Light Boxes
by Shane Jones
In February 2009, a tiny independent publisher called Publishing Genius printed 600 copies of a strange, mysterious little book called Light Boxes – a sort of adult fairytale by a young NY-based writer called Shane Jones, about a town that’s waged a war on the month of February. It was the first book that Publishing Genius published, but by summer that year the blogosphere was spinning with excitement and they were already selling way more copies than they could manage to distribute. Soon, Penguin US had bought the rights to reprint it, Spike Jonze had optioned the film rights, and finally we’d managed to get our hands on it too. And were hooked. The otherworldly, allusive quality of this dreamy fable instantly set it apart and we had to publish it too.
Now, the last few copies of the original run published by Publishing Genius are out of bounds unless you have a spare $400.00 to get hold of one on Amazon.com, but luckily we’ve just published our own edition so the Light Boxes story lives on in the shape of a little, Japanese-style jacketed paperback, which we hope makes the book as distinctive on the outside as it is on the inside.
You can watch a short video trailer for Light Boxes here, or if you prefer, watch a trailer for the German edition. A musician has even written a soundtrack for it, and if you like stickers, Shane’s got that covered too, here. Meanwhile, the blog reviews that have started hotting up and are praising Jones’ ‘beautiful way with language and visual imagery’ and calling the book ‘a marvellous, escapist read’ and ‘headily unusual and beguiling, like oddly scented smoke’. There are interviews with Shane Jones in Herald Scotland and Dazed and Confused and more reviews in Time Out New York and thebookbag.
Of course, as one blog put it, as novel as unusual as Light Boxes is never going to be everyone’s ‘cup of mint tea’, but that’s part of the fun and we’re up for some healthy debate. If you’d like to decide for yourself, there’s an extract in the latest issue of Drawbridge magazine to get you started . . .