such a self-contained work—you won’t often find a commercial publisher putting resources behind so few pages. (Shepard’s fourth story collection, the 268-page You Think That’s Bad, is forthcoming from Knopf in March.) With an advisory board that includes New Directions’ editor in chief Barbara Epler, ArtForum editor-at-large Tim Griffin, and novelist Darin Strauss, Solid Objects plans to publish three titles annually. The two others currently available—via Small Press Distribution and from Amazon and the press’s Web site—are Mac Wellman’s play Left Glove and Jake Bohstedt Morrill’s epistolary novella, Randy Bradley. Winter and Lubasch—her fourth book of poems, Twenty-One After Days, was published by Avec Books (avecbooks.org) in 2006—are accepting submissions of all genres year-round.