Novel Concepts
Dennis Loy Johnson, MobyLives

And, in a greater sense, and for equally depressing reasons having ultimately to do, I think, with clearing shelf space for the higher-profit-margin new -- what, the explicit sex and vulgar language of "The Corrections" is better for kids than hearing Holden Caufield talk about "goddamn phonies"? -- there are numerous other books kept behind the metaphoric counters of modern America. This is true especially if they are edgy -- I mean, really edgy -- and/or experimental, and especially if they are more than a year or so old. And it's especially especially true f they are written by a dern foreigner.

Nonetheless, let's just say for argument's sake that you're a perverse so- and-so and you would like to read such. Where to go?

Hop on the Internet and visit the website of the Dalkey Archive Press -- http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/index.html -- the site of perhaps the most quietly subversive publisher in the country.

Dalkey has made it its mission to "keep in print as many of the great experimental books of the last 100 years as possible," including many books that were out of print in America when Dalkey first published them, as editor Chad Post explained it to me when I tracked him down at company headquarters in Normal, Illinois. And of the 240 books Dalkey has published so far, only two have been allowed to lapse out of print -- both books of interviews with Latin American authors that had simply gone out of date, Post says.
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After checking out Dalkey Archive Press, stay tuned for more independent publishers sitings at MobyLives.