YEAR ZERØ

The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes is the first Year Zero project. Here you will find the Year Zero manifesto.

The problem

The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.


YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.

Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.

YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.
Culture is the breath we suck from• each others’ lips.

Culture is not alive. Culture is• life.

Readers and writers, like all• producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.

Culture speculates; culture takes• risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.

YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.

We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart.

We are, among others: Garalt Canton, Larry Harrison, Dan Holloway, Annia Lekka-Blazoudaki, Gupter Puncher




Books.
On June 1 we will be releasing “Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair”, a quilt of prose patched together from all our writers

Our first novels will be released on September 1, 2009, with further releases following quarterly.

‘Benny Platonov’ by Gupter Puncher.
Benny Platonov will save the eight-hundred and fifty-seven homeless of Hong Kong. He will save them with his words!

Glimpses of a Floating World - Larry Harrison
It is 1963. Scandals like the Profumo and Challenor cases are exposing the dark underbelly of post-war Britain, while one of the first teenagers to be addicted to heroin and cocaine undergoes a cold turkey in prison. A poetic and triumphant elegy to a seedy, vice-ridden London of the Sixties.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall - Dan Holloway.
Sandrine, who has grown up in post-communist Hungary, faces the choice that will shape her future – to stay in the cosmopolitan life of art and music she shares with Bohemian sculptress, Yang; or to return to the rural vineyard her dying father’s family has run for 300 years. She is led on a journey across Europe and cyberspace, accompanied by diaries that appear from nowhere, a talking bull, and an elderly fashion mogul who may be telepathic.