On Silver Current Press

Silver Current Press was founded in MMXXVI in Philadelphia by the novelist James Mulhern, with a single, unfashionable conviction: that literary fiction, made carefully and championed patiently, still finds its readers. We are a small house and intend to remain one — publishing few titles a year, each held to the standard of a book that ought to last beyond its season.

Our literary lineage runs through two writers in particular. From James Joyce we take the conviction that the local, properly attended to, becomes universal — that a single street in Dublin or South Philadelphia can hold the world entire. From Flannery O’Connor we take the older, harder lesson: that fiction owes its reader a kind of truthfulness that may not be comfortable, and that grace, when it appears, often arrives armed.

James Mulhern is the author of the Kirkus-starred novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams and of Molly Bonamici, Useless Things, and Assumptions and Other Stories. His work has appeared in more than three hundred and fifty publications. In 2015 he was a Fellow at the University of Oxford. He has taught literature for two decades, and he founded this press because he wanted to make the kind of books he had spent his life reading.

Our editorial philosophy is plain. We acquire books we believe in. We edit them closely — line by line, in conversation with the writer, in the tradition that produced Maxwell Perkins and Robert Gottlieb. We design them with restraint, set them in classical type, and put them into the hands of the booksellers and librarians who still read what they shelve. We do not chase trends. We do not pad a list. We do not publish a book we would not be proud, ten years on, to have set our device upon.

We accept submissions from agented writers and, occasionally, from writers who have published widely in literary magazines. We answer every query. We say no kindly when we must, and yes only when we are certain.

To begin a correspondence, write to james@silvercurrentpress.com or use the letter form. For James Mulhern’s own writing, criticism, and selected essays, visit his author site at authormulhern.com.