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OK, so here is the Reverend Jen giving out some valuable (and free) anatomical information. You may want to have a pen handy.
If you're still confused, you really need to check out the book. I just saw the Reverend read at McNally Jackson. She was wearing a silver sequined mini-dress and elf ears and she was amazing. I had never been at a reading staffed by a fully-uniformed butler handing out candy dots on a silver tray.
Captain’s Log: I’m three and a half weeks in at the helm of Soft Skull and I feel like a kid in a candy store. This seems too good to be true. Although, as Soft Skull author extraordinaire Jonathan Evison was pointing out to me, Soft Skull may be the only place that I could land where my experience at FSG renders me a corporate suit worthy of suspicion. I’ll do my best to dispel any rumors to that effect. At heart I’m just an old school punk rock girl with a love of smart thinking, good writing, and culture both highbrow and gutter low. (Ok, I failed to mention cheap beer and fine bourbon but I’m sure we’ll get to that another time.)
For me, this is a kind of homecoming, worldview-wise, and I’m looking forward to continuing our editorial mission, which at the moment seems to be obsessed with disaster, apocalypse, . . . and zombies. As a girl who knows her way as much around Richard Matheson as Peter Matthiessen, this is too f*cking awesome.
But now, confession time: I must admit it gives one pause to consider stepping into the shoes of someone like Richard Nash (not to mention Sander Hicks). I have tremendous respect for those men and they did an incredible job of cutting through the white noise of the book world and creating a sharp and commanding voice in indie publishing, and one that’s weathered many storms. What they’ve wrought is not just a collection of great books, it’s a persona—and, yes, we could take this discussion in a very existential, Bergman-esque direction but, suffice it to say, it’s the Soft Skull persona as much as anything that will be guiding me. I’ll be listening to the list and seeing where it takes me while at the same time looking for fellow travelers who may not have found a place at the table with us yet. But regardless of the path we take down the line, I suspect you’ll find that Soft Skull will remain true to its roots—the barroom brawler of the lit world, your super smart friend with the radical opinions who somehow seems to have read everything. She always drinks too much and often overstays her welcome—but would the party be the same without her?
I didn’t think so . . .