There's a Road to Everywhere Except Your Destination

It is with a strange satisfaction that we at Poets & Suicides write to inform our nonexistent readers that the publication of The Author’s novel, ANTHROPICA, has been delayed due to the stubborn and ingenious COVID-19 virus, one of the best viruses to disrupt human civilization in decades. Of course, given The Author’s lengthy and impressive record of Not Publishing Novels, we are tempted to believe that COVID-19 is itself merely the latest instrument the universe has employed to prevent the insertion of ANTHROPICA into the public record. Do you believe in fortune, reader? Do you believe in prophecy? In doom? Do you believe that there are some Authors who — despite endless wells of talent and a work ethic that makes nest-building birds look like eye-rolling millennials — are simply destined to author into the void? We do believe it, which is why we must also believe that the “postponement” of ANTHROPICA’s publication is likely merely a prelude to its cancellation, the handful of Advance Readers Copies currently circulating among reviewers likely to pan The Work the only physical testament to a decade of intellectual labor and the pursuit of literary excellence.

But in the interest of the fullest of full disclosure we must also admit that it is not merely the excellently-named COVID-19 virus (we find this cognomen nearly as sturdy and unassailable as the virus itself) that threatens the publication of ANTHROPICA, but also the slow and disheartening internal collapse of its publisher, formerly known as Dead Rabbits Books but currently in the process of becoming (for reasons we will outline in the broadest possible strokes in a moment) Animal Riot Press. The Author has a contract with Dead Rabbits Books, but that contract may be null and void given the press’s collapse into this new name, and the concomitant sacrifice of the hard-earned community and brand-name recognition Dead Rabbits has worked for nearly a decade to build.

The name must be changed (here come the aforepromised broad strokes) because Dead Rabbits Books has lost a lawsuit to the owners of a lower Manhattan bar and eatery known as The Dead Rabbit. We at Poets & Writers have looked closely into the situation and have discovered that the owners of The Dead Rabbit entered this absurd lawsuit (absurd for reasons including a.) the names are not identical, b.) one establishment is a bar and the other a publishing company, and c.) Dead Rabbits Books officially crossed all t’s and dotted all i’s in the initial copyright-and-trademark explorations preceding the establishment of the press) armed with tons and tons of cold hard cash and an aggressive lawyer determined to destroy any vague threat to The Dead Rabbit bar-and-grill’s empire of bad food and overpriced cocktails. It was this possession of “capital,” one not shared by Dead Rabbits Books, which as an upstart small publisher was naturally running “in the red,” that forced The Author’s potential publisher to cave and eventually pay $10,000 it did not in fact have to The Dead Rabbit bar-and-grill, despite the fact that legally Dead Rabbits Books was probably in the right, and also despite the fact that the publisher had attempted to meet with and amiably discuss the whole sordid business with The Dead Rabbit bar-and-grill’s owners many times, these advances rebuffed in favor of increased monetary demands for “damages” on behalf of the bar-and-grill by its enormous asshole of a lawyer (pardon our French, (non)reader) and the two gigantic bar-and-grill owning assholes that asshole represents.

If we here at Poets & Suicides seem angered or chagrined or even embittered by these eventualities, rest assured that, while we are indeed angered and chagrined and embittered, we are also relieved and impressed to see that the universe is willing to pull out all the necessary stops to prevent the publication of ANTHROPICA. A frivolous lawsuit. A global pandemic. Fires, floods, pestilence and drought. We fully expect an asteroid strike to end the entire world into which books were once released, should ANTHROPICA somehow approach the finish line toward which it seems determined to point itself, death and damnation be… well, damned.

Let us pray for The Author, (non)reader. Or if we cannot pray for him, let us wish for his swift and painful demise. And if we cannot do that, either, let us continue to do what we have always done: ignore him and the meaningless drivel that comprises his hopeless idiom of hopelessness, and choose in favor of Authors not predestined for obscurity. Alis grave nil! Fly far from here,(non)reader and forget everything you have (not) seen!