Datura of the Press, “you are very welcome in our worlds”
It's a lock in at the late night bar for losers in love. Inspired by our very own Etta Vale's new release, we fish the change from our pockets and wonder what to put on the jukebox.
Datura at The Press’ HQ Florence. “Words are Worlds”
“Dahlia’ dress by Rei @fugacefugace
Here’s how it is. The Datura Press is not here to populate bargain bins, book club intro offers, or fill standard distribution quotas. We are a new, adventurous, and unapologetically fierce literary imprint, and we’ll let you into a secret: we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. This, we feel, is for the best.
Currently, our editorial engine is running white-hot with a slate of upcoming releases that we love very much, and like all parents, we’re worried about when they leave home. We sit in a corridor along with our sisters and brothers in the I Live Night by Night Collective (NxN). Mujiki and the crew at DarkArc Studios/The Datura Tapes are making audio field recordings for our Scandi poet Ronja; Rei at atelier FugaceFugace is cutting fabric for our first folio book jackets. We write sleeve notes and lyrics and find names for custom couture.
We’re a very close family here in the heart of Florence. You should come visit.
For those who share our appetite for destruction and/or creation, the door is open (and being Florence, it’s about 30 feet tall and about 500 years old). We are always looking to collaborate with visionaries, creators, and quality partners who want to bring these worlds to life—whether on the page, the screen, or through cross-disciplinary art.
Character Building. Literary…
In our foundational character roster—Manton, Walker, and Narcisa—we are ushering in a motley crew of protagonists. These characters are deliberately blurry, existing entirely in the high-contrast tension between light and dark, but they are never grey. They possess no neutrality. They are driven souls, forever on the lookout for the next danger to overcome, the next fight to pick or run from, the next deep-buried secret to unearth, and the next locked door to kick open.
A Little About Me, Myself and I
There is me. That is Datura, head of typewriters and roller ink here at The Press HQ.
Born in Italy to English parents, I spent my early years in the nowhere spots of the Tuscan countryside, reading, reading, and reading. I moved to Florence to study it and Italy’s vivid poetry tradition, while in my spare time doing the same for British and Irish writers. As much Alan Moore as Dante; as much Woolf as Joyce. And every year I try and add another shore to my travels.
The Press? Well, it seemed, on my travels, that a lot of what I loved—female fiction, new fantasy, the occult, and the gothic—wasn’t happening here. And that didn’t seem right. Florence’s fire of Renaissance creativity still has hot embers, so why not blow them back to burning in my homeland and home city?
Of course, it helped that loon power-couple Mujiki and Rei stumbled across me—no, the other way round. I hammered on Mujiki’s door to tell her to turn her C90 cassette of Yellow Magic Orchestra B-sides UP. This seemed to tickle them no end.
A Hot Mess of Mix and Match
So, of course, we just started working together, crossing over and sharing ideas. In the end, it was The Datura Press that became a real girl first. We had several novels we were working on, so we were the first to break cover and go live with our message.
The Tapes was born from making weird ambient Eastern European folk-opera songs to go with our novels like Narcisa Before Narcisa, or louche-Lynchian jazz instrumentals for Walker, and ASMR wax cylinder poetry readings for Manton. Weird cats, Mujiki and the in-house production team darkStylus.
FugaceFugace are no less crazy. Either they are making felt bricks, because… actually, I forget why they did that, or they are dressing me in amazing Gaultier-Gothic gowns so I’ll feel in the mood for late-night writing sessions. Yes, we have blazing sunshine here a Firenze, but it just makes our shadows and midnights that shade more black.
Let's Twist a Whole New Plot
Ultimately, what I hope we’re building here at The Press is not just a collection of books; we are constructing vivid, unique, and beautifully weird cinematic universes. These are worlds rich with atmosphere and narrative depth, specifically designed to scale and cross over with forward-thinking media companies, visual artists, and independent production houses who have decided this world is not for them.
If you are a filmmaker, a gallery curator, an illustrator, a translation house, or simply someone who has an idea about something unique that could come after “Once upon a time…”—we should talk and see what we can get written down.
Contact our desk via mail to initiate the dialogue. Or, if you find yourself wandering the historic stone streets of Italy, our main headquarters is nestled right in the beating heart of central Florence. The Duomo is our alarm clock, literally.
Why not drop by, escape the Tuscan heat, join us for a proper espresso, and see what we’re plotting? Let's make something unforgettable.
A presto.
