If this is the "What Is Oliver?" edition of our Newsletter, the first thing that needs to be said is this: Oliver is the luckiest press in the country because it gets to bring out Gregory Marszal's extraordinary book of poetry, I Am Not Dead.

 

 

I Am Not Dead will be available soon, a feast infinitely greater than these small samples can possibly suggest. Why wait? Click here to pre-order a copy now! 

Oliver is a press dedicated only to the best and finest in the literary arts. That means, among other things, that Oliver seeks out and celebrates both wholeness and truth, and it does not seek out or celebrate--as most publishers seem to do in this poor and dangerous age--superficiality, incompleteness, emptiness, familiarity, repetition, or plain old propaganda.

 

Oliver's publisher, Eric Larsen, has himself been writing on these matters now for some years, most recently in "Can the Literarary Life Exist in a Post-1984 Nation? What do Frank Rich, Dwight Garner, Rebecca Solnit, Don DeLillo, and Thomas L. Friedman Have To Do with This Immeasurably Important Question: And With Giving It the Most Terrible of Answers?" Oliver refuses to hide behind propagranda. It refuses to hide behind the fashions of half-thinking. It refuses also to hide behind mere style--not literary style, but social and political style: That is, it refuses either to value or to hide behind any pose.

 

This means that Oliver values and seeks out writers and thinkers who insist upon and who strive toward knowing everything that can be known about the world they live in and, therefore, about the very subject itself of their arts. If the entire world itself and every aspect of our lives in it don't make up the material for literature, what does? Read I Am Not Dead for a great demonstration of the answer to that question. 

 

Things come along that need to be pondered and understood--though not by those who stop at the "comfort zone barrier" of mere fashion.

 

"This Is War," an essay by Karen Kwiatkowski on the subject of the recent Wikileaks video of killings-from-the-air in Iraq, is such a thing. There may be much more that's fishy about that video than has yet been said. But Karen Kwiatkowski sees through falsehood sufficiently to assert that, yes, "American official defense strategy is 'shoot the messenger.'" She sees not only that withering fact, but she sees past it to an implication for all of us: Namely, that as citizens and patriots, if we choose truth over lies, "we are all messengers."

 

For the likes of Air Force Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Kwiatkowski to point out such a thing is significant. Attention needs to be paid. Her article is required reading for all Oliverians.

Another thing that Oliver is: Oliver--

because of its character, philosophy, aesthetics, and aims--is an entity that refuses to hide behind false gentility of any kind. Lies of innumerable, pernicious, and, in an awful age like this one, catastrophic kinds fester behind the veil of false gentility--the veil of false gentility in literature, in publishing, and in academics.

 

On that subject, let it be said that anyone who doesn't know who Professor Francis A. Boyle is or what the nature of his extraordinary work is, has been, and continues to be in the service of human rights, justice, international law, and in the service of bringing to account those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity--well, such a person will want to find out about Professor Boyle asap and will want to look into his many books, including Biowarfare and Terrorism, Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law, and other important titles, not to mention his extraordinary number of articles, essays, and updates.

 

And that brings us to the particular point here and now where  Oliver and Francis A. Boyle meet: Every Oliverian, every American, every person who may still have an automatic reverence for the American institution of higher education, for academia, thinking that it is still a humane, just, liberal (in the oldest sense of that poor beleaguered word), and enlightened institution committed to the pursuit of truth and to the harboring of truth--every such person will want to read Boyle's recent and extraordinarily rousing accusation of and lamentation for nothing less than the august and immensely influential Harvard Law School. 

 

This institution, Boyle tells us--the institution where he (like Obama and many an illustrious other) earned his own law degree--is now a "school for torturers." 

 

Francis A. Boyle is a national--international--asset and treasure for every single citizen and thinker who does want to see humanity, justice, and law (as opposed to crime) restored again as the foundation of American policy, thought, belief, and behavior.

 

That happens also to be what Oliver wants, profoundly. And so it is that I beg every Oliverian, every reader of this newsletter, every person who values the best the human mind can be capable of, to do this assignment, and read the incredible lament by Professor Francis A. Boyle, "Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School: The School for Torturers."