Black Sun Lit is a print and digital literary press that endeavors to showcase and support both emerging and established writers whose work has minimal exposure in a reading world largely governed by commercial publishing interests.
We understand that the principal task for a publisher should be to act as a gatekeeper of carefully curated works and to give readers every instrument to access them. To do so, we have revived the forgotten custom of a publisher guided only by a well-defined canon. Our ambition is to publish works that harken to the complex traditions of decadentism, symbolism, surrealism, and the nouveau roman—among other innovative literary movements—and compile them so that single voices are not floating alone but gathered into a corpus in which a reader can find a commonality of intents.
At Black Sun, we want to free ourselves from the constraints of a book market that has slowly homogenized and trivialized the availability of literary offerings. Our mission as a publisher, therefore, is not to entertain or educate. Instead, we strive to publish works directed toward a few discerning readers who seek a style of literature that refuses to justify itself through concepts of utility or morality.
We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty—not communication or identification—as the end of literature. Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself. We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom. Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness. We value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive. While we surely have an audience in mind, we would like our contributors to be bold and less concerned with their potential public.
Black Sun Lit publications and programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Black Sun Lit is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Black Sun Lit: Brooklyn & Arkville, NY
Distributor: Small Press Distribution