Dennis Cooper is hosting a Little House on the Bowery Day over at his blog, a teaser for the next LHotB releases:
I think most people reading this know that in addition to my writing, blog, and theater collaborations, I’m the editor of a series of books that are published in the US under the imprint Little House on the Bowery. I first got the idea to launch the line of books in 2002 when my then-publisher Canongate offered me my own imprint as part of their bid to publish my novel My Loose Thread. I’ve written about my disastrous experience being published by Canongate a few times, and their reneging on the promise of the imprint was one of the many problems. So I was shopping the idea of the line of books around to other publishers when Johnny Temple of Akashic Books heard about my interest and offered me the reins of Little House on the Bowery, an imprint focused on adventurous fiction that he’d just launched. I happily accepted, and the series was born. The guidelines of LHotB are pretty simple: books of fiction by emerging, adventurous North American writers. The authors can only have published two prior, reasonably well distributed books of fiction at most. Other than those rules, pretty much anything goes. Akashic has been a complete joy to work with from the start. They’ve given me total freedom with the single rule that authors must be able and willing to promote their books via readings and interviews and so on, and they’ve have worked hard to promote the series. All the books in the series have done well in one way or another. Several of the titles have been very good sellers. Others have developed cult followings and/or received very good reviews at the very least. The original idea was to put out two titles per year, although there have been years when LHotB put out three books and a few years in which there was only one LHotB book released. I’m very picky, and I have a strong sense of what kind of work I want to series to represent, and so the output is determined by my passion for the individual books and basically nothing else. This year there was one book LHotB released, but next year I believe there will be three titles coming out. In fact, I’d hoped to use this occasion to announce the #11 and #12 books in the series, one of them an amazing novel by a member of this very own community, but official confirmation from the head office hasn’t arrived in time, so those formal introductions will have to wait. Anyway, below is a kind of display case containing all the LHotB books to date plus a little background information.
[Read on]
Further: Some DC / LHotB in 3:AM includes… American Psycho, Stephen Lucas interviews Dennis Cooper, as does Dan Epstein / Is this text fucking with my brain, Matt Thorne reviews Dennis Cooper: Writing at the Edge / Dennis Cooper does drugs by Stewart Home / Brandon Stosuy on his DC fixation / Richard Hell talks Godlike / Language is a Whore, Victims author Travis Jeppesen interviewed.
First posted: Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008.
