The relationship between literature and digital technologies has long been defined as one of opposition. Will the physical printed book be replaced? Will the author and the translator disappear in the face of artificial intelligence? Will literature be the antidote to disinformation and propaganda, or will it be a vehicle for them? While it is clear that the relationship is more complex than solely oppositional, as CAPONEU’s workshop proved, many scholars and authors focus on a separation between the digital and the literary, a division between the constraints of the technological and the emancipatory potential of art. This essay will explore how the digital business model and literary production of contemporary small publishers complicates the apparent dichotomy between literary autonomy and digital subsumption. I will briefly investigate the uses of digital paratextual spaces at And Other Stories, an independent not-for-profit publisher based in Sheffield (UK) known for its award-winning translations of contemporary literary fiction, and in one of its publications, The Visitors, a political novel in English by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, published by And Other Stories in 2022. There are several reasons why these case studies are relevant to this analysis.
Firstly, And Other Stories, a company legally bound to community benefit rather than private profit, is representative of how contemporary small-scale publishers are maintaining the political and cultural role that small presses have historically played in rejecting and resisting commercial and market-driven paradigms. Independence transforms non-profit and legal status into economic autonomy, which has historically been the main characteristic defining small-scale independent publishing. Even though the ubiquity of today’s digital marketplace seemingly unsettles this undisputed autonomy, small publishers like And Other Stories are an example of how the digital medium can have its advantages without this meaning that they endorse a technocentric discourse. The reality is that And Other Stories, like most contemporary publishers, depends on digital platforms for financial viability and editorial reach – payments, subscriptions, submissions, reading groups and advertising are all processed through digital infrastructures. As the small press was previously characterised “by the politicization of aesthetics through the seizure or invention of its ‘own means of production and distribution’” (Yankelevich 2020, 114), the question of whether and how digital means of production and circulation can be seized remains open. Analysing small-scale publishing can shed light on the potential for literary institutions, especially small presses, to resist and undermine digital economies or, conversely, to consolidate them, both practically and discursively.
Secondly, this paradox between resistance and reliance mirrors the formal tension explored in The Visitors, written by Jessi Jezewska Stevens and published by And Another Stories in 2022. This political novel revolves around a woman named C, a second-generation Slovenian immigrant living as a tapestry artist in a dystopian New York during the global financial crisis of 2008. Saturated with the syntax of programming languages, database queries, and machine logic, both on a paratextual and textual level, The Visitors foregrounds the aesthetic and epistemological consequences of digital mediation. In doing so, it performs a meta-critique of the very economic infrastructures that support its publication and circulation. Its recursive, paratextual, and often fractured forms do not simply reflect a technocentric reality but question the ways in which knowledge, narrative, and political agency are formatted and foreclosed by digital systems. Thus, the use of code, markup, and procedural syntax in the paratextual material in The Visitors can be read as more than a stylistic innovation and constitutes a formal strategy that blurs the boundary between text and infrastructure, narrative and system, fiction and metadata. The novel’s code, which announces each part like a heading, is not merely decorative or metaphorical but operates as a structural principle that reframes the reader’s encounter with literary meaning, affect, and temporality. In this sense, The Visitors exemplifies how the contemporary political novel can embed in its own form a critique of the digital rationalities that underlie contemporary life and, by extension, literary production.
The aim of this article is twofold. First, I examine how And Other Stories’ anti-commercial and social commitment, evident in its not-for-profit model and transnational catalogue, is represented in epitextual digital spaces through its use of paratextual code and infrastructural poetics. Second, I argue that The Visitors challenges the notion of autonomy in the digital age. By analysing both the novel and its publishing context, this essay proposes a framework for understanding how small presses operate not only as cultural institutions but also as sites of negotiation between economic structures, socio-political commitment, and literary experimentation.
Aesthetics of Authenticity and Social Values in Digital Paratexts of the Small Press
On the “About” page of And Other Stories’ website, one can read the following statement: “Even before the late 2000s recession made the output of the big commercial publishing houses risk-averse (i.e. boring), there weren’t many publishers choosing books solely for literary merit. In 2009 Stefan Tobler, a translator and now And Other Stories’ publisher, met with fellow translators and writers to brainstorm the idea of setting up a collective to publish fresh, contemporary fiction” (And Other Stories, “About”). As Rachel Noorda argues in her analysis of the discourses and values of independent publishers “the structure of the mission statement genre is a framework upon which independent publishers build rhetorical discourse that positions themselves in particular ways” (Noorda 2019, 12), in this case, in clear opposition to “big”, “commercial” and “risk-averse” publishing houses, and in favour of small, anti-commercial and risk-taking collectives that prioritise “literary merit”.
The rhetorics, aesthetics, and scale of the independent small press have historically been delineated relationally to this very opposition, especially as the conglomerate profit-driven publishing industry established itself at the end of the twentieth century. Matvei Yankelevich, poet and co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse (U.S.), explains how, in the second part of twentieth century, the political and economic autonomy of the small press was defined by what he calls an “aesthetic of authenticity” that was “created through a variety of means: the use of cheap or obsolete technologies, experimental or anti-aesthetic design, unremunerated labor, and alternative systems of distribution” (Yankelevich 2020). By showing how autonomy was “created” through a specific “use” or appropriation of inexpensive “means” of production and circulation, Yankelevich asserts that autonomy was therefore not a given, but an ongoing performance maintained at the level of design, distribution, and editorial ethos. Yet, as he himself notes, at the turn of the twenty-first century these signs of authenticity had been absorbed by the systems of digital capital in the form of polished websites, professionalised branding, and social media fluency, erasing the trace of struggle that once made small publishing legible as resistance. Indeed, in the digital age, the legacy of small press autonomy is not so much erased as it is refracted, complicated by the infrastructures it now relies on. The shift is neither purely economic nor simply technological. It is a shift in how value circulates and accrues, and how that cultural value is discursively presented as “authentic” through a contradiction that Paul Crosthwaite, following Sarah Brouillette’s analysis, has labelled a “marketable antimarket gesture” (Crosthwaite 2020, 23).
To examine the discourse, I turn to the notion of the publisher’s “epitext” defined by Gérard Genette as “any paratextual element not materially appended to the text” whose marketing and promotional function does not always present or comment directly on a particular the text (Genette 1997, 347). Since marketing has become a fundamental aspect of the publishing industry, publishers’ epitexts can be a way to gather the perceived positionalities of autonomy, which, as I have shown, are crucial to the definition of the small press, as well as the self-reflexive uses of digital platforms themselves.
In this context, And Other Stories’ self-presentation combines a kind of institutional transparency with a deliberate informality that relies on humour and clarity to reinforce the ethical and symbolic distance from shareholder-driven publishing:
And Other Stories has been set up as a Community Interest Company (CIC, pronounced ‘kick’). This means we are a not-for-private-profit company. In such companies no profits are ever paid out to owners. But what really gives us a ‘CIC’? (Couldn’t resist!) We make our decisions based on what we think is good writing and a good way of working. This sets us apart from shareholder-driven publishing companies where all decisions are ultimately about increasing profits.
The corporate structure of And Other Stories is reframed as a moral position: the very form of the press becomes part of its editorial ethos. Profit is not the driving force, but neither is it entirely dismissed. Instead, it is focused on collective and social goals, as the epitextual material on their website shows (And Other Stories, “Donating Profits”). In concrete terms, this means that 10% of the profits are used for donations for 1) the purchase of subscriptions to literary journals for libraries that “are in a challenging financial position due to slashed central government funding for councils”, 2) the organisation Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB,) that protects the indigenous peoples living in Brazil’s rainforests or “living with the trauma of dispossession, which is a story told in the novel Nowhere People by our Brazilian author Paulo Scott”, and finally 3) ASSIST Sheffield, an organisation that provides access to essential services for those who have been refused asylum: “Two of the And Other Stories’ books that offer perspectives on the experience of people seeking asylum are Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel’s novel The Gurugu Pledge (tr. Jethro Soutar) and Wolfgang Bauer’s reportage Crossing the Sea: With Syrians on the Exodus to Europe (tr. Sarah Pybus). By some kind of symmetry, both translators are Sheffielders.”
These digital epitexts highlight how the literary production of the press is intertextually connected to the ethical values it upholds, establishing its commitment to contemporary socio-political issues such as the lack of state funding for the arts, climate change, or the refugee crisis in Europe, and the literary agents directly affected by these issues. Nevertheless, the publisher’s discursive social and ethical values would not have the same impact if the literary production contradicted them. Part of And Other Stories’ production, as The Gurugu Pledge by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel exemplifies, is written by exiled writers who dismantle complex legacies of European colonial rule – in Laurel’s case, the Spanish colonisation of Equatorial Guinea. Indeed, And Other Stories has published novels translated into English that explicitly tackle rooted power imbalances and oppressive regimes from various historical moments and geographical locales: the US-Mexico borderlands in the last decades (see Yuri Herrera), the Iraqi town of Thawra City in the context of the second US invasion of Iraq (see Shalash’s novel, Shalash the Iraqi), contested spaces during and after the apartheid regime in South Africa (see Ivan Vladislavić), the militarily occupied West Bank in historical Palestine (see Ibtisam Azem’s novel, The Book of Disappearance), or the Kazakh steppes in the final years of the Soviet empire (see Oleg Pavlov). Even though the main function of paratext is promotional – and in digital settings it should still be analysed as such – the editorial concern for the political and historical context and the aesthetic complexities of the literary works that engage with these contexts demonstrates a commitment that goes beyond discourse and is reflected throughout their catalogue, including their future titles (“From 2025 onwards, And Other Stories has an internal commitment to publish 50% writers from the Global Majority, as well as continuing to support work from the LGBTQ2S+ community, writers from the North of England, and working-class writers (And Other Stories, “Equity and Justice”). This editorial concern also includes recognising and promoting “the artistic value of translation as an integral creative input” as James Graham argues in a book chapter on the cultural economy of independent publishing, focusing on And Other Stories as a case study (Graham 2017, 75). And Other Stories’ publishing structure relies partly on a now digital subscription-based model and a collaborative working system whereby reading groups of translators source international fiction (Tobler 2013, 9). These reading groups are run by volunteers, so collaboration in this specific context often involves unpaid labor, a key feature of Yankelevich’s “aesthetics of authenticity”.
A closer look at And Other Stories’ statements on their website shows that this commitment goes beyond editorial decisions. The donation to The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil is part of a wider sustainability campaign (And Other Stories, “Sustainability”) based on eco-friendly production and business (“We use environmental, low-carbon printers, where production is respectful of human and animal rights”), advocacy (“We publish books that deal with the climate emergency, such as Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, which gives a Caribbean perspective on the climate emergency”) and a carbon-cutting policy. As part of this policy, they explain how “We always consider digital options for events, especially a) to cut the carbon footprint and b) to make artists’ work, talks and performances widely accessible (including outside major urban centres).”
This preferred use of digital platforms for events, collective patronage and self-positioning within the field does not seem at all consistent with the argument that “the small press as it operates today situates itself consciously not only on the margins of mainstream publishing but also on the margins of the digital […]” (Colby, Marczewska, Wilson 2020, 4). However, while the use of the digital as a means of production and circulation seems to be established, they seem to be detached from the aesthetics of the press. In 2023, the founder of And Other Stories, Stefan Tobler, published a blog about the new cover design of future titles, which involved extensive collaboration with paper merchants, printers, typographers, designers and booksellers (And Other Stories, “Blog”). Similar to And Other Stories’ first titles – which featured reproductions of handmade letterpress cover designs – the new cover designs feature no images, only a paragraph of printed text set up against a white background. The emphasis on text and font, with each letter neatly juxtaposed, evokes traditional typesetting and printing techniques. This emphasis foregrounds a professionalised and institutionalised use of the “aesthetics of authenticity”, which used to apply to all aspects of production and distribution and now depends on a recreation of these aesthetics through large-scale digital and industrial printing. Furthermore, the pre-digital aesthetics further reinforce the value of the materiality of books as well as a consistent political and social commitment to craft in the literary field.
Consistency and self-reflected legitimacy of values, discourse, and aesthetics are crucial for a publisher that relies partly on the subscription-based approach. Indeed, potential funders will not have read the literary work they are funding, and will provide their support based on reading samples, digital statements, and previous publications, as well as the publisher’s mission and identity, which exists as a discursive whole in digital form. However, they will also rely on what James Graham calls the “author-brand”, reinforced through digital platforms and their media (i.e. interviews, blogs, and other paratextual interactions) and is proven in And Other Stories’ case by their re-editions of previously well-known authors. Graham argues that:
As independent publishers respond to digital transformations by looking to incorporate and capitalise on this model of networked collaborative production, and even as they engage with participatory culture and acknowledge that the ‘ethical value’ of their literary products is co-produced among collaborative publics, what Alessandro Gandini (2016) terms ‘reputational capital’ – and so inevitably in this case the mark of the author-brand – retains a privileged position in the publishing ecosystem (Phillips 2014, 20).” (Graham 2017, 78)
While And Other Stories’ self-positioning against commercial publishing seems to be upheld in its corporate structure and value system, there is no such opposition to the digital economies of solidarity and collective patronage. The use of the digital is extended to circulation and promotion through online infrastructures that portray the editorial mission and positioning of the press in both the market and in society. However, a closer examination at one of its titles reveals a more destructive side of the digital, one that impinges on artistic and economic autonomy.
Market and Digital Subservience in The Visitors
Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s The Visitors (2022) is particularly relevant for this analysis, as its paratextual material stages the procedural logic of both digital platforms and economic infrastructures. Through its procedural forms, coded prologues and recursive logics, The Visitors not only reflects on digital economies and their affective toll, but simulates and resists them. In many ways, the novel performs, rather than merely represents, the collapse of financial and ecological systems. The deployment of code-like syntax and statistical modelling language is not an ornament but a structural conceit that reflects the conditions of artistic production in a digitally saturated economy. The code is not meant to run, it is code as peritext, as a method for framing a narrative, and for diagnosing the conditions under which the narrative itself becomes queryable, loopable, and regressable.
The first peritext in the novel is an unusual epigraph rendered in the syntax of a Unix shell command (i.e. direct interaction with the operating system) which implies a pre-processing of the text, a pre-narrative operation that is both symbolic and structural:
[~] $ install aptitude GNITE
vim visitors.txt
:g/rat/s//irr/g”
This first visual and textual cue already sets the tone: “install aptitude” is a package manager for Debian-based systems, a tool for installing other tools, “vim.visitors.txt” situates the novel in a text editor format, and “:g/rat/s//irr/g” is a substitution command to find all instances of “rat” and replace them with “irr” (suggesting irrationality, as the next paratext-code confirms), a sort of linguistic hack on the work itself, meaning the novel is presented as a palimpsest from the beginning. Following this “install” function, the prologue is presented as an SQL procedure:
“CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE impute_missing (
in_table_name "visitors",
in_attribute "prologue",
in_impute_method DEFAULT "irrational") IS”
The “CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE” is an extension to define a new stored procedure or to overwrite an existing one. In this paratextual space, it implies rewriting or overwriting an incomplete corpus, as we can tell by the “impute_missing”, a function used to estimate unknown or missing values in a data set. But here the missing values are not numbers, but affect, memory, even reality itself, and the data set is the text from The Visitors (“in_table_name "visitors"). The prologue is flagged as an “attribute”, suggesting that paratextual narratives can just as easily become data structures. Nevertheless, the last line of code rejects empirical and algorithmic languages by subverting the logical method of “imputation” with an “irrational” default. By embracing the absurd, the poetic and the non-quantifiable through the most empirical, logical and quantifiable language, the text does the opposite of becoming data, to instead not only resist such a transformation, but to suggest that it is impossible to capture literary abstraction in such a narrow configuration; data language becomes a constraint and a form of artistic irreducibility. The prologue within this process is one of survivalist detachment, which further develops the idea of a system that has collapsed:
off the grid, along the border, up north, operatives fit new batteries into gear, slip backups into pockets, and set off into the dark; there are no hikers, no tourists, no botanists from Vancouver trailing the lost cause of flora depleted by fauna adapting too well to a warming earth; ha!; with night-vision goggles, you see through the skein of things to their authentic core; shoot a deer from four hundred meters, hoist the shadowed body onto shoulders, make your way back to HQ, a trailer, an outline in the night; inside is everything you need to survive […]; psychedelics sprout in the compost of the operatives’ own manure; they shit pure; list: venison, scavenged plants; no chemicals, mood stabilizers, anxiety killers, erection enhancers, progesterone supplements, beta-blockers, amphetamines, vitamin B complexes, Tofurky, vegan ice cream, soy-based eggs, hormone-enhanced chicken breasts, undigested margarines, I Can’t Believe It’s Not … !; query: what kind of world was it down there, at sea level, where one’s own shit was poisonous?; […] (Stevens 2022, 6)
These acts are not just post-apocalyptic routine; they are manual recodings of a world that can no longer be trusted to function automatically. This prologue marks The Visitors not only as a novel about the failure of systems, but also as a novel written in the language of systems themselves — executing SQL queries, building GLM models, and returning outputs that are messy, partial, and full of unresolvable errors. This formal strategy reveals a flaw in the digital infrastructure as a system that promises coherence but delivers only selective readability. The code that frames The Visitors becomes a site where the reader is asked to confront the impossibility of total knowledge and the persistent gap between system and subject. In contrast to this procedural logic of the code, the prologue being imputed is visceral, organic, dirty; it is a list of a capitalist chemically altered consumption and a body mediated by pharmaceuticals, supplements, and hormones. The operative’s waste (“they shit pure”) is unlike the unsafe one at sea level (“poisonous”), which suggests a civilisation alienated from its own body and is broken on many different levels.
After the prologue, the code runs again, this time extracting “part one” from the visitors data. The plot follows C, a woman who undergoes a hysterectomy on the same day that the stock market crashes in 2008: “They capped her nose and mouth with the small dome of the mask and let the anesthesia flow on the day the market crashed. She went under in a time of relative abundance and woke up in a different era, financially speaking” (Stevens 2022, 11). The comparison between C’s own body collapsing and the structures around her is used to dramatize the contemporary economic condition through the lens of personal debt and survival in late capitalism, especially as it relates to gender, precarity, and artistic labor. The first sentence of the novel, after the dystopian prologue, reads: “Retail is debt”, an opening line that equips the act of selling and participating in the market as a binding contract (Stevens 2022, 8). Indeed, debt is foundational, “the molten bedrock atop which all else rests”, a striking image that recasts debt not just as a financial state but as a structural and existential ground (Stevens 2022, 8). C’s initiation into economic survival comes not through institutional education, but through female mentorship in the informal economy: “The proprietress of a lighting store taught her everything she knew” (Stevens 2022, 8). Her advice – “use credit cards”, “avoid banks at all costs” – turns traditional financial wisdom on its head. There is an anarchic practicality here, but also a form of mutual aid: a kind of matrilineal transfer of survival strategies within a hostile system. The line “The interest rate is upward of 20 percent, but when the shit hits the fan, they can confiscate nothing but your reputation” (Stevens 2022, 8) underscores the moral economy underpinning debt, especially for women and creatives. Reputation is capital, and losing it is akin to bankruptcy, but it is also unseizable if you do not care about it anymore. This passage speaks directly to the reliance on private patronage, reputation, and informal networks over institutional finance in the small press economies. In the same way small presses like And Other Stories rely on subscriber support, C’s artistic venture exists through social capital, not fiscal capital.
The lighting store in the first paragraph of the novel is not just a business, but also a place of affective labor. The owner “tended to [the lamps] like children”; the language evokes care, craft, and an almost maternal attention. But there is a tension: “C confessed: What if she’d already entangled herself? Also, my friend Zo – she invested. Turned out that the lamp proprietress had also been funded by friends. Most nonessentials are supported by private patronage, which of course carries its own form of interest” (Stevens 2022, 8). This reinforces the precarity of creative or aesthetic work – the “nonessentials”: it must always take a risk and rely on networks of taste, wealth, and favour. “How did it feel… to be someone else’s pet project?” asks C in free indirect speech (Stevens 2022, 8), recognizing the dependencies that come with patronage and reflecting the wider anxieties about the autonomy of writers, artists, or publishers surviving on the goodwill of others.
In the following peritexts, as the novel evolves, so does the code: in “part two” another package is installed from the “visitors” data; in “part three” the data is selected from “history” and the reader is introduced to a memory of C flying to former Yugoslavia with her mother; in “part four”, a function replaces the character being imputed and chooses Zo, C’s best friend from childhood. This last part is where the imputed text in the paratext space starts to merge with the literary text from part four: “midnight, an ambulance passes on the street outside; pov = &float.; she means to go to sleep but it is soothing to roll on the second coat; take a break, open windows, smoke a cigarette; insert detail: ivy growth, walls slightly bruised, the purple hovering just beneath the topcoat; another coat to go; […]” (Stevens 2022, 66). The change of character is also a change of setting and rhythm, from the post-apocalyptic scene in the prologue to a quiet, meditative domestic scene that follows Zo’s thoughts as she renovates her apartment (“it is soothing to roll on the second coat”), and C’s health deteriorates (“an ambulance passes on the street outside”) without anyone around her noticing except for an imagined gnome-like figure who visits and follows her everywhere, to the hospital, to her art supply store, to her apartment, and to the protests that follow the financial scandal.
Finally, in “part five”, the paratext invokes the language of statistical regression, a method designed to isolate and measure relationships between variables, but the results “slip” and “approximations pile up at the foot of the glassy curve so many adventurers have tried to climb” (Stevens 2022, 80). In statistical modelling, the residuals are the leftover error, that is, the unexplained variance. In The Visitors, the residuals seem to become a metaphor for everything that resists modelling: affect, ambiguity, and literary metaphors themselves.
Joana Roqué Pesquer
KU Leuven
Joana.roquepesquer@kuleuven.be
Works cited
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