V I S I O N

Double Negative publishes to our tastes, which are eclectic and don’t reduce to a neat précis. Despite this, we find ourselves drawn to certain writers, traditions, subjects, techniques, affective domains, and other concerns, which we have done some work to map explicitly for prospective readers and writers and for our own edification.

Concerns

We are especially interested in work that...

• Engages with theory and thought or is itself philosophical
• Is animated by language and sound as much as character and narrative
• Pays attention to marginal subjects—outsiders, side characters, subcultures—or renders their own margins with lush care
• Cultivates oblique, obsessive, or otherwise distinctive—but apt—relationships towards their subjects
• Moves in strange, surprising ways—prose that leads down garden paths; narratives that roam and drift
• Comes together in unusual shapes—diptychs, triptychs, parabolas, frames, nesting dolls, or, even better, unnamed shapes idiomatic to the project and its concerns
• Sustains multiplicity and ambiguity, as in Lyn Hejinian’s “open text” or Tobias Wolff’s “shimmer of possibility”
• Synthesizes binaries—art and entertainment, high and low, comedy and tragedy—or completely unlike elements
• Explores the reciprocity between binaries—content and form, interiority and exteriority, signifier and signified
• Leaves itself open to experimentation and accident
• Marks a significant shift from a writer’s other output

Traditions

More tangibly, we are interested in publishing books that adapt, critique, defamiliarize, or outright invent the following creative traditions:

acid westerns, afrofuturism, the aleatoric, alter egos, altered states, amnesiacs, anarcho-primitivism, animate objects, atomized & stratified societies, auction patter, bandes dessinées, biomorphism, Blaxploitation, blissful idiots, bodice rippers, body horror, the Bohemian colony, botch jobs, bottle episodes, boys who cry wolf, brutalism, the car chase, the carnivalesque, the categorical imperative, Chekhov’s shootout, chick flicks, the collective unconscious, confessional booths, conflicting accounts, consecution, conspiracy theory, crime as art, cyberdeath, daredevils, a day in the life, decentralized & distributed texts, declassified documents, deliberate pacing, descents into madness, digital epistolaries, dimensional bleedthrough, disappearing acts, domestic thrillers, double binds, driftworks, eschatons, eternal questions, exquisite corpses, fabulism & magical realism, failed quests, familiar strangers, family curses, farce, fast talk, fatalism, Faustian bargains, feeds, field guides, the fireside chat, first-person plural, first-person shooters, the flâneur, found families, freak folk, frame stories & nested narratives, the free indirect, free jazz, the gambler, gender performance, gentle monsters, giallo, gnosticism, the Greek chorus, happy accidents, hard sci-fi, hate mail, hauntology, the Hero’s Journey, heroic bloodshed, historical reenactment, hoaxes, hobo graffiti, houses of cards, houses of psychotic women, hyperstition, hypnosis, impersonation, incidental movement, itinerants, jingles, joke structure, Jungian archetypes, かわいい / kawaii, kindred spirits, kismet, kitsch, kompromat, 功夫片i / kung fu & 武俠 / wuxia, labyrinths & mazes, the lives of others, littérature potentielle (Oulipo), lone wolves, lost generations, lost in the woods, lounge lizards, lovers on the run, manifestos, manuals, mappa mundi, math rock, memes, MMORPGs, monstrous hybridity, moonshiners, muckraking, the mute narrator, mythic animals, near misses, neorealism, new ages, New Narrative, noise, le nouveau riche, old money, orbits, ordealism, outsider art, pataphysics, patchworks, peddling, performance culture, petty crime, parallel lives, parapolitics, phone sex, photojournalism, pinballing, ピンク映画 / pink films, poetic injustice, polemics, polycrisis, pools of memory, postcards, postcolonialism, pornography, pranks, primal fears, the prisoner’s dilemma, process-driven work, prog, psychogeography, punctum, pyramid schemes, rape revenge, retellings, retrofuturism, retrospective understanding, rites of passage, rhizomes, self-exploitation, self-sabotage, sex comedies, shaggy dogs, shock jocks, shoegaze, the short story epiphany, situationism, slackers, slapstick, slashers, slow cinema, sludge, soap operas, song & dance, southern gothic, space opera, spam, speculative aesthetics, spheres of influence, stoicism, a stranger comes to town, stoner noirs, story cycles & the roman-fleuve, straight-to-video, stunts, Sturm und Drang, surveillance, survival horror, tabloid talk shows, tactical espionage action, the telegram, telemarketing, temporal paradoxes, the tragic form, trances, transactional encounters, transit announcements, trip reports, triptychs, the unreliability of memory, urban anonymity, vagabonds, vaporwave, vaudeville, vertigo, voyeurism, walkabouts, weird science, whodunnits, xenofeminism, yellow journalism, yentas, zeuhl, 随筆 / zuihitsu.

Publishers

We see ourselves participating in a legacy of literary separatism alongside the following publishers:

11:11 Press, 2D Cloud, Action Books, Amok Books, Amphetamine Sulphate, Apocalypse Confidential, Archipelago Books, Archway Editions, Black Ocean, Breakdown Press, Calamari Archive, CLOAK, Crisis Editions, Dalkey Archive, D.F.L., Deep Vellum, Dorothy, Dzanc, Equus, Erratum, Ex Pat, FC2, Fence, Feral House, Gallows Fruit, Hexus, High Risk Books, Hogarth Press, Infinity Land, Inside the Castle, Isolarii, Koyama, kuš!, McSweeney’s, Merigold Independent, Nightboat, Nobrow, NYRB, RE/Search, Repeater, Rescue Press, Sarka, Schism, Secret Acres, Semiotext(e), Sidebrow Books, Spork, Strange Attractor, Sublunary Editions, tragickal, Transit Books, Two Dollar Radio, Wave Books, Youth in Decline, Zero Books.

Writers

Lastly, here are a few of our favorite writers.

Renata Adler, Will Alexander, Molly Antopol, Nicholson Baker, James Baldwin, J.G. Ballard, Donald Barthelme, Jean Baudrillard, Aase Berg, Kate Bernheimer, Brian Blanchfield, Jonathan Blum, Roberto Bolaño, Heinrich Böll, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Bowles, Jamel Brinkley, Anton Chekhov, Dennis Cooper, Joseph Conrad, Kathryn Davis, Don DeLillo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Andre Dubus, William Faulkner, Mary Gaitskill, Eduardo Galeano, William H. Gass, William Gibson, Barry Hannah, Ernest Hemingway, Cathy Park Hong, Joanna Howard, Julie Iromuanya, Kazuo Ishiguro, Fleur Jaeggy, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, James Joyce, Michael S. Judge, Yasunari Kawabata, David Keenan, Matthew Kinlin, Grace Krilanovich, Anna Krivolapova, Milan Kundera, Jhumpa Lahiri, Garielle Lutz, Thomas McGuane, David Markson, Patrick Modiano, Manuel Muñoz, Vladimir Nabokov, New Juche, Dorthe Nors, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas Pynchon, Mary Reufle, Lisa Robertson, Marilynne Robinson, W.G. Sebald, Aurelie Sheehan, Jim Shepard, Gary J. Shipley, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, Robert Stone, Suspended Reason, Ian Svenonius, Leo Tolstoy, William T. Vollmann, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Penn Warren, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, Virginia Woolf