Feature: Hotel St. George Press

I’d like to share with you some books and information from a really cool press. But before you listen to me or check out the books, you should really just go to their website and spend some time: www.hotelstgeorgepress.com. In reality, it seems that the immensely pleasing, multi-media website is really the soul of this operation, and the print arm is almost more of an added perk.

The organizing principle of the website is, not surprisingly, a hotel – the rooms of which are occupied by the writers, artists, and musicians who produce work there. They’ve taken the idea of “hosting” that is inherent in a website, and made it a little more literal. They’ve created a space where your mind can wander and discover things and explore nooks and crannies.

The books that they’ve produced are few (the 4th is at the printer), but each is well-crafted, yet minimalist. Their mission statement really puts it best: “Hotel St. George Press is committed to producing books resistant to the predictable trends of genre, style and structure endemic to corporate publishing. We create bound narrative objects – unique, slender, palpable, playful – that wed the formal novelty of children's books to the content of sophisticated mature fiction.” Their books are small, but each one offers many opportunities for curiosity and serious thought.

First, you might ask yourself of each of their books: What is it? Or a bookseller or librarian might ask “What section will I shelve it in?” Is it a play? Is it a novel? A history? Is it a story, a poem, a collection of aphorisms? And because this object in your hand is so pleasing and yet uncertain, resembling yet not quite fitting any single category, you begin to ask: WHAT exactly IS a play, a novel, a poem?

Take, for example, The Musical Illusionist by Alex Rose.
It has no plot, and no characters. The style is neutral historic, like a museum exhibit. And yet none of it is true, so it must be fiction. The divisions resemble short stories rather than chapters, and yet they are linked in several ways. So is it a novel? It might best be described as a fictional mythology of stories, civilizations, and technologies that have been lost. If I had to choose a physical referent, it would undoubtedly be The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. There, you never know what is real and what has been invented, what is science or what is art. In terms of literature, I am reminded of Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, and of the magical realist political histories of Uruguay’s Eduardo Galeano.

Bicycle by Paul Fattaruso is equally charming, but in a different way. If William Carlos Williams had written about a red bicycle rather than a red wheelbarrow, it would be this book. The feeling upon reading it is similar to Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee comics and drawings. When you finish, you’re not exactly sure what you’ve consumed, but it is pleasing and it leaves a pleasant taste in the back of your mind, and you want to go back to it again and again.

And finally, The Session by Aaron Petrovich. Minimal in its language but definitely with its share of cleverness and wordplay. And humorous, but dark. The description compares it to Beckett, and I think it fits. The style, the dark humor, and the absurdity. In the words of a fellow bookseller in Decatur, GA: "It’s a piece of work you’ll want to read, to experience, and then frame."



Be sure to check out these books, and keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming projects of Hotel St. George Press. Rumor has it that we, the readers, will have a part to play in their next collaborative object. If the past is any indicator, their future books will make you think, they will be well-designed, they will have an air of whimsy, and they will be extremely pleasing to behold and to consume.





Hotel St. George Press was recently featured at Skylight's monthly salon, along with Soft Skull Press and PM Press. If this article was at all interesting to you, join us for our next salon to learn about more small, independent publishers that we love.