GIANCARLO DiTRAPANO was an avant-garde magazine and book publisher who died on this date (b: 1974); As the founder of New York Tyrant worked with Atticus Lish, Sam Lipsyte and Padgett Powell among others and proudly defied mainstream trends.

DiTrapano had a small, but devoted following, and was praised for his willingness to take on writers that the larger publishers shunned.

A native of Charleston, West Virginia, and graduate of Loyola University New Orleans, he founded New York Tyrant Magazine in 2006 and three years later began Tyrant Books, which he ran out of his kitchen in Hell’s Kitchen. Releases from what became New York Tyrant ranged from a book of photographs of Iggy Pop to Scott McClanahan’s raw “The Sarah Book” and Marie Calloway’s “what purpose did i serve in your life,” a work so explicit that a printing company refused to produce copies of it.

DiTrapano was also a writer who was published in The Paris Review and Playboy among other magazines and co-founded a highly regarded writing workshop that he ran out of his family home in Italy. He is survived by his husband, Giuseppe Avallone.