Josh Rothes
LightNews LightNews
banner
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Josh Rothes
@joshuarothes.bsky.social
950 followers 160 following 46 posts
Writer, editor, worker.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Josh Rothes
jsief.bsky.social
since the British 19C poet Amy Levy is in the news (a trove of letters was recently discovered & made available for research), I will share a link to the volume of her collected poems that we pub’d in the Empyrean Series (no. 30) a couple years ago asterismbooks.com/product/the-...
November 16, 2025 at 2:23 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Can’t wait for you all to get these in your hands!
jsief.bsky.social Jacob Siefring @jsief.bsky.social · 28d
It’s been a long while! Empyrean Series nos. 46–50 are announced & available for preorder as of today.

Books by Jean Paul, Pierre Custot, & Fernando Pessoa are due out in November. Ludwig Tieck & Niu Sengru will be published next spring.

asterismbooks.com/publisher/em...
October 30, 2025 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
jsief.bsky.social
“And here the earth returned from its year and flew down from the sun above, and the sound sang ever more beautifully and soft: ‘Go to your earth, you who have not yet died.’”

—‘The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix’ (1797), trans. @unpaginated.bsky.social
jsief.bsky.social Jacob Siefring @jsief.bsky.social · 28d
Jean Paul’s ‘The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix’ (1797) is translated from German (and studiously annotated with footnotes) by Matthew Spencer. Publication date of Nov. 18. See here for a partial preview of the book’s interior:

asterismbooks.com/product/an-a...
Declaring himself the inventor of a new literary genre—one which "explains little and banters much"—Jean Paul in The Parson in Jubilee: An Appendix (1797) portrays the joys and sorrows of the Schwers family on the eve of a momentous occasion: the double fifty-year anniversaries of the parson's marriage and of his service to his village congregation. When a messenger arrives with a letter appointing the pastor's son, Ingenuin, to the pastorship from which the father will soon retire, the romance between Alithea, the family's adoptive daughter, and Ingenuin is starting to blossom. Through a series of "pastoral and encyclical letters", Jean Paul presents the reader with an uproarious satirical complement to the the books idyllic aspects. The book concludes with "The Appendix of the Appendix, or, My Christmas Eve," one of Jean Paul's most stunning and wondrous dream visions. Never before available in English, studiously annotated by translator Matthew Spencer, here is an irreverent, unclassifiable work from one of Germany's most beloved and eccentric novelists.
October 24, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
aminckey.bsky.social
asterismbooks.com/product/the-burial-of-the-white-wolf-marcia-barbieri

Pre-orders are available for the second installation of the Trilogy of the Body, written by Brazil's freakiest living writer and brought to you by @sublunary.bsky.social.
The Burial of the White Wolf | Asterism Books
The second in her Trilogy of the Body, *The Burial of the White Wolf* follows Barbieri's *The Whore* down a different delirious rabbit hole, this time centered on the murder of a woman of many names, ...
asterismbooks.com
September 30, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
minxmarple.bsky.social
Fully excellent post courtesy of @joshuarothes.bsky.social / NOT IMMUNE FROM POLITICS
Yellow pamphlet, Hydra, Certain Biological and Psychoanalytical Considerations of by Joshua Rothes Not Immune from Politics What other motto can a collection of heads astride a single body have but one of solidarity? How else would they, this multitudinous maw, treat their collective labor? Should one go hungry because another's jaws snapped shut first? No! Because they, more than we, understand that there may be many gullets, but only one belly! And so I would posit the hydra as communist agitator.
September 15, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
joshuarothes.bsky.social
It was hot today so I made some chapbooks. Will send you one. Inquire within.
August 26, 2025 at 12:03 AM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
It was hot today so I made some chapbooks. Will send you one. Inquire within.
August 26, 2025 at 12:03 AM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
“Art is utilitarian.

Indeed it is doubtful whether anything like work, war, and money-making is useful to the life of a man.”

—Carnevali, notebooks
August 24, 2025 at 12:33 AM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Hello a literary prize paid for by submission fees is a raffle thanks.
August 19, 2025 at 10:27 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Now would be a good time to ask yourself if you’re working for the clampdown.
June 10, 2025 at 5:14 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Found this FDR stamp (c. 1968) in my copy of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s stories, published in Argentina around 2003. Open to interpretations.
May 31, 2025 at 11:24 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Projects I’ll never have time to finish, part whatever. Please enjoy these prototypes for trading cards based on Fernando Pessoa’s many heteronyms and alter egos.
May 17, 2025 at 6:47 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Remember: Sometimes the other guy dies on the hill. Then you still have a hill.
March 21, 2025 at 5:10 AM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
jenniferlcroft.bsky.social
Becky Burke of Book Island (a picture book publisher in the UK founded by my fellow Tokarczuk translator Greet Pauwelijn) was "detained" by ICE at the Canadian border on 2/28. Her father asked that her story be shared in case someone can help her. He writes:
March 9, 2025 at 5:02 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Ending 2024 with an ill-advised text conversation with my brother that ended with “Really little bro? I can deal with the atheism, but socialism?”
January 1, 2025 at 4:07 AM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
jsief.bsky.social
“Go to your earth, you who have not died.”

Jean Paul, ‘The Parson in Jubilee’ (1797), tr. Matthew Spencer @unpaginated.bsky.social [forthcoming 2025]
December 20, 2024 at 3:37 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
You’re darn right I made it snow asterisks.
asterismbooks.bsky.social Asterism Books @asterismbooks.bsky.social · Dec 6
With gift-giving season upon us, we pulled some of our favorite books, limited editions, stocking-sized tomes, and much more together in this handy guide!

Browse: asterismbooks.com/gift-guide
December 7, 2024 at 12:25 AM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Update: Merle is now part lynx.
Image of part of a dog’s head with his ear sticking up against the arm of a couch. The ear has a long tuft of hair standing straight up.
December 1, 2024 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
acontainerco.bsky.social
Get a DEEPER LOOK at our LOOK BOOKS series through writer, designer, and chef of @sublunary.bsky.social Joshua Rothes' TOMB OF THE ECSTATIC POETS: a series of compressed, abstracted histories.

Find out more and subscribe today:

acontainer.co/projects/loo...
Container LOOK BOOK Subscription Series. Title: Tomb of the Ecstatic Poet; Installment #5 (November 2024). Description: "...a historical narrative carved in miniature, an exercise in condensation, or a story wrung from stone." Subscribe today using code NEWLOOK Black background, white foreground text in handwritten script reading: Carolus had stones from Jericho and coarse hairs from Herod's beard; a finger of incalculable age, to the second knuckle, and under the nail, Ederic dirt; wherever it had been dropped, it was said, sprouted an oak. A guileless plunderer, but when a finger bled, he put it back, simple s that. Black background, white foreground text in handwritten script reading: One who serves discretely need not fear regret. And it is best remembered that revelation is a historical matter first. It is not as important that something happens so much as that something has happened. Black background, white foreground text in handwritten script reading: No poet should live long enough to confront the porousness of his abstractions. EXTASE, APRÈS LA TOMB.
January 4, 2024 at 6:59 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Awful to see another independent distribution resource for publishers go down.

www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...
NBN to Close, Clients Offered Opportunity to Move to S&S
The independent distributor of some 150 publishers will close by the middle of 2025, leaving Independent Publishers Group as the remaining independent distributor of significant size in the United Sta...
www.publishersweekly.com
November 20, 2024 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
vikshirley.bsky.social
Pre-orders for my chapbook, Some Deer @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social, are open! 🦌🦌🦌

Huge thanks to Ian McMillan, Alina Stefanescu & Michael Earl Craig for blurbs; to Aaron Kent for publishing; & to Kristofor Minta for putting deer in my head at Seattle AWP.🦌

www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...
November 19, 2024 at 4:32 PM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
Thinking back fondly on the time I reported a bug in WordPress’s core code and got it fixed… the simple things.
November 19, 2024 at 3:09 AM
joshuarothes.bsky.social
A morning visitor.
A female Northern Flicker woodpecker perched on the railing of a balcony; behind it, trees with ruddy orange foliage; behind those, townhomes, with a partly cloudy blue sky behind them.
November 17, 2024 at 5:38 PM
Reposted by Josh Rothes
johannesg.bsky.social
Interesting article by Swedish critic Rebecca Kärde about contemporary US "workshop style" poetry: "polished and measured... It is important to behave with a certain elegance. It must never be too much..."

www.ornenochkrakan.se/smakfullt-ti...
November 16, 2024 at 8:52 PM