Marc Estrin, an author, publisher, and activist who wrote 17 novels and two memoirs, died August 10. He was 86. Seven Days reported that Estrin and his wife, Donna Bister, also "started and operated Fomite Press, the 14-year-old 'postcapitalist' publishing company that returns 80% of book revenue to authors."
Estrin's fiction works include Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), The Education of Arnold Hitler (2005), Golem Song (2006), The Lamentations of Julius Marantz (2007), The Annotated Nose (2008, artwork by Delia Robinson), Skulk (2009), The Good Doctor Guillotin (2009), When the Gods Come Home to Roost (2011), and Kafka's Roach (2017).
Fomite has published about 350 titles, "primarily literary fiction, poetry and 'odd birds,' works that elude classification," Seven Days noted. The company has published about 20 books with the legendary Bread and Puppet theater company, Bister said.
Painter and sculptor Delia Robinson, who has illustrated books for Fomite Press and had known Estrin since she was 16, told Seven Days that he treated everyone as if their ideas were valuable and worth discussing, adding: "He really was a person of integrity in many astonishing ways, and that included helping other people to try to learn, to jump a little higher and to discover the best things they could do."
On his website, Estrin described The Insect Dialogues, one of his nonfiction books, in third person: "In 2016, Marc Estrin decided to publish Kafka's Roach, the unedited version of the manuscript that a dozen years earlier Fred Ramey had acquired, edited, and published under the title Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Estrin's decision raises questions about the editor's role in the life of a book, the trajectory of one author's career, and whether a published novel is a stable thing anymore. All of that is worth a wide discussion, and so Ramey asked his erstwhile author to engage in a colloquy. The Insect Dialogues is the record of the e-mail conversation that ensued."
After Estrin's death, Ramey, co-publisher of Unbridled Books, recalled their exchange and editorial relationship: "It's been about 25 years, since I published Marc's debut novel at BlueHen/Putnam. (I published it a second time at Unbridled Books.) In all, I published, I think, six of his first seven novels. Marc was prolific and irrepressible, but he was not in any way uneditable. On the contrary. What he wrote was always brave and imaginative and unexpected. After he and Donna founded Fomite Press, he would often encourage my work as he did for so many people. I think that was an extension of his activism. After 25 years of our exchanges, I imagine I'll keep wondering about all the books Marc didn't get to write."
Burlington, Vt., City Councilor Gene Bergman, who knew Estrin as a friend and comrade in peace and justice work, said, "Marc had a philosopher's sensibility" and was "an intellectual in the truest sense of the word."
Bergman's wife, Wendy Coe, who co-founded the Peace & Justice Center where Estrin was hired as the first paid staffer in 1984, told Seven Days that while Estrin could be curmudgeonly at times, he was positive and always thinking about ways to change the world. "He did enough thinking for a thousand people."
Author Ron Jacobs had just finished a piece, "Marc Estrin's Fictions of Alienation," for CounterPunch when he received news of his friend's death. "I will write a tribute to him once I gather my thoughts. I'll miss him as a friend, editor and co-conspirator," he noted.
In the tribute, which was published this morning in CounterPunch, Jacobs wrote: "I don’t want to make Marc sound too serious because he wasn’t. Consciously or not, he reminded me of the trickster more than once. While our work may have been serious, his approach reminded me of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman about dancing and revolution. I never saw Marc dance, so this seems like a more honest paraphrase: 'If I can’t laugh, I don’t want to be in your revolution.' "