Small Beer Press has been earning my respect. After reading a couple of their short story collections, including, recently, “The Ant King,” it seems they’ve latched onto a very particular aesthetic. It’s a flavor that no one else seems to be publishing, so they’ve established a niche. The mission statement on their website claims, “We are committed to publishing short story collections and novels by authors we feel are slipping through the cracks.” So far, they’ve done a good job at plugging that crack.
Kelly Link is the heart of this publisher (also, the founder), and “Magic by Beginners” is the first book I read of SBP. Then I took up “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead,” by Alan Deniro, which I think was one of the choices of the Litblog Co-op that fulfilled the LBC mission of promoting non-mainstream titles (also, “Skinny Dipping” is a brilliant title, I might add). The next book on my list is “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories” by John Kessel, of which I received a copy at BookExpo.
To call all these stories fantastical would be a stab at naming the commonalities between them, but it doesn’t cover all their peculiarities. For instance, look at the range of “The Ant King.” The title story is a hilarious fairy tale employing pop culture references (Charlie’s Angels, Pokemon) and consumerism culture (Doritos, gumballs.com) as Stan tries to work with a kid named Corpse (a nice dig at Goth culture) to rescue his girlfriend Sheila from the underground lair of the Ant King. It reads like a video game designed by Escher, Takashi Murakami, and George Saunders. From there the collection goes meta with the “Biographical Notes,” in which a character named Benjamin Rosenbaum has a discussion about his name and genre — a pen name, it’s explained, and he’s a plausible-fabulist, which I suppose is as good a term as any to describe the genre. Then an assassin using needles climbs onto the zeppelin and sparks a war between zeppelin fleets. Or, consider “Start the Clock,” in which children rule the world, children who perpetually remain at a particular age, and are trying to buy property, most notably houses designed as Galleons and Pirate Ships. Throughout the collection, there’s a fetish for boats, even flying boats, and ants, most of which ends up being hilarious somehow, even though boats (even flying boats) and ants do not usually make me laugh until my stomach hurts.
In regards to categorizing Small Beer Press, its authors are borrowing from a number of genres. It’s very postmodern, this pastiche of genres. Mix in a dash of Sci-Fi with the speculative, ladle in some magical realism, add a dose of fable or fabulism, sometimes a pinch of slipstream or cyberpunk. All in all, the stories seem very brave. Any writer needs the virtue of courage, and these writers have it in spades. Small Beer has given a voice to writers who are willing to do anything — quite literally, anything — on the page in the service of their imagination. At this stage, there doesn’t seem to be rules, or guidelines, except avoiding the already done, the platform of realism, and the quotidian.
It’s also interesting to me to go to the roots of these collections and see where the stories are originally published. “Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead” had pieces originally published in more mainstream journals (Fence, One Story, Santa Monica Review), and also more obscure, experimental ones (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Fortean Bureau, Polyphony). “The Ant King” also has a mix of mainstream (McSweeney’s, Quarterly West) and genre mags (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Asimov, Strange Horizons, Fantasy and Science Fiction). “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories” has a lot in common with the publication places of the Ant King, including Asimov, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and, once again, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet (seemingly ubiquitous in publication histories). Also has one story published in the non-genre but decidedly experimental journal Conjunctions.
