New Binary Press

Last updated

New Binary Press was an independent publishing house founded in 2012 in Cork city, Ireland. [1] In a Tweet dated 19 January 2021, the New Binary Press announced that it had ceased operations. [2] It published print books and electronic literature, specialising in more experimental works, as well as a number of periodicals. It was established and run by its editor, James O'Sullivan.

Contents

In 2017, the literary scholar Dr Kenneth Keating described New Binary Press as being one of the first publishing houses to "explicitly [cross] the division between online and print publishing in Irish poetry in a more progressive fashion". [3] Irish poet Matthew Geden also noted the role which New Binary Press played within Irish publishing, stating that "the press has published books by a number of new and interesting writers [and] The emergence of new voices owes much to small publishers like New Binary and others". [4]

History

New Binary Press was founded in 2012 by James O'Sullivan, [1] who stated that he founded the press because other Irish publishers were ignoring the creative potential of digital technology, and that he wanted to make "a real tangible contribution" to the literary world. [5] The press was officially launched by Irish poet Leanne O'Sullivan at the City Library, Cork, on 5 April 2013. A similar event was held at The Teachers' Club, Parnell Square, Dublin, several days later. [6]

New Binary Press announced that it was ceasing operations in a Tweet posted on 19 January 2021. [2] In 2017, New Binary Press' editor, James O'Sullivan, had been vocal on the difficulties faced by independent publishers in Ireland, [7] and also questioned the need for publishers in the digital fiction marketplace. [8]

Publication history

The press had a number of critical successes: Graham Allen's The One That Got Away (2014) was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award 2015, [9] while Unexplained Fevers (2013) by Jeannine Hall Gailey came second in the 2014 Science Fiction Poetry Association's Elgin Award. [10] In 2016, the press published its first novel, Karl Parkinson's The Blocks, which would go on to earn considerable critical acclaim. [11] [12] [13] [14] novelling, a work of recombinant fiction by Will Luers, Hazel Smith, and Roger Dean, won the ELO's 2018 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature. [15] [16]

New Binary Press published a number of works of electronic literature, most notably by artists like Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Jason Nelson, and John Barber. [17] The first work that New Binary Press published was digital poetry by Graham Allen, entitled Holes. The one-line-a-day semi-autobiographical narrative was praised and analysed by several scholars and critics. [18] [19] In 2017, two born-digital works published by New Binary Press, The Bafflement Fires by Jason Nelson and novelling, were shortlisted for the Turn on Literature Prize, co-funded by the European Union's Creative Europe Programme. [20]

A number of New Binary Press publications represent marked political leanings.[ citation needed ] In 2017, the press published The Elysian: Creative Responses, an anthology of poetry, short fiction and critical essays. [21] Edited by Graham Allen and Billy Ramsell, the collection includes contributions by a number of notable writers and critics, including Cónal Creedon, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Frank McDonald. [22] The collection uses the symbol of The Elysian building in Cork city to reflect on the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland.[ citation needed ]

Earlier in 2017, New Binary Press released John Barber's Remembering the Dead: Northern Ireland, a web-based commemoration of the victims of The Troubles which builds on earlier iterations intended as a response to gun violence in the US. [23] [24]

In 2018, New Binary Press published Autonomy, edited by Kathy D'Arcy, [25] [26] a project which sought to raise funds in support of the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, as well as contribute to the campaign for "safe, legal abortion" in Ireland. [27] [28] [29] Kit de Waal associated New Binary Press with the publication of working class writers. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Coover</span> American novelist

Robert Lowell Coover is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.

David Marcus was an Irish Jewish editor and writer who was a lifelong advocate for and editor of Irish fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic literature</span> Literary genre created for digital devices

Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Literature Organization</span>

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of and criticism of electronic literature, hosts online events and has published a series of collections of electronic literature.

Eastgate Systems is a publisher and software company headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, which publishes hypertext.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Montfort</span> American poet & digital media professor

Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.

The University of Wisconsin Press is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It publishes work by scholars from the global academic community; works of fiction, memoir and poetry under its imprint, Terrace Books; and serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and the Great Lakes region.

Judy Malloy is a poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vincent O'Sullivan (New Zealand writer)</span> New Zealand writer (born 1937)

Sir Vincent Gerard O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's best-known writers. He is a poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, biographer, and librettist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deena Larsen</span> American writer of electronic literature (born 1964)

Deena Larsen is a new media and hypertext fiction author involved in the creative electronic writing community since the 1980s. Her work has been published in online journals such as the Iowa Review Web, Cauldron and Net, frAme, inFLECT, and Blue Moon Review. Since May 2007, the Deena Larsen Collection of early electronic literature has been housed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephanie Strickland</span> American poet

Stephanie Strickland is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Duke University.

James Christopher O'Sullivan is an Irish writer, publisher, editor, and academic from Cork city. He is a university lecturer, the founding editor of Blackwater Publishing and the now defunct New Binary Press, and the writer of several academics and creative books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Arellano</span> American author, musician and educator (born 1969)

Robert Arellano is an American author, musician and educator from Talent, Oregon. His literary production includes pioneering work in electronic publishing, graphic-novel editions for Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, and five novels published by Akashic Books. His guitar-playing for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is featured on 'I See a Darkness', which Pitchfork magazine named one of the Top 10 albums of the 1990s, and since the 1980s he has been writing and recording songs for solo projects and his group Havanarama.

J. R. Carpenter is a British-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. She was born in Nova Scotia in 1972. She lived in Montreal from 1990 to 2009. She emigrated to England in 2010, and became a British citizen in 2019. She now lives in Southampton, England.

John A. Glusman is vice president and editor-in-chief of W. W. Norton and Company, the largest independent, employee-owned publisher in the United States, and the author of Conduct Under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graham Allen (writer)</span> Writer and academic from Ireland

Graham Allen is a writer and academic from Cork city, Ireland. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Madhouse System (2016) and The One That Got Away (2014). He is a former recipient of the Listowel Single Poem Prize, awarded each year at Listowel Writers' Week. As a literary critic, he has published numerous books, including Harold Bloom: Towards a Poetics of Conflict (1994), Intertextuality (2000), and Roland Barthes (2003).

Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033.

SurVision is an international English-language surrealist poetry project, comprising an online magazine and a book-publishing outlet. SurVision magazine, founded in March 2017 by poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky, is a platform for surrealist poetry from Ireland and the world. SurVision Books, the book imprint, started up the following year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samantha Gorman</span> Writer and narrative designer

Samantha Gorman is an American game developer known for her combination of narrative, theatricality and gaming in VR environments, and for introducing gestural interactions in touchscreen narratives. She has won multiple awards for her work, both in the field of games and in electronic literature and new media writing. Gorman co-founded the computer art and games studio Tender Claws in 2014 and has been an assistant professor at Northeastern University since 2020.

Netprov is "networked, improvised literature" or collaborative literary improvisations performed on the internet. The word netprov is a portmanteau of "networked" and "improv" as in improvisational theatre. Netprov is considered a genre of electronic literature.

References

  1. 1 2 "History of the Press". newbinarypress.com. Retrieved 14 Jan 2017.
  2. 1 2 @NewBinaryPress (19 January 2021). "We have ceased operations" (Tweet) via Twitter.
  3. Keating, Kenneth (2017-08-24). "Irish Poetry Publishing Online". Éire-Ireland. 52 (1): 321–336. doi:10.1353/eir.2017.0015. ISSN   1550-5162.
  4. Geden, Matthew (2018). "On Bindweed, The Yellow House and Courting Katie: Matthew Geden reviews new collections by Mark Roper, William Wall and James O'Sullivan". Southword (33).
  5. Nyhan, Tracy (19 Mar 2013). "A New Chapter in Irish Publishing". UCC Express.
  6. "New Digital Poetry Published by New Binary Press". Department of English, University College Cork. 2013. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  7. "The realities of independent publishing in Ireland". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2023-10-11.
  8. O'Sullivan, James (2021), Dene Grigar; James O'Sullivan (eds.), "Publishing Electronic Literature", Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms, & Practices, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 255–266
  9. "Poetry Award Nomination for Prof Graham Allen". ucc.ie. University College Cork. 4 Feb 2015. Retrieved 14 Jan 2017.
  10. "2014 Elgin Awards". sfpoetry.com. Science Fiction Poetry Association. Retrieved 14 Jan 2017.
  11. O'Reilly, Aiden (2016). "The Blocks review: Psalms of degradation, psalms of exaltation". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  12. O'Keeffe, Cormac (2016). "Book review: The Blocks". Irish Examiner. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  13. O'Donovan, Conor (2016). "Review of The Blocks". HeadStuff. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  14. 1 2 Waal, Kit de (2018-02-10). "Make room for working class writers". The Guardian. Retrieved 2018-02-13.
  15. "Announcing the Winners of the 2018 ELO Prize". eliterature.org. Retrieved 2018-08-18.
  16. "novelling wins the Coover Award". newbinarypress.com. Retrieved 2018-08-18.
  17. "Publication Record". newbinarypress.com. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  18. "Holes, by Graham Allen". holesbygrahamallen.org. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
  19. Karhio, Anne (2017). "The End of Landscape: Holes by Graham Allen". Electronic Book Review.
  20. "TOL 17 Prize and Exhibitions". www.turnonliterature.eu. Retrieved 2017-07-05.
  21. Brennan, Marjorie (2018-01-02). "Tower of inspiration for Cork writers". Irish Examiner. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  22. "OUT NOW! The Elysian: Creative Responses". newbinarypress.com. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  23. Barber, John (Fall 2016). "Remembering the Dead". Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures (15).
  24. "Remembering the Dead: Northern Ireland". newbinarypress.com. Retrieved 2018-01-03.
  25. "Autonomous Voices". the contemporary small press. 2018-03-23. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
  26. Evans, Martina. "Autonomy edited by Kathy D'Arcy, Repeal the 8th edited by Una Mullally review". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2018-04-08.
  27. Worswick, Matthew (2018-04-11). "When Archives Meet Activism: The Role of Historical Research in the Irish Abortion Debate". Manchester Historian. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
  28. Walsh, Aisling (2018-04-14). "Book Review: Autonomy". Headstuff. Retrieved 2018-04-23.
  29. De Vere, Taryn. "Irish doctor-turned-editor pens book about women's reproductive rights". Her. Retrieved 2018-04-23.