[Book Review]
No Record Press Presents: The Red Anthology of Hitherto Unknown Writers
Reviewed by Sterling Preston
YOU CAN’T HELP but love the idea. Think COMETBUS for the New Yorker crowd. Sort of, anyway.
A group of good people up in San Francisco put their heads, funds & resources together to sift through slush piles of fiction, find the ones they liked and publish them in an anthology. The primary requirement seems to be that the authors were NOT entrenched in academia. Reason being, there’s quite enough of that being bought and sold already, thank you.
The result is an interesting collection of short fiction by unknown authors, most of whom can put together a pretty damn decent short story.
Not every story is perfect… not every story is even necessarily all that good. There are treasures within the covers, however… stories by “hitherto unknown” authors. Some of it is entertaining, some of it is pure poetry… and yeah… some of it is going to make you have to think.
I’ll spare you a watered down version of the book’s introduction, because it’s one of the most inspiring pieces in the book. It explains what the people at No Record Press set out to do, and why they attempted such a thing. (You can actually read it on their website.)
My personal favorite story from the book is something called “from I’M HERE TO MAKE YOU SMILE” by Andy Darley, but then I’m not you. You’ll probably have your own favorite.
Both Christopher Cole’s “Flesh” and Sarah Todd’s “Seventy-Eight Days in the City” are stand-outs – beautifully written with skillful uses of imagery.
Anyway, if you do nothing else, go to no-record.com/stories/motivationunabridged.html and see for yourself if this is something you’d want to support. [no-record.com] SPa