Bizarre Boy and the Flies, by Monica Bustos

Below we attach a short questionnaire that Sara Cantero, editor of Calla Canalla, has answered with great kindness:

STUFF: For those who don’t know Calla Canalla, how would you introduce yourselves?

S.C.: Sara Cantero and Pedro Jiménez are at the helm of the publishing house. Our motto is “publish only cool stuff,” so we want to grow slowly, with confidence, so that we can defend each book we publish with joy because we are very proud of it.

STUFF: What motivated you to set up a publishing house in these times?

S.C.: Our life has always been surrounded by books and in 2020 we planned to open a bookstore in Cádiz. With almost everything already in motion, the pandemic and confinement appeared in our lives… and everything stopped. During those months we realized that we liked making books more than selling them, we gave ourselves a couple of years to train in publishing and in the fall of 2023, we were born.

STUFF: What is your vision for Calla Canalla? What catalogue, publication pace and aesthetic do you have in mind?

S.C.: The only thing we demand of ourselves as a publishing house is that everything we publish must be of quality. We do not aspire to be profound, nor to change the publishing world, nor do we even aspire to fill market niches. We do not aspire to anything, only to make books, to find stories that are worth reading and to build a beautiful and lasting shell around them.

And to achieve this, the only way is to have the best professionals: we print at Kadmos, we are distributed by La sombra de Caín, we have had the help of illustrators Elisa Ancori and Guillem Bosh, authors such as Mónica Bustos and Santiago Ambao…

In 2024 we will launch three books, next year four and we hope to jump to eight in 2026.

STUFF: Is there any book that you are particularly excited to publish? Also, are there works that you think would fit perfectly into Calla Canalla but for whatever reason you will not be able to publish?

S.C.: We are delighted with our first two books, we have taken the best care of them, but we are also very excited about the release of the third, which will be at the end of the year. It is the first unpublished book, with a Spanish author for whom it will also be her first novel. It is very beautiful, of great quality and told with a very special voice.

For a book to fit into our catalogue, it “only” has to be quality, original… as I said before, be something cool. If it meets that requirement, we will publish it. The only good books that we will not be able to publish will be those that have already been published by others, and the list of those would be very long.

STUFF: Why have you decided to start your journey in the publishing world with Bizarre Boy and the Flies by Monica Bustos? And continue it with The trilogy of miracles de Santiago Who?

S.C.: The goal was to start our catalogue with novels that were of high quality, but, of course, when you are new and you have not yet published any books, the manuscripts that you receive go hand in hand with the level of the publisher. So we decided to try to reissue some novel that had been published in South America years ago and that we found attractive. The surprise was that we found these two hidden gems, although even more surprising was that the authors let themselves be convinced to publish with us despite our inexperience.

STUFF: Can you give us a preview of what’s coming up at Calla Canalla?

S.C.: Well, I told you before that in a few months our first edition will be released with unpublished text and a Spanish author; so we will also start the machinery of presentations, fairs, events… For next year we promise to publish more cool stuff.