Reading and Release Party

Friday, April 15 / 7 PM / Free

Marilyn Monroe Didn’t Marry Henry Miller: Howl! Happening, Ping-Pong Free Press, and the Henry Miller Memorial Library invite you to an evening of reading, ranting and raving to celebrate the release of their magazine and launch of their press.

Readers include: Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Susan Lewis, Alexander Cigale, Sheila Maldonado, Cathy McArthur, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Stephen Boyer, Christen Clifford, Amanda Davidson, Dia Felix, Matthew Sharp, Robert Marshall, Laurie Stone, Pamela Sneed, J. Hope Stein, Christine Hamm, Kate Lutzner, Sarah Sarai, Maria Garcia Teutsch and Magnus Toren. Special thanks go to Joanna Fuhrman and Shelley Marlow for helping to curate readers.

The Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California champions the literary and artistic legacy of Henry Miller. This cannot mean only the writings of Miller himself. We may not have even known about Miller had it not been for Anaïs Nin. Miller existed at the peripheries of American literature, but his sources, and his influence, extend far beyond this country, to the international literary avant-garde.

Ping-Pong Free Press follows in the footsteps of its literary parent Ping-Pong magazine and therefore sees itself as a current and vital part of that same impulse. It represents a living connection to the centers and peripheries of contemporary literary culture, both in the United States and beyond. As such, we are not looking for writing that is pretty.

Miller himself was not a pretty writer. But he was vital. That is why even when Miller was hardly read in the U.S., Kenneth Rexroth describes himself meeting “…miners in the Pyrenees, camel drivers in Tlemcen, gondoliers in Venice” who all asked, “Do you know M’sieu Millaire?” Ping-Pong Free Press will not be censored, will not bow to whimsy, will speak loudly in the face of injustice, and will support those artists whose voices are sometimes silenced.

American writers who exist just under the radar of the mainstream literary world—as Miller and Ginsberg did for so much of their careers—will be represented by Ping-Pong Free Press.

And just as Miller was and is as much an international literary figure as he was/is an American one, so too does Ping-Pong Free Press seek to reach beyond our shores in order to bring unknown, or lesser known, writers from around the world into more prominence in English, doing so with its first title: A Small Suitcase of Russian Poetry, trans. by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris.