PRESS
RELEASES: individual titles
THE UNITED
STATES GOVERNMENT DECLARES WAR ON JUNK FOOD!
RIOTOUS
COMEDY PUTS THE “UGH” BACK INTO “DONUT,”
LAMPOONS PROHIBITION, FOOD CRAVINGS, AND MISGUIDED
CRUSADES
Christopher
Largen’s Iconoclastic Novel JUNK Latest Release
From Boutique Fiction House ENC Press
NEW YORK–TEXAS —Court
mandates liposuction. Cops are busted for selling
doughnuts. Protesters demand ban on Charlie
& the Chocolate Factory. U.S. military
forces eradicate Africa’s cocoa fields. All
this and much more takes place in the dystopian
satire Junk, where the lives of an undercover
police officer, an inner-city food-abuse counselor,
and a black-market baker collide with devastating
consequences.
A hilarious and tragic exploration
of moralistic prohibition policies, Junk
transcends the false dichotomies posed by conservative
and liberal ideologies, and raises more questions
than it answers: What are the public effects of
private health choices? When legislators respond
to epidemics with criminal sanctions, do they exacerbate
the health crisis? Do mafia kingpins support the
prohibition of their products? Can public safety
and personal responsibility ever become reconciled
through government policies?
Preliminary reviews are calling
the novel a classic, comparing it to the works of
Mark Twain, Will Rogers, George Orwell, and Kurt
Vonnegut. Junk’s author, Christopher
Largen, is a leading proponent of drug-policy reform.
His credits include Prescription Pot (a
nonfiction exploration of the U.S. government’s
medical cannabis program), and articles in various
publications, including the Village Voice,
High Times, Nashville Scene, Ft.
Worth Weekly, and Cannabis Culture.
He is a frequent guest speaker at colleges and festivals
across America.
Mr. Largen discovered that writing
about cannabis gave him a severe case of the munchies,
and Junk flowed forth like cream soda.
In the gluttonous tradition of Supersize Me,
he method-wrote Junk during a three-month
food binge, hoping to augment his prose with a sugar
rush. He gained 25 pounds and inspired inquiries
from concerned clerks at his local convenience store,
where he loaded up on ice cream, hot dogs, and candy
bars. Since finishing the novel, Mr. Largen claims
to have reformed his dietary habits, but federal
authorities have not yet completed their investigation.
Junk is the latest example
of intelligent alternatives to limited, mainstream-publishing
editorial decisions, offered by 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 becoming 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.
ENC Press’s catalog of quality paperback originals
is marked by strong elements of humor, unorthodox
insights into foreign cultures, and a trail of tipped
sacred cows left behind it.
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. It also allows her to keep all
her titles available indefinitely on the Web —
a practice recently adopted by industry giants Penguin
and Random House. It’s a model that’s
worked so far; ENC Press was in the black after
one year, and Galvin had to take a break from reviewing
new submissions because of the happy problem of
having all the “excellent, original works
of maverick minds falling through the cracks of
big publishing” she could handle for the time
being.
“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 miserly 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.
Junk is another example of fiction that can entertain
while addressing contemporary issues, and it will
appeal to the steadily growing audience of readers
who hunger for more healthy and nutritious food
for thought than they can find in chain bookstores.”
A capsule summary and an excerpt
of Junk are available at www.encpress.com/JUNK.html
— and so are a few of the other wickedest,
funniest, and most thought-provoking novels the
big publishing business doesn’t know how to
handle.
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|
MOZART:
ALIVE AND LIVING IN A UTOPIAN CITY-STATE?
IMMORTAL
LIVES IN STYLE BY SELLING “LOST” WORKS,
PONDERS SEX CHANGE
Mark A.
Rayner’s Irreverent Amadeus Net Latest Novel
From Boutique Fiction House ENC Press
NEW YORK — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was certainly
irreverent enough that he might enjoy a 250th birthday
present of a novel in which he’s immortal,
plans on a sex change but paradoxically changes
his mind when he falls in love with a lesbian, and
lives in a self-aware utopian city-state he helped
create after a globally catastrophic meteor strike
— in Mark A. Rayner’s novel The
Amadeus Net. Is Mozart, still alive in 2028,
a fitting hero to explore art, love, and identity
at the end of the world? Rayner and the equally
irreverent ENC Press believe they have a case for
this proposition.
In The Amadeus Net, the
one-time wunderkind didn’t really die in 1791,
but has kept his existence secret while trying to
understand his immortality. Although he lives in
style in Ipolis through funds raised by selling
“lost” Mozart works, a few complications
mar his utopia. The world’s greatest reporter
knows he’s still alive and will stop at nothing
to expose him. The stakes are higher than Mozart
realizes, because if this reporter finds him, so
will the spy planning to sell Mozart’s DNA
to the highest bidder. Oh, and, by the way, the
world might end in seven days. Mozart’s only
allies are a psychotic American artist, a bland
Canadian diplomat, and the city itself: a sapient,
thinking machine that is messing up as only a sapient,
thinking machine can.
Mark A. Rayner, author of The
Amadeus Net, does some playing around with
identity of his own. He’s also known as Professor
Friendly, the Web design guy from the University
of Western Ontario. When not “pushing pixels,”
as he calls it, he’s the acting secretary
of the Emily
Chesley Reading Circle, a society dedicated
to literary scholarship and frequent meetings in
the pub.
The Amadeus Net is the
latest example of intelligent alternatives to limited,
mainstream-publishing editorial decisions, offered
by 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 becoming 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. ENC Press’s catalog
of quality paperback originals is marked by strong
elements of humor, unusual insights into foreign
cultures, and a trail of tipped sacred cows left
behind it.
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. It also allows her to keep all
her titles available indefinitely on the Web —
a practice recently adopted by industry giants Penguin
and Random House. It’s a model that’s
worked so far; ENC Press was in the black after
one year, and Galvin had to take a break from reviewing
new submissions because of the happy problem of
having all the “excellent, original works
of maverick minds falling through the cracks of
big publishing” she could handle for the time
being.
“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. The Amadeus
Net is another sophisticated good read the
big boys simply didn’t get because it’s
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.’”
A capsule summary and an excerpt
of The Amadeus Net are available at www.encpress.com/AN.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.
back to
top |
