HAVE A NICE DAY, BY ORDER OF THE COURT

NEW YORK—Can a grumpy old man who hadn’t left his apartment in 30 years and just wants to be left alone with his cold-cut sandwiches, his frog figurines, and his TV shows stand up to a relentlessly well-meaning social worker and her enforcers? He can. But to win this epic battle of wills, he’ll need to call on a lifetime of stubbornness and downright meanness, a patience rarely seen, and more than a little luck.

The curmudgeonly protagonist of Scott Stein’s new novel Mean Martin Manning faces a militant do-gooder in the form of Caseworker Alice Pitney. Pitney is starting a self-improvement program in Martin’s building and won’t take no for an answer. If it takes a trial of absurd proportions and a ludicrous treatment program to make Martin into the man he could be and should have been, that’s just fine with her. And if the satire and sarcasm fly fast and furious in the process, that’s just fine with Scott Stein and the sacred cow tippers at his publisher, ENC Press.

Scott Stein is associate director of the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. The book Drexel University Off the Record, the unauthorized guide for prospective students, lists his Humor & Comedy Writing class as one of the “Ten Best Things About Drexel.” The Philadelphia Inquirer called his first novel, Lost, “wonderfully comic” and “a page-turner.” BookSense.com selected it as a daily pick, calling it “hilarious and winning.” Stein was the founding editor of the online magazine When Falls the Coliseum: a journal of American culture (or lack thereof), which New York magazine called “hip, sardonic … quirky.”

Scheduled for release next winter, Mean Martin Manning has just been acquired by the boutique New York fiction house ENC Press, which has established itself as a specialist in sophisticated social satire. Its self-chosen “boutique” designation involves more than house size and the high level of attention given to the editing, design, and production of each release. It is a deliberately chosen business model as well. With the exception of a few independent bookstores, ENC Press bypasses the usual retail book industry channels, whether brick-and-mortar or online, in favor of selling books exclusively through its Web site. Publisher Olga Gardner Galvin says only her small run/direct sales model makes it possible for her to focus on the content of her books rather than fret about the bottom line. It also allows her to keep all her titles available indefinitely on the Web — a practice recently adopted by industry giants Penguin and Random House.

“I started out thinking we were ‘alternative’ because our authors saw and discussed more than one side of any question and issue and did so with wit and humor, which is ‘alternative’ in today’s book industry,” says Galvin. “But then we realized that in pursuit of such novels we came up with some intelligent alternatives to limited editorial decisions, the hideous practice of printing books only to remainder and pulp them, and serfdom for writers in the form of miserly royalties. We certainly provide an intelligent alternative to the touchy-feely groupthink of the mainstream book scene, simply by publishing guilt-free, topical entertainment for independently thinking people. Mean Martin Manning is one more ENC Press offering for the steadily growing audience of readers who hunger for more sophisticated, nuanced, and original fiction than they can find in most bookstores.”

A capsule summary of Mean Martin Manning is available at www.encpress.com/MMM.html — and so are a few of the other wickedest, funniest, and most thought-provoking novels the big publishing business doesn’t know how to handle.