8/8/2019 Cursor Frankfurt2011

1/3

CURSOR LAUNCHES ITS FIRST IMPRINT,RED LEMONADE,AND ANNOUNCES SPRING 2011LIST

Contact: Richard Nash rnash@rnash.com +1-917-804-0716

FRANKFURT,5OCTOBER2011

On the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair and on the day of Tools of Change Frankfurt,Cursors founder and CEO, Richard Nash, is pleased to announce the line-up ofbooks for Red Lemonade, their first publishing imprint.

Someday This Will Be Funny Lynne Tillman(Apr 2011)Zazen Vanessa Veselka(May 2011)Follow Me Down Kio Stark(June 2011)

They will be available in the book trade in trade paperback, as digital downloads inall formats and channels, and as a limited edition artisanal object direct from thepublisher.

Tillmans backlist novels Haunted Houses,Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and 1998NBCC finalistNo Lease on Life will also be put back in print.

While Cursors aim is nothing less than the reinvention of the publishing businessmodel, said Nash, all publishing begins with the writer, in our case three writers, all

women, one an internationally-celebrated novelist, the other two thrilling debuts by

writers with long careers ahead of them. They are powerful representatives of thekind of writing Red Lemonade will foster, house, and promote.

Red Lemonade holds translation rights for all the titlesFrench rights toZazen havealready been licensed to Zanzibar Editions. Erin Edmison will be representing thesetitles at the coming Fair.

All three writers will enjoy the benefits of the provocative new set of terms Cursor isofferingthree year licenses, instead of life-of-the-copyright.

Descriptions of the books, their authors, and the Cursor enterprise follow over

8/8/2019 Cursor Frankfurt2011

2/3

Someday This Will Be Funny Lynne Tillman(April 2011)

The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative formas immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman,author ofAmerican Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, andMadame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators by turn infamous and namelessshift withintheir own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus,then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bouncebetween lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillmanspreferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oathsmade and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by loves shifting chartreuse. Theytraffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of beingswallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved inthe glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planterstuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned withcandor and animated by fits of wordplay and inventionstories that affirm Tillmans unshakabletalent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence,

defying genre and defining experimental short fiction."Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very,very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song thatseems to say it all. That's how I feel "Jonathan Safran Foer

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essaysand two nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on culture.Her novels includeAmerican Genius, A Comedy(2006),No Lease on Life(1997) which was a New YorkTimes Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast inDoubt(1992),Motion Sickness(1991), andHaunted Houses(1995).Absence Makes the Heart(1990) andThe Broad Picture(1997) are both collections of Tillman's essays that were published in literary andart periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor atFence Magazine, Associate Professor and Writer-in-

Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of aGuggenheim fellowship.

Zazen Vanessa Veselka(May 2011)

Somewhere in Dellas consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, abomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last. Reactions tothe attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Dellasrevolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped withintheir own insular beliefs. Her activist restaurant co-workers, who wouldrather change their identities than the problematic world around them,resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption.

Not Della. In search of clarity, and unburdened by ideologicalposturing, Della calls in bomb threats to various locations throughouther city. She relishes the panic and confusion incited by herfabrications. But when real explosions suddenly strike her imaginedtargets, Della is lured into a catastrophic plot from which there may beno return. At once authentic and hallucinatory, fearless anduproariously funny, Zazen portrays a world that might be considereddystopic speculation if it didnt so sharply mirror our own.

Vanessa Veselka is something like a literary comet: bright-burning, far-reaching, rarely seen, and a littledangerous.Tom Bissell

8/8/2019 Cursor Frankfurt2011

3/3

Vanessa Veselka has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, astudent of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, awaitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Yeti,Bust,Bitch,Maximum Rock n Roll,and elsewhere.

Follow Me Down Kio Stark(June 2011)It begins with an envelope. Twenty years old, maybe more, with thedust of the dead-letter office still clinging to the stained, frayingpaper. It arrives in the mailbox of Lucya proofreader andsometimes-photographer haunted by the face of a brother she leftbehind with the address of a vacant neighborhood lot barelylegible on the front. Inside she finds only a photograph of a man shedoes not recognize, but whose face captivates her instantly. Shehunts for him, feeling for blind answers in the boroughs of her souland city. The details of her world of a neighborhood decaying and

maimed in daylight, yet pulsing with some hidden life in dark; theshaded, shifting menace of shadow on the night sidewalk blurtogether through the fogged lens of her plastic camera, and thecasual banter of summer afternoons evaporates into the hiss ofsomething missing, something lost and formless that she mustreturn.

Kio Stark writes about relational technology and teaches at NYU'sInteractive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program forgeeks, hackers, and artists. She has written about feminism, NYCnight court, the history of documentary, graphic novels, failure and her favorite saints for TheNation,Killing the Buddha,Feed,Lime Tea and other publications and wrote the introduction toLeastWanted: A Century of American Mugshots, a collection of vernacular police photography. She spent a

racetrack season in Miami interviewing old thugs for her doctoral work in American Studies atYale. She talks to strangers and lives in Brooklyn with her partner, inventor Bre Pettis.

ABOUT CURSOR: Cursor connects writers and readers, creating a complete content ecosystem for all users, allowingwriters and readers to directly connect, interact and collaborate. We marry the best of curation to the wisdom of thecrowd. OUR MISSION IS TO: * Serve established writers by growing readership, attention, and income through moresales channels and enhanced discoverability; * Serve emerging writers by improving access to mentors and peers in anenvironment that promotes skills acquisition; * Serve readers by offering rich reading experiences within books andbeyond them, sharing experiences through collaborative annotation and discussion with other readers and directly withthe writers, across an array of subcultures, genres, and styles.

RICHARD NASH,CEO. For most of the past decade, Richard ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which he wasawarded the Association of American Publishers Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in2005. Books he published landed on bestseller lists from theBoston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times and on Best of

the Year lists from The Guardian to theLos Angeles Times. This year the Utne Readernamed him one of FiftyVisionaries Changing Your World and Mashable picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape ofPublishing. Wireds Chris Anderson calls his speech Publishing 3.0 the best speech on the future of publishing Iveever seen.

MARKWARHOLAK,COO. Before joining Cursor, Mark ran the digital content business for the imprint Fodor'sTravel at Random House. There he pioneered the rebuilding of the TravelTalk community, and aligned the socialmedia strategy for the brand. Mark speaks fluent Mandarin, lived and worked in Mainland China for more than fiveyears, advising and managing companies there, with a focus on web and business strategy for tech ventures.

BOARD OF ADVISORS: Clay Shirky, Elizabeth Spiers, Cory Doctorow, Brian OLeary.