Instar Books

We publish the darkness.

[instarbooks]

OPEN MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS, August-October 2017

OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

As part of our ongoing publishing program, INSTAR BOOKS is looking for new manuscripts! Maybe YOUR manuscript!

GUIDELINES

We'll be open for submissions from August 1, 2017, to October 31, 2017. Any submissions received prior to or after this window will not be read (except by prior arrangement.)

Please direct submissions to [email protected] within that range of dates. Please also be advised that we will NOT read any submission packages that don't have this exact mix of components:

In body of email: Cover letter that includes an elevator pitch for the project, a short synopsis of the full book, its word count, and some kind of bio, including any prior publications, social media handles potentially relevant to book promotions, etc.

As attachment: NO MORE THAN twenty-five (25) pages or two chapters, whichever is shorter, of your manuscript. Submissions in .docx or .rtf format rather than PDF are preferred by far.

Bonus: Your favorite thing about your hometown.

If we like what you send us in the short package, we'll request the full manuscript! (At present, we’re generally not interested in working with incomplete manuscripts, although if you’re realistically sure the project is one we would be interested in, you are welcome to query.)

We will endeavor to respond to every submission, but please be advised that we’re a small press and may not be able to achieve this endeavor! Feel free to query about the status of your submission after eight weeks from submission. (If we’ve requested the full manuscript from you, we will respond.)

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR RIGHT NOW

book-length single-author works of fiction

interesting, trade-friendly nonfiction proposals

biographies of ill-appreciated historical figures (computer game creators / ppl important to Internet History a plus)

digital literature projects that can plausibly be marketed as "books" (please be thorough in describing these)

At this time, we're NOT looking for:

poetry

memoir (unless your story is v harrowing)

business books (unless your business is v harrowing)

self-help

YA

optimistic cookbooks

If, after reading the above, you remain in doubt about whether your project is something we would be interested in, go ahead and send a cover letter?

CAVEAT

Please look through our back catalog and see if this is the kind of company you would like your book to keep before submitting.

There are the following general principles behind what we have published to date:

queer literature

digital text experiments

fiction for people with troubles

combos

If at least one of the above realistically describes your project, and ideally more than one, we would like to hear from you! If it doesn't, your odds are longer! But we are excited about doing a few select nonfiction projects that may or may not fit these categories, so you could do worse than give us a try.

=== PLEASE DISSEMINATE WIDELY===

[instarbooks]

merritt kopas, allison parrish & pals to do a pre-Lambda poetry-reading at Spoonbill & Sugartown, 99 Montrose Avenue, June 5

May 27, 2016

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BROOKLYN—Six transgender poets, including Instar Books authors merritt kopas and Allison Parrish, will perform a reading to inaugurate Spoonbill & Sugartown’s new location at 99 Montrose Avenue in Brooklyn at 6 p.m. on June 5, 2016. 

The reading will mark the first official event at the new location of the Brooklyn-based independent bookstore (whose Williamsburg location has been in operation since 1999), and will also coincide with the 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards, to take place the following Monday (at which merritt kopas’s book, VIDEOGAMES FOR HUMANS, is a finalist in the LGBT Anthology category.) The all-trans reading will feature a combination of poetry and prose, lyric and experimental writing, showing off the breadth of approaches and concerns found in modern trans poetry.

Readers will include: Cat Fitzpatrick, merritt kopas, Allison Parrish, Paco Salas Pérez, Thel Seraphim, and Charles Theonia. Books and chapbooks by these authors will be available for purchase.

About the Readers:

CAT FITZPATRICK is an editor at Topside Press and the founder of the Trans Poets Workshop. She is currently editing the first ever anthology of trans speculative fiction, and her book of poetry, Glamourpuss, is due out in 2017.

MERRITT KOPAS is a Canadian writer whose work investigates the conditions of intimacy in precarious settings. Her first book, Videogames for Humans, is an exploration of contemporary interactive fiction and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @merrittkopas.

ALLISON PARRISH is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer who lives in Brooklyn. Her teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She was the Digital Creative Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University from 2014 to 2016, and her book Everyword: The Book came out in 2015 from Instar Books

PACO SALAS PÉREZ is a two spirit Mexican poet, editor and computational linguist living in Brooklyn, in Lenape country. They write about the science and technologies of meaning and colonialism. They are on team Chomsky and team Magneto. Their work has appeared in The State, The New Inquiry, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, the zine of the NYC Trans Poets Workshop, and elsewhere.

Before her retirement, THEL SERAPHIM was a gadfly-ish fixture in the trans literary world, as a fan, a critic, an organizer, and finally an author herself. There were some workshops, zines, poems, letters to the editor, and comment threads—never mind the names. She's the author of the forthcoming books Subspace Biographies and The Other Ellipsis. She prefers the term “flicker-out,” and asks for your indulgence now.

CHARLES THEONIA is a poet and teacher from Brooklyn, where they are working to externalize their interior femme landscape. They are the author of Which One Is the Bridge and a co-editor of Femmescapes.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Jeanne Thornton: [email protected]. (and please spread the news! 6 p.m., June 5, 99 Montrose Ave in BKNY!)

[instarbooks]

INSTAR BOOKS is looking for an intern

INSTAR BOOKS is looking for a short-term intern to aid us in our publishing work! We need someone who can help primarily with publicity & social media tasks, but also potentially with some light editorial, graphic design, and manuscript evaluation work. (Will train of course in any of these.)

Ideally you are someone who is very smart and in your twenties who has not gone to fancy college for reasons either of finance or contempt, and who is interested in one day being involved in publishing or publicity. (If you are a white dude please do not apply: other opportunities are surely available at bookjobs.com.) We can't yet pay, but will write letters of rec and try to promote your independent creative works in whatever ways we can. About 12 hours/week, 3-4 months max.

If interested, please contact [email protected] by October 30, 2015 with resume, short statement about why this unpaid internship appeals to you, and links to any cool things you do.

More about the publishing program at www.instarbooks.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!

[instarbooks]

@everyword

Allison Parrish's EVERYWORD: THE BOOK is now available!

“At long last: every word in the English language compiled in a single volume.”--Darius Kazemi

Presenting an accelerated, “director’s cut” experience of the English language like no other—as well as, in botmaker and digital poet Allison Parrish’s writing on her methods, inspirations, and reactions to the initial reception of her work, a deeply personal look at the intersection of conceptual art and secret humanity.

Containing all 109,157 words from the initial run of the @everyword​ account from 2007-2014

2,338 pages of accurate favorite/RT counts

Appendices making it easy to assess the most popular and socially relevant words in the corpus

$10 for ebook in PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats, for easy reading on devices. Limited physical hardbound edition to follow. Book currently available in glow-in-the-dark USB aardvark-in-étui format exclusively on the RHYTHMS + METHODS tour in collaboration with Topside Press, concluding October 17 at Bluestockings in New York City

“A ‘conceptual dictionary’ (recording the popularity of its own lexical entries)—this inventory lists all the ‘components’ in the lovely, if not brutal, machinery of discourse itself. The book itemizes every piece of a common puzzle, out which of which we must make our individual identities for expression in the world. Find your word—and like it.” --Christian Bök 

[instarbooks]

RELEASE DATE ANNOUNCEMENT: Our new title, EVERYWORD: THE BOOK, by ALLISON PARRISH (creator of gifandcircumstance), will be released for sale on October 10, 2015, in conjunction with the RHYTHMS AND METHODS tour featuring authors from Instar Books and topsidepress.

Containing all 109,157 words from the original run of the @everyword account, along with accurate counts of the number of times each word was favorited and retweeted by Twitter users, Everyword: The Book provides an accelerated, “director’s cut” experience of the English language like no other—as well as, in Parrish’s writing on her methods, inspirations, and reactions to the initial reception of her work, a deeply personal look at the intersection of conceptual art and secret humanity.

Official book website to launch OCTOBER 10 at http://instarbooks.com. The book will initially be available for purchase in ebook (PDF/EPUB/MOBI) format for $10, as well as in glow-in-the-dark USB “seed” format for $20. Copies of the latter will also be available for purchase from the author on her tour dates. A case-bound physical edition of the book, in one or two volumes, is an eventual certainty.

For further updates, consider the Instar Facebook; consider it. (Please direct all publicity inquiries to Jennifer Hanks.)

“At long last: every word in the English language compiled in a single volume.”-- Darius Kazemi / randomshopper

(cover art by kathmachine!)

[instarbooks]

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Instar Books Fiction Anthology #000001 ALMOST VOID

June 15, 2015

For Immediate Release

INSTAR BOOKS (a partner of OR Books in NYC, publishers of Julian Assange and Yoko Ono), in preparation for its forthcoming 2016 fiction anthology ALMOST VOID, has officially elected to declare the official English-language translation of the hexadecimal color code #000001 to be “Almost Void.” The book’s cover design and promotion will prominently feature the color.

#000001 ALMOST VOID (the anthology’s official title) is intended to be the first in a semiannual series of fiction anthologies, each associated with a notable hexadecimal color. According to the publisher’s call to submissions, the inaugural volume will publish “fiction that involves some or all of the following qualities”:

-          Privileging imaginative transformation of experience over experience directly (i.e., not necessarily memoir by other means),

-          Concerned with atypical subject matter,

-          Concerned with atypical emotional states (trauma, isolation, Zen acceptance, etc.),

-          Concerned with sex,

-          Written by people who haven’t necessarily had access to traditional means of publication by the literary establishment, and/or

-          Funny, yet about something terrible.

Further, the publishers “aim to publish roughly 25 percent new writers, 75 percent established writers or others we’ve worked with in the past. If you are comfortable identifying up front as someone who is not white, cis, and/or straight, you ought to do this, since we are extremely interested in publishing such someones.” The publishers also “intend to use this anthology primarily as a statement of purpose for Instar Books’s fiction publishing program, and will thus transparently privilege work that caters to their tastes.”

On the decision to associate this “statement of purpose” with a maybe-arbitrary hexadecimal naming convention, Instar copublisher & fiction author Miracle Jones opines: “There are 16,777,216 possible hexadecimal colors, representing technology's best efforts to replicate the infinite divisions of light and darkness. We hope to hack the entire color spectrum to infuse it with the possibilities of transgressive, delightful short fiction; to pry open technology's colors with the primal magic of language. Additionally, we encourage everyone to use "Almost Void" (#000001) instead of "Black" (#000000) whenever possible: it sends a message to the frankly hostile cosmos that you have not yet been defeated in your dreams and ambitions, that there is .39% hope left, and that might just be enough. Probably won't be, but maybe!"

The press will be taking submissions for #000001 ALMOST VOID through All Souls’ Day (November 1), 2015, at [email protected].

For more information on the project, please contact Instar publicist Jennifer Hanks at [email protected].

For more information about the color itself, please consult http://www.colorhexa.com/000001

[ontologyofthus-blog]

Drawing the Thingbody. It would have an intestine growing out of its body, two sets of vertebrae, and mismatched femurs…right?

[orbooks]

"Dr. Bantam Says There's Only One Way to Be Perfect!"

from the Institute of Temporal Illusions. God, we love that place.

[instarbooks]

Re: Twine games and the harassment of Zoe Quinn

Hi, we’re Instar Books, and in Spring 2015 we’re publishing the electronic book Videogames for Humans, edited by game designer and critic merritt kopas. Videogames for Humans is a collection of Twine games, presented both as the game files themselves and as text playthroughs, with reactions by other Twine game makers, as well as authors, artists, critics, and others.

One of the contributors to this book is Zoe Quinn, author (with Patrick Lindsey and Isaac Schankler) of Depression Quest. Depression Quest will be included in the book. So will games by other Twine developers, including Anna Anthropy and Christine Love (both of whom were recently singled out as part of the problem facing mainstream games by someone named “Mr. Fart.” Other parts of the problem include Tim Schafer and Bioware, the latter for “hiding behind the LGBT crowd.”)

We’re publishing this book because video games, at present, are in about the same cultural position as comic books were at one point in their history: i.e., the market is dominated by high production value work that caters primarily to men interested primarily in a certain type of power fantasy. Just as the comics world evolved in the 1990s—developing, through the efforts of publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, as well as a legion of self-publishers and initiatives like Vertigo from within the major publishers, a viable alternative to that mainstream—so the world of video games needs to evolve and develop such viable alternatives.

Twine is one of the most robust of those alternatives. And through the efforts of Twine developers like kopas, Anthropy, Love, and others—most certainly including Zoe Quinn—the medium is evolving, as we speak, and the creative work that’s growing out of it brings new perspectives and approaches to games, new stories that AAA developers haven’t traditionally told. The work is worthy of whatever additional attention we can bring to it both within and outside of the games community.

The recent, consistent, and unapologetic harassment against Zoe Quinn for doing this kind of work is appalling. Claims about “journalistic corruption” aside, the people responsible for and perpetuating her harassment have explicitly said that one of their motivations is to remove the influence of “social justice warriors” from video games journalism, and presumably from video games.

If you’re one of the people who’s doing this, I’ll say this to you: One of the reasons you’re attacking these people is that you can’t tolerate the existence of the “social justice” world view, and you want to stop the people who do have those views from speaking. If you claim you’re doing this because you “love vidya” and want “corrupt SJW journalism” out of it, then you can’t have the faith that your own art form—and the forces of capital that support your ideas about what that art form should look like—are resilient enough to coexist with “social justice,” or with any perspective or work you happen to disagree with.

We do have faith in video games as a form, and we have faith in the work that social justice warriors are doing to help find new directions and new evolutions of it. This is why we’re publishing Videogames for Humans, and it’s why we unreservedly support Zoe Quinn and condemn her harassment, or the harassment of anyone for their views on or work in video games. We call on game publishers and developers—as well as those who distribute and promote video games, such as Steam, Gog.com, and other portals—to do the same.

All best, Jeanne Thornton Copublisher, Instar Books

[instarbooks]

The Black Emerald is coming EVER SO SOON! Pick up an early copy at our LAUNCH PARTY ON AUGUST 5TH. 

[instarbooks]

INSTAR BOOKS invites YOU and your FELLOW GUESTS OF QUALITY to our OFFICIAL LAUNCH PARTY at LE POISSON ROUGE! 

  Enjoy the decadent, synaesthetic reading stylings of Todd Anderson, Clare Louise Harmon, Miracle Jones, and Jeanne Thornton and musical guests Mad Meg, Jason Laney, and Kevin Carter!

  Learn the secrets of our launch title, The Black Emerald, and witness the prototype Wunderkammer Seed that will transform the world of publishing! Take a complimentary copy of our catalog zine to see what we are planning! And above all, come meet the plucky young publishers of INSTAR BOOKS, a partner of O/R BOOKS! Drink with us, dance with us, have whispered conversations with us in awful neon alcoves, and learn about how we will change ALL THE PUBLISHING ASSUMPTIONS UPON WHICH YOU RELY, SINNER.

  Business! Pleasure! Which is this?? How will you know?! Forget "knowing!" Come and join us for an evening of readings, music, and fundraising, out here in the darkness!