Barnes & Noble declines to stock Fucking Daphne

Barnes & Noble recently declined to stock the June 2008 Seal Press title Fucking Daphne, edited by Daphne Gottlieb.

According to Seal Press Senior Editor Brooke Warner:

Barnes & Noble is passing on our book Fucking Daphne because of the title. The good bookbuying American public might be offended. I get it. Or the buyer over there doesn't value the word fuck like I do. I realize that it's a big word, maybe a bit too graphic and visual for some. I try to refrain from using it around my mother, after all. Oftentimes unsuccessfully.

But I also know I'm not alone in my fuck-loving ways. Because amazon.com yields a healthy number of books with fuck in the title. Just type in fuck and you get 40,099 results. Yes, a lot of those are search-inside-the-book references. But still.

Indeed, Brooke is right: some titles that come to mind are The New Fuck You edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz and The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersesian (both at Bn.com).

Here's the publisher's description of the book:

When Daphne Gottlieb first found herself the character in someone else's story she was intrigued; over time, as she appeared in more and more stories, she started to wonder about the implications of what was real and what wasn't. Did it matter that there were published stories of her having sex in bathrooms, vacant parking lots, on the balcony at a party in an old bordello? Did it matter whether or not they were true?

This question sparked the idea for Fucking Daphne, a collection that blurs the lines between reality and fiction and begs the question “who is the real Daphne?” A pill-popping wild child? A soft place to fall with a broken heart? A dreadlocked vixen?

Contributors include Hanne Blank, Stephen Elliot, Sarah Katherine Lewis, and Ariel Gore, who describe, watch, and engage with a character that is not Daphne Gottlieb; Daphne is a projection, a fantasy, a zeitgeist. We are all a multitude of people in bed. We are all Daphne.

Harnessing the playfulness of the hoax, the seductiveness of literature, and the edginess of the avant-garde, Fucking Daphne is unique in a culture hungry for sex, information, and most of all, understanding.

I don't really know the backstory, but I do know that this was originally slated to be publisehd by Cleis Press in 2007, and here is the original cover (from Amazon Canada):



(Full disclosure: I publish with both Cleis and Seal Press, but beyond that and having done a Litquake reading with Daphne, I have no connection to this book, just an observer.)