Republic of Consciousness Class of 2021: Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman (Peninsula Press)
Between March 8th and March 19th we will be posting ten pieces on our blog celebrating the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 longlist. There will be interviews, extracts and articles, with each piece focussing on a longlisted book.
Here we have an interview with Peninsula Press, which publishes Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman.
Who is Peninsula Press, and what’s your story so far?
Peninsula Press was launched in 2017 by three booksellers, that is, Jake Franklin, Sam Fisher, and Will Rees. We’d all been working at Burley Fisher Books – Sam of course still does – and, encouraged by the publishers we’d met there, we decided that there was space for one more. Our first priority was essays: due to the exciting work of other, mostly small publishers, it was clear that there was an appetite for books of stylish, critical non-fiction; but it was also obvious that this appetite still outstripped what was available. Our Pocket Essay series has been our intervention there: through the small format and low cover price, we’ve tried to make this kind of writing – sometimes seen as a luxury product – as accessible as possible. In addition to essays, we’re now beginning to expand our fiction list.
How does your experience in bookselling influence your publishing?
As a bookseller, you have to have a wide view of the landscape. This view, along with conversations with readers, helps to identify readerships that are un- or underserved. As a publisher, we’ve always looked to these gaps. A good bookshop is also a community, a place where collaboration can emerge organically. This is another aspect that greatly informs our publishing.
Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman is your first novel, no? What attracted you to it?
Our first novel, although not our first work of fiction – that was back in 2018 with our edition of David Wojnarowicz’s vivid short fictions The Waterfront Journals.
I was quite late to the party with Lynne’s work. I came across Soft Skull’s reissue of American Genius, A Comedy a few years ago while living in Chicago, followed by the newly published Men and Apparitions. When I started asking around it turned out that everyone I knew over there loved Lynne’s work. It’s then I realised that while many British readers were familiar with Lynne’s criticism through her regular magazine writing, most hadn’t had to chance to acquaint themselves with her equally wonderful fiction. Which struck me as such a shame, but also, of course, an opportunity. Lynne’s novels innovate at every possible level: syntactically, formally, conceptually. They’re ideas novels that are voice-led. Like the best essay writing, they are above all adventures of thinking. But they also press ideas back into life, since to be inside one of Lynne’s novels is to gaze out upon the world from inside the mind of one of her intelligent, companionable, neurotic narrators. This is how Lynne builds character: through what her narrators choose to pay attention to, and don’t. Under the curious, imaginative eye of one of her narrators, any topic is revealed as rich, strange, and expansive in ways previously unexpected. But her novels are also wildly, sometimes wincingly funny.
If you could be a big press would you be?
Diminutiveness has its advantages, light-footedness, flexibility, portability. In some ways has been affirmed by this past year: sales dropped, but we don’t have lots of outgoings and so we were able to weather the storm. Yet the pandemic also made visible some of the difficulties of being a small publisher of unconventional books: getting review coverage, for instance, was a challenge last autumn when almost an entire year’s worth of book was published in the space of a couple of months. With review space shrinking, this will be an ongoing difficulty for lots of small presses. This is one reason why the Republic of Consciousness Prize is playing such an important role in supporting the thriving – but precarious – ecosystem of small press publishing in the UK and Ireland.
The pandemic has also underlined how essential bricks and mortar bookshops are to that ecosystem. We sell far more books through indie bookshops than A—. Essential to our survival are passionate, intelligent, enthusiastic community booksellers who like our books and then recommend them, or who simply leave them face out in prominent places in physical bookshops that those customers who can have to drag their corporeal selves to and around. There’s something pleasingly analogue and nonsensical about that in a world supposedly presided over by algorithms.
But above all, we are small because we are new, and because we want to publish exactly the books that we want to publish. We aren’t attached to smallness in and of itself; we want to keep on doing what we’re doing while continuing to grow, so that the books we publish can take life in as many minds as possible.
What does 2021 (and beyond) hold for Peninsula Press?
This June we’re publishing Sterling Karat Gold, a new novel by the Republic of Consciousness-shortlisted Isabel Waidner. We’re really so thrilled about this. It’ll hardly be news to your readers that Isabel’s first two novels are among the strangest, most expansive, inventive, and politically engaged novels to have appeared in the last few years. They put a magnifying glass to all that’s insidious in our social and political worlds while also celebrating the radical possibilities that remain: for friendship, comradeship, resistance, and invention. In these respects Sterling Karat Goldis no different, and also involves spaceships, matadors, and Boschian hellscapes.
Later in the year we’ll publish another of Lynne’s books, the razor-sharp, hilarious Weird Fucks, to be followed, in due course, by American Genius, A Comedy – her masterpiece of a novel about skin and sensitivity, and everything else. Later in the year we’re publishing Oval by Elvia Wilk, a wonderfully inventive debut set in a near future Berlin, which savages corporate greenwashing, tech utopianism, and the heavily overlapping worlds of art and commerce. In October there are ambitious, wide-ranging essays from Amber Husain and Josh Cohen, Replace Me and Losers.
Men and Apparitions is available to buy on the Peninsula Press website.