What we offer

We publish short texts (12-36 pages) on high quality paper. Subjects include essays on literature, philosophy, and politics, as well as poetry in translation. Some of our booklets are by well-known writers, but we also publish contemporary work by selected unknown writers. We strive to create objects for the reader’s contemplation, enjoyment, and edification. We believe that words are tactile things, like stones or feathers, and that books of words should be tactile, too. Our goal is to create beautiful booklets (5.5 x 8.5) that you desire to hold in your hands, like the face of a beloved friend.

The Spirit of Apophasis

“Apophasis” means saying what cannot be said. Around such saying lies a sea of silence. In mystical theology apophatic language is a strategy that arises out of a deep suspicion that our forms of expression cannot articulate the matters that are, or should be, most important to us. Mystical apophatic language nonetheless stammers and stutters in the longing for such articulation.

We may also speak of a literary apophasis. Samuel Beckett is to this tradition what Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is to the mystical. In a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett writes:

“It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as . . . the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through — I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.”

At Apophasis, we aim to contribute to this abuse and disrepute.