Dear Friends:
“There’s no money in poetry,” the poet and novelist Robert Graves once quipped, “but there’s no poetry in money, either.” It’s the time of year when I write to ask you to reverse Graves’s idea—in short, I am asking you to “poeticize” a little of your money by supporting the mission of the little indie literary press known as Slant Books.
You don’t have to be a hysterical “doomer” to believe that the state of contemporary literary culture is in crisis: from the decline of reading (especially among the young) to the widening gender gap among serious readers; the incessant, hectoring virtue-signaling of politicized books; the substitution of ephemeral, forgettable styles (using terms like “meta” and “auto”) for painstaking literary craft and the hard-won acquisition of wisdom; and the continuing erosion of attention and interiority by our addiction to electronic devices.
The playwright Matthew Gasda says that what we’re suffering from right now is what he calls “samestream culture”: “It is a place where there are no distinctions between high and low, good and bad, where the format (the phone) molds everything into the same experience.”
To adapt a phrase from spaceship captain Malcolm Reynolds in the film Serenity—someone who is also trying to defy a monolithic, reductive culture—in the face of the samestream, Slant Books “aims to misbehave.”
What does that mean? Consider for a moment Gasda’s list of the markers of a healthy culture:
“Is it easier or harder for originals to find an audience? Are the different regions of cultural production talking to each other? Is there cross-pollination? Is there curiosity? Are audience and artist pushing each other to greater degrees of cultivation and sophistication, or is the cycle inverted: are artist and audience making each other dumber?”
The samestream reduces art to mere self-expression but the great artists have always known that art is a response to something greater than our egos. Gasda notes:
“What Emerson…believed is that you have to live at a certain pitch of intensity to be a genius; an artist can’t have completely smooth edges; they are actually formed by intense pressures and anxieties. There has to be some brush with the outside—with nature, with systems, with God; genius isn’t something that’s cultivated in a private sanctum, but something that’s sculpted by the world.”
Now there’s a great new motto for Slant: we publish books “sculpted by the world”!
These issues have a direct application to how a literary press operates. Slant works hard to find and showcase true originals, to encourage cross-pollination across genres, styles, and disciplines; to engage in the strenuous—but also deeply rewarding—process of pushing each other to greater degrees of cultivation.
To do these things in the context of the samestream is to misbehave, to swim against the tide, and that means to forego the kinds of money and power that flow to the lowest common denominator books. It is why we need your help to stay true to the traditions of humanistic publishing.
But are we actually doing what we claim to do? Well, in just the past year:
- Old Songs Olga Sedakova, translated by Martha M.F. Kelly, was a finalist for the PEN Poetry in Translation Award;
- Foreword Reviews made Bret Lott’s Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land a featured book;
- A chapter from Jeanne Murray Walker’s memoir, Leaping from the Burning Train, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize;
- Amit Majmudar’s Twin A: A Memoir was a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards;
- Richard Michelson’s Sleeping as Fast as I Can was a poetry finalist in the Foreword Indie Awards;
- John Salter’s There Will Never Be Another Night Like This made Electric Lit’s Best Short Story Collections of 2024 list;
- Slant titles were translated into Russian, Italian, and Spanish;
- Nearly 500 book manuscripts were submitted to Slant;
- We continued to bring out provocative and engaging podcasts and blog posts.
- Slant was present at several major events this past year, including, New York Encounter, AWP Bookfair, Calvin Festival of Faith & Writing (where we held a reception in honor of Jeanne Walker), and the Catholic Imagination Conference.
And next year will be no different. Forthcoming titles in 2025 from Slant will include:
- A guide to classical music by the founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, Luigi Giussani;
- The final volume of Morgan Meis’s highly acclaimed trilogy about art and philosophy;
- A memoir of his aesthetic education by the acclaimed novelist Robert Clark;
- Your Names are Written in Heaven, a biography of Rose Busingye, the founder of an NGO in Uganda that serves people from the slums of Kampala affected by HIV/AIDS;
- Poetry collections from Stephen Haven, Bonnie Naradzay, Eric Pankey & Gary Fincke;
- Fiction from Molly McNett, Samuel Ligon, and Gilbert Allen.
You, our readers, make all this possible, through your purchases and donations. (You can purchase books directly from Slant now: they will take a little longer to arrive, but each sale will return more to us!)
Will you misbehave alongside us as we confront the samestream? Will you help us to keep literary culture vibrant, challenging, unpredictable, open to mystery? Would you “poeticize” a few dollars by donating to Slant?
Thanks, as ever, for your generous support.
Yours,
Gregory Wolfe, Publisher & Editor
P.S. I hope some of you will consider becoming monthly givers: that kind of consistency provides us with a bedrock of support and spreads out your gift!
P.P.S. Don’t forget that you can now purchase books directly from us! They will take a little longer to reach you but they’ll let us keep a bigger cut of each sale and help us become more sustainable.
