A New Kind of Publishing House


We're a new, small press on a mission to rescue civilization one book at a time. We publish print and ebook editions of remarkable out-of-print books, so they aren't lost to history, and new manuscripts we think are destined to become classics.

The Team


Ivory Madison

CEO and Publisher

Publisher, editor, and writer (Oxford University Press, Harvard Business Review, DC Comics). Founded Red Room, an online community and social media platform for authors, which was acquired in 2014 by Wattpad. Former management and communications consultant to startups (Serena and Lily) and Fortune 500 companies (Gap, Inc.). Juris Doctorate (Editor in Chief of the law review, interned at California Supreme Court). Named “Best Writing Coach” by San Francisco Magazine. Keynote speaker on writing (Independent Book Publishers Association, Stanford Writers Conference, USC Writers Conference) and featured expert on writing and the future of publishing (Digital Publishing Innovation Summit, Writers Digest West) and entrepreneurship (Lean Startup Conference, Exceptional Women in Publishing). Guest-lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the San Francisco Zen Center. On the leadership team of the Bay Area Book Festival and a former Litquake Committee member. Literary influences include Umberto Eco, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Kurt Vonnegut. Her feminist-superhero-mafia-noir graphic novel, Huntress: Year One, was named “Best Graphic Novel of the Decade” by one random person on Twitter.

Terence Clarke

Director of Publishing

Publisher, developmental editor, novelist (Mercury House, Ballantine Books), short-story writer (The Yale Review, The Antioch Review), journalist (San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Huffington Post), and translator (Pablo Neruda’s 100 Sonnets of Love). Influences include Jane Austen, Frank O’Connor, and Eduardo Galeano. His novels include My Father in the Night, The King of Rumah Nadai, and A Kiss for Señor Guevara. His short-story collections include The Day Nothing Happened, Little Bridget and the Flames of Hell, and New York. In his spare time, Terry enjoys a rather serious relationship with Argentine tango music and dance.

Books


New York:
Stories
By Terence Clarke
“Tales like these feel like new takes on classic stories of New York by Salinger or Capote—fine company, all in all.” -Kirkus Reviews

New York City provides the setting for these fourteen vivid stories. In one, an attorney’s stony heart begins to soften the day he is attacked by a homeless man on the High Line. In another, a world-class ballerina’s love is won and lost. In yet another, Bouquet, a celebrated fashion photographer, ponders the picture she took in war of an orphaned boy in the Peruvian Andes. Pat, a so-so novelist, finally discovers his muse on the uptown 1 train at Canal Street. Rodney, a Cuban refugee, mourns his father Wilfredo and the wonders of Wilfredo’s splendid music.

Author Bio:

Terence Clarke is a novelist (Mercury House, Ballantine Books), short-story writer (The Yale ReviewThe Antioch Review), journalist (San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Huffington Post), and translator (Pablo Neruda’s 100 Sonnets of Love). Influences include Jane Austen, Frank O’Connor, and Eduardo Galeano. His novels include My Father in the NightThe King of Rumah Nadai, and A Kiss for Señor Guevara. His short-story collections include The Day Nothing HappenedLittle Bridget and the Flames of Hell, and New York.

Release date: 11/01/2017
Le Grand Tango:
The Life and Music of Astor Piazzolla
(2017 Updated and Expanded Edition)
By María Susana Azzi and Simon Collier
“The authors base their book on 220 interviews.... With great care and fidelity, the authors define Piazzolla's place and relevance in the world of twentieth-century music.” -Booklist

Le Grand Tango is the definitive biography of Argentine composer and musician Astor Piazzolla, whose genius is nothing if not controversial. The debate still rages as to whether he reinvented tango or if his music is indeed tango at all. This new updated and expanded “Anniversary Edition,” published twenty-five years after Piazzolla’s death, includes new material from both authors, updates on the Piazzolla family and legacy, and new photographs.

Born in a seacoast town in Argentina in 1921, Piazzolla spent most of his childhood in the East Village of New York, returning to Argentina at sixteen, already a talented bandoneon player. He would take tango music to new, jazz and classical-influenced heights that were rejected in Argentina but celebrated in Europe and on the international stage. By his death in 1992, he had millions of fans, including some of the most accomplished musicians in the world.

Author Bio:

“María Susana Azzi is an expert on Argentine tango, Simon Collier the chair of the history department at Vanderbilt (specializing in Latin America), and it would take two to keep up with the mercurial and dynamic Piazzolla…”  -Kirkus Reviews

Release date: 02/14/2017
A Surgeon’s War:
My Year in Vietnam
By Henry Ward Trueblood M.D.
"Trueblood's memoir transports us into the pathos, the courage, and the desolation of a tragic war."
-Irvin D. Yalom, author of When Nietzsche Wept

It’s 1965. A young surgeon is drafted into the U.S. Navy and sent to Vietnam, where he finds himself closer than he ever imagined to the carnage of war. He performs operations while under fire and sees wounds that can barely be contemplated. Marines are dying on the operating table in front of him. The small-town moral certainties he grew up believing in may themselves succumb to the ravages he is witnessing. More than anything, he wants to make it home to marry the woman he loves.

Author Bio:

Henry Ward Trueblood M.D. grew up in Indianola, Iowa, where his father was the town doctor. By the age of ten he was regularly making house calls with his father. Trueblood graduated from Stanford Medical School in 1964 and served in the U.S. Navy as a surgeon in Vietnam in 1965-66. An award-winning faculty member at Stanford, he continues to teach third-year medical students and serve as Trauma Attending at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a Level One Trauma Center.

Release date: 11/07/2015
Compelled to Witness:
Women’s Memoirs of the French Revolution
By Marilyn Yalom
"...a thoughtful feminist analysis of the French Revolution."
-Publishers Weekly

From Marie Antoinette during her final days in prison, to Charlotte Robespierre, the sister of the man responsible for ordering hundreds to the guillotine, women on both sides of the revolution were bound together by a common nightmare. Join Stanford professor Marilyn Yalom, as she uncovers first-person accounts of more than eighty remarkable women memoirists—all ages and backgrounds, all victims of the French Revolution.

Author Bio:

Marilyn Yalom was decorated as an Officier des Palmes Academiques by the French Government, and is the author of several popular nonfiction books, including How the French Invented Love: 900 Years of Passion and Romance, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen. A former professor of French literature, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University, Yalom was educated at Wellesley College, the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins.

Release date: 01/30/2015
The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro
By Terence Clarke
". . . a view of love, art, and religion at battle with each other
in ways you’ve never seen before."
-bestselling author and Guggenheim Fellow Alev Lytle Croutier

Infamous Mexican muralist Jesús Lázaro comes to San Francisco from Mexico, where he had painted the exteriors of churches despite objections by the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. The artist sees the massive cathedral of Saint Mary of The Assumption of San Francisco, at the corner of Gough and Geary Streets, and determines he must paint the entire exterior with grand murals. Archbishop Ruben Mullins refuses the artist, and therein lies the conflict. The dispute sparks protests in the street, gets the attention of the Vatican, sets off a disastrous love triangle, and may or may not invoke the wrath of God.

Author Bio:

Terence Clarke is a novelist (Mercury House, Ballantine Books), short-story writer (The Yale ReviewThe Antioch Review), journalist (San Francisco Chronicle, Salon.com, Huffington Post), and translator (Pablo Neruda’s 100 Sonnets of Love). Influences include Jane Austen, Frank O’Connor, and Eduardo Galeano. His novels include My Father in the NightThe King of Rumah Nadai, and A Kiss for Señor Guevara. His short-story collections include The Day Nothing HappenedLittle Bridget and the Flames of Hell, and New York.

Release date: 01/30/2015

Blog/News


Contact and Submissions


We publish new and previously out-of-print fiction and nonfiction, in ebook and print editions. What they all have in common is quality and lasting importance. Let us know if you’re interested in supporting a book rescue or want to suggest an out-of-print title for us to publish. Reviewers may contact us for electronic review copies. We don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts of new works. Thank you.

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