Our mission
Punic Press is an aspiring indie press focused on finding and publishing unabashedly liberal entertainments that embrace diversity and tolerance and eschew calcified social attitudes, militaristic themes, and weapon fetishization. More Margaret Atwood and less Tom Clancy, that's our motto!
Our primary focus is on a criminally under-represented literary subgenre that we affectionately call "progressive pulps": highly entertaining, compulsively readable genre titles that reject the glorification of military might and mechanized violence that tend to dominate the modern thriller market. Instead, Punic Press titles seek to embrace alternative action, mystery, and horror narratives that showcase diversity, empathy, and respect for all peoples and cultures, while still delivering the high-octane thrills and delicious twists that genre readers crave.
Our ultimate goal? To build a list of enjoyable and nourishing beach reads for the underserved left-leaning, genre-obsessed reading community.
Why Punic?
Sometimes you find a name, sometimes a name finds you
It all began as a joke, really, with no real thought given to the greater implications. Due to the merciless nature of warfare, and the ability of the victors to write history, one of the peculiar modern definitions of "Punic" is "false, faithless" (this meaning was created out of whole cloth by the Romans, who twisted the Latin descriptor poenus into a harder-edged epithet they could use to disparage the denizens of Carthage, with whom they fought three long and grinding wars before ultimately erasing the city from the face of the Earth).
So literally Punic Press means "false press" — an in-name-only publisher created so than an indie author could slap a cool-looking logo on the spine of his new thriller.
But to be honest, we've come to love the ambiguity of the name, and think that it suits our new venture perfectly. Not because we have a great love of ancient history, or fantasize about crossing the Alps as Hannibal's back-warmer on a majestic elephant (though that would certainly be awesome), but because it perfectly encapsulates the odd vagaries of language, and how we imbue words with meaning in the most random and inexplicable ways.
And about that shrike in the logo? Well, that's an entirely different story...