PRESS RELEASES
Mean Martin Manning
$everance
Junk
The Amadeus Net
Mother’s Milk
Cherry Whip
Exit Only
Devil Jazz I
Devil Jazz II
Season of Ash

ENC Press 21 April 2005
ENC Press 10 January 2004
ENC Press 15 October 2003
ENC Press 4 July 2003
CLIPPINGS

NEW! $everance in Chicago’s WGN9, 1 June 2007
NEW! $everance in Chicago Radio Spotlight, 13 May 2007
NEW! $everance in Chicago Sun Times, 10 May 2007
NEW! Richard Kaempfer in podcast interview on Cara’s Basement
NEW! Richard Kaempfer on The Stan & Terry Show on WCKG
NEW! Richard Kaempfer on The Ministry of Truth radio show on WHPK 88.5 FM
ExecTV in the Connecticut’s Day, 9 December 2005
The Writing Show: Olga Gardner Galvin Interview 26 September 2005
The Writing Show: Christopher Largen Interview 29 August 2005
Time Out Chicago 21-28 July 2005
FoxNews 20 April 2004
FrontPage Magazine 12 November 2003

PRESS RELEASES: individual titles

GOT MIND CONTROL? MILK IS AN ALIEN PLOT
IN THE SATIRICAL ADVENTURE MOTHER’S MILK

COMEDY SCI-FI NOVEL TWEAKS DAIRY PRODUCTS,
MILITANT VEGETARIANS ALIKE

Andrew Thomas Breslin’s Novel Latest Release From
Boutique Fiction House ENC Press

NEW YORK — Not since comics artist Gary Larson retired The Far Side has the secret life of cows figured so prominently in a work of satire. Andrew Thomas Breslin’s first novel, Mother’s Milk, makes cows and their milk key players in a secret global conspiracy from outer space. In this science-fiction adventure comedy, the dairy industry is a puppet of alien masters from a distant planet orbiting the star Vega, who brought cows to Earth millennia ago to enslave humans by slipping us mind-controlling substances in the milk we drink. These outer-space Vegans are being fought by the space-cadet vegans of the True Foods Project aided and abetted by assorted conspiracy theorists, anarchists, and militant feminists. A lactose-loving skeptic gets sucked into this motley resistance movement when a client of hers, who figures out how to spill the beans (soy or otherwise), is captured by the “milk thugs.” And if she doesn’t rescue him (and the human race), she’ll never collect on her legal billings and pay off her student loans.

Mother’s Milk’s author, Andrew Thomas Breslin, has no beef (as it were) with veganism. He can be a very persuasive advocate of swapping out cow’s milk for soy milk, even as he exhibits an equal interest in slapping down smarmy activists, Big Business, and the government. As befits a scholar who never intended to become a novelist, Mr. Breslin punctuates his amazingly erudite slapstick here and there with etymological asides on Latin, Greek, Old English, and Sanskrit roots of theme-related words. His chapter epigraphs quote the likes of Cervantes and Martin Luther, not to mention verses about milk from the Hindu Vedas.

How did someone with an interest in math, medicine, history, biology, physics, linguistics, mythology, and chemistry come to write fiction in the first place? While this raises the question of why such a polymath wouldn’t, Mr. Breslin says it was the result of his finding out that writing fiction didn’t take hard-earned credentials, just the sacrifice of any lingering traces of sanity. And by the time he figured that out, he claims with self-deprecating humor, he didn’t have much left anyway.

Mother’s Milk is the latest example of “intelligent alternatives to limited mainstream-publishing editorial decisions” from publisher Olga Gardner Galvin of ENC Press. Galvin’s ENC Press is a small, completely independent boutique press whose audience is the emerging independent-thinker counterculture. It is known for sharp, entertaining, genre-busting fiction driven by engaging characters and likely to contain elements of social and political satire or commentary—offbeat, well-written novels too quirky and irreverent for mass-market publishers.

ENC Press’s self-chosen boutique designation involves more than house size and the high level of attention given to the editing, design, and production of each release. It is a deliberately chosen business model as well. With the exception of a few independent bookstores, ENC Press bypasses the usual retail book-industry channels, whether brick and mortar or online, in favor of selling books exclusively through its Web site. Publisher Olga Gardner Galvin says only her small-run/direct-sales model makes it possible for her to take real editorial risks and remain open to submissions of witty, perceptive, irreverent books that have a strong element of humor and tip a few sacred cows along the way.

This model allows Galvin to keep all her titles in print indefinitely and avoid remaindering and pulping her books, a practice she calls hideous. While her editorial stance continues to be “alternative,” her model of using Web pages in the place of bookstore shelf space to display titles and make them available permanently is being picked up by mainstream giants such as Penguin and Random House. The difference is that Galvin bypasses the mass market by design, making Internet sales only at her ENC Press Web site where readers get discounts, same as they would at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble, without Galvin’s having to accept such a low wholesale price that she’d be forced to play it safe, the way mainstream houses do.

Gardner Galvin’s concept has proven sound, if only on a small, boutique scale so far. ENC Press finished its first year in the black while publishing novels too complex and nuanced for the mass market, too multidimensional to be assigned to one particular genre, and too fun and readable to be classified as “literary.” Meanwhile, Random House and Barnes & Noble have both experienced flat revenues for the past two years, despite their marketing partnership, with many of 2004’s best sellers, including The Da Vinci Code, The South Beach Diet, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, having been actually published in 2003. This lack of growth is set against the background of the average age of book “consumers” continuing to climb.

Galvin believes she and ENC Press can counteract these trends “by publishing guilt-free, topical entertainment for independently thinking people.” Her Internet marketing strategy is to promote the idea that fiction can entertain while addressing contemporary issues to the growing audience for nonfiction content that is passionate about the self-publishing pundits of the blogosphere. And she’s doing just that with the help of wickedly satirical offerings like Mother’s Milk.

A capsule summary and an excerpt of Mother’s Milk are available at www.encpress.com/MM.html—and so are a few of the wickedest, funniest, and most thought-provoking novels the mainstream publishing business doesn’t know how to handle.

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JAPANESE JAZZ CAT PLAYS ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
IN REVERSE IN CHERRY WHIP

COLUMNIST WHO EXPLAINED AMERICAN BUSINESS IDIOMS IN JAPAN
SETS FICTIONAL JAPANESE MUSICIAN LOOSE IN NEW YORK CITY

Michael Antman’s Novel Latest Release From
Boutique Fiction House ENC Press

NEW YORK—From the moment the deeply eccentric Hiroshi, a budding Japanese jazz genius, hits American ground, the ground starts hitting back with everything it’s got—just as he is to begin a high-profile gig that promises to make his career. This “accidental tourist” in reverse experiences disorientation on all levels at once—physical, cultural and emotional—in Michael Antman’s Cherry Whip, the latest novel from start-up boutique fiction house ENC Press.

Hiroshi’s experiences in New York are exhilarating and humiliating, thrilling and traumatic in equal measure. As the quirky, disaster-prone, and language- and music-obsessed artist struggles to recover both emotionally and physically from a paralyzing illness that is not permanent but whose aftereffects may render him unable to ever again play his clarinet, he must also cope with the long-distance betrayal of his beautiful girlfriend and with his sublimated guilt over his role in the death of his sister many years ago, at the dusty end of a mysterious route she called “The Forbidden Pathway” in the tiny country town in Japan where they grew up.

This seriocomic novel, densely populated with quirky characters, is a love letter to New York City and to the English language. It also shines a spotlight on one fairly peculiar corner of the Japanese sensibility embodied in its hyperconscious but absentminded, sensual but abstracted, intelligent but terribly innocent hero, a Japanese Lucky Jim, who comes to terms with becoming an adult and respecting his gifts against the dual backgrounds of a mysterious pathway in Japan, which now exists only in his memory, and what he lovingly describes as “the filthy charm of New York City,” in the only too-real present day.

Michael Antman is a veteran advertising creative director and marketing consultant. He lived in Japan for three years, where he was a cross-cultural trainer and author of the popular weekly magazine column “Antoman’s Idiomu Scuramburu,” which used a serialized story in Japanese to illustrate the meaning of various baffling business idioms, such as “dog and pony show.” He also published haiku in literary magazines and anthologies, wrote textbooks and recorded English-instruction tapes.

Cherry Whip—a novel about disorientation that won’t make you dizzy reading it—had several close calls with major publishing houses before it found its home at ENC Press, a small, completely independent boutique press whose audience is the emerging independent-thinker counterculture. It is aiming to be known for sharp, entertaining, genre-busting fiction driven by engaging characters and likely to contain elements of social and political satire—offbeat, well-written novels too quirky and irreverent for mass-market publishers.

“Some of the best fiction being written today has completely unprecedented points of view,” says ENC Press publisher Olga Gardner Galvin. “Cherry Whip’s Hiroshi isn’t a simplistic character whose life falls apart because of one mishap and who then spends the rest of the book doing a slipshod job of introspection. It’s not what the mainstream houses do over and over again. It’s what ENC Press publishes: a novel too complex and nuanced for the mass market, too multidimensional to be assigned to one particular genre, and too fun and readable to be classified as ‘literary.’”

ENC Press’s self-chosen “boutique” designation involves more than house size and the high level of attention given to the editing, design, and production of each release. It is a deliberately chosen business model as well. With the exception of a few independent bookstores, ENC Press bypasses the usual retail book-industry channels, whether brick and mortar or online, in favor of selling books exclusively through its Web site. Publisher Olga Gardner Galvin says only her small-run/direct-sales model makes it possible for her to take real editorial risks.

“I started out thinking we were ‘alternative’ because our authors saw and discussed more than one side of any question and issue and did so with wit and humor, which is ‘alternative’ in today’s book industry,” says Galvin. “But then we realized that in pursuit of such novels we came up with some intelligent alternatives to limited editorial decisions, the hideous practice of printing books only to remainder and pulp them, and serfdom for writers in the form of low royalties. We certainly provide an intelligent alternative to the touchy-feely groupthink of the mainstream book scene, simply by publishing guilt-free, topical entertainment for independently thinking people. Cherry Whip is one such sophisticated good read.”

A capsule summary and an excerpt of Cherry Whip are available at www.encpress.com/CW.html—and so are a few of the wickedest, funniest, and most thought-provoking novels the mainstream publishing business doesn’t know how to handle.

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EXIT ONLY: AN EXPAT’S-EYE VIEW
OF THE GRIT ON THE ARAB STREET

MULTI-ETHNIC FERMENT, POLITICAL TENSIONS IN CROSSROADS
CITY OF JEDDAH INSPIRED NEW SUSPENSE NOVEL

Saudi Aviation Career Made Close-Up, Crosscultural Interaction
Author Liam Bracken’s Daily Life

NEW YORK — “Do you know any race that’s better at squeezing people’s balls?” brags a Saudi first officer to his American airplane captain. “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t love lording it over people when I get a chance. Just make sure, before you throw your weight around, there ain’t somebody nearby with more weight than you.” Nearly everyone is lording it over someone, or on the make, in Liam Bracken’s suspense novel Exit Only — Saudis both rich and poor, American and British airline personnel, a Pakistani taxi driver, American academics and consulate party animals, a hash-smoking English instructor, and Bangladeshi street sweepers.

Liam Bracken is the pseudonym of a former Saudi expat who has chosen to remain anonymous. He had worked in aviation in Saudi Arabia since the end of the First Gulf War. His friends there were people of all nationalities, political views, economic backgrounds, and values. The action and characters of Exit Only emerged from the real-life aspirations and frustrations swirling together in the global bazaar of cultures, ideologies, and desires that is Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The title Exit Only refers to a type of visa allowing exit from, but not re-entry into, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Among the characters drawn fatefully together for a flight that will forever take them away from the kingdom are Sara Santos, a maid from the Philippines, who hopes that a palmed and altered U.S. passport will enable her to escape twelve years of abuse and confinement in a middle-class Jeddah household. Her “exit only” flight is an illicit commercial opportunity for American aircraft mechanic Charlie Durango, who figures he understands the Saudi mentality in Jeddah well enough to take a few thousand dollars for helping his colleague Khalid Ba Sallah stash two kilos of cocaine on the New York–bound flight. But some casual anti-American remarks of Khalid’s have driven Charlie into an obsession with whether he may actually have been used to deploy something more deadly than cocaine.

With a nuanced spectrum of characters and motivations that prevent it from aspiring to be the next Hunt for Red October, but gently remind one of The Orient Express and Alexandria Quartet, Exit Only is an example of the interesting new voice with an original work that editors and publishers used to take pride in discovering, nurturing, and promoting. These days, that tradition is being resuscitated by ambitious, high tech–savvy independent houses like ENC Press.

ENC Press is a small, completely independent boutique press whose motto is “Tipping Sacred Cows Since 2003.” It has already published another novel with an on-the-ground-level understanding of important geopolitical issues created by friendships between Westerners and Third World locals. Season of Ash, set in South Africa on the eve of that country’s first free elections, emerged from former professional soccer player Justin Bryant’s friendship with a Johannesburg local, from whom Bryant learned that black South African hopes and fears were a lot more complex than the Western media’s triumphant feel-good stories.

“Nobody in mainstream publishing, which I know quite well, sees much commercial potential in first novels about Saudi Arabia or South Africa,” says ENC Press publisher, Olga Gardner Galvin. “I selected Exit Only and Season of Ash from among hundreds of submissions because they’re both compelling, fantastically well-written novels that give insights into cultures and issues you can’t get from newspaper pundits or network television news. This is the beauty of my business model: it allows me to take chances on brilliant novels that won’t get the time of day from the rest of the retail book industry.”

Galvin has deliberately chosen to publish books in a series of small print runs, and distribute them primarily through her Web site. She says the retail book industry, whether brick-and-mortar or online, is stuck in a wasteful routine of wholesale print runs, mass distribution, and remaindering of “product,” namely blockbusters and genre titles. “While it’s certainly good to have books listed on searchable sites like Amazon or Barnes & Noble,” she says, “the traditional, cutthroat, deep-discount wholesale route that treats books like so much interchangeable product ultimately doesn’t do my novels justice. I’d rather keep my overhead low, publish books that excite me, and keep them in print so they can find their audience of intelligent readers.”

Exit Only — set in the city of Osama bin Laden’s education in the decade of Al Qaeda’s rise to terrorist “stardom” — is a novel for readers who are looking for political and crosscultural insight, new ideas and information, and food for thought, along with action and suspense. An excerpt, author’s bio, and ordering information can be found at www.encpress.com/EO.html.

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