Madras Press are a Massachusetts-based publishing house, specialising in short and novella-length fiction. A fledgling enterprise, they are interested in removing usual length-oriented limitations and instead, designing books that bend to the demands of the stories inside. It's an exciting and obvious idea: what happens when you peel back the constraints surrounding a story and allow the fiction to speak for itself?
At the helm of the Press is 26-year old Sumanth Prabhaker, who says, 'So many of the books I own actually seem to be hiding their stories — there's a cover with all kinds of superfluous copy, and then pages of blurbs to convince me to buy the book, and then on the back cover are four or five other things that have nothing at all to do with the story, but rather to my wallet, or to the supply chain.' Their alternative is to offer compact, tactile books, objects whose design is informed by the classic Penguin 60s series, making them easy pickings for literary blazer pockets. There's also a touch of the homespun; each title individually bound and authors involved in their own cover design. Better still: they are also missing out blurbs, barcodes and hiding prices, though they do include an Ex-Libris panel with which to personalise the volume. It's a kind of utilitarianism for mystery's sake.
In stripping back so many design staples, it becomes obvious that a text nearly always comes accompanied by a cacophony of surrounding agendas, and Madras Press's intention to allow the story primacy is a welcome change. Prubhaker expounds: 'We're also interested in promoting stories that are often arbitrarily ignored by most publishing outfits. Most often, this is an issue that comes from page length -- it just seems silly to us that writers should start out with a vision of their stories as either under thirty pages or over two hundred pages, when there's no sound reason not to accommodate the middle-ground. However, 'ignored' here can also imply publication in an inappropriate venue. Bobcat by Rebecca Lee is a perfectly acceptable 20- or 25-page manuscript that any magazine or journal would be lucky to print; but it's also a story that, I think, would suffer greatly with a bunch of other unrelated stuff surrounding it. We're not making any kind of missive, or saying that all stories ought to be read on their own; we're just trying to make that kind of reading experience possible.'
Lifting off frames as they go, Madras Press are a reminder to reassess expectations about how we consume fiction. And the short story, already informed by white-space and the value of exclusion, has always been well placed to disrupt form and time.
Series One, which launched in September, relishes these preoccupations in its inaugural list. It's an eclectic roll call with a penchant for the Fantastic, made up of Aimee Bender’s The Third Elevator, Trinie Dalton’s Sweet Tomb and Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat, as well as Prabhaker’s own A Mere Pittance. Dalton's Sweet Tomb oozes with treacly adolescent grotesquerie in a 'Witch comes of age with a Vampire called Chad' tale, so alive with teen introspection it could be a Noah Baumbach screenplay. Meanwhile, A Mere Pittance is propelled deftly along by only two voices, Beckett-like. Prabhaker's dislocated dialogue crackles through the sparseness.
But this sort of publishing necessitates a degree of freedom. In this case, it is informed by a generosity on behalf of both the publisher and authors. Explains Prabhaker, 'Our writers have agreed to publish these works at no profit to them; nor do the sales profit us in any way, either, as all proceeds go to a charitable organization or cause selected by the author. Just about everything but the cost of manufacturing is done on a voluntary basis. To help maximize the amount of the donation, and keep the sticker price low, we're foregoing commercial distribution and working directly with consumers, as well as a network of our favorite independent bookstores.' Thus far, these bookstores are all within the USA, so purchasing outside requires a trip to www.madraspress.com. Which is well worth a look for its own sake.
