Other Voices Books

"If you love fiction and are tired of the bland or gimmicky books championed by media book clubs and stocked prominently on the shelves of your local super-store, you've come to the right place!" So begins the homepage of the Other Voices Books website (http://www.ovbooks.com), making explicit our mission of focusing on risk-taking, unique literary fiction too often ignored by the corporate New York City publishers. In particular, Other Voices Books was launched to help keep books of short fiction alive and well in a dominant publishing climate that has, over the past two decades, increasingly marginalized the short story form. Our first six titles, including work by writers as diverse as Tod Goldberg, Josip Novakovich, Allison Amend, Billy Lombardo, Amanda Eyre Ward, Nathan Englander, Etgar Keret, and Laila Lalami, have been short story collections, novels-in-stories, and themed anthologies. Forthcoming work in this vein will include an anthology guest edited by controversial writer Cris Mazza, featuring women writers depicting sexual encounters from the point of view of male characters; this project will include work by such bold voices as Rachel Resnick, Diane Williams, Aimee Parkison, Pam Houston, and Wanda Coleman.

Founded in 2004 as an offshoot of the award-winning literary magazine Other Voices (1984-2007), Other Voices Books is dedicated not only to offering readers the most vibrant voices in contemporary literary fiction, but also to the deeply collaborative author/publisher relationship, which we see as another tragic casualty of the current publishing climate. These days, with corporate publishers focusing almost all their energies on a few "superstar" writers, and independent publishers struggling more and more with low budgets and short staffing, too many writers are left virtually on their own when it comes to their publishing experience. As a "boutique" press, Other Voices Books strives to offer writers a unique and highly personalized journey, with perks many other small indies are unable to undertake due to expending all their resources on publishing as many titles as they can. By contrast, we keep our list very small (one to two titles annually) so as to be able to dedicate a great deal of time and energy to each author, from creative revisions to rigorous copyediting to an extremely competitive marketing push in the galleys stage to booking wide-reaching and diverse national author tours. In this day and age, when authors increasingly feel the pressure to self-market and build a social networking platform, Other Voices Books continues to spearhead promotion at every step of the process, working intensely with authors to optimize the experience of bringing a book into the world and connecting it to its target readers.

Part of this philosophy means combining the best of old-world and innovative publishing models. While embracing e-books and Internet marketing, Other Voices Books continues to view every book first and foremost as a physical work of art, and has a long history of collaboration with visual artists and galleries to create a product that remains extremely pleasurable to hold in one's hands or collect, while also making its content available in a variety of platforms.

In 2007, Other Voices Books became an imprint of Dzanc Books, becoming part of the publishing world's pioneer "conceptual conglomerate": a group of independent book and magazine publishers all joining forces under one economic and distribution umbrella, despite each retaining its individual non-profit status. This move has enabled Other Voices Books to expand its mission further, and in spring 2010, we will publish our first novel, the inaugural title in the Morgan Street International Novel series, which will spotlight work set outside the US. This series grows out of our IPPY gold-medal-winning anthology A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection (2008), and like the anthology that inspired it, the novel series will focus on the ways culture is defined by interpersonal relationships. The debut novel of the series is Zoe Zolbrod's Currency, a sexy literary thriller set in Thailand. We see this as a twin mission with championing short fiction, as international fiction is equally marginalized (with a few...