When my friend the poet Landis Everson killed himself near the end of 2007, I travelled to California to attend the scattering of his ashes on Mt. Tamalpais just before the new year. Sixty years earlier, Landis had been close friends with the Berkeley poets Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, with whom he had shared his poems until the group broke up and he stopped writing in the early 60s. I had contacted Landis in the fall of 2003, while researching a history of the Berkeley poets for Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, and Landis and I had struck up a friendship that he said led to his returning to poetry again after a silence of 43 years. Landis began writing extraordinary poems that he said he was writing for me, and I began placing them in literary periodicals, including The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Jacket Magazine and The Poker.

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1) Did you know that you can fit 2348 copies of Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory in a two-door Volkswagen GTI?

However, when you’re headed to Chicago to lecture and read at The Chicago Academy for the Arts to a poetry class which has been studying Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory for an entire semester, you think about filling that VW with obscure theory texts, finger paints, and bizarre trinkets.

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Poor Neptune. Standing in the piazza while lactating mermaids sit on stones beneath him, gazing up at the god that controls the sea and its depths, he is naked. Surrounded by beautiful amphibious maidens, his mind wanders and insecurity pokes him with his own trident.

As legend has it, Pope Gregory XIII had the god’s copper penis shrunk because he thought the sculptor, who was gay, made it too big.

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Today we talk with Corinna Barsan, senior editor at Other Press, about the ways a book should challenge readers, what titles they have forthcoming, and how working with Random House publishing services has affected their business.

Tell us a little about Other Press. Do you have a guiding philosophy for the books you publish?

I once heard a bookseller describe our books as eclectic gems and I think that hits the mark. Other Press publishes a wide variety of titles from around the world — works in translation, American fiction, nonfiction that ranges from current events to pop art to biographies and memoir. The common denominator is that we look for books that challenge readers to think about their lives differently or to see the world in a new light. Ideally, a transformation will take place in the reader between the first and last pages. Roger Rosenblatt told writers that “what you write must be useful to the world.” We apply that same methodology to the books we publish.

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