What follows is the eighth in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

It is a dangerous game to mimic or mirror or reinvent a classic piece, so it is perhaps the most dangerous game for Ted Pelton to reimagine the classic of classics, Herman Melville’s much honored and beloved story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, though in the end, it is an investment well worth Pelton’s time and energy.

Bartleby, the Sportscaster is the original book published by Subito Press outside of their annual fiction and poetry competition, a novella in which the character Bartleby is recast as a minor league baseball analyst who would “prefer not” to exercise his talents on-air, and whose journey succinctly parallels that of its classic, including all of the original angst and narrator rumination:

Here then is the story of a very sad case, like I started to say before. One of the saddest, Bartleby. I guess you might say he was just the last new prospect who didn’t stick, like a thousand others before him. He certainly wasn’t like any of the others. But he was more than just strange. Continue reading →