JOLT: Jonah and Austin Barnett launching Countershade Press, debuting ‘Menagerie’

Countershade Press is run by publishers Jonah and Austin Barnett.

A great write-up of our press by our friend Rachel Benton! Here’s a good bit I loved.

Benton: Why does now feel like the right time to launch Countershade? Why is reading, regardless of the format, so important to today’s world? 

Barnett: “Today, reading is really important because literacy is down, and that is a heartbreaking, huge bummer because reading rocks. Reading creates well-rounded people and encourages critical thinking and introspection. It makes you realize you are not the center of this universe. ... You share this universe with so many other beings, humans and nonhuman. It was always a dream of mine to have a small press, but it feels really important at this time in our history to make sure queer voices are heard and amplified when there is so much work trying to bury them under the rubble.

“On the other side of that, it’s queer speculative fiction. Speculative fiction lives in the realm of possibilities of, ‘What if. … What if it was different.’ That kind of thinking is needed now more than ever in our world. It is so hard with all these fires that we are seeing not to feel like everything is ending, but speculative fiction can open minds, start conversations, and inspire action.