Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry Turtle Point Press Helen Marx Books

Since its founding in 1990, Turtle Point Press has delighted readers with new fiction, poetry, memoirs, translations and rediscovered classics. In the last few years, our books were reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Out, Bookforum, TLS, Poetry, Lambda Literary Review and many other fine literary journals and blogs.

Broken Irish by Edward J. Delaney, our lead fiction title in Fall, 2011 was the Grand Prize Winner of the New England Book Festival and was the only small press novel to have been given starred reviews in all four trade magazines -- Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. The book, now in its third printing, was on the Top Book of the Year list of Booklist and was selected as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Michael Patrick Brady who reviewed it for the Boston Globe, and by Robert Birnbaum, who reviewed it for the Morning News / Identity Theory blog.

Both Turtle Point Press 2011 poetry titles received extraordinary reviewer attention. Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems by David Trinidad, was named one of the two best poetry books of the year by BOOKLIST and was a Publishers Weekly top ten selection. Charles North's What It Is Like: New and Selected Poems (co-published with Hanging Loose Press) was named one of the Best Books of the Year by National Public Radio.

Looking back, a number of Turtle Point Press titles received special notice. Without Saying by Richard Howard was nominated for a National Book Award and Sources by Devin Johnston was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Years earlier The Deposition of Father McGreevy by Brian O'Doherty was shorlisted for a Man-Booker Prize.

In Spring 2012 we will publish a new collection of poems by poet, cultural critic and Distinguished Professor of English at CUNY, Wayne Koestenbaum. Here's how Kenneth Goldsmith describes Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background, "Like a desiccated David Markson novel, this additively readable book of minimalist pop koans, welds the body to the page. Strained through dreamspace, refracted by mediaspace and enacted in meatspace, these poems refute stability and certainty, opting instead for the irrefutable vagaries of Koestenbaum's exquisitly tuned subjectivity."

In September, Turtle Point Press will release Christopher Cahill's first book of poems entitled The Drug Of Choice. Billy Collins, our former Poet Laureate, writes, "Christopher Cahill's poems will keep you on your toes with their exciting mix of lust and formality, their happy shuffling together of curb-talk and cultured discourse. The selections in The Drug Of Choice are a guaranteed buzz, and some are strong enough to get you off for days."

Finally in Fall 2012, we return to our original mandate — the rediscovery of beautifully written but forgotten fiction — with the release of a new translation of Andre Maurois' A Voyage To The Island Of The Articoles. This enchanting novella, from early in the career of the greatest biographer of the twentieth century tells a story of a couple who become shipwrecked on a South Seas Island and there discover a race of people who have taken their the literary zealotry to an extreme. This Maurois novella is a favorite of Alberto Manguel and Gianna Guadalupi, who mentioned the work in The Dictionary Of Imaginary Places, their beloved Baedeker for mental traveling.

Publishers are constantly asked to name a favorite author, the author whose work they are most proud of publishing. Although I love all the books I've published, there are two authors — polar opposites in every conceivable way — whose work represents the seriousness and the frivolity of this entire publishing enterprise — Julien Gracq and Lord Berners.

In an obituary of Julien Gracq that appeared in The Independent five years ago, James Kirkup called Gracq "the last of the great universal writers." He concludes his essay about this mysterious, solitary man, who refused the Prix Goncourt with the following sentence, "He and his works are lessons to our expiring humanity." Here are the works by Julien Gracq available from Turtle Point Press:

Lord Berners (1883-1950) was one of the most flamboyant personalities of his day. A composer, writer, painter, and eccentric ( famous for dying his pigeons into rainbow hues), he knew everyone in the world of the arts and society in the first half of the twentieth century and was the model for Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. He was admired by Stravinsky, collaborated with Diaghilev and Gertrude Stein, and his five ballets were choreographed by Balanchine and Frederick Ashton.

Turtle Point Press is so devoted to the whimsical fiction and amusingly candid autobiographies of this colorful figure, "the very model of the minor artist" that we have posted excerpts of his works in a special drop-down section of the 2012 web site. "To delight, to charm, to entertain, such are the goals the minor artist sets himself, and, when brought off with style and verve and elegant lucidity, they are - more than sufficient - wholly admirable." Joseph Epstein

Jonathan D. Rabinowitz
Publisher