New Jersey native Aaron Talwar left his editorial job at John Wiley and Sons (the publishing company behind the ...for Dummies series, Frommer's guides, and other reference books) and decided to abandon the corporate publishing game. He knew he wanted to become a publisher of literary fiction, and he knew he wanted to publish his friend Jarret Middleton's novel as his first book. Rather than move across the river to New York—"We both believe that New York is kind of going downhill" as far as the publishing world goes, Talwar says—he and Middleton had to find a new home base for the launch of their business.
The criteria narrowed the field quite a bit: Talwar says they searched for a place "where indie bookstores are big, where there are book readings every night." And he admits that he liked that there was "not much competition" on the Seattle publishing scene as compared to, say, Brooklyn, where residents are required by law to start a new publishing concern every two weeks. In the fall of 2009, Talwar and Middleton moved to Seattle and founded Dark Coast Press. Talwar is the publisher, the vision and public relations guy, and Middleton, the language-minded artist, is the editor in chief. The books Talwar and Middleton say they wish they could have published include The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch, along with early Chuck Palahniuk and Neil Gaiman. Their organizational role models are the publishers that every young literary-minded entrepreneur should have in mind as they set out to found a press: City Lights, New Directions, Grove. "It's been forever" since that wave of publishers changed literature, Talwar says. "We thought there was an opening for a newer, youthful push for literature, that we could carry the torch."
Dark Coast published Middleton's debut novel, An Dantomine Eerly, a surrealistic stream-of-consciousness narrative about the end of a poet's life, in early 2010. Here's what I said about it in the April 1 issue of The Stranger: "Eerly calls back to centuries of Irish literary tradition, from the aisling (a patriotic lyric poem from the 17th century with dozens of bizarre constraints) to James Joyce's giddy molestation of language." It was a flawed-but-ambitious launch for the publisher, the sort of uncompromising debut that makes you anxious to see what they'll do next. This month, Dark Coast finally published its next two books—Thirteen Fugues by Jennifer Natalya Fink and Elynia by David Michael Belczyk—and while three titles isn't enough to accurately triangulate Dark Coast's entire publishing plan, its organizational flavor is now a bit clearer.
Of the two new volumes, Fink's Thirteen Fugues is by far the stronger book. A woman named Tanya reflects on her adolescence, and her observations are at once repulsive—the weirdness of her sexual awakening is so unflinching that the squirming, hairy truth can't be stared at directly—and detail obsessed. Every suburban kid has had some experience like Tanya's memories of "the summer they came out with instant iced tea," when for one week "little grains of tannic acid and artificial lemon stain dark outlines between her teeth." The fugues are often presented as numerical lists of recollections, of Tanya begging a man to "plug her up," of theological arguments about whether it's possible for a woman to rape a man, of the cheapness of Brazilian tampons. It's a marvelous, intense document, a biographical record of a fictional brain that swallows the reader's head whole and spits it out, slightly changed, after the last page.
Dark Coast's other new release is a collection of stories. Talwar says that Middleton "helped find" Belczyk's Elynia, and "he decided to overhaul the original manuscript" in order to bring out something akin to "more experimental fiction." The experimental pieces of Elynia are what don't quite work; the best story in the book, about a shoe-shine man and a shoe-stretching machine that runs riot, has the illusory density of a fairy tale. But when the language gets too airy, the adjectives fly every which way and the narrative ultimately takes an ugly bruising. Consider this overstuffed passage:
Even without speaking, his attitude and looks betrayed him an interstitial foreigner millandering in their midst. They closed on him naturally, a synched noose. Their grotesque wide grins overtook his vision. They wanted him and what they could get out of him, ignorant boy. The traveler was surrounded.
The impulse to cause a passage's own descriptiveness to angle back on itself, creating a surrounding feeling in the language itself, is a good one. But the early conjunction of interstitial and millandering, the unnecessary synched noose, and the grins that are grotesque and wide make the passage too stolid and not sinewy enough to do the snaky work Belczyk wants it to do. The book flashes between moments of sharp clarity and overwritten typographical tricks, like italicized flourishes that seek to tie each story together but really just jam up the works. The slenderness of Fink's prose glows in comparison.
But the ambition of both these titles, like the energy of Middleton's debut, makes the reader excited to see what Dark Coast will produce next. In September, it will publish Swell, a fantasy novel by Corwin Ericson that Talwar describes as "an adventure novel—a literary novel that has an adventurous sense." They've just signed cult literary sensation Kris Saknussemm for a February release titled Reverend America, which Talwar says is a Flannery O'Connor–style novel about a retired preacher taking a road trip through the South.
In a few years, Dark Coast would like to publish 12 titles annually. At the moment, they are most interested in finding work by women—Talwar grumbles that 95 percent of the submissions he's been getting are from men—and local authors, too. They don't want the constraints of being a local press, but they want to celebrate their adopted city as they expand their slate. "The whole goal is, every time we release a book, we're always going to try to have a party in Seattle to keep it local," Talwar says. The first party is this Thursday, June 9, at Conor Byrne Pub in Ballard and will feature local authors, a reading from Thirteen Fugues, and bluegrass music from Larry and His Flask. Talwar is excited about the start of this tradition. "No matter where the author is from, Seattle is a part of Dark Coast, and Dark Coast is a part of Seattle, and we want to pay homage to that," he says. 
