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The Soft Skull Exodus
by Nathaniel G. Moore

Brooklyn-based "small press" Soft Skull is snorting up lines of Canadian authors starting with the re-release of Michael Turner's The Pornographer’s Poem and later this fall Derek McCormack’s The Haunted Hillbilly.

Nathaniel Moore's fiction has appeared in many magazines, including B&A, Front & Centre, and Forget Magazine as well as the Canadian humour anthology Career Suicide.

Dear LPG, my name is Richard Nash and I was wondering if I could borrow a cup of sugar….

It seems there is a "suspicious" leak in the publishing sector here in North America that no one is quick to patch up. Canadian books are slowly leaking, as though through a pipe, down into the US. Brain drain, literary style. Our greatest alternative press authors are being stolen, nicked, pinched one by one and there's nothing we can, or should, do about it.

What I’m talking about is Soft Skull Press, the Brooklyn-based media darlings who are not only stealing the limelight in the literary planet of New York but starting to shoplift our own writers.

According to the Literary Press Group, a publisher must be (among other things) 80% owned and controlled by Canadians to join their organization. So, technically, for those with tape measures and calculators pacing back and forth shaking their fists, Soft Skull cannot join.

A representative from the LPG wouldn't comment on whether an American small press with reprint rights from several Canadian small presses represents a positive or negative development, but was interested in how well the publishers were being compensated for the rights. To the LPG, the longevity of the Canadian Publisher is of the utmost importance. Perhaps, then, Soft Skull should be classified Canadian?

Soft Skull was started by Sander Hicks and Susan Mitchell in 1993. It was run very DIY for a few years, until incorporated in 1996. During a famous brouhaha involving finances, Richard Nash came on in an advisory capacity in 1999 and took over the company in mid-2001, after Sander Hicks took a "leave of absence." That's when things really took off for Soft Skull.

Part of Nash's success springs from the fact that he has no major frontier when it comes to publishing or working with publishers.

"I just try to meet with people, pick their brains. I just don't have time to read magazines. I actually know sweet fuck all about the structures of funding for Canadian publishers, other than that it exists. Really my attitude is that I publish the best books I can afford to publish, and publish them as hard as I can. If the North American market for writers artificially discounts ones from above the 49th parallel, that creates an opportunity for me. Canadian writing here is basically considered "foreign" like French or Italian but, conveniently, it's in a language I can read. Or take Rob Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World, which we acquired first (though only US rights and Verso is publishing in the UK/BC incl. Canada). That's a brilliant book, artificially discounted cause it's so "political" and "people don't read political novels." Bullshit, you just don't know how to publish them! Or books like The Sleeping Father: because the first two didn't do so well, that means the rest won't either. So: no-one's selling out by coming to Soft Skull, but we do pride ourselves in publishing books that are really fucking good, but, because of industry prejudices, aren't getting published."

Call it the publisher’s version of the game of Risk, but many people admire what Nash is doing, and what he's doing reflects partially on what Canadian presses are not doing…

"...I think infusion is the way to go. The more time I spend at international bookfairs the more I feel that there is this evolving global ecology of independent publishers be it Arsenal Pulp, Akashic Books, Anansi, or Canongate and Alison & Busby and Serpents Tail and Profile in the UK, or Au Diable Vauvert in France, or Minimum Fax and Fazi Editore in Italy. That ecology involves publishers embedded in the culture from which and into which they are publishing. So while we all learn from each other, and we from time to time might publish each others' books, I don't see any of us being able to get so involved in each other's worlds that we could set up operations in other countries."

Might this be, after all, part of our problem? Is our pool too small? Not enough editors? Money? What is it? Promotion? Lack of advertising? Poor distribution channels for LPG titles?

Nash has a master plan, and he's ready to share it - you just have to ask. At Poynter online I discovered one of Nash's posts about mainstream perceptions of bookselling and what's believed to be hip and relative:

"The Times really has no idea what they're talking about. Commercial fiction is not going to draw them a younger audience. The reason the "best-sellers" aren't doing as well as they used to is that the younger audience has no interest in those books. I'm going to be somewhat self-serving here and observe that my company, Soft Skull Press is nothing if not tuned into younger demographics. Hell, I started a children's book imprint because we were selling so many of our "adult" books to teens."

With recent mentions in Maisonneuve Magazine, Quill & Quire, and The Danforth Review the press is becoming a household name for those in the know. Sam Hiyate, former Gutter Press boss and current Toronto literary agent at The Rights Factory, says, "Richard Nash and Soft Skull have a vision that is like Barney Rosset's vision of Grove Press or Maurice Girodias' of The Olympia Press: I love their books and the risk they take with new writers and brave subjects."

And speaking of risks, this spring Michael Turner’s celebrated novel The Pornographer’s Poem gets dumped in the unsuspecting lap of America (the rights bought by Soft Skull last summer through Turner’s agent.) When I spoke to Nash this summer at his headquarters, a small library type corner shop in Brooklyn, he said he was going to have to have someone scan the original edition because apparently Doubleday wanted to charge him for the Quark files of the manuscript.

Nash first saw Turner’s book through agent Hilary McMahon at Westwood Creative.

"What had happened is that John Geiger had contacted us about doing the US edition of his Gutter Press book Chapel of Extreme Experience. We agreed to do it, then he put me in touch with Hilary McMahon, Turner’s agent. I asked if her she had anything else I should know about and she sent me The Pornographers Poem. I just couldn't believe it. It was certainly one of the best novels I had ever read. Period. And here it was, being offered to me to publish! I showed it to my Marketing Director, Tennessee Jones, formerly a woman now undergoing gender transition. Tennessee’s reaction was that it was the best depiction of adolescent sexuality s/he had ever read. If I, a conventional straight guy, and Tennessee both had that reaction (and he's a tough critic), we knew we had to do it. So we’re going to publish it the way it should have been published two years ago. All guns blazin’! Really, this novel's brilliance exceeds that of most of all the hot-shot authors in the United States right now. I would definitely want to bring him to Book Expo America and get him to meet all the arbiters of literary taste and make them confront the astonishing reality of this book."

And Nash does indeed have some big U.S. plans in store for our Canadian hero:

"It's now officially June, but the broad outlines are a shitload of galleys going out to reviewers, a booksigning at Book Expo America, and East Coast tour in June, and a West Coast tour in the Fall with one of our other authors Daphne Gottlieb, co-sponsored by Arsenal Pulp. I met his French publisher last week (Marion at Au Diable Vauvert) and we agreed that in certain respects The Pornographer's Poem could prove to be the best book either of us would ever publish."

(Nash also notes that his French translator is the same guy who translated Get Your War On! or Putain, C'est la Guerre! and also translates Pynchon, DeLillo, Gaddis, Vollman…)

Toronto’s Derek McCormack is another small press swindle currently in the works with not one but two New York Publishers.

"Akashic is is doing the Dark Ride/Wish Book collection and we're doing The Haunted Hillbilly," says Nash. “The most important thing there is another shitload of galleys at Book Expo America avec l'auteur, West Coast tour in early Fall with Denis Cooper and a tour of the good ole American South in late Fall, including an event (somehow) in Nashville..."

Though Nash's dealings with Canadian authors is, at this point, largely through their agents, he's starting to eyeball other well-known Canadian presses.

"We’re starting to talk to other publishers (Martha at Anansi, Steve at Raincoast,) and Arsenal Pulp and word of mouth (from the authors...). And yup, we're putting Canadian critics on the back (though not the front...). And sending out press packets with the Canadian clippings."

Will this marriage last? Will Canadian readers want to buy reprints of "classic" Canadian small press books? Will American's? Time will tell.

Rebecca Godfrey, author of The Torn Skirt says Soft Skull is able to access the underground in a way that larger houses cannot.

"They're possessed of a great energy and relevance; they're able to be engaged with underground culture and discover and publish provocative and unruly voices in a way bigger houses are often unable or unwilling to do, and many of their books will probably be seen as influential and prescient twenty or fifty years from now."

Richard Nash is an amicable guy: friendly, down-to-earth, human. Soft Skull readings are intimate, well attended and full of nice writers reading from great books. It’s a simple plan really. Perhaps something larger will develop from this small leak, perhaps not. But what Nash feels about publishing as a whole, "the big picture", as it were, is much more important than the subjective hook of this article: this "sporadic" pinching of our Canadian All-Star small press roster.

Pinch away, Nash, some might say. We might be dreaming.

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Soft Skull Press
Nathaniel G. Moore

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