Arsenal Pulp Press is a book publisher in Vancouver, Canada with over 160 titles currently in print, ranging from fiction and poetry to cultural, gender, and multicultural studies to guidebooks and cookbooks. It began life in 1971 as Pulp Press Book Publishers. 

Recently TDR caught up with Brian Lam, publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press to discuss the vibrancy of the Fall season’s new wares, including fiction and non-fiction titles, as well as a preview of what is due from Arsenal soon.

http://www.arsenalpulp.com/ 

Interview by NGM, Fall 2006.

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BL: We’ve got some great books this fall, including The Geist Atlas of Canada, a full-colour collection of Canadian maps on various themes (such as meat, sex, hockey, and doughnuts), based on the series that appears in Geist magazine. We also have Ivan E. Coyote’s very first novel (after 3 successful story collections, including 2005's Loose End, nominated this year for the American Ferro-Grumley Fiction Award) entitled Bow Grip, about a lonely mechanic from small-town Alberta. 

There’s also The Future is Queer, an international collection of gay and lesbian science fiction; Whisper Their Love, a new-format reprint of a classic lesbian pulp novel of 1958, published as part of our ongoing Little Sister’s Classics series that resurrects gay and lesbian classic novels that have gone out of print; Skids, an extraordinary story collection about the street kids of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, by UBC creative writing grad Cathleen With; and The Age of Cities, a novel by Vancouver writer Brett Josef Grubisic, about a young man coming of age in 1950s Vancouver. 

Finally, we are publishing Vancouver Art & Economies, a full-colour collection of essays and visual art that depicts Vancouver as an international art centre, co-published by Vancouver’s Artspeak Gallery; and Gay Art: A Historic Collection, a brand new edition of a classic 1972 book of erotic gay art and illustration from antiquity to present-day, co-written by Thomas Waugh.

TDR: Any new changes at Arsenal promotion-wise, etc.

BL: We’re revamping our website, and are introducing a brand-new logo, which we feel represents who we are and what we aim to achieve as an indie publishers from the west. Our promotional goals remain multi-faceted; currently our US sales are 60% of our total, and we also produce a separate academic catalogue which we send to professors and instructors.

BL: We’re publishing The View from Here, a collection of interviews with gay and lesbian filmmakers including John Waters and Pedro Almodovar, by Montreal’s Matthew Hays; Comfort Food for Breakups, a food memoir by Toronto filmmaker Marusya Bociukicw; Anarchy and Art, essays on the history of anarchy as depicted in visual art, by Victoria’s Allan Antliff; Where People Feast, an aboriginal cookbook from the Lilliget Feast House of Vancouver, one of the only aboriginal fine-dining establishments in the world; and Seminal, a comprehensive anthology of Canadian gay male poetry from the 1800s to present day. 

I’m also excited about Soucouyant an extraordinary Caribbean-Canadian novel by David Chariandy that’s will be one of the best things we’ve ever published.

Nathaniel G. Moore is TDR’s features editor.