A publishing house for fiction that treats systems as material.
The Means of Production publishes fiction that operates at the same level as the research — work that investigates the systems producing ordinary life by inhabiting them from the inside.
Not political fiction in the didactic sense. Fiction that treats institutions, bureaucracies, and social machinery as the actual subject of human experience, not the backdrop to it.
The press is an independent operation run by Victoria Mansberger Schoen, based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It publishes under its own name and under the imprint The Worst Words Worth the Work.
Titles current and forthcoming
Books stay here. Projects and portals have their own marked sections below, so readers know whether they are buying a title, submitting work, or entering a separate world.
The Load-Bearing Unit
Stories about structures that ask the body to carry what the institution refuses to name.
Available on Amazon ↗Container Metaphors
A collection on boxes, borders, vessels, rooms, and every enclosure that pretends containment is care.
Available on Amazon ↗Post-Occupancy Diagnostic Report: The Standardization of Erasure
A diagnostic file for buildings, systems, and forms that make disappearance look like procedure.
Available on Amazon ↗The Prevailing Myths of Productivity
A management manual for the myths that turn exhaustion into virtue and compliance into common sense.
Available on Amazon ↗Handbook for the Recently Deceased
A forthcoming guide for those still learning which forms of life the system has already declared over.
Submission Fetish is the intake portal, not a book in the catalog.
Archive of unwanted offerings — accepting submissions
A publication project for work that has had difficulty finding a home because it was misaligned, over-aware of the machinery, or too strange for the available gates.
Submission Fetish also presents Submission Weather — a live forecast of the conditions at the gate, for anyone deciding whether to offer the work today.
Accepted work lives in The Archive — each piece published in full, read by three editors in open conversation, and examined for the myth it reaches for. The finest pass into Permanent Residency.
Landing pages for publishing projects
Separate worlds live here as clear entry points: small, legible cards that tell readers where they are going before they leave the press page.
Detective Oblivia Appropria
Privileged Eye
The name does the work. Oblivia: oblivious, incurious about her own position. Appropria: she appropriates — the labour, the knowledge, the grief of communities she passes through.
She solves the case. She is the case.
Murdercari
Listings from the scenes we can't forget
A true-crime marketplace where every listing is a piece of a larger story. Three storefronts — an auction house, a finds shop, a dossier — each selling evidence and ephemera from scenes the record couldn't quite close.
Everything is for sale. Nothing is resolved.
Favorite
A Series
Two cousins, one grandmother's estate stuck in probate, and a summer of escalating dares — a roof, a beehive, a water tower, a train, a silo. Each dare is really the same question, asked five ways.
Who did she love best? Nobody answers.