Months after the initial tidal wave of 9/11 books crashed over bookstores, a pair of fringe New York presses have produced short, provocative works that use analogy, parody and satire to critique the nation's reaction to the attacks. This month, Brooklyn's Soft Skull Press (dist. by PGW) sallies forth with Get Your War On by David Rees, a graphic novel composed entirely of computer clip art depicting office workers bantering about the war on terror in hip-hop-inflected streams of commentary peppered with vulgarity.
The first comic was posted on the Internet at www.mnftiu.net on October 9, 2001, and drew millions of visitors in the subsequent months. Rees was contacted by publishers soon thereafter, but turned down offers from the big houses because "I didn't want someone to buy it and then drop it later, because it was too late," he said. The book version, which has an introduction by novelist Colson Whitehead, ends with the workers discussing President Bush's announcement last August of his plans to attack Iraq. Soft Skull has so far printed 40,000 copies.
"I think the book crystallizes a lot of things people have thought or said behind closed doors," said Benn Ray, co-owner of Atomic Books in Baltimore, Md. His small store sold out its initial order of 75 copies and expects to move more.
The book is also doing well in the Boston area. Carole Horne, buyer for the Harvard Book Store, reports the book has been on the store's bestseller list since a week after it arrived. "We sold 20 copies in the first day or two. I think it's going to do extremely well for us for the holidays."
Rees, who is in the midst of a 30-city tour and is donating all profits from the book to the Afghan-based charity Adopt-a-Minefield, told PW, "It was good to take something painful and traumatic and disarm it using black humor—and get it out of my head."
Though novelist John Reed's Snowball's Chance (Roof Books, Nov.) has yet to ship, it's likely to appeal to a similar audience. The novel reimagines George Orwell's Animal Farm in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In Reed's version, which is introduced by political commentator Alexander Cockburn, Snowball the pig returns to the farm and transforms it into a capitalist paradise, powered by a pair of wooden windmills. The local beavers, already enraged by the pig's destruction of their dams to maintain the free flow of water, plan their revenge. "It can be read as a satire, but it doesn't have to be," explained Reed, whose previous novel was A Still Small Voice (Delacorte, 2000).
The book has marked a new kind of commercial venture for its 20-year-old experimental publisher, Roof Books, which is best known for its poetry chapbooks. To support the 5,000-copy hardcover printing—the press's largest to date—publisher James Sherry has arranged for Small Press Distribution and Ingram to represent the title.
Both Sherry and Reed undertook the book with a sense of urgency, despite the risks involved. "It's relevant, regarding terrorism, 9/11 and Orwell. It was obvious to me that I had to do it," said Sherry. For his part, Reed explained, "In the two weeks after 9/11, I couldn't sleep anyway, so I worked 16 hours a day. I wrote fiction, because I didn't know what else to do."
