Black Sun Lit

http://blacksunlit.com

Press

Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Translation, Visual Art

2013

Brooklyn, NY

Jared Fagen

Editor

Black Sun Lit is a print and digital literary press that endeavors to introduce, promote, and support both emerging and experienced writers whose work has little representation—or minimal exposure—in a reading world largely governed by commercial publishing. We understand that today’s principal task for a publisher should be to act as a gatekeeper of carefully curated works and to give readers every instrument to access them. To do so, we have revived the forgotten custom of a publisher guided only by a well-defined canon. Our ambition is to publish works that harken to the complex and transgressive traditions of decadentism, symbolism, modernism, surrealism, or the nouveau roman—among other innovative literary movements—and compile them so that single voices are not floating alone but gathered into a corpus in which a reader can find a commonality of intents. At Black Sun Lit, we want to free ourselves from the constraints of a book market that has slowly homogenized and trivialized the availability of literary offerings. Therefore, our mission as a publisher is not to entertain or educate. Instead, we strive to publish works directed toward a few discerning readers who seek a style of literature that refuses to justify itself through the concepts of utility or morality. We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty—not communication or identification—as the end of literature. Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself. We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom. Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness. At Black Sun Lit we value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive. While we surely have an audience in mind, we would like our contributors to be bold and less concerned with their potential public.

Yes

http://blacksunlit.com/submit/

Varies

3 - 6 months

Small Press Distribution