The Drill Press

publishers aiming to get in your head: We publish books in paperback and and also as e-books, though we have not yet decided on an e-book format other than pdf. Our approach is through print on demand, given that the 19th century model for publishing houses printing books on paper pimped by semiliterate agents with their heads up their asses is antiquated and doomed. We seek writers who understand the process of writing, conscious of their words and sentences and paragraphs and why they should come together in a given form. Literate and literary writers outside the norm of genre-slavish zombies to a moribund culture. We eschew the whores who don't have any idea of literary history or literary roots, without past or experience or new viewpoint. If one must flop on one's back to open one's legs, at least do it with some integrity, ingenuity, experimental fervor and sense of adventure. Try something new. Otherwise we aren't interested in your stuff. NO GENRE. (Note: we respect prostitutes who serve with integrity and distinction, whether it be writing or just plain old sex.); We intend our catalog to grow as books are published and remain in print. We're looking for original work that transcends the bounds of 19th century standards set by the major houses and will only publish when we find writing that meets our standards.; Our books will be available from online retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and our ebooks will remain available at ebookmall.com. They might be also be available at some independent bookstores and they can be ordered by booksellers from Ingram.; Meanwhile, we are reading other interesting work. Since we have several books in the pipeline now, we are closed until early next year. However, we will continue to actively seek submissions that are not crassly commerical bilge. Work with a purpose beyond the counterfeit notion of unengaged entertainment best served by the dual tediums television and film which have converged to the point they are largely interchangeable. We suggest reading the few paragraphs under submissions regarding books.

Now available:: Dear Vito by Mickey Z.; "Mick is super-smart and sexy, looks great in nothing but boy shorts and serves the best pina coladas in town. Oh yeah, he can write pretty good too."; —GINA RANALLI, author of Sky Tongues and Mother Puncher; Go directly to The Drill Press Catalog; available from Amazon.com and from Barnes and Noble

A Broca Literária: Saudanções, internauta.; A partir de novembro, a Drill Press concede espaço para autores e leitores da lingua portuguesa com sua nova revista digital "A Broca Literária". Serão quatro trabalhos de prosa expostos mensalmente seguindo linhas similares às adotadas pela editora em suas outras revistas. Publicaremos crônicas, artigos, estórias curtas, romances de ficção e não-ficção, tudo em lingua portuguesa. Queremos textos originais, criativos, que instiguem a reflexão no leitor, que lhe agucem o espírito crítico sem comprometer-lhe a doçura e a expontaneidade, que matem sua sede de arte, talento e verdade.; Produções óbvias como tantas que transbordam na rede escondendo trabalhos valiosos são dispensáveis para nós, mesmo que bem apresentadas. Nossos lemas são criatividade, originalidade, qualidade e ousadia. A "Broca" não teme novidades. Não ostenta barreiras quanto à temática apresentada. O importante é que se respeite essas quatro prerrogativas.; Você, leitor e autor da língua portuguesa, agora tem um espaço só seu.; Para saber mais sobre a proposta da Broca ou sobre como ser um de nossos autores, acesse a revista.; A Broca Literária

We're new, we're vicious and we're hungry.: We seek a few good readers. Terrestrial intelligences seeking pleasure in engaging the brain, eschewing the standard television-aping pap presented by the major houses as literature. Readers relishing the English language, prose that realizes its potential, and tales that exploit the marvels of reality wherever it is found.; We seek a few good writers. Authors renouncing cliché with tales outside the mainstream, explicit in setting and detail to transport the reader, trusting rather than bludgeoning the reader. Creators of convincing creatures in unique settings.; You can eat off our prose.

Manifesto In Five Easy Movements: This work simultaneously appeared on the computers of our three founding editors as they made plans to start this publishing house. Investigation revealed slight variations in text which over time merged into this version; under the properties were three different comments, though the title and author were as given. One comment stated CHANCE: Computer enHANced, another CHANCE: Computer Hosted AlieN intelligenCE. In the third a longer description: A work by silicon life forms created by information and inhabiting the web. Later one of us got an email with no address simply stating Collective intelligence from bits to words.; Click To Read the Full Manifesto

The Big Stupid Review
Idolatry: By Robert Smith; I was only on comfort break for five minutes tops, but by the time I get back in there Frank has gone and went and hotdesked me again. Fifth time this month. I come in to find him swiveling his fat ass around in my caster chair, this nasty evil smirk plastered on his aftershave-reeking ugly mug like a neon bowtie. I notice too how he's whiteouted his own initials in the earpiece of my brand new headset. I feel like crying. more...
P H I L E M A T O P H I L I A: By Traci Chee; So when Helena kissed that bullfrog, she didn't do it because he swore that he was royalty. She did it because watching the reflection of clouds in the lake was like watching cream being poured into a blue cup. She did it because he was a talking frog! And how often do you meet a talking frog. And how often is the afternoon perfect like that, with the faraway mountains looking so much like footstools, like you could just long jump the valley and land that close to the sky. more...
They Do!: By Al Po; Hook chafed at mall management's expecting him to be, at worst, a melodramatic parody of evil, evil Disneyfied, evil co-opted and made commercially palatable for the Christmas-shopping mall crowd. How he would have liked to skewer one of them with his sword or the prosthetic hook at the end of his left arm that the Theater Department's prop and costume people had rigged up. What a surprise for the sweet families that would be! more...

Journal Of Precognitive Memories
Saving California: Secession and the Reagan Scheme: By Pig Bodine. California fell for a Reagan scheme … sometimes called Reaganonics … not surprising given the old gasbag came from that fantasy land and governed it for a time before getting promoted to the Presidency. Reaganonics is a complex graft that can be carried on for decades given that three requirements are in play … but there's a significant difference between the Presidency and governorship of California when it comes to implementing the grift. more...
Maurice Stoker on Tom Bradley's Even the Dog Won't Touch Me: By Maurice Stoker. I'm leading a tour of fellow literary professionals. Writers, editors, publishers, and agents. Lots of agents. A tour for a clutch of charities. A service tour of the glory holes of Europe. Western Europe. We do the US and Canada later in the year.; It seems that with Cheney and Bush Jr. having memoirs surreptitiously penned and to be published in the near future, they are both going to be with us on the US leg. I can't wait to see the Secret Service agents on their knees beside the former President and his Vice chowing down on anonymous wiener dogs protruding from holes in stark bathroom walls. Although I have been informed that SS will require all anonymous participants submit to short arm inspection and penile toivel, probably laving away the tasty smegma from around those few remaining lovely foreskins. more...
Maurice Stoker Anent Two Errors in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon: By Maurice Stoker. Given the climate of black-and-whitism about these days, let me confess I be a fan of Mr. Pynchon’s, having enjoyed in particular all his odd-numbered novels (anent this sequence more later, assuming this labyrinthine geodesic of aberrant mentality doesn’t cross the Rio Lethe). But there exist a pair of gaffs in Mason and Dixon more than mere flubs, given the duality of their pairing: one a spatial riff in the fabric of words, the other a temporal anomaly, an anachronism if you will, both mathematical to boot. These be nothing if not planned, part of the thread worming words into the very nature of space-time in all its curved fecundity; more than miscues of a mere mortal.; That is to wit first the stogie incident amidst chapter thirty-four (almost dead center!) in which a twisted cheroot (in a loose sense of the word) produces a smoak Möbius band. What horrible confusion to even the most moderately informed of readers! The would-be Toroidal smoak ring twisted via the quotient topology must emanate as smoak Klein bottle, not smoak Möbius band; as all those with a modicum of education (through only an elementary course in General Topology) know that the quotient space of a cylinder with reversed boundary identification becomes Klein bottle, the Möbius band rather the quotient space resulting from reversed boundary identification of rectangle. more...

Spooky Action At A Distance
Fear of Merging: A Christmas Tale: By Jim Chaffee. I suppose a more apposite memory would be the six or seven inch, finger-thick, brown ascaris wriggling from the anus of a young Marine. Extend the memory to a vision from the Pink Eiga of Japanese film directed by someone like Mitsuru Meike with perhaps the lovely Rinako Hirasawa sucking the worm from the young man's butt-hole more...
Notes From a Season at the Center of the Universe: Cecil Taylor at the Take 3: By Robert Levin. In late 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3, a coffee house on Bleecker Street. It's right next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I'd thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column—something about how this new comic exploited his appearance to good advantage.) more...
Meaning and Almostness: By Jim Chaffee. Essence and existence. For certain believers in God and such, essence precedes existence. For some unbelievers, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, the statement is reversed. Neither of these notions is anything more than a repetition of the point they are attempting to drive home, however, and as far as existential dilemmas go, the God-no God question is at best meaningless and really a yawner. Besides which all the arguments end in begging.; Consider instead a chilling ontological-epistemological cocktail with the potential for profound existential hangover. more...
Kalari Payat: By Gitanjali Kolanad. The young lithe bodies with long muscles under dark skin glistening with oil and sweat crouch and kick and leap, taking inspiration from the movement of elephant, lion, horse, snake. The actions are low to the ground, curving, punctuated by sudden high twirling jumps, just like the Malayalam script, all curves interrupted only rarely by a straight line. more...
Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan: By Tom Bradley. I teach conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets.; Ever since I first reluctantly mounted the bamboo podium, back in the days when this was the richest country in the world, my campus has been under occupation by platoons of boys who call themselves "cheerleaders." Seeming to grow like bunions out of the karate and judo teams, they’re too bristly to get laid, so they scream and march a lot, and flail their arms around. They’re seminarians of a sort, practicing to be full-blown Hirohito worshipers like those I saw officiating at the Feast of the Transfiguration in A-Bomb Park. more...
Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues: By Jim Chaffee. Gilbert Ryle nailed Cartesian dualism by killing the ghost in the machine. Now someone named Carl Zimmer wants to use noise in the machine to kill a straw man standing in for genetic determinism. This mushy-headed blather arises as an attempt to simulate science-talk to people inured to comic book encapsulation of the most complex ideas. Who knows what the author intended to convey, or why, but the premise demands deconstruction like Lon Cheney Junior demanded a dew claw. more...
Name of a Flower: By Sonia Ramos Rossi. The bar in Madrid's gay area was full of smoke and young, pretty lesbians dancing salsa with each other, petite and sun-tanned. I pulled up a high stool at the counter, ordered a Martini and had a look around. To my right a tall, slim, middle aged lady was drinking Baileys on ice, chatting with the bar staff. She looked a little out of place there, I mean she was neither a young pretty lesbian, nor one of the older type of 'guy that understands' who tend to hang out in this place. She did fit another type who normally go there, though; she was a transsexual. more...
Breakable Bayonets, Made in China: By Tom Bradley. Try to get a typical Red Chinese lumpen-prole to sit down with you and share a few minutes of pleasantly goose-bumped thermonuclear war paranoia. He’ll first look puzzled, then think about it for half a second. And then he’ll say there are so many of his people around that lots of them are bound to survive even the biggest holocaust Bush can provoke. So, there’s no need to fret. And his lack of a silly grin when he says this cannot be ascribed to the legendary inscrutability of the yellow face. He’s not joking. more...
Sunny Tells Me a Story: By Robert Levin. We're in my living room, taking a break on the second day of an interview I'm doing with him for Jazz & Pop—and smoking the amazing bush he's always holding—when Sunny says, "Bobby, I never told you this, but for a while there were people trying to kill me." more...
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s: By Robert Levin. Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play - with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume - four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began - or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method. more...