Thanks to all the authors and readers who made 2008 a great year for RDSP. We're wishing the best for all of you in 2009.

Times are tough for small businesses and publishers are no exception. But there's a way you can support RDSP and without spending a dime.

Several of last year's releases have been nominated as best books of the year and we could really use your votes!

To vote for Sheep and Wolves by Jeremy Shipp in the Preditors & Editors Readers poll click here: http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novelh.shtml

To vote for My Landlady the Lobotomist by Eckhard Gerdes click here: http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novel.shtml

You can also vote for RDSP itself here: http://www.critters.org/predpoll/ebookpublisher.shtml

Horror Isn't a 4-Letter Word by Matthew Warner is up for a Black Quill Award. You have to register with the site to vote but it's an easy process: http://www.darkscribemagazine.com/current-nominees

There's been a lot of buzz around Jeffrey Thomas' newest Punktown novel, Health Agent, including a recent review in Locus Magazine:

“HEALTH AGENT is a fine introduction to one of the weirdest yet most vividly rendered cities in the genre, a gritty melting pot of desire and despair, of the grotesque and the sublime, of love and dread…”—Locus Magazine

For more info on Punktown check out Pulse Magazine's article on Thomas. You can also read a great interview with himn over at Enter the Octopus.

What was your main goal for putting together the Avant-Garde for the New Millennium anthology?
It’s meant to be a realization, an epiphany. The anthology is proof that our great writers have not left us. But they are stuck in the shadows, that’s the reality of our contemporary condition. There was a time, you know, when artists were respected, perhaps the most respected members of society, but that’s just not the case today. Everything is gimmicks and money. If you walk the halls of a contemporary art museum you will find nothing but gimmicks and art which has forgotten the tradition of art, it’s forgotten the primary role of art which is to be a function in the artist’s life. We are creating art to teach ourselves, we are also creating art to push the vehicle of art further and further, but today you don’t really find that sort of thing. You turn on the radio, you find formulas, you find songs that were not born out of emotion but out of statistics and market-equations. It’s all playing to the market, it’s all motivated by money.  I don’t know, it’s the same with books today. I say let those people have their art, they’re not hurting us.  But I would hope to dispel the contemporary condition of amnesia, which has almost forgotten genuine art altogether, and has pushed it out of place to allow more room for stuff which I personally consider to be absolute bullshit.

So this anthology is really a collection of all the best writing I’ve been able to get my hands on. A lot of the people I knew about beforehand, and asked them to submit. A lot of people were totally new to me and those turned out to be some of the best pieces in the anthology. All of it’s genuine; it’s not all crazy-experimental, some of it is, but some of it is just totally fresh stuff, written a way only that particular author could have ever written it.  If I had to state in one sentence what the goal of Avant-Garde for the New Millennium is, it would be: that the reader who has heard of none of these guys, who spends most of his or her time reading whatever the New York Times tells them too, can pick up this book and realize that there is so much more out there. There’s real, genuine art being created today, that didn’t die with Hemingway or the Beats. It could be life-changing for someone who’s had no contact with this kind of stuff – and that’s a lot a lot a lot of people, much more than you’d expect. And even people who have had that contact, I think they’ll learn a lot from this.  It’s certainly bringing a lot of people from sort of different schools of thought into the same place.

The anthology has both fiction and poetry, usually that’s not the case. Why did you decide to include both?
Well, because one is no more important than the other. There’s some incredible fiction happening right now and some incredible poetry, and both are just as important – no, just as necessary. What we are working with, fundamentally is words – nothing but words. The way we format them is an extension of the way we choose to use those words. I don’t really see much of a difference past that.  I write both, and really the only thing that dictates whether something is going to be in prose or in poetry is sort of just instinct, sometimes I can tell the words for a piece want to be arranged in paragraphs and sometimes in lines; and sometimes neither of those formats will work, it’s got to be something else.  Something bent, something broken. I guess I included both for the sake of freedom, so that every writer was only approaching me with his or her particular collection of words, however they arranged them. I’ve got a story and a poem in there, and Kevin Donihe’s got one of each, too. Some of the pieces were not really a story or a poem, they were something really impossible to put a name on.

Like I say, this book was meant to be an epiphany, so I really wanted it to include everything, all the best – and I think I succeeded in that. There were a couple people I couldn’t get a hold of in time. Eckhard Gerdes comes to mind.  I met him recently at the Bizarro Convention and told him I wish I could have talked to him before finalizing everything. Another guy I really, really wanted in this was Cedric Bixler, the singer and lyricist of the Mars Volta. You want to talk avant-garde, literature unlike anything that came before it, just check out that guy’s lyrics, especially from Deloused. But of course he was just about impossible to get a hold of. Who knows, maybe I’ll do another one someday, and be able to include the few I missed, as well as the few that have come to my attention since.

What do you see in the future for the underground writing scene?
I go through phases about it. Absolutely, I know that there will be a turning of the tides, probably quite soon. I hope this anthology and things like it will be good fertilizer for that.  Right now I’m in the middle of digging through Boston, trying to establish some kind of scene here (anybody who knows what’s going on around here, let me know!), and I hope to see more physical work being done, because I think the internet is tremendously useful but only to an extent. We need to give people something in the flesh, something they can touch – something they’ll remember much longer and much more vividly. I worry, sometimes, that the environment of America today is going to keep making that harder and harder, but it’s also important to remember that everything we do to try and bring this kind of genuine art to the people will help, and will make the next effort that much easier.