The Catapult Book Group, which includes imprints Catapult, Counterpoint Press, Soft Skull Press, and the recently acquired Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, is being sold and will cease operations at the end of the month.
In a statement (via Publishers Lunch), the Catapult Workers Collective, which voted to join UAW Local 2110 by an "overwhelming majority" in June, said the sale includes the company's assets only, adding that it was also notified that "continued employment with the prospective buyer is not an option."
Catapult is a publishing collective created by the founders of Electric Literature and Black Balloon Publishing. Operating within Unlikely Collaborators, the nonprofit founded by Elizabeth R. Koch, Catapult's authors have received major recognition, including an International Booker Prize, an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and several National Book Award finalists.
Author Gina Frangello told the Los Angeles Times that she had never experienced the intimate publishing experience she had with Counterpoint, specifically Dan Smetanka, the editorial director and senior v-p of Catapult. "As someone who has been in indie publishing culture since the '90s, Catapult was a holdout of an old world," she said. "Dan ran things the way they used to, in the storied, fabled days of publishing before everything went corporate."
Meredith Maran, author of more than a dozen books including a novel (A Theory of Small Earthquakes) published by Counterpoint in 2012, told the Times: "Counterpoint, its imprints, and its beating heart, Dan Smetanka, have been (I cannot bring myself to say 'were') the stuff of legends. True legends.... Counterpoint humanized publishing, revered its authors, honored and will live on in its books."
Author Tod Goldberg added: "Since their founding, Counterpoint has published books that matter, has taken chances on authors and topics that others wouldn't, and have been celebrated for this strident independence with wide critical acclaim and commercial success.... Counterpoint took big risks and found big rewards. I'm confident that whomever the buyer is (and I've not been told, so y'all can stop texting me...) will keep these great writers in print while also continuing to publish new work from them, but what's lost here is not merely a publishing house, but a culture of excellence, of risk taking, plus a dash of punk rock."