mission statement

     Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.     We’re launching our new publishing venture Arrow Stork Press with this declaration of first principle: If you’re not allowed to describe the world exactly as you see it, if you’re looking over your shoulder at what the cultural arbiters are going to say—worse, if you’ve enthroned their secret censors in your creative soul—then you’ve already lost the writing game. The world has corrupted your unique vision with its politics and caveats and the creation of literary art becomes impossible.     Here at Arrow Stork Press, we’re going to publish books that express the writer’s uncorrupted vision. But most importantly, we’re going to publish good writing. We really don’t care about our writers’ race, gender or politics. Consider this: The Florence of Dante’s day was dominated by two murderously antagonistic political parties, Guelphs and Ghibellines—the liberals and conservatives of the 13 th century. With the exception of a few scholars of Medieval Italian literature, no one now remembers orcares to which of these parties the great poet belonged, and yet his Divine Comedy lives on, a monument for the ages. In publishing terms, we would not hesitate to include on the same fiction list the misanthropic French Fascist and genius Louis-Ferdinand Celine and the misanthropic Jewish-American Radical Feminist and genius Andrea Dworkin. (Of course, as both writers are long dead, this is an unlikely scenario, but you get the point).     These days, legacy New York publishing is home to an ever-expanding legion of gatekeepers, from woke agents and woker editors to wokest of all “sensitivity readers.” You’ve heard of “cultural appropriation”—weirdly, a concept originating with restaurant critics—that essentially forbids a writer to write about anything not within his own narrow experience of life. What to make, then, of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Madison Smartt Bell’s Haiti Trilogy—masterpieces of the novelist’s art. Allow us to restate our first principle: If a novelist is not permitted to describe what it’s like to walk around insomebody else’s shoes, then the novel itself, fundamentally an act of creative empathy, is dead.