Fast Books

I inaugurated my press by publishing my long poem “American Baby” in 1983; having taught myself bookbinding out of a book, I hand-made 100 copies, most of which I gave away. I typeset Melisande Potter’s play “On the Ball” at Zuckermann Harpsichords and put the Fast Books name on it although Dan Potter did all the rest of the work. My poem sequence “A Sojourn in Paris” made a sweet little chapbook; I wish I had made more of them. I have published two books of poems by friends, Dan Potter’s “Up Scaffolding” and Gary Zarr’s “The Flight of the Great Red Bird,” a long sequence of haiku in memory of his brother.

My experimental novel “Near the End” is the first book that was professionally designed, printed, and bound; the cover is the George Washington stamp Johnny Dodd used for his lost collage mural in my apartment on West Third Street in Greenwich Village; the book turned out beautifully, except the designer neglected to remind me to put anything on the back cover, which came out blank white. I made 500 copies and recently recycled several boxes of them.

Production has picked up in recent years. John Labovitz designed “Automatic Vaudeville,” “Yes Poetry,” “Jesse & Elvis,” and “Azúcar, Tabaco y Café,” and and made many substantial and continuing contributions to the development of the press. I have designed subsequent books myself. In May 2012 Fast Books published “Chain,” a remarkable, great novel by the late Ronald Tavel.

In 2013 we (that is, I) published “My Dear, Sweet Self: A Hot Peach Life,” Jimmy Camicia’s entertaining and provocative memoir of his legendary theatre company, Hot Peaches. I published my own “Rhapsodic Photography: Selected Poems 1964-2012,” lest they be forgotten. Marya Ursin’s charming book of yoga tales, “A Bowlful of Ladoo,” with paintings by Daniel Potter, reveals the connection between myths and specific yoga poses (asanas). Marya and Dan followed up with “Sky Tails,” a selection of Native American stories dramatized for the Mystic Paper Beasts, their indefatigably inventive theatre company.

A major but sporadically visible part of my own oeuvre is my plays, which like most new plays vanished into thin air after a few performances. Believing in them as literature as well as scripts for acting, I published a collection of the main ones in 2013—22 plays in two volumes.

My short novel “A Cat’s Life” was released as an ebook, downloadable from Amazon.

This flurry of vanity publishing continued with “Names and Events: Winter 1965-66,” an intimate 24/7 diary I kept while I was writing for The Village Voice and engulfed in a seething bohemian Greenwich Village art scene, at the brief, exhilarating peak of the legendary sixties.

“Having Loved,” a new collection of eloquently direct poems by the great Judith Malina, founder of the Living Theatre and a personal hero, came out in time for her to enjoy it while she was still alive.

I seem to be publishing books by people who have died. Niel Hancock’s “Old Dime Box Stories” is a colorful transcontinental picaresque and a touching revelation of the author’s determined recovery from the Vietnam War. Ronald Tavel’s sharp-witted “Andy Warhol’s Ridiculous Screenplays” recovers the complex human comedy of Warhol’s infamous Factory at its height. I also put out a generous collection of my output as a theatre critic, “Theatre Journal: Reviews from The Village Voice, 1960-74.”

Our newest title is “Ecuador Journal” by Bill Hart. In the works is “25 Plays by Robert Heide,” hopefully to appear by late summer 2016.

Details of these and our other books are at http://fastbookspress.com.

Fast Books may be ordered direct from the publisher. For packaging and postage, please add $5 for the first book, plus $4 for each additional book. Since 2008, most of our books have appeared in the Ingram catalogue and can be ordered from your favorite bookstore or online bookseller.