Little Engines
Little Engines are the little engines that could. Named after the titular children’s book main character, they think they can, and they do. 2001 was 24 years ago, and that’s when Little Engines began its long, winding journey. For a small Philadelphia-based publisher, breaking even and achieving mini-successes is remarkable. Their focus has always been on the esoteric, the unconventional, and various aspects that may not necessarily lend themselves well to overall marketability. I can attest to this – somehow, I continue to do this, even though Beach Sloth has gone through 1.0, 2.0, and so on, and managed to retain a semblance of readership. I’m not sure how that happened, necessarily, but stranger things have happened.
A hiatus for Little Engines happened from 2006 to 2020. The pandemic changed everything. All those bookings, the beloved Adam Voith loved to do, dried up. Nobody toured during the pandemic; they stayed at home. With all that free time at home, Voith found himself writing extensively again. When you cannot go anywhere, what better thing to do than write? There’s very little else to do, and plenty of artists rekindled their artistic practices by being quarantined within their cozy little homes. Millions of people worldwide have managed to get their working-from-home jobs continuing to this very day, years after the pandemic ended. Are people in the United States still dying from easily preventable diseases, illnesses, and mass shootings? Oh yes, but violence and premature death have always been the American experience.
Literature, less the American experience in many ways, primarily the reading one. The audiences for reading have remained mostly stable, unable to expand or contract. Despite the United States’ population increasing multiple times since its literary renaissance, the readership remained constant. Some of those new human beings ended up reading, but many more did not participate in the culture at all. Given the difficulty of navigating the diverse literary scenes in the US, ranging from Bizarro to Comedy to Breakup to Autofiction, it is understandable that many would-be readers would opt out of the system, preferring to decide for themselves whether things are straightforward. And that’s fine, you really do need to understand what is and is not cake in this Joker era.
The release schedule for Little Engines is not quick. They take their time, which, as a sloth, I appreciate. I hate speed; I never felt the need for it. I am no fighter pilot; I am a person living my slowest, most below-the-radar life possible. I am glad that Little Engines understands things can take a long time, and it is no problem if they do.
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