Melville House Publishing wins gong!"Melville House’s 2008 leap across the Hudson River from Hoboken to DUMBO means they’re fully ours now, and Amen. There is no shortage of small and independent presses in New York City, but Melville House—whose stable includes both an avant-fiction wing, of the Tao Lin/Stephen Dixon variety, and a lively political nonfiction roster that includes Mark Danner, Renata Adler, and Andre Schiffrin—is so firmly the best of them that one wonders what everyone else is doing wrong.
Even Melville’s in-house design team dominates its field. The house’s upcoming books include cartoonist and critic David Stromberg’s graphic novel Baddies and a reissue of New Yorker contributor Lore Segal’s Lucinella novella, a long-beloved send-up of literary New York that, had it been written in this century, would surely have made room for its own little Melville House cameo."
Thoroughly deserved, I say! Long may it continue.
In their own words:
"Melville House Publishing is an independent publishing house born out of the book blog MobyLives and founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is also known as the Left Bank of New York City, and which is where Marlon Brando said to Eve Marie Saint (in "On the Waterfront," which was shot in Hoboken), "Come on, I'll walk you home. There are a lot of guys around here with only one thing on their mind." As it turns out, what's on the mind of a lot of those men -- and local women, too -- is good, solid literature, especially literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In an amazing coincidence, this is exactly what Melville House provides. Except now it provides it from an entirely new location -- Brooklyn. Yes, the Real Left Bank. Well, except for the Other Real Left Bank, of course. We're in the neighborhood known as DUMBO, to be exact. With a spiffy bookshop to boot. So, to review, that's DUMBO, D-U-M-B-O, as in Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Remember the "O," or it's just dumb. And where would you be without the O? In the river, that's where."
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