MANIFESTING

What follows is an excerpt from the beginning of the first draft of the new NewLights Press manifesto:

The book is a dangerously unstable object, always between, continuously opening. It is interstitial, occupying many planes at once. It hides its workings in the spine, along the fore-edge, between the lines, words, and even the letters themselves. It betrays, bless it. The author is dead, slain by the book. No matter. The book moves, promiscuously, from reader to reader to reader, creating meaning after meaning after meaning after meaning. It is unthinkable for a book to be faithful, for one to have faith in a book. No matter. The book lies, cheats, steals, conjures illusions, and tells stories. We do not trust it. No matter, we cannot live without it.

The book is an impossible thing—comprised entirely of edges and full of holes. It moves. It happens between.

It is our goal to mine the between-spaces of the book, to articulate its mechanics, to expose it for the fraud that it is. We will lift up the curtain. We will be watching the magician’s hands. We will be watching its language. We will be breaking its back.