'SOME NIGHTS THERE'D be no one here, and you'd be standing there saying nothing's happening, we've got to make something happen," says Alan Black, the man behind Edinburgh Castle Pub, the infamous Scottish haunt that's been dishing out pints and whiskeys and fish-and-chips since the late 1950s. After the bar almost tanked in the early '90s, Black, along with some fellow Scottish arts upstarts, decided to make some serious Something happen there in the form of literary readings featuring traveling Scottish writers and the soggy local scribes who'd been scrawling in the corner with their chips. More than a decade later and the Edinburgh Castle is an established literary spot; Irvine Welsh not only gave Black and co. permission to put on the stage play of his junkie classic Trainspotting, but he's also been a regular guest reader at the Tenderloin pub. The city's annual LitQuake festival was brainstormed inside its wooden walls, and it was a prominent venue during the event. With so much street-level literary organizing under his belt, Black has naturally made the leap from promoter to publisher. Public House Press it's called, and the debut anthology, Public House, gives us a mix of national luminaries, underground cult heroes, and folks seeing their pieces in print for the very first time. Edited – or "Forged," as the cover proclaims – by Black and Luke James, an OG punk who writes with the pub's Writer's Bloc writing group, the collection is a stunningly strong start for a uniquely San Franciscan press: born in a bar, infused with a surly class-consciousness, and tied to many of the town's separate literary clusters. Pieces by Irvine Welsh, Po Bronson, and Mary Roach bump up against Jon Longhi and Alejandro Murgia, which bump up against a selection from Writer's Bloc scrawler Amy Itzert.

"We just asked, 'Do you want to be in the Edinburgh Castle book that'll be coming out in 200 years?'" Black explains with a laugh at how he formed the collection. "Everyone was really supportive. Obviously there's some really big successful mainstream writers, but there's also people from the Castle. I even put my seven-year-old son in it. I like his poem – it's about burgling a rich guy's house and taking his gold and distributing it among the poor." The piece, "If I Were a Burglar ... ," takes a simple political stance and references fantasy without getting too carried away – sort of amazing for a third grader. "He's been depressed all week 'cause of the election," his dad says.

Public House opens with Keith and Kent Zimmerman's brief orientation, "Fish and Chips and Lit," which provides an entertaining rundown of the Edinburgh Castle's history and contains treasures such as "the piper at the bar who would stand up and pace the barroom in full parade regalia every twenty or so minutes, blowing us all away with some of the worst sounding, out of tune bagpipes west of Dundee." Bronson's "Recovered Memories" parodies Scottish pride with a faux memoir about undergoing "cultural immersion therapy" at a spa. "White people don't have any culture," he foolishly tells a Scottish psychotherapist. "We have television." We soon find him huffing burning cow dung in a smokehouse he made with his own manure-stained hands.

Emer Martin's short story, "A Sacrificial Shoe," is a gripping tale narrated by Avril, a mean-spirited, bulimic, Irish ex-junkie biding her time to suicide while traveling in Israel. Working on a kibbutz, her fate becomes entwined with that of Sharon, a Scottish woman who grew up in an orphanage and whose fleshy body, good cheer, and believable mix of sluttishness and innocence inspires freaked-out loathing and, eventually, true cruelty from Avril. "She knew nothing about anything, she was ignorant, ate all the time, and picked her nose. She was prone to crass and tasteless utterances," Avril rants. The story pulls you in steady as a deadly tide and leaves you a bit devastated at the close.

Noah Hawley's "Hurricane Tours" is another good one, featuring one more unsavory main character, dot-commer Ben, who takes his on-again, off-again girlfriend on a "Hurricane Tour" of Florida's coast with the intention of setting his romantic ambivalence to rest. Instead he hits on a modelslashactress sharing the tour with them and gets kneed in the balls by her boyfriend, a professional adventurer. The story takes us into the wild and brutal heart of a hurricane and the tragicomic effects the violence has on the vacationing storm chasers.

"We're going to be distributing Public House at the bar and through the Web site [www.publichousepress.com] and hopefully through some bookstores," Black says. "We've got a pretty limited run. A thousand books is all we could afford to put out. We figure, well, just keep it local, keep it really modest, put our name out there, and see what happens. If we sell enough books, we'll make enough to put something else out." One more reason to get on out to the public house and get yourself a copy of Public House.