Official Release

Today marks the official publication date for the paperback and kindle editions of our latest title, Eckhard GerdesHow to Read! We're very excited about this book. Gerdes is a veteran author and the longtime editor-in-chief of Journal of Experimental Fiction. Here's the cover description and some blurbage:


For too long, our educational system has oversimplified the practice of reading while pretending that only one method works: Read as fast as you can, from beginning to end, in a straight line, without skipping anything. The fastest reader is the best reader and gets the gold star and the certificate for free ice cream! This, of course, punishes deliberate, careful students and booklovers who delight in the process and incorporate what they read into their everyday lives. The dominant method of reading works for simple linear texts, but it is by no means the only way to go about reading and excludes many other types of texts. In How to Read, veteran novelist, editor and educator Eckhard Gerdes reveals 81 different approaches for reading, opening up new horizons that restrictive educators have been blocking from view for far too long. This innovative guidebook will enrich the experience of textuality for young and old readers alike.

“Eckhard Gerdes has messed up my head—in the best way possible. I haven't been this dazzled by a book since Queneau's  Exercises in Style. How to Read will definitely shake things up.” Derek Pell, author of X-Texts and The Little Red Book of Adobe LiveMotion

Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible, goes the slogan scrawled across the Parisian walls in May 1968: Be realistic, ask the impossible. That's precisely what Eckhard Gerdes does on every page of his critifiction about how to read, which is to say about how to write, which is to say about how to rewrite, which is to say about how to un-write. It's ingenious, impossible revolution all the way down.” Lance Olsen, author of Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing