This may be my last post for some time, as I really need to get the L.A. Rollins book ready for press and devote more energy to other Nine-Banded Books in the wings.
…Speaking of which, once The Myth of Natural Rights and Other Essays has topped the bestseller lists, the humble Hog’s editorial attention will turn primarily to Against Life, Against Death, a collection of writings on antinatalism and related ideas that’s currently slated for release in early 2009. Being just past the germinal phase, I can say that the book is shaping up nicely, with several contributors providing provocative chapter-essays on the personal and philosophical dimensions of Schopenhauer’s orphaned nostrum. In addition to being the first non-scholarly treatment of a subject that has too hastily been dismissed as nihilistic, counter-intuitive, reductionist, apocalyptic, hostile, misanthropic, and, perhaps most conveniently, as the sad product of depressive ideation, Against Life will present the moral case against procreation in engagingly human terms. If David Benatar’s important but academically-bound meta-ethical discursion provides a useful overview of the antinatalist position (and it does — read it), my hope is that our anthology will serve as an accessible yet philosophically undeceived underview — a book that takes full account of the profound, and perhaps intractable, biases that lead decent and thoughtful people, often in this instance alone, to reify genetic interests in moral terms; a book that will not flinch before the implications of a strange and long-forbidden dialectic that pits eternal nothingness against the tempting language of parental agency, or against the ever-shifting formulations of some dismal short-sighted calculus. If you believe the proposition that "no one should ever have children" to be preposterously untenable or simply mistaken, Against Life, Against Death, will beg you, earnestly and emphatically, to reconsider the stakes.
For more information, keep checking the soon-to-be redesigned Nine-Banded Books site. And while you’re there, please consider ordering a copy of Bradley Smith’s disarmingly poignant novella, The Man Who Saw His Own Liver. Sales are slow, but the hipster clerks are slowly catching on.