Starcherone Books - 2000-2015

20/02/2024

Starcherone Books is back! 23 out-of-print books by Michael Joyce, Steven Hendricks, Aimee Parkison, Jonathan Callahan, Steve Katz, Kent Johnson, Stacey Levine, Sarah Falkner, Raymond Federman, Leslie Scalapino, Donald Breckenridge, Joshua Harmon, Jeffrey DeShell, Harold Jaffe, Sara Greenslit, Nina Shope, Kenneth Bernard, Aimee Parkison, Nicolette de Csipkay, and anthologies 30 Under 30 and PP/FF: ProsePoem/FlashFiction are now available through Calamari + there's more to come.

Calamari welcomes Starcherone Books to the archive. Founded by Ted Pelton, Starcherone Books (2000–15) was among the leading U.S. publishers of innovative prose fiction, both debuting new talents and supporting audiences of established avant-garde authors. These Starcherone titles are now availabl...

17/07/2023

Kent Johnson passed away in October 2022. In 2012, Starcherone was honored to publish A Question Mark Above the Sun, Kent's terrific speculative literary critical novel collage assemblage alleging Kenneth Koch was the actual author of the Frank O'Hara poem, "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island." This article by Jenny Hendrix in The New Republic tells more of the story. Kent was always enmeshing himself in scandals, sniping at other poets, and seemed to regard literary life as at least partially a cloak and dagger affair. I don't think he actually ever received the credit he deserved for his imaginative artistry, as he was equally skilled as a writer of poetry and creative prose. I knew he was sick last year, but didn't know how sick, and then he was gone. - TP

IN SEPTEMBER 1966, a reading took place at New York University’s Loeb Center, near Washington Square. Less than two months had passed since Frank O’Hara’s death on Fire Island, and the event took on the flavor of a memorial for the recently departed poet. In his memoir, the poet’s longtime r...

14/07/2023

I think the book I'm most proud of Starcherone having published is Alissa Nutting's debut short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. I saw this is manuscript as an initial reader for Starcherone's annual blind-judged contest, and guest judge Ben Marcus selected it out of the finalists we sent him. I've since seen Alissa's career rocket on to new heights, including two years of the HBO series Made for Love, developed from her novel of the same name. Here's an Electric Literature review/interview with Alissa from 2018. If you've never read her dark, satirical, LOL stories, you owe yourself the delectable pleasure. - Ted Pelton

Alissa Nutting spent the last couple years crushing the literary landscape with her critically acclaimed, sometimes controversial novels Tampa and Made for Love. Banned in many bookstores, Tampa tells the story of an attractive, hebephiliac female teacher sleeping with her students, satirizing doubl...

14/07/2023

This is the legacy page of Starcherone Books, a nonprofit publisher of innovative fiction, now defunct. Founded by Ted Pelton, Starcherone had in its short history an outsized importance and influence on contemporary literature, publishing debut books by authors Alissa Nutting, Aimee Parkison, Zachary Mason, Nina Shope, and many others, as well as work by innovative writers Joshua Cohen, Raymond Federman, Michael Joyce, Leslie Scalapino, Stacey Levine, Kent Johnson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Jeffrey DeShell, Donald Breckenridge, and more. This page is devoted to documenting Starcherone and its authors' accomplishments in helping define new fiction in the early 2000s.