Little Books, Big Ideas.
So New is an ultra-micro-mini publishing company (although company is a very strong word here because we don't make any money) whose goal is to seek out, publish and promote the Web's best writers.
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Consumed: Format: Trade Paperback Price: $10 |
Listen to an MP3 interview with Consumed editor Savannah Schroll, given to WITF in PA on November 14, 2005!
From Savannah:
Okay, here's THE IDEA:
We are women driven by consumption and the insatiable desire for bigger, for better, for more. It's a response programmed into our psyches even before we're fully cognizant of media culture, and it's transforming the natural course of civilization, history, and ultimately humanity. It's invisible to us because it's indivisible from our identities.
This collection is not about goods alone, but everything we crave--lost time, gluttony, hedonism, addiction--anything related to the pleasures, pain, joys and evils of wasting, buying, imbibing, or ingesting--even accumulating. The authors and artists here have complete creative freedom within the multiple definitions of consumption and all its lusty, ravenous, and sweaty implications.
The authors and artists in this anthology are exclusively women whose work has appeared online. They are sprinkled throughout the United States and England. I sought to incorporate each particular contributor's work because they have a style or voice that is individually arresting but also works beautifully within the whole. With this anthology, I hope to amplify their unique talents and bring satisfied smiles to hungry hedonists everywhere.
Who bit?
Consumed Authors:
Claire Zulkey
Jai Clare
Jackie Corley
Pia Z. Ehrhardt
Claudia Smith
Amy Havel
RoseMarie London
Rochelle Spencer
Gail Louise Siegel
Consumed Artists:
Kate Bingaman
Roxanne ('Roxi') Carter
Caroll Planque
Bridget Riversmith
Brenda Stumpf
Gilda Davidian
Consumed's Pia Ehrhardt won the annual Narrative Magazine Prize.
SOME FAMOUS QUOTES TO SET THE MOOD:
"We're consumers. We're by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty -- these things don't concern me. What concerns me is celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra." -- from Fight Club, Chuck Pahlaniuk
"I like my money right where I can see it... hanging in my closet." --Carrie Bradshaw, Sex & the City
"Junk is the ultimate merchandise. The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he degrades and simplifies the client."--William S. Burroughs
"During the earlier stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the better grades of goods,--ideally all consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum, --pertains normally to the leisure class." -Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1902.
"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." --Noam Chomsky
