About
About Slow Reading
We live in an age that urges us to “read fast”: summaries, quick guides, and books to be finished in three minutes—as though the purpose of reading were simply to reach the final page as quickly as possible.
But we believe in another way of reading.
Slow reading does not necessarily mean reading at a slower pace. It means being willing to pause—to linger over a sentence, return to it again and again, and allow it to remain with you a little longer. A good book loses nothing when read slowly. On the contrary, the more willingly you linger, the more it reveals.
It is like looking at a river. You can hurry across a bridge and move on, or you can sit by the riverbank and watch its waters throughout an entire afternoon. The river remains the same, yet what you see is entirely different.
Slow reading is a small space we preserve for ourselves amid the accelerating pace of the age—a quiet interval in which words may settle, deepen, and become our own.
About Deep River Publishing
Name
“Deepness” speaks of depth and vastness; “River,” of convergence and flow. Together, they evoke a state in which all things are drawn together, interwoven, and made whole.
Named “Deep River,” the publishing house seeks, amid the turmoil and intricacies of the earthly world, to follow a deep and far-reaching spiritual current—like waters born of snow and ice in the sacred region of Mount Kailash, winding through the Himalayas toward the Ganges. Along this course, Deep River seeks to hold space for the profound and subtle energies of politics, history, and human emotions.
Agency
Within Deep River’s vision, writing, publishing, and reading possess equal value. Together, they set reality in motion, bringing new forms of reality into being and opening dimensions of possibility within it. Reality is both the tangible world and the fleeting moments that arise in the act of reading. It is multidimensional yet fluid, singular yet plural—vast enough to contain the small, and intimate enough for the small to hold the vast.
Writers, publishers, readers, and all who take part in the creative process are gathered into this current. As they enter its flow, they generate new forms of energy. And as the current converges with the passage of time, it becomes an exchange—a circulation of energies, meanings, and possibilities. Within this depth and movement lies a natural, tranquil, and uninterrupted force. This is Deep River.
Creativity
Deep River is devoted to literature, art, thought, and religion, and above all to the spirituality inherent in the making of reality. Creativity is a force: it dissolves the tensions, anxieties, traumas, and helplessness that bind reality, carrying them into a deeper and quieter current where light and darkness coexist. In creation, another path becomes possible—a path that departs from inherited trajectories and moves toward renewal and rebirth. Deep River does not seek refuge in nostalgia or fantasy. It turns instead toward the limitations within us, confronting, dissolving, and transforming them so that new forms of life may emerge.
Words and Things
Publishing is one such practice.
Guided by this vision, Deep River Publishing reaches beyond the written words into images, sounds, live performances, and other forms of expression. It seeks to awaken the more active and dynamic energies that words, when confined to the page, can only partially contain.
At the heart of this practice is a desire to bring forth the “things” within words—to allow what is spiritual to take material form and enter the world as a living presence, while at the same time allowing the material world to be touched by aesthetic and literary meaning. Through this reciprocal movement between spirit and matter, new “things” may come into being, and existing things may discover new capacities to act and signify. In Deep River’s world, nothing is entirely inert. Everything carries a breath of its own, like waves upon the sea, rising and receding, appearing and passing away. This is Deep River: a publishing practice in which words become things, and things begin to breathe.
Asia
The emergence of “Asia” has been shaped by the shifting forces among China, Japan, and the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. Situated within these forces, Taiwan has absorbed and carried their various currents, giving rise to a phantasm, an embryo, a field of emotions, and an intermediate state formed from countless converging elements. Political struggles, both within and beyond the island, have never ceased. Yet Taiwan’s internal ecology has, in some way, sustained a measure of stability amid continual upheaval. Can this distinctive historical and contemporary condition generate a force that no longer dissipates or circles endlessly back upon itself, but instead gathers and absorbs the energies of history, transforming reality in the process?
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the history of Asia has grown increasingly intricate and enigmatic. New realities continue to emerge, each following its own historical trajectory while resisting interpretation through established frameworks. Within this inescapable spatial condition—where there is no easy way to turn away or step aside—Taiwan possesses the potential to grasp these shifting currents without defining itself solely through either the self or the other.
Deep River Publishing therefore seeks to loosen the rigidities imposed upon Taiwan by successive struggles and competing forces. Through “creation,” it seeks to open channels through which thought and emotion may move freely. Deep River is committed to cultivating the island’s “compound eye” and its capacity to listen, deepening its apprehension of reality, and allowing the energies and materialities of literature, thought, image, religion, and other forms to become a mode of breathing—a manifestation of creation and freedom.
From Deep River’s perspective, this dynamic process—charged with tension and resilience—is the formation of “Asia.” This “Asia” does not turn away from the realities of politics; rather, it preserves, within them, the possibility of creation.
“Asia” is not a static object.
It can reveal itself in different forms, again and again.
