According to Sterling’s press release, Arnosky said, “From the first time I heard it, the lyrics created pictures in my mind of a land of primeval beauty…I thought this vision would make a dream of a book, and I asked for Bob Dylan’s permission to make this dream come true. Happily, he said yes.”

With Man Gave Names to All the Animals, Sterling hopes to create a success similar to that received by the book Puff the Magic Dragon. Frances Gilbert, VP, Publisher of Sterling Children’s Books said that with the sales and acclaim of Puff they “realized how strongly folk songs resonate across generations. We’re equally confident Bob Dylan’s fans will enjoy sharing Man Gave Names to All the Animals with the children in their lives.”

*Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100201/DC45220

“We have contacted a mix of professional reviewers and passionate readers, building a new feature with the help of our readership,” said Jason Boog. “Our first reviews will be launched later this month, but the program will grow over the next year.”

GalleyCat Reviews will also feature a directory of online sources for book reviews.  “As traditional review outlets disappear, online communities may be one of the last places where readers can go to find out about new books.”

“For readers, the venture promises the ability to buy content once and then be able to read it on multiple devices. Currently, newspapers purchased on the Amazon Kindle reading device cannot be read on Sony Corp.’s Reader, for example.

‘Publishers missed the opportunity to make money from the Web, and they see these devices as a second chance to do things right,’ said Ken Doctor, news industry analyst with Outsell Inc., a consulting firm in Burlingame, Calif. ‘They’re sensing a new business model around these devices.’”

After a student survey showed that students are “twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form,” the chair of the Toronto school began pushing for e-book readers. “When [students] were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it.”

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann            19,000 copies
Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips            15,000 copies
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin    9,000 copies
Far North, by Marcel Theroux                         1,400 copies
American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell                 1,300 copies

Of course sales have no correlation to winning an NBA, but for comparison’s sake, Publisher’s Marketplace notes that Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country, last year’s fiction winner, sold approximately 6,000 copies in hardcover prior to winning the award.

What was the impetus for Madras Press?  How long has it been in the works?

It hasn’t been in the works for very long at all, actually. I think I first thought about it in terms of a company of my own toward the end of May.  I’ve tried to move things along as quickly as possible — our first books will begin to circulate around the beginning of December, if not sooner, and the second set of books is already coming together. But the things we’re trying to accomplish with this project have been around for a little longer, mostly in the form of me complaining — about how assumed it is that books have to be available for sale at Amazon.com and Borders and Barnes & Noble, that they have to have blurbs, that they have to be a certain size and shape. These are all perfectly fine things when done deliberately in aid of the story, but it’s frustrating when they become the standard that the story has to comply with. I guess that’s a feeling I’ve had for a while.

Probably the immediate motivating factor was this series of novellas I’ve been working on for the past couple of years — I have two done so far, and two more to go. And often, as I’ve been working on them, I’ve had to resist the urge to edit them down to short story length, or to inflate them to novel length; again, not because there’s anything wrong at all with those forms, but just because they weren’t right for these stories. And it seemed a little silly to me that the prospect of publishing work between, say, thirty and two hundred pages is so perfectly hopeless; that the standards of what merits publication are so concerned with something like page count, rather than the quality of the writing, when there’s really no reason for it. It’s not like we don’t have the technology to print and sell an eighty-page booklet.

John Madera’s recent novella project brought hundreds of writers together to talk about these “little monsters.”   What is it about the novella that moves you?  What are some of your favorites?

Madera’s project has some really smart people saying really smart things about the novella as a form, the physical effect it has on readers, etc., and I’d feel bad joining their conversation because I don’t have very much to add. My interest in it has more to do with expanding the ways that readers and writers think of books, and of the publishing industry’s faculties, which in recent years have been limited by arbitrary theories about what sells and what doesn’t.

There are too many favorites to list here. Ben Marcus wrote a long story called The Father Costume, and that’s one of my favorite books. A lot of Calvino’s and Barthelme’s books could be called novellas. The Crying of Lot 49. Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, which is three novellas. There’s a great story by David Foster Wallace called “The Soul Is not a Smithy”, that may not count as a novella but it’s pretty long. Kelly Link has some wonderful ones, too.

Beyond the formal page count, I think what’s important about these stories is that they function better when read on their own, and not necessarily as a part of something. It’s unimaginable to me that you’d ever have to flip through an anthology or magazine to read “Revelation” or “The Dead”.

You have decided to skip commercial distribution, working instead with independent booksellers directly.  What have been some of the challenges associated with this tactic?

We knew that working with a place like Small Press Distribution or Consortium would bring in a lot of sales, and we may end up asking to work with them at some point, but there didn’t seem to be enough reason for us to not try it on our own, at least for now. So while the decision has made us work a little harder, it hasn’t provided challenges, in that sense. When there are too many orders for me to handle mailing them out on my lunch break, or too many books for my aunt and uncle to store in their attic, that will be a challenge.

And there are a lot of advantages to distributing the books on our own. This helps us keep the sticker price low and maximizes the amount of the donation. We’ve hidden the barcode on the inside back covers, which we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. And we’re working with some really amazing independent bookstores, who are all very motivated to keep our tiny titles from getting lost on the shelves. I really like doing business this way. I think it’s sort of weird to expect every bookstore in the world to be an appropriate venue for a book, or to expect to find every book you want in one place.

Who are some of the writers featured in the first series?

Our first series includes four titles:

The Third Elevator, a novella by Aimee Bender, author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. The Third Elevator is a fairy tale about a swan and a bluebird and the village they live in and the objects in their lives that move up and down and their attempts to sustain a family.

Bobcat, a short story by Rebecca Lee, author of the novel The City Is a Rising Tide. This one is about a dinner party, and the things its hosts and guests bring to it, both food-related and not. It’s our shortest title, but it’s many-layered — there are books within the story, people pregnant with other people, a terrine and a trifle, all carried by prose that’s precise and lyrical and often mysterious.

Sweet Tomb, a story collection by Trinie Dalton, author of the story collection Wide Eyed (part of Akashic’s Little House on the Bowery Series) and the novella A Unicorn Is Born, co-editor of an art book Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is that McSweeney’s published a few years ago, and editor of an anthology called MYTHTYM, which she wrote a lot of, too. Sweet Tomb is the story of a candy-addicted witch named Candy, who leaves the safety of her childhood gingerbread house in the forest in search of the excitement of a more urban environment. Her adventures lead her to eat meat for the first time, open a bank account, develop a crush on Death, and possibly comes to terms with her inherited lifestyle.

A Mere Pittance, a novella by me. This story is a telephone conversation between two people — a young woman stranded in India after enduring a kind of metaphysical experience, trapped beneath a piece of furniture in a strange hotel room, and her older boss and lover, at home in the US.

Is it a priority for Madras Press to publish emerging writers, or is the focus more on finding homes for established writers’ non trade-book length projects?

Our concern is for the stories. It’s a privilege to work with the authors I’m working with, and there are a lot of other writers whom I’d love to work with, but I’m also really excited to see what submissions come in through the mail. And we can’t really afford to be choosy, as our entire catalog is reliant on the generosity of our authors, who have all agreed to contribute their work for no profit.

One Story, the literary journal with a similar spirit, says their mission is to  “save the short story by publishing in a friendly format that allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment.” What is the mission of Madras Press?

There are a lot of smaller things on our agenda: publishing stories that may have been overlooked by other companies; printing them in a way that removes as many distractions as possible and emphasizes the story over the book’s commercial value; working with independent bookstores; and raising funds for charities. All of these came about as separate decisions as we learned more about what was required to achieve an end product worth selling, and so they’ve made kind of a mess of whatever mission we may have started out with. We create books that are maybe a little smaller and a little less about money than most other books. I don’t know if every story ought to be read in this fashion, but it’s definitely nice to have the option.

Aimee Bender reads on Saturday November 14th at Brookline Booksmith to benefit InsideOUT Writers.

The list includes indie publisher Richard Nash (featured in this TFT column a few weeks back) as well as Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, and Loudpoet’s Guy L. Gonzalez.

“The speech CD and its accompanying book have been a resounding success, selling 200,000 copies since its release in January. A compilation of President Barack Obama’s speeches has done even better, selling half a million copies since November, solidifying his role as Japan’s English teacher.”

Publishers have generated titles such as “Speech Training: Learning to Deliver English Speech, Obama Style”; “Learn English Grammar From Obama”; and “Yes, I Can With Obama: 40 Magical English Phrases From Presidential E-mails,” in the hopes of staking a claim in the $8.7 billion foreign-language teaching industry in Japan.

In related news:  East meets West in political sushi.  Check out the cool/creepy Obama roll.

So, what is social publishing, anyway? “For the reader-as-reader, what ’social’ means is that there’s going to be more information about books, more scope to interact with the books (your own commenting & annotating and reading others’), more scope to interact with the author, more scope to interact with one another,” says Nash. “‘Social’ is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.”

When Nash left Soft Skull in March, he had big plans for the future of publishing. “I really want to be engaged in helping figure out a new model for independents. And I am enormously optimistic.”

40 Canadian college undergraduates read two versions of Kafka’s “The Country Doctor.” One version maintained the decaying narrative and non sequitur nature of the original and was accompanied by bizarre, unrelated images.  The other version had been excised of all tangential material and adhered to a revised traditional narrative, along with relevant illustrations.

Participants from both groups were then shown a series of 45 strings of letters, which they were instructed to copy. “They were informed that the strings, which consisted of six to nine letters, contained a strict but not easily decipherable pattern,” says Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune. “They were then introduced to a new set of letter strings, some of which followed the pattern and some of which did not. They were asked to mark which strings followed the pattern. Those who had read the absurd story selected a higher number of strings as being consistent with the pattern. More importantly, they ‘demonstrated greater accuracy in identifying the genuinely pattern-congruent letter strings,’ the researchers report. This suggests ‘the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning statistical regularities’ are enhanced when we struggle to find meaning in a fragmented narrative.”

Stimulate your brain with the latest issue of Bust Down the Door and Eat all the Chickens, a journal of absurd and surreal fiction, which features work from indie darling Shane Jones and Bright Stupid Confetti editor Christopher Higgs.

**Image “Summer of Love” by Saiman Chow via Bright Stupid Confetti.**