Sneak Peek of MONSTER PORTRAITS, releasing in Feb. 2018!

We are thrilled to reveal the cover of MONSTER PORTRAITS by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. MONSTER PORTRAITS will release in February 2018. The cover features artwork by Del Samatar and was designed by Heather Butterfield.

MONSTER PORTRAITS
By Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar
FEBRUARY 2018
ISBN 978-1-941628-10-2

Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, Monster Portraits investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two—texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday—Monster Portraits multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.

Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. Monster Portraits resonates in a world obsessed with the Other, using captivating nomenclature, fiction, art, and essay to examine society’s damaging desire to define and divide. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

You can read a sample from Monster Portraits at Tin House here.

Printing the Covers for The Passion of Woo & Isolde

On June 6th and 7th, we gathered in Boston to letterpress the covers for the chapbook chosen by judge Amelia Gray as the winner of our Eleventh Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest. This year's winning chapbook is Jennifer Tseng's The Passion of Woo & Isolde. 

Happily, we were able to print again this year at Union Press in Union Square, Somerville, with the amazing and expert help of UP's Eli Epstein. We printed one color a day, cranking roughly 500 covers across the Vandercook press each day to end up with the lovely 2-color covers we used for the 425 finished books in this limited edition run.

This year we used a Steel Blue-colored paper from the French Paper Construction line for the covers, and used metallic gold and deep brown as our ink colors. In The Passion of Woo & Isolde, the final story of section II, "Zealots," hinges on an argument Woo and Isolde have over a pair of scissors. We felt like scissors made for a good motif and cover image for this book, which features sharp, clean prose and often invokes the feeling of being cut off or separated in some way from one's family, community, or homeland. The similarly crisp title font is Kabel. The cover and interior were both designed by our award-winning designer Rebecca Saraceno. The amazing linoleum cut of the scissors was made by Eli Epstein, a master of creating nuanced artwork for letterpress from linoleum blocks.

The covers came out beautifully and the finished books look terrific, featuring gold and white patterned endpapers and cool white interior pages. The book launches today, August 8, and you can order your copy here.

One highlight from this year's printing fun was that author Jennifer Tseng was able to stop by and personally roll out a few copies of her book's cover! It was the first time one of our chapbook authors has been Boston-based, and it was a pleasure to share our letterpress process with her.

Here are some photos of our printing process this year:

The magical gold metallic ink

The gold ink and Day 1 lock-up on press

RMP intern Sara Henke printing

Designer Rebecca Saraceno checking our gold ink coverage

Day 1 covers drying

Eli Epstein setting the type for Day 2

The lock-up for the brown ink on Day 2

A finished cover coming off the press

Finished covers drying on Day 2

Our letterpress printing team this year! L to R: Sara Henke, Kathleen Rooney, Heather Butterfield, Rebecca Saraceno, Abby Beckel, and Eli Epstein. Also, check out Union Press' amazing work on the wall behind us.

Many thanks to everyone who helped print covers this year and especially to Eli Epstein of Union Press for his help, expertise, and use of UP's equipment and inks.

Order your copy of this limited edition contest-winning chapbook! More details about the book, including the book trailer, are available here.