Sadly publishing is a tough business and we lost another great imprint. Emily Books, the Coffeehouse press imprint, is closing its doors in March. The imprint was started by the authors Emily Gould and Ruth Curry. The little imprint launched the careers of Nell Zink (Wallcreeper), Jade Sharma (Problems), Samantha Irby (Meaty), Chloe Caldwell (I’ll Tell You In Person), and Karolina Waclawiak (How To Get Into the Twin Palms). Emily Books also published works by Chris Kraus (I Love Dick), Eileen Miles (Inferno), and Helen Dewitt (Lightning Rods).
In their goodbye letter Emily and Ruth spoke of their goals of publishing new and interesting books by women:
“Though back in 2011 we might not have been able to articulate this, or appreciate how ambitious it was, we also wanted to create an alternative literary canon, counter to the one we’d been taught in school and had witnessed forming when we worked in corporate book publishing. We wanted to read books by women about the most uncommercial, unattractive aspects of their lives – memoirs without redemption arcs, novels without marriage plots and tidy, happy endings. We wanted to celebrate narratives that took place outside of convention, outside of heterosexuality, outside of a world that men controlled. We wanted literature that gave no fucks about how it was received, or, alternately, exposed the ways in which giving a fuck fucks you over in the end. Women should not have to apologize, conform, or transform in order to be heard.”
Their last book will be Temporary by Hilary Leichter, a surreal novel about a temp who takes conventional jobs as well as being an assassin’s assistant and swabbing the deck of pirate ship. The book is already on our radar and we will be excited to talk about this amazing book in the future.
