Books are social glue. {Richard Nash opines} is a tumblelog.

Future Tense

lareviewofbooks:

It is no exaggeration to say we are in the midst of an even greater transformation in publishing, and the Los Angeles Review of Books will continue to focus on what this means for writers and readers. One new publisher I’ve been looking at is Red Lemonade, an imprint of Cursor, which is not a publisher, but a “publishing platform.” Both Red Lemonade and Cursor are the creation of Richard Eoin Nash, who ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2009 until he left to start this venture. Cursor, Nash has explained in interviews, is a platform for “social publishing,” which means that it is first and foremost a social networking site for writers and readers, where manuscripts are posted and then read and commented upon by others in the “community”: a hive mind approach to the editorial process. Like its namesake, the literary social networking site Red Room, Red Lemonade is a site where members provide the content as well as comments, with the significant difference that Red Lemonade offers the possibility of publishing, supposedly if the community recommends it. The specific path to publication is not entirely clear. Cursor and Red Lemonade, Nash says, are “the future of publishing.” (Red Lemonade, like many new small presses and publishing collectives, also claims to be carbon neutral, which is nice if it’s true — I know my colleague Toby Miller is attempting to calculate the environmental impact of websites, including their carbon footprints, and it is difficult to assess once we factor in the plastic waste of dead computers, the mining operations for their production, and the power demands involved in everything from wireless mouse batteries to the cooling of servers.)

The Red Lemonade imprint has published three books now: Lynne Tillman’s Someday This Will Be Funny, Kio Stark’s Follow Me Down, and Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen. Tillman’s book is what one would expect from this widely respected writer of a dozen previous volumes, her last with Nash at Soft Skull: it’s a collection of short pieces — carefully observed, meticulously written, small moments — all treading a quietly experimental line between poetic short fiction and quotidian memoir. (We will soon be posting Veronica Gonzalez’s review of Tillman’s book.) I read the first sections of Stark’s novel on the website — these books can all be read there for free — and the editorial comments by a dozen or more hands in the margins was distracting; perhaps they wouldn’t have been if the book had grabbed me, but it didn’t and I let it go. 

Veselka’s Zazen, though, is grabby from the opening scene…. Read More