The Drill Press

publishers aiming to get in your head: As of now, we intend to publish e-books. There are a number of reasons for this decision, none of them worth listing here in detail except to say that the 19th century model for publishing houses printing books on paper is antiquated and doomed. We are considering the move to PDF soon, however.; We intend our catalog to grow as books are published and remain in print. We're looking for original work that transcends the bounds of 19th century standards set by the major houses and will only publish when we find writing that meets our standards.; Our ebooks will be available from the online ebook retailer ebookmall.com.; Meanwhile, we are reading other interesting work. We actively seek submissions, but not pulp fiction or crassly commerical bilge. Work with a purpose beyond the counterfeit notion of unengaged entertainment best served by the dual tediums television and film which have converged to the point they are largely interchangeable.

Now available:: WHEN PACINO’S HOT, I’M HOT A Miscellany of Stories & Commentary by Robert Levin; "A writer from whom I always learn something." – Nat Hentoff; Go directly to The Drill Press Catalog; Or order now as a print copy and a pdf download from PRINT, or else from as an ebook from E-BOOK in pdf and prc format. We suggest the pdf format for this work if ordered as an ebook.

A Broca Literária: Saudanções, internauta.; A partir de novembro, a Drill Press concede espaço para autores e leitores da lingua portuguesa com sua nova revista digital "A Broca Literária". Serão quatro trabalhos de prosa expostos mensalmente seguindo linhas similares às adotadas pela editora em suas outras revistas. Publicaremos crônicas, artigos, estórias curtas, romances de ficção e não-ficção, tudo em lingua portuguesa. Queremos textos originais, criativos, que instiguem a reflexão no leitor, que lhe agucem o espírito crítico sem comprometer-lhe a doçura e a espontaneidade, que matem sua sede de arte, talento e verdade.; Produções óbvias como tantas que transbordam na rede escondendo trabalhos valiosos são dispensáveis para nós, mesmo que bem apresentadas. Nossos lemas são criatividade, originalidade, qualidade e ousadia. A "Broca" não teme novidades. Não ostenta barreiras quanto à temática apresentada. O importante é que se respeite essas quatro prerrogativas.; Você, leitor e autor da língua portuguesa, agora tem um espaço só seu.; Para saber mais sobre a proposta da Broca ou sobre como ser um de nossos autores, acesse a revista.; A Broca Literária

We're new, we're vicious and we're hungry.: We seek a few good readers. Terrestrial intelligences seeking pleasure in engaging the brain, eschewing the standard television-aping pap presented by the major houses as literature. Readers relishing the English language, prose that realizes its potential, and tales that exploit the marvels of reality wherever it is found.; We seek a few good writers. Authors renouncing cliché with tales outside the mainstream, explicit in setting and detail to transport the reader, trusting rather than bludgeoning the reader. Creators of convincing creatures in unique settings.; You can eat off our prose.

Manifesto In Five Easy Movements: This work simultaneously appeared on the computers of our three founding editors as they made plans to start this publishing house. Investigation revealed slight variations in text which over time merged into this version; under the properties were three different comments, though the title and author were as given. One comment stated CHANCE: Computer enHANced, another CHANCE: Computer Hosted AlieN intelligenCE. In the third a longer description: A work by silicon life forms created by information and inhabiting the web. Later one of us got an email with no address simply stating Collective intelligence from bits to words.; Click To Read the Full Manifesto

The Big Stupid Review
Mawlawchee: By Ben Drinen; I used to know this guy from Altoona. Said his name was Mawlawchee. When he told me that his name was Mawlawchee, I said to him "Mawlawchee, what the hell kinda name is that?" He said he didn't know what kind of name it was, but that most of his family was Italian. I asked him "Is that an Italian name then or what?" He said he didn't know that either. "Spell that shit," I said to Malawchee. "M-A-L-A-C-H-I, Mawlawchee," he said to me, and I just started laughing my ass off right there in a dive bar in downtown Philadelphia. more...
Successful P's: By Chris Vaughan; A list of fabric conditioners, bio-agreeable … Everyone’s a winner in advertising. I was told this on my first day and everyday since.
Fabric Conditioner is now our number one concern. Think, think. The word should sound as soft as the product, or as hard. Crisp. Like crisp. more...
Excerpt from Dear Vito: By Mickey Z.; I performed my first miracle on the Q101 bus. more...
As the Song Goes: By Ryan McBride; The broken pavement in this alley is rough and cold; I'm wearing ballet flats and I jump every time a car's headlights throw our shadows against the brick wall. We're out behind the Ralphs in West Hills, a town which is basically the hemorrhoid of LA. I'm with my friend Stacy, and this girl Natasha, who's leaning against a big metal dumpster like she's done this before, in black tights and a Nausea shirt. We're here to meet Jamie, Nat's dealer, and trying not to feel too ‘sketched out'. more...

Journal Of Precognitive Memories
Saving California: Secession and the Reagan Scheme: By Pig Bodine. California fell for a Reagan scheme … sometimes called Reaganonics … not surprising given the old gasbag came from that fantasy land and governed it for a time before getting promoted to the Presidency. Reaganonics is a complex graft that can be carried on for decades given that three requirements are in play … but there's a significant difference between the Presidency and governorship of California when it comes to implementing the grift. more...
Maurice Stoker on Tom Bradley's Even the Dog Won't Touch Me: By Maurice Stoker. I'm leading a tour of fellow literary professionals. Writers, editors, publishers, and agents. Lots of agents. A tour for a clutch of charities. A service tour of the glory holes of Europe. Western Europe. We do the US and Canada later in the year.; It seems that with Cheney and Bush Jr. having memoirs surreptitiously penned and to be published in the near future, they are both going to be with us on the US leg. I can't wait to see the Secret Service agents on their knees beside the former President and his Vice chowing down on anonymous wiener dogs protruding from holes in stark bathroom walls. Although I have been informed that SS will require all anonymous participants submit to short arm inspection and penile toivel, probably laving away the tasty smegma from around those few remaining lovely foreskins. more...
Maurice Stoker Anent Two Errors in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon: By Maurice Stoker. Given the climate of black-and-whitism about these days, let me confess I be a fan of Mr. Pynchon’s, having enjoyed in particular all his odd-numbered novels (anent this sequence more later, assuming this labyrinthine geodesic of aberrant mentality doesn’t cross the Rio Lethe). But there exist a pair of gaffs in Mason and Dixon more than mere flubs, given the duality of their pairing: one a spatial riff in the fabric of words, the other a temporal anomaly, an anachronism if you will, both mathematical to boot. These be nothing if not planned, part of the thread worming words into the very nature of space-time in all its curved fecundity; more than miscues of a mere mortal.; That is to wit first the stogie incident amidst chapter thirty-four (almost dead center!) in which a twisted cheroot (in a loose sense of the word) produces a smoak Möbius band. What horrible confusion to even the most moderately informed of readers! The would-be Toroidal smoak ring twisted via the quotient topology must emanate as smoak Klein bottle, not smoak Möbius band; as all those with a modicum of education (through only an elementary course in General Topology) know that the quotient space of a cylinder with reversed boundary identification becomes Klein bottle, the Möbius band rather the quotient space resulting from reversed boundary identification of rectangle. more...

Spooky Action At A Distance
Meaning and Almostness: By Jim Chaffee. Essence and existence. For certain believers in God and such, essence precedes existence. For some unbelievers, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, the statement is reversed. Neither of these notions is anything more than a repetition of the point they are attempting to drive home, however, and as far as existential dilemmas go, the God-no God question is at best meaningless and really a yawner. Besides which all the arguments end in begging.; Consider instead a chilling ontological-epistemological cocktail with the potential for profound existential hangover. more...
Kalari Payat: By Gitanjali Kolanad. The young lithe bodies with long muscles under dark skin glistening with oil and sweat crouch and kick and leap, taking inspiration from the movement of elephant, lion, horse, snake. The actions are low to the ground, curving, punctuated by sudden high twirling jumps, just like the Malayalam script, all curves interrupted only rarely by a straight line. more...
The Ekonomics of Fantasyland: By Jim Chaffee. The bigger and more dangerous irony can best be illustrated by returning to bad television, taking the metaphor from the ridiculous series Star Trek in its later incarnation. The belief in war as an investment was brought to naught by self-delusion. The Neocons somehow saw themselves as Klingon leaders of a nation of Klingons. But clearly the Bush administration inner circle is composed of sniveling, cowardly, devious, lying Ferengis. Karl Rove is so Ferengi in temperament he might have been a model for the series if one believes in the future affecting the past. So is Cheney, passed along by Bush the Elder; so are those in the background, like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Just who is the Grand Nagus in this crew is not clear, but my bet it is likely Cheney and not Bush the Younger. Cheney seems to have the bigger ears.; Reality is that the US is a nation of Ferengis, not Klingons. And so a final irony is that the "Cold War" ought to have been approached Ferengi style. The US could have bought the successors of the real Greatest Generation who defeated Hitler, the Soviet Red Army. They would be the real Klingons. And the investment in war could have been cheaply managed without a hiccup in the force-feeding of money into the homeland via "Defense Spending." more...
Ethnic Narcissism and Infertility in Japan: By Tom Bradley. I teach conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese "imperial university" where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets.; Ever since I first reluctantly mounted the bamboo podium, back in the days when this was the richest country in the world, my campus has been under occupation by platoons of boys who call themselves "cheerleaders." Seeming to grow like bunions out of the karate and judo teams, they’re too bristly to get laid, so they scream and march a lot, and flail their arms around. They’re seminarians of a sort, practicing to be full-blown Hirohito worshipers like those I saw officiating at the Feast of the Transfiguration in A-Bomb Park. more...
Noise in the Machine: The Homogeneous Chaos Blues: By Jim Chaffee. Gilbert Ryle nailed Cartesian dualism by killing the ghost in the machine. Now someone named Carl Zimmer wants to use noise in the machine to kill a straw man standing in for genetic determinism. This mushy-headed blather arises as an attempt to simulate science-talk to people inured to comic book encapsulation of the most complex ideas. Who knows what the author intended to convey, or why, but the premise demands deconstruction like Lon Cheney Junior demanded a dew claw. more...
Name of a Flower: By Sonia Ramos Rossi. The bar in Madrid's gay area was full of smoke and young, pretty lesbians dancing salsa with each other, petite and sun-tanned. I pulled up a high stool at the counter, ordered a Martini and had a look around. To my right a tall, slim, middle aged lady was drinking Baileys on ice, chatting with the bar staff. She looked a little out of place there, I mean she was neither a young pretty lesbian, nor one of the older type of 'guy that understands' who tend to hang out in this place. She did fit another type who normally go there, though; she was a transsexual. more...
Breakable Bayonets, Made in China: By Tom Bradley. Try to get a typical Red Chinese lumpen-prole to sit down with you and share a few minutes of pleasantly goose-bumped thermonuclear war paranoia. He’ll first look puzzled, then think about it for half a second. And then he’ll say there are so many of his people around that lots of them are bound to survive even the biggest holocaust Bush can provoke. So, there’s no need to fret. And his lack of a silly grin when he says this cannot be ascribed to the legendary inscrutability of the yellow face. He’s not joking. more...
Sunny Tells Me a Story: By Robert Levin. We're in my living room, taking a break on the second day of an interview I'm doing with him for Jazz & Pop—and smoking the amazing bush he's always holding—when Sunny says, "Bobby, I never told you this, but for a while there were people trying to kill me." more...
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the '60s: By Robert Levin. Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play - with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume - four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began - or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method. more...