Two Ravens Press

Here’s another shot at a post which didn’t seem to work yesterday…
I have been rather lax this year already – not just that I missed posting on the first day of 2008 (only by 45 minutes, though) but in writing about Two Ravens Press. I’ve been meaning to do it since October, I think, but better late than never.

Quite a while ago I was sent three of their books to read, and I decided that I wanted to be able to write about all three of them at the same time. That meant quite a lot of reading, and that had to happen alongside lots of other books which needed to be read right-this-minute for all sorts of reasons. Well, the books have now been read! But they’re going to wait until tomorrow. To give Two Ravens Press their proper due, I shall write today’s post about the company in general – and tomorrow tell you about the three books I’ve read.

Two Ravens Press are an independent publisher, and can be found at www.tworavenspress.com – they, like many independent presses, have een rather remiss. No, not just missing the first day of 2008 on my blog (only byone main rule for what they publish – they have to love it. Literary fiction, poetry and non-fiction are all considered, their central consideration is… well, I’ll let them speak for themselves. This is from their website:

Everything that we publish, we publish with passion. We love each of our books. They say something about the author, they say something about us and they say something about the time and the place they were born into. Each book is a person we like being around. Because each, in its own way, fights back against formulas and homogenization, against the analgesic washing-out of colour that threatens to fade our bright thoughts.

What made this publisher stand out for me? Well, as you may know by now, I tend to judge books by covers. Or at least let them lead me in the right direction. I certainly look at book covers to tell me what sort of publisher I’m looking at. And well done Two Ravens Press! Their covers are strikingly attractive while also being a little edgy and uncompromising. Very cutting-edge, but with humanity and beauty too. Good signs. I went straight to novels, as they are the area I know best, and the ones listed all look so different from anything else I’ve encountered. Probably the bigger presses didn’t know quite where to place them in their marketing – Two Ravens Press can simply market them as individual books, with passion. That’s not to say I adored all three, but it’s a definite good sign when I’m intrigued and surprised by the description of a book – genuinely unable to think of a precedent, let alone a genre full of near identical books, as is sometimes the case.

Do go and check out the website; their novels are listed here. And tomorrow you can find out what I thought of some of them…!