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Thursday, December 3, 2009

"Publishing the Unpublishable"

Posted by on Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:44 PM

Doug Nufer has alerted me to /UBU Editions (motto: "Publishing the Unpublishable"). It's a great, neat use of the internet as a publishing platform. Here's their mission statement:

What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you've long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you're best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good. We've all got a folder full of things that would otherwise never see the light of day.

Invited authors were invited to ponder to that question. The works found here are their responses, ranging from an 1018-page manuscript (unpublishable due to its length) to a volume of romantic high school poems written by a now-respected innovative poet. You get the idea.

Here's a bit from George Kuchar's 27-page screenplay The Kiss of Frankenstein:

Screen_shot_2009-12-03_at_2.31.45_PM.png

Nufer has contributed a collection of poems titled Rumor that is...well, it's a collection of words, all right, but it works more as a juxtaposition of syllables than as a collection of words (the word "tuna" shows up a lot, and as you read, you tend to forget about tuna's fishy connotations and appreciate it as what it is: A lovely, weird word.) /ubu is a lovely, sleek website, and kind of a kissing cousin of Borges's imaginary library. Get lost there this afternoon.

 

Comments (5) RSS

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Baconcat 1
So is this website where we'll find future issues of The Stranger?
Posted by Baconcat on December 3, 2009 at 3:01 PM
TVDinner 2
Does unpublishable mean unreadable?
Posted by TVDinner http:// on December 3, 2009 at 3:01 PM
Max Solomon 3
that screenplay excerpt was very enjoyable. i want to know more about mischa and coco.
Posted by Max Solomon on December 3, 2009 at 3:28 PM
Fnarf 4
There aren't enough hours in the day to read more than a tiny fraction of the books that ARE worth publishing; why would I want to waste time reading ones that aren't?
Posted by Fnarf http://www.facebook.com/fnarf on December 3, 2009 at 4:03 PM
NaFun 5
"(the word "tuna" shows up a lot, and as you read, you tend to forget about tuna's fishy connotations and appreciate it as what it is: A lovely, weird word."

You alerted Dominic to this, right? He loves that word.

Posted by NaFun http://www.dancesafe.org on December 3, 2009 at 5:57 PM

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