-
The People Who Watched Her Pass By
by Scott Bradfield
$14.50, 146 pages
ISBN 978-0-9820151-5-5, eISBN 978-0-9826848-4-9
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $14.50
"Challenging [and] original . . . A billowy adventure of a book. In a book that supplies few answers,
Bradfield's lavish eloquence is the presiding constant."
-Gregory Beyer, New York Times Book Review
Salome Jensen is three years old when she is taken from her home by the man who fixes the hot water heater.
As Sal drifts through Laundromats and other people’s homes, she develops a perspective of the world and an understanding
of its people more meaningful than the most erudite observer could muster.
Scott Bradfield's books include The History
of Luminous Motion, What's Wrong with America, Animal Planet, Greetings From Earth, and most recently,
Good Girl Wants it Bad and Hot Animal Love: Tales of Modern Romance.
Additional Reviews
"Brave and unforgettable. Scott Bradfield creates a country for the reader to wander through, holding Sal's hand,
assuming goodness."
-Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"A dark comedy that cuts through the bureaucracy and political correctness of modern American life."
-Anthony Furey, Times Literary Supplement
"Scott Bradfield is an otherworldly writer. There is an inarguable wholeness to [The People Who Watched Her Pass By],
as in certain dreams."
-Paul Maliszewski, Rain Taxi
"This gem of a novel is by turn instructive, incisive, beautifully vivid, and funny."
-Claire Kelley, TK Reviews
"I read Scott Bradfield's new novel with a pencil in hand, enthusiastically underlining his clever remarks and turns of phrase.
This short novel is a wake-up call shouting Bradfield's humorously erudite take on modern American life."
-Kassie Rose, WOSU
"Bradfield keeps a wary distance from his homeland [the U.S.], employing his outcast narrators to do his dirty work:
sneaking into suburban neighborhoods and peering into bedroom windows just to reaffirm that a home is nothing but
nails and wood. The People Who Watched Her Pass By is uninterested in superficial compassion. To follow Sal
on her wanderings is to drive straight into the Zen void at the heart of the classic road novel."
-Ross Simonini, Bookforum
"This short novel is filled with wisdom. Bradfield's humorously erudite take on modern American life so overwhelmed me
with memorable goodies, I grabbed a pencil and began underlining. I enjoyed this quirky story immensely."
-Kassie Rose, The Longest Chapter
"Jonathan Lethem has called Scott Bradfield one of his favorite living writers, and after reading The People Who Watched
Her Pass By, I can understand why. Bradfield's fifth novel is narrated by a three year-old girl ... [who is]
easily one of the most memorable narrators I have read in years."
-Largehearted Boy
"[Scott Bradfield is] an adept prose stylist, and his portrayal of children as symbols instead of individuals is incisive."
-Publishers Weekly
-
The Correspondence Artist
by Barbara Browning
$16, 168 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9820151-9-3, eISBN 978-0-9832471-2-8
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
"The Correspondence Artist is smart, funny, sexy, knowledgeable, subtle, disturbing, light-hearted, obsessive,
and tragic: a comedy that, I surmise, is wholly confessional and wholly imaginary."
-Harry Mathews
In The Correspondence Artist, an unremarkable woman has been carrying on with an internationally
recognized artist, largely via e-mail. To protect her paramour's identity, she creates a series of correspondent,
alternative lovers in a self-destructing roman ŕ clef.
Barbara Browning has a PhD in comparative literature
from Yale. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet
and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village. The Correspondence Artist is her first novel.
Additional Reviews
"A deft look at modern life that's both witty and devastating."
-Nylon
"Intelligent... a pleasure to read."
-Bookslut
"This novel of an affair told prismatically is a love letter to letters, a passionate mixtape to the world of culture."
-Kevin Thomas, The Rumpus
"Barbara Browning's The Correspondence Artist has a conceit that will sound like a dog whistle to readers hungry
for a certain kind of high-concept writing. The particular details of these relationships... are sharp, witty, and well
-developed: I experienced that nerdy thrill novel reading sometimes gives you when you learn something new... I'm interested
in what a Malian musician would have to say to his Lacanian therapist, and the micro-history of ETA we get tickles me the
way that getting another strange stamp in your passport might."
-Matt Dube, The Collagist
"Jam-packed with cultural references and lubricated body parts... in a fiction that merges with cultural theory.
This is mail worth rifling through."
-The Fanzine
"The Correspondence Artist is a thoroughly enjoying read that raises many questions through its fresh
sense of storytelling. This book is worth reading if, for nothing else, than for pure enjoyment of the author's
ability to execute a well-told tale."
-Patrick Trotti, jmww
"Browning's writing is truly sexy. Playful and evocative, it captures the obsessive nature of love in a way few authors manage.
The Correspondence Artist is a smartly complex and surprising work of art. More than being simply a 'novel' in the
traditional sense it takes that term a step further, existing in form as something truly innovative and new. Part memoir,
part fiction, part epistolary, part metadata-existentialist philosophy, part art installation; the sum total is a triumph
of a debut."
-Sarah Twombly, KGB Bar Lit Magazine
"[The Correspondence Artist] is wrapped up in powerful feelings of disconnect, confusion, and sexual need. Imagining
a failed romance through four different characters [gives] the story an unusual liveliness, and Browning expertly filters
critical moments through each imagined lover."
-Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper
"Browning relentlessly explores her theme of love's many faces, giving readers a rewardingly offbeat novel that's by turns
sexy, humorous, and insightful."
-Publishers Weekly
-
I'm Trying to Reach You
by Barbara Browning
$16, 192 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9832471-1-1, eISBN 9780983247159
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
* YouTube CHANNEL
"A provocative novel... that blurs the boundaries between life and performance, dance, art,
and viral video. The novel is also framed in the world of performance art and is itself its own
kind of performance... and feels rightly reflective of a moment when dance is pushing
the boundaries of what constitutes a performance space."
-Slate Book Review
“I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died. When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was,
That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’”
First Michael Jackson, then Pina Bausch. Next is Merce Cunningham.
Gray Adams, a former dancer with the Royal Swiss Ballet at work on his dissertation at NYU, has a theory spurred
by countless hours of YouTube-based procrastination: Someone is killing these famous dancers! (And he may bear an uncanny
resemblance to Jimmy Stewart, circa Vertigo.)
I’m Trying to Reach You is a moving and candid contemporary look at how we process grief, as well as how
we love and communicate with one another.
Barbara Browning has a PhD in comparative literature
from Yale. She teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. She's also a poet
and a dancer. She lives with her son in Greenwich Village. The Correspondence Artist is her first novel.
Additional Reviews
"The novel shows ambitious scope, encompassing everything from critical theory to the relationship
between Merce Cunningham and John Cage.”
-Lambda Literary Review
"Recommended to anyone . . . who wants to experience a multimedia novel blurring genres and
means of communication as well as the boundary between the author and her fictional narrative.”
-New York Journal of Books
"I'm Trying to Reach You is another stunning work, one that smartly explores love and grief in a
modern culture that often connects through social media.”
-Largehearted Boy
"Deftly blending highbrow intellectual concerns with the informality of Facebook-era communiques,
Browning's newest is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.”
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred*)
"Exquisite storytelling at its finest. I’m Trying to Reach You cultivates our relationship addiction
with YouTube and our desire for interconnectivity while illuminating what it means to
strive, cope and love with all of our heart, brain, body and soul. It is all here.
Browning writes with humor, wit, grace and passion to the human purpose, mortality and the joys of
existence. Start reading.”
-Karen Finley
"The writing of Barbara Browning reminds me of the young, spirited Françoise Sagan whose first three novels
Bonjour tristesse (1954), Un certain sourire (1955) and Aimez-vous Brahms? (1959), were written
when she was still in her teens and early twenties and are beyond brilliantine. The film version of Bonjour Tristesse
1957 was directed by Otto Preminger starring a lovely Jean Seberg. If only Mr. Preminger were alive today to direct a
filmed adaptation of Ms. Browning's I'm Trying to Reach You. That would be granada."
-Vaginal Crčme Davis
-
Vagabond Blues
by Emmanuel Burgin
$14, ISBN 978-0-9763895-1-4
* ORDER FOR $14
* San Diego Book Award Finalist.
"A breathtaking read. Even if you're not a football fan the book offers a glimpse into a world totally
unauthorized by the NFL and it's a worthy read for that alone. Recommended."
-Espresso
Vagabond Blues is an insider's peek at minor league football in the early '80s, an entire netherworld
that most people never had the opportunity to see, let alone experience. It's a place where players hopped up on speed
and painkillers injure one another for no other reason than because they can. They are drunks and drug-users, Vietnam Vets
and NFL misfits, who try just as hard to keep the adrenaline rush going after the game.
Emmanuel Burgin's non-fiction has appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, El Sol de San Diego, San Diego Weekly Reader, Rugby West Magazine, and Rugby News. His fiction
has appeared in San Diego Writer's Monthly, Tidepools, Weavings, and Solstice Literary Quarterly. In 1981, Emmanuel
was captain of the minor-league professional team, Twin City Cougars, and prior to that was under contract with the L.A.
Thunderbolts.
-
Baby Geisha
by Trinie Dalton
$16, 162 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9832471-0-4, eISBN 978-0-9832471-4-2
* READ 'THE PERVERTED HOBO'
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
"Half ingenuous and half wily, winningly hard to pin down. The result is a kind of everyday
fantastic. Dalton nails the Walserian trick of evincing a sincerity nearly indistinguishable
from irony. The effect is a poised instability, more uncanny than the magic the stories sometimes
describe."
-Bookforum
Baby Geisha is a collection of thirteen sexually-charged stories that roam from the Coney Island Ferris wheel
to the Greek Isles.
True to Dalton’s form, the stories in Baby Geisha are distinctly imagined while also representing a
more grounded approach in the author’s style. There’s the Joan Didion-obsessed starving journalist of 'Pura Vida,'
struggling to maintain a relationship with her performance artist sisters (or anyone, for that matter), on assignment
in Costa Rica to write an article on sloth-hugging. 'Millennium Chill' is about a woman who discovers that her body heat
is mysteriously linked to that of an elderly beggar.
Baby Geisha serves to underline Dalton’s reputation as a remarkable stylist and original artist.
Trinie Dalton has authored and/or edited five books.
Wide Eyed, Sweet Tomb, and A Unicorn Is Born are works of fiction. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your
Name Is and Mythtym are art compilations. She writes articles and reviews about books, art, and music,
somewhat collected on sweettomb.com.
Additional Reviews
"[Baby Geisha] pokes fun, it's satirical, there's an underlying delicious irony to it, and the
telling parts are the ones where Dalton coins names, cuts down trees with her paragraphs, gives us just
a touch of the absurd... Dalton's skill as a writer, and above all her expertise in choosing words that
play into a darker cultural picture--an offsetting of America's natural high!--are not to be missed
here."
-Fanzine
"[Dalton's] her command of language and astute descriptions keep her work decidedly literary, even as
she is challenging her readers and riffing on the form. Inside each of these stories is a pulsating
crater of loving energy that guides her characters (and us) through her inventive, bizarre, and
heartbreakingly slanted view of the world."
-The Collagist
"Though some of the more surreal and absurd moments in Dalton's work get the headlines,
it's the quieter moments... that shout the loudest."
-Time Out Chicago
"Dalton handles her narratives with a deft skill and a keen, distinct, confident voice that never
eases up, never ceases to surprise, leaving readers happy to experience her intriguing world up close.
Just the way we like it."
-Brooklyn Rail
"[The stories] feel like brilliant sexual fairy tales on drugs. Dalton writes of self-discovery and sex with a knowing humility
and humor."
-Interview Magazine
"'Pura Vida,' about an emotionally unavailable journalist on assignment to cover a sloth clinic in Costa Rica, is a standout,
its final moment between woman and sloth arriving with breathtaking lightness, like the first flower of spring. Other memorable
outings include trips to the Missouri Ozarks ("Wet Look"), the Alps ("Shrub of Emotion"), and the Painted Desert ("Baby Geisha"),
with men and women on the verge of, but never quite reaching, psycho-sexual breakthroughs."
-Los Angeles Magazine Critic's Pick
"Though Dalton writes in the minimalist vein, alongside the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus,
and Gary Lutz, her peculiar fascinations give her a singular voice. A pleasurable trip."
-Publishers Weekly
"Trinie Dalton’s Baby Geisha is a travelogue. Her stories speak volumes of lostness about a world full of riveting
features and no map. Things just kind of dead-end in a macho way that feels like porn that didn’t happen – the dirty scene
I mean. Trinie’s writing absolutely unfeminine work. Which feels unique to me. In her hands, gender, like a new kind
of western, is just moving across a landscape, the salutary effect of which is that it requires that Trinie write this
beautiful stuff of which I can’t get enough. Like a desert, her work refuses to give us
even a drop more, is full of strange animals, is enduring and glittery."
-Eileen Myles
"Trinie Dalton's collection, Baby Geisha, is seductive and exciting, the stories told by voices that might be talking
inside your head, except their language is entirely unexpected and dazzling. Every sentence winds up in an unexpected
place, peopled by "space virgins...on orgiastic planets" and "cousins smelling like salami." Both fantastic and very
real, Dalton's stories are surprising universes, ringing evidence of her terrific talent."
-Lynne Tillman
-
Life on the Ledge:
Reflections of a NYC Window Cleaner
by Ivor Hanson
$14, ISBN 978-0-9763895-3-8, 220 pages
* ORDER FOR $14
"Fascinating."
-New York Magazine
After drifting out of his current band, Ivor must face that window cleaning is no longer his day job - it's his only
job; he's not going to be a rock star after all. This, despite having played in such ground-breaking punk bands as S.O.A.
with Henry Rollins, Faith, and Embrace with Ian Mackaye.
Ivor Hanson is a freelance writer and window cleaner
who has written for The New York Times, The Big Takeover, Time Out New York, and other publications. A graduate of Vassar
College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Ivor lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.
When not working as a stay-at-home dad, he cleans windows around town.
-
The Shanghai Gesture
by Gary Indiana
$15.50, ISBN 978-0-9820151-0-0, 207 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15.50
"[Gary Indiana] is the primary reporter of the underground, the dissociation of cultures, the new behaviors; there is a
sense that if you want to understand what has happened in America, you would have to read Gary Indiana. And this newest book
is a leap forward."
-Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm
A mysterious bout of narcolepsy has overtaken the seaside hamlet of Land’s End, a funk endemic to the region since
the wreckage a century earlier of the ship, the Ardent Somdomite. Inspector Weymouth Smith and unconvinced cohort, Dr.
Obregon Petrie, attempt to thwart Fu Manchu’s latest ploy for world domination while confronting South American Piyas,
matching wits with a club-footed ex-Stasi, as well as battling the latest technological crazes and their own drug
dependencies.
Gary Indiana is the author of several previous novels:
Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Rent Boy, Resentment, Depraved Indifference, and Do
Everything in the Dark, as well as nonfiction works, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, The 120 Days
of Salo, Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995, Schwarzenegger Syndrome, and Utopia's Debris.
Additional Reviews
"Half William Burroughs, half William Gibson . . . funny, in something of the parodic, tongue-in-cheek mode of The Princess
Bride or Austin Powers. If you simply enjoy parody, wordplay, scabrous humor and mind-spinning narrative
developments - The Shanghai Gesture might be just your kind of jeu d'esprit."
-Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"An uproarious, confounding, turbocharged fantasia that manages, alongside all its imaginative bravura, to hold up to our
globalized epoch the fun-house mirror it deserves. This most socially astute writer has fashioned a riotous artifact that
is both self-contained and self-consuming; The Shanghai Gesture is at once a wicked riposte to contemporary failings
and an aesthete's hallucinatory folktale. That the writing can balance Indiana's thoroughgoing pessimism with a yarn of
such imaginative buoyancy is not the least of its achievements."
-James Gibbons, Bookforum
"Captivating and sometimes brilliant... a vaguely apocalyptic sci-fi picaresque that suggests the work of authors as
diverse as J.G. Ballard, Laurence Sterne and Joseph Conrad. Indiana's powerful prose... achieves a gnarled lyricism
and occasionally dips into delightfully left-field digressions on the Belgian Congo or imaginary telenovelas."
-Scott Indrisek, Time Out New York
"The Wizard of Oz meets Naked Lunch... this strange, filthy, uproarious little novel is a riveting read
from start to finish."
-David Zax, Boldtype
"Ambitious . . . gonzo social satire."
-Publishers Weekly
-
Radio Iris
by Anne-Marie Kinney
$16, 192 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9832471-7-3, eISBN 978-1-9375120-4-0
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
* BOOK TRAILER
"Radio Iris has a lovely, eerie, anxious quality to it. Iris's observations are funny,
and the story has a dramatic otherworldly payoff that is unexpected and triumphant."
-Deb Olin Unferth, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
'16 Best Books Out in June'
"A noirish nod to the monotony of work."
-O: The Oprah Magazine
Radio Iris is the story of Iris Finch, a socially awkward daydreamer with a job as the receptionist/personal
assistant to an eccentric and increasingly absent businessman. When Iris is not sitting behind her desk waiting for
the phone to ring, she makes occasional stabs at connection with the earth and the people around her through careful
observation and insomniac daydreams, always more watcher than participant as she shuttles between her one-bedroom
apartment and the office she inhabits so completely, yet has never quite understood.
Her world cracks open with the discovery of “the man next door.” Over the next few weeks or months
(the passage of time is iffy for Iris), she takes it upon herself to learn everything she can about this
stranger. But the closer she gets to him, the more troubling questions at the heart of her own life rise to the
surface, questions like - Why does she keep having the same dream? Why is it that she and her brother don’t
seem to have a single shared memory of their childhood? What is it her boss actually does? In the end, Iris
is faced with a choice she never imagined, and a reality she never knew enough to dread.
Anne-Marie Kinney's work has appeared in Black Clock,
Indiana Review, and Keyhole, and has been performed by Los Angeles’s Word Theatre. Radio Iris is her first novel.
Additional Reviews
"There's almost a noirish feel to this slim book, which offers a surreal look at how tedious
and weird modern corporate life can be."
-Vulture
"There's a Kafkaesque layer of weirdness smeared across everything [but] Radio Iris refuses to limit
itself to the drama of the weird. Instead, within the framework of the facelessness of contemporary
society that it sets up, the novel digs deeper, wrestling with timeless, fundamental questions."
-The Collagist
"Radio Iris exists in a potent unreality, 'The Office' as scripted by Kafka."
-Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"[An] astute evocation of office weirdness and malaise."
-Wall Street Journal
"Iris spends her days in this world, but not of it - always listening, always dreaming, always
looking beneath the surface. Like her protagonist, Kinney is a messenger between worlds, and
the news she brings, is startling and beautiful."
-The Rumpus
"Radio Iris is about a young woman who keeps to herself while also being an allegory of
the global economic collapse. Iris sees the everyday, mundane world through an enviable lens
of detail, wonder and even magic. The larger themes of the novel -- death, reality, family
-- are mirrored in the mystery with which she translates the world around her."
-HTML Giant
"Kinney is a Southern California Camus. She writes the old story of human versus workplace monotony
with a twist. Iris may not be glamorous, but she is persistent, with a front-row seat to the end of
business as usual."
-Los Angeles Magazine
"A first novel with aplomb. Whether read as a parable about the modern workplace, an "Alice in Wonderland"
fable or a portrait of an existential crisis that starts within Iris but spreads outward, the
conclusion is as haunting as could be. Fans of David Lynch's films will appreciate how Iris Finch's
world crumbles around her, literally and figuratively, in this intoxicating debut novel."
-Shelf Awareness
"The language is gorgeous and, especially when spun into Kinney's apt and lyrical reflections
on life, the real reason to read this book."
-Colorado Springs Independent
"One of the year's finest literary debuts, a modern office novel both lyrical and surprising."
-Largehearted Boy
"Gen-Y has an angst-ridden poster girl in Iris Finch."
-Publishers Weekly
"A finely-crafted, subtle thriller. Kinney leads us by the hand so skillfully that everyday happenings
become riveting... Suggestive of Murakami... A very satisfying and engaging read."
-The Brooklyn Rail
"Working for a company that might be called Kafka Ballard & Dickinson, bearing a kind of sonic
witness to a world of static, Iris likes to listen the way some like to watch. Searching for home,
she’s the passenger of her own voice. Anne-Marie Kinney’s Radio Iris is a novel of unsettling
humor and elusive terror, a piercing loneliness and the strangeness of the banal, and a hushed power
that grows in volume before your ears."
-Steve Erickson
"Radio Iris is a revelation, a whimsical, charming and beautifully observed novel about quotidian life. Anne-Marie Kinney's
Iris is a contemporary version of Calvino's Marcovaldo, caught between the rich expression of her own humanity and the random demands
of the workaday world."
-T.C. Boyle
"Radio Iris brings new shimmer and depth to the word 'sensory' - Iris's perceptions are both
keen and open, so mysterious and grounded, and the book builds a narrative of mystery and longing
with visceral, ringing precision."
-Aimee Bender
"In Radio Iris, Anne-Marie Kinney, introduces us to Iris Finch, a young woman of a new lost and lonely generation.
With prose as pitch perfect as the Buddy Holly songs Iris loves, Kinney draws us into a world both familiar and quotidian and unfathomable
and harrowing."
-Bruce Bauman
-
I Smile Back
by Amy Koppelman
$15, 189 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9763895-9-0, eISBN 978-0-9826848-2-5
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15
"Powerful. Koppelman's instincts help her navigate these choppy waters with inventiveness and integrity."
-Paul Kolsby, Los Angeles Times
Laney Brooks acts out. Married with kids, she takes the drugs she wants, sleeps with the men she wants,
disappears when she wants. Lurking beneath Laney's composed surface is the destructive impulse to follow in the
footsteps of her father, to leave and topple her family's balance in the process.
Amy Koppelman lives in New York City with her
husband and two children. She is the author of the novel, A Mouthful of Air.
Additional Reviews
"Koppelman explores with ruthless honesty a woman come undone."
-Bookslut
"Koppelman mosly writes from inside Laney's disillusioned mind, ricocheting between the quotidian details of wife and motherhood and big-picture musings, forming exquisite stand-alone tone poems."
-Elle
"This crushing novel by the author of A Mouthful of Air is a shocking portrait of suburban ennui gone horribly awry.
Koppelman's prose style is understated and crackling; each sentence is laden with a foreboding sense of menace. Like a
crime scene or a flaming car wreck, it becomes impossible not to stare."
-Publishers Weekly
"Laney Brooks is a woman in agony, suffering from an undefined malady that makes standard housewife ennui — boredom from
carpooling or picking up dry cleaning — look like a picnic. Laney’s despair, [is] ably depicted by Amy Koppelman in her
affecting second novel."
-Sara Ivry, Bookforum
"This book is a demanding read, with relentless pacing, a choppy, aggressive tone and a compelling battle for redemption."
-Lilith Magazine
"Koppelman's writing is expressive and nuanced... [a] potent novel."
-Booklist
"[Koppelman's] brave and challenging look beyond appearances of beauty to the ugly reality of a disturbed mind will remain
with readers long after they've finished the book. Highly recommended for literary collections."
-Library Journal
"Koppelman is great at evoking the polarized psychology of a woman pulled between conflicting desires. Imagine the
uncompromising sexual prose of the great Tamara Faith Berger merging with an episode of Mad Men."
-Broken Pencil
-
The Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich
$16, 172 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9820151-8-6, eISBN 978-0-9826848-6-3
* READ AN EXCERPT
* READ STEVE ERICKSON'S INTRODUCTION
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
* BOOK TRAILER
* National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Selection.
* NPR Best Books of 2010: A Hidden Gem.
* The Believer Book Award Finalist.
* Indie Bookseller's Choice Awards Finalist.
* Shelf Unbound Magazine's Top 10 Books of 2010.
"The book feels written in a fever; it is breathless, scary and like nothing I've ever read before. Krilanovich's work
will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins."
-Rachel Syme, NPR
A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who
credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister
along “The Highway That Eats People,” stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks’ “Bob” and the Green River Killer,
known as Dactyl.
Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell Colony
Fellow, and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be
excerpted twice in Black Clock.
Additional Reviews
"One of 2010's small-press triumphs."
-The Week
"Grace Krilanovich’s first book is a steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a
horrific new organism — the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe."
-The Believer
"Rimbaud, Huysmans, Kiernan - they're all in there, along with a very dark and satisfyingly malevolent sense of humor...
The real and the phantasmagorical combine in a chemical reaction."
-Jeff VanderMeer, Omnivoracious
"A relentless existential nightmare as baffling as it is brilliant. Krilanovich dispenses with so many writing norms that
the reader is required to figure out a new way to read. It's a thrilling ride."
-Shelf Unbound Magazine
"This one is a must read."
-BlackBook
"In [Krilanovich's] impressively weird surreal-horror novel The Orange Eats Creeps, 'vampire hobo junkies' rampage
around Portland and its burbs. Think Twilight on the urban growth boundary - except actually interesting."
-Portland Monthly Magazine
"One of the more interesting literary experiences in recent times. The Orange Eats Creeps is sure to make an impression."
-Joshua Chaplinsky, The Cult
"Potent and entirely original."
-Gerry Donaghy, Powell's Review-a-Day
"I know this will be a book I read again and again over the years; it will not be artifice on my shelf, it will be a space."
-Blake Butler, The Nervous Breakdown
"The Orange Eats Creeps contains the hallucinatory, disjointed, plotless, yet bizarrely charming ravings of a
young refugee from foster care who now belongs to a pack of teenage hobo vampires that rove convenience stores and
supermarkets high on Robitussin and mop buckets of coffee. These feral, trashed-out bloodsuckers have nothing to do
with the Twilight crowd, devoid as they are of sex appeal or commercial potential."
-Newsday
"This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. Krilanovich build[s] characters
that most other first-time novelists wouldn't dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language
that you wouldn't expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. [The Orange Eats Creeps
is a] nervy novel. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation."
-Shane Patrick Murphy, The Dominion
"Forget about trite vampire books. In Grace Krilanovich's bold debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, her undead
protagonists are "immoral shithead" junkies, thirsty for blood and cough syrup."
-Mallory Rice, Nylon
"Beautiful and deranged. [Krilanovich] nails the shaky worldview of a supernatural teen narco-insomniac... Being undead,
here, is the defining paradox of the teenage female experience: to be both immortal and rapidly aging."
-Adam Wilson, Bookforum
"Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps rewrites both the vampire novel and fiction in general. Come[s] close
to performing a lobotomy on the reader. Screams with a post-punk adrenaline, like Nightwood on really bad acid."
-Ashley Crawford, 21c Magazine
"If Black Hole is a mythology of adolescence in Seattle in the 1970s, then Krilanovich's book picks up the reins
twenty years later, only slightly to the south in central Oregon. By the end, Krilanovich's narrator has encountered and
embraced her own personal form of hell, which in its horror also contains a great beauty."
-Anne Yoder, The Millions
"[The Orange Eats Creeps is] raw and seething. It snatches up the reader and doesn't let go until the surprising
twist at the end, which is perhaps the most frightening part of the book. The result is a creepy uneasiness and an
impulse to look over your shoulder."
-Samantha Ecker Angerame, The Brooklyn Rail
"Excellent. It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands. Language charges this book.
It provides regular reward from one sentence to the next."
-Darby M. Dixon III, The Collagist
"A hallucinatory deluge, a place where the present and the past are in constant flux, where the mundane and the fantastic
bleed into one another. Like Brian Evenson, Krilanovich borrows certain tropes from horror fiction, but the terror she's
after is a much more elemental one: the loss of self, the question of identity, and the demolition of what could be
considered real."
-Flavorwire
"[Krilanovich's] novel shares a disorienting quality with . . . Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain. And in the end,
the most resonant pit-of-your-stomach dread doesn't come from a roadside killer or fangs poised above a neck. Instead,
its a much simpler scene, something rooted in mundane indifference that brings this novel to its unexpectedly domestic
and achingly painful conclusion."
-Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Amazing. Truly lives up to its hype: it's enormous and insane and magic."
-Blake Butler, HTML Giant
"The year's most horrifying novel. This postmodern gem is both intense and surreal, and one of the most spectacular debuts
I have read in a long time."
-David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"A pretty incredible read."
-Michael Berger, The Rumpus
"[A] slyly arch debut. The story careens from encounter to encounter, bursting into vibrant tableaus of images and barrages
of prickly observations. Krilanovich's postmodern mashup is refreshlingly piquant and playful, reminiscent of postmodern
Euro fiction and full of poison pill observations."
-Publishers Weekly
One of Fall '10's Most Interesting Titles.
-Gawker
"For some the intensity and boldness may be a shock, for the rest of us the exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond
calculation. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here."
-Steve Erickson
"Like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream. The Orange Eats Creeps is visionary,
pervy, unhinged. It will mess you up."
-Shelley Jackson
"Wandering back and forth between the waste spaces of the Northwest and the dark recesses of its narrator's mind,
The Orange Eat Creeps reads like the foster child of Charles Burns' Black Hole and William Burroughs'
Soft Machine. A deeply strange and deeply successful debut."
-Brian Evenson
-
Erotomania: A Romance
by Francis Levy
$14, 162 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9763895-7-6, eISBN 978-1-9375120-0-2
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $14
* Inland Empire Weekly Standout Book of 2008.
* Queerty Top 10 Book of 2008.
"Francis Levy is our generation’s D.H Lawrence, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski rolled into one."
-Bill Kohlhaase, Inland Empire Weekly
A comedic, absurdist portrait of a modern-day romance, Erotomania traces the development of James and Monica,
from a couple that is forced to move to a nuclear fall-out bunker so their explosive sex life doesn't physically harm their
neighbors, to James' one-night bout with alcoholism, to Monica's sexually-fueled obsession with abstractionist expressionism,
to marriage counseling, to a new-found reliance on reality television and microwaveable meals.
Francis Levy's short stories, criticism, humor,
and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star,
The Quarterly, Penthouse, among others. He is co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination,
is a third degree black belt, and blogs at TheScreamingPope.com.
Additional Reviews
"[A] hilariously satirical debut novel. Miller, Lawrence, and Genet stop by like proud ancestors... But it's a more recent
generation of mischievous deviant writers (Nicholson Baker, Mary Gaitskill) that truly looms large."
-Zach Baron, Village Voice
"[Levy's] excellent too, like Miller and Bukowski, on the mechanics and energy and animal filth of rumpy-pumpy,
bringing to his sex scenes all the humor they need. There's a hilarious sequence in which the lovers use art
criticism as a sex aid. Readers will never think of Robert Hughes or the abstract Expressionists in quite the same
way. Sex is familiar, but it's perennial, and Levy makes it fresh."
-Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Levy seems to have an eye for detail for all that is absurd, commonly human, and uniquely American.
Erotomania is recommended for those who are looking for an alternative read that borders on surrealism and is
over-the-top."
-Beth Harrington, Bookslut
"It's a great book, written with flawless verve by a tremendous fictioneer and thinker, and it deserves glory. A classic."
-Andre Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse
"A high-minded yet slapstick take on erotic desire." 4/6 STARS
-Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
"A novel that effectively satirizes traditional tales of romance."
-The L Magazine
"[A] nontraditional love story, with traces of Bukowski and Henry Miller."
-Judith Rosen, Publishers Weekly
(*Erotomania selected by PW as a "hot independent press title for Fall 2008."*)
"The book's raw but thoughtful carnality comes off as at once serious, clever and crude in sending up the absurdities
of contemporary hookings-up. It's not a traditional love story, but debut novelist Levy puts thought and genuine
feeling behind all the doings."
-Publishers Weekly
"[Erotomania] can just as easily be a bookend to the beautifully nuanced prose of Milan Kundera as it can be a
long-version story for a nudie mag minus the accompanying photographs. It's all in the context - as it is with most
relationships."
-Billy Thompson, Quarterly Conversation
"Erotomania wields a comedic punch that makes it, above all, a fun novel to read."
-Joseph Lazauskas, Nerve
-
Seven Days in Rio
by Francis Levy
$16, 146 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9826848-7-0, eISBN 9780983247197
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
"The funniest American novel since Sam Lipsyte's The Ask."
-Village Voice
Kenny Cantor, always dapper in his seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 1818 collection, is a CPA, amateur
psychoanalyst, and sex-tourist vacationing in Rio when he gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic conference.
What ensues is a provocative journey that merges sex and psychoanalysis through Rio’s tawdry netherworld of
Sontag-quoting denizens as only an incendiary voice like Francis Levy could imagine.
Francis Levy's short stories, criticism, humor,
and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star,
The Quarterly, Penthouse, among others. He is co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination,
is a third degree black belt, and blogs at TheScreamingPope.com.
Additional Reviews
"Levy delivers a visceral blend of hilarious satire and study in human sexuality, taking us on
a deviant tour of Rio."
-Royal Young, Interview Magazine
"It's like an erotic version of Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Levy is matter-of-fact in his raunchiness, which is try-and-suppress-your-laughter-because-people
-are-beginning-to-stare-at-you funny. The man is fearless in his exploration of human sexuality."
-Joshua Chaplinsky, The Cult
"A ribald chronicle of [a] 60-something Manhattan accountant, who's come to Rio de Janeiro as a sex tourist. [A] fever dream of a novel."
-New York Times Book Review
"Francis Levy's sex-tourist hero is sucked into a psychoanalytic convention during his Seven Days in Rio."
-Vanity Fair
"Twisted brilliance... Levy is a hilarious satirist, who launches the book with a thunderclap and maintains its
galloping pace throughout."
-The Collagist
"A hilarious and absurdist romp that turns the cultural fascination with sex on its head. This riotous look inside the mind
of a sexually preoccupied, ambitious American male is as intellectually provocative as it is ridiculous."
-Publishers Weekly
"An impressive satirical comedy that tackles themes of sex and psychoanalysis and had me laughing aloud
from the first page to the last."
-Largehearted Boy
"This ironic and absurdist highbrow little sex novel is a hoot. . . . Mr. Levy’s humor is dryer than Monty Python’s but
no less funny, and he combines high and low culture in a particularly appealing way."
-David Cooper, New York Journal of Books
"An incredibly elaborate and well-crafted satire... Levy is wicked smart, has a very strong voice, and is clearly out to poke his Literary knife into our precious little feelings."
-Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Seven Days in Rio is the best buy of the decade; it’s worth a full course of psychoanalytic therapy of
whatever persuasion. Reading this book will have the added benefit of curing you of psychoanalysis itself, not
just the neuroses psychoanlysis guns for. In other words, by reading Levy you get seven days in Rio living like an
exiled great duchess in excellent health and rolling in dough. Additionally, you also get the pleasure of schadenfreude
because you realize that for the price of a book you get what people spent fortunes for in the past. If Levy ever
gets retroactive, he could take the cash from all the business Freud’s spanned and distribute it to you, readers.
You’d all be rich. And smarter. Oh yeah, and he’s hilarious."
-Andrei Codrescu
"Seven Days in Rio is a brilliant comic novel. I marveled throughout at the energy, enthusiasm, and innocence of the
protagonist in his quest for multiple hookers. This is a great gift, to be able to combine so seamlessly a character's
intellectual curiosity with his compulsive horniness, and is especially warming in the cold climate of political correctness.
I hope this book receives all the notice it deserves."
-Robert Brustein
-
Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place
by Scott McClanahan
$16, ISBN 978-1-937512-03-3, 192 pages
* 'A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MCCLANAHAN
FAMILY,' IN FREQUENCIES
* 'CHECKERS,' IN
OXFORD AMERICAN
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
"Crapalachia is the genuine article: intelligent, atmospheric, raucously funny and utterly wrenching.
McClanahan joins Daniel Woodrell and Tom Franklin as a master chronicler of backwoods rural America."
-The Washington Post
Crapalachia is a portrait of Scott McClanahan’s formative years, coming of age in rural
West Virginia, during a stretch of time where he was deeply influenced by his Grandma Ruby and Uncle
Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral
folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.
Beyond the artistry, there is an optimism, a genuine love for people and the past and memories.
Even more, there is a grasp to bridge the disconnect between reader and writer, for McClanahan’s
stories to bind us closer to one another.
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN is the author of Stories II
and Stories V!. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Vice, and New York Tyrant. His novel Hill William
is forthcoming from Tyrant Books.
Additional Reviews
"McClanahan’s deep loyalty to his place and his people gives his story wings: “So now I put the dirt from
my home in my pockets and I travel. I am making the world my mountain.” And so he is."
-Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[Crapalachia is] a wild and inventive book, unquestionably fresh of spirit, and totally unafraid
to break formalisms to tell it like it was."
-Vice
"Part memoir, part hillbilly history, part dream, McClanahan embraces humanity with all its grit, writing
tenderly of criminals and outcasts, family and the blood ties that bind us."
-Interview Magazine
"A brilliant, unnerving, beautiful curse of a book that will both haunt and charmingly engage readers
for years and years and years."
-The Nervous Breakdown
"McClanahan's style is as seductive as a circuit preacher's. Crapalachia is both an homage and a
eulogy for a place where, through the sorcery of McClanahan's storytelling, we can all pull up a chair
and find ourselves at home."
-San Diego City Beat
"[Crapalachia is] McClanahan's best and most affecting work to date. McClanahan is that rare
writers'-writer, an artist whose work you'd just as easily recommend to a teenage kid as to a
distinguished professor."
-The Coffin Factory
"It is the defiance in the writing that is breathtaking, the very aliveness of this voice in the face of
all those dead: the thousands and thousands of dead miners, the dead of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, the dead
of the Sago Mine Disaster, the dead of the Buffalo Creek Flood, the dead of hunger, the dead of a death
by their own hands."
-HTML Giant
"A heartfelt narrative [and] homage to everyday things that are somehow extraordinary. A wonderful eulogy
to a time and a place."
-Verbicide
"Crapalachia is an open-hearted, poetic existential exploration disguised as a southern-fried memoir.
McClanahan has staked out new literary territory and firmly planted the Crapalachian flag there.
Long may it wave."
-Shelf Unbound
"This punchy, inimitable book is one of the best memoirs I can remember reading, a prescient and
preposterous ode to Americana’s charms and failures with enough greasiness to stick to your bones
like homemade gravy."
-The Lit Pub
"[Crapalachia is] a remarkable and rambling personal history, a loving, laughing, eye-rolling and
affectionate portrait of a region, [McClanahan's] home, the place he’s from and therefore who he is."
-The L Magazine
"McClanahan’s frenetic account of life growing up in rural West Virginia practically seethes
with place, with empathy, with humor and violence and the boringness/incredibleness of being young."
-Flavorwire
"In this innovative 'biography,' McClanahan... chronicles the peculiarities of Appalachian life—punctuated
by mine collapses, quotidian tragedies, and recipes for chicken and gravy—and is infused with both
boundless love and the ever-present specter of death... His singular mission is to create a lasting
testament to the people he has loved and he succeeds: [Crapalachia] leaves an enduring
impression."
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred!)
"Though the book doesn’t come out until the middle of next month, I can’t wait until then to say how much
I liked Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia. [McClanahan's] voice is wholly unaffected, and his
account manages to be both comic and unpretentiously sentimental."
-The Paris Review 'Daily'
"McClanahan through words attempts to transform memory into a record of family and friends, to somehow make
them permanently a part of his life—and all our lives... stark, beautiful writing."
-Paste Magazine
-
Damascus
by Joshua Mohr
$16, 208 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9826848-9-4, eISBN 9780983247135
* READ AN EXCERPT IN THE BROOKLYN RAIL
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
* Shelf Unbound Magazine's Best Books of 2011.
"Damascus succeeds in conveying a big-hearted vision."
-Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
It’s 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco’s
Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.
Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar’s proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time,
agrees to host the joint’s first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her
act to the dramatic precipice of the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.
An incredibly creative and fully-rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There’s No Eyebrows, a cancer patient
who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead-singer who
acts too much like a lead-singer; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable.
Joshua Mohr is the author of
Some Things That Meant the World to Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus (forthcoming October 2010).
He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
Additional Reviews
"With a remarkably subtle hand, Mohr leads the reader through a minefield of explosive topics:
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, living with cancer and dealing with addiction. Damascus
transcends all that and is nothing less than a primer on how to love those incapable of loving
themselves."
-San Diego CityBeat
"[An] assured new novel. As gritty and sordid as its details are, Damascus has a soft, sentimental heart."
-The Columbus Dispatch
"Mohr's writing in Damascus works winningly... Some of the humorous touches may remind readers of the prose of Bukowski, but
where he would have shined the spotlight on their drunken stupor, Mohr reveals a more thoughtful, existential consideration of who
these people are. If his work continues in this vein, we may one day instead see Bukowski being compared with Mohr."
-Shelf Awareness
"[Mohr] is the new millennium street poet of San Francisco's Mission District."
-3:AM Magazine
"Mohr continues his impressive trajectory of artistic integrity with an ambitious story of self-pity and redemption, the Iraq war, cancer,
addiction and the purpose of art. At once gripping, lucid and fierce, Damascus is the mature effort of an artist devoted to personal
growth and as such contains the glints of real gold."
-San Francisco Chronicle
"There is no greater achievement than being able to locate the sacred in the profane, to raise the light out of the dark, to find the sage
in the alcoholic. As Mohr makes sense of our illogical drunken ramblings, he also finds the human element in characters most often overlooked.
Mohr's got an inherent ability to spin a yarn; it's as if he's standing over your shoulder lighting each page with a match as you read.
Damascus is a scrapbook of all the things from our lives we worried would get lost in the wind."
-The Rumpus
"We'll tell you what [Joshua Mohr] did accomplish [with Damascus]: the feat of bringing a pathetic dying man, an alcoholic semi-prostitute,
and a naive performance artist to full literary life while at once intelligently exploring various viewpoints on the war in Iraq. Oh,
do we dig this book."
-Shelf Unbound
"Rife with themes of humanity, passion, and determined resilience... this accomplished effort
demonstrates Mohr's rich, resonant prose, authentically rendered settings, and deft characterization."
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review)
"Reading like a cross between Harry Crews and Armistead Maupin, [Damascus]
has a wacky authenticity and demonstrates the preciousness of life. For immediate consumption
by fans of gritty reality; an outstanding achievement."
-Library Journal (*Starred Review)
"Moving, bitterly charming, sometimes depressing, but always engaging."
-HTML Giant
"What elevates Damascus from the mire of its fatalism is its immense compassion."
-Zyzzyva
"Quite a feat. Mohr treats his characters with such tenderness that he managed to squeeze the blood
of empathy from this turnip I call a heart."
-LitReactor
"A better understanding of our sweetly seedy city we could not ask for."
-SF Weekly
"The extraordinary low road characters that make up the saloon world of Damascus rush straight at the reader right
from the opening bell. In this startling and original work, Joshua Mohr explores the dark side of the human condition
with compassion, humor and dangerous precision."
-Rudolph Wurlitzer
"Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Behind his wayward
and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist."
-Jonathan Evison
-
Some Things That Meant the World to Me
by Joshua Mohr
$15.50, 205 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9820151-1-7, eISBN 9780982684801
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15.50
* O: The Oprah Magazine's #8 of 10 Terrific Reads of 2009.
* San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller.
"Mohr's prose roams with chimerical liquidity."
-Boston's Weekly Dig
When Rhonda was a child – abandoned and ignored by his mother; abused and misguided by his mother’s boyfriend
– he imagined the rooms of his home drifting apart from one another like separating continents. Years later, after
an embarassing episode as an adult, Rhonda’s inner-child appears, leading him to a trapdoor in a most unlikely place
that will force him to finally confront his troubled past.
Joshua Mohr is the author of
Some Things That Meant the World to Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus (October 2011).
He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
Additional Reviews
"Meet Rhonda, a man who spends his haunted, liquor-fueled days Dumpster diving for redemption. With his first line —
"I'd like to brag about the night I saved a hooker's life" — debut writer Joshua Mohr sucks you into Some Things That
Meant the World to Me. Charles Bukowski fans will dig the grit in this seedy novel, a poetic rendering of postmodern
San Francisco culminating in, of all places, Home Depot."
-O: The Oprah Magazine
"This trippy, hypnotic and volatile little novel packs immense punch into a slim volume. Mohr's debut shows more than
promise for a rich, risk-taking future, and, with irreverent wit and a jolting attention to detail, gives a whole new
spin to novels about the aftermath of "trauma." Amid a landscape of psychological surrealism, the protagonist, Rhonda,
is unforgettably vulnerable and emotionally real."
-The Nervous Breakdown
"A novel of visceral realism and an exploration of a damaging youth. Grit seems to be the theme, but despite its darkness
the narrative prose soars. [A] blunt, fearless novel."
-Web100.com
"What Joshua Mohr is doing has more in common with Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Haruki Murakami, all great chroniclers of
the fantastic. He's interested in something weirder than mere sex, drugs, and degradation."
-Joshua Furst, The Rumpus
"Joshua Mohr's debut novel is that rare literary gem: the kind of story that envelops you so wholly, you forget that
you're reading. The kind of book you want to lend to everyone you know - except that you can't bear to part with it.
I haven't felt this enamored of a book since I first encountered Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son more than a decade ago."
-Sheila Ashdown, Powells Review-A-Day
"Joshua Mohr’s debut novel, Some Things That Meant the World to Me, is where Michael Gondry would go if he went down a
few too many miles of bad desert road. Replace the director’s Science of Sleep -style clouds-of-cotton whimsy with harsh
whiskey and hot sand and you get a sense for the dark world Mohr constructs. Dark, yet not pitch black: he pits his vision
of ugly realities against one of basic human kindness. It is this tension that gives his engaging novel its emotional power."
-Darby Dixon III, The Collagist
"Share[s] an affinity for the human condition, in all its selfish, demanding, utterly human reality... Some Things That Meant
the World to Me embrace[s] and affirm[s] the value of the lives we're in."
-Kel Munger, Sacramento Bee
"Stunning... Mohr's protagonist Rhonda is unforgettably crafted, and this gritty tale of self-redemption is told with exacting
prose and poetic insight."
-Largehearted Boy
"Mohr's first novel is biting and heartbreaking, a piercing look at the indelible scars a violent past has left on a young man
named Rhonda. The disturbing narrative engine - Rhonda's renaming and reimagining of the world around him to fit into his
damaged logic - keeps the story creepily moving as it touches on homebrew prison wine and Rhonda's friendship with his
childhood self, little-Rhonda. Mohr uses punchy, tightly wound prose to pull readers into a nightmarish landscape,
but he never loses the heart of his story; it's as touching as it is shocking."
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred)
"In his first novel, Joshua Mohr nearly accomplishes a masterpiece." Grade: A
-Campus Circle
-
Termite Parade
by Joshua Mohr
$16, 180 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9820151-6-2, eISBN 9780982684832
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* BOOK TRAILER
* Sacramento Bee Best Read of 2010.
"[A] wry and unnerving story of bad love gone rotten. [Mohr] has a generous understanding of his characters, whom he describes
with an intelligence and sensitivity that pulls you in. This is no small achievement."
-Rebecca Barry, New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
Termite Parade tells the story of Mired, the self-described "bastard daughter of a menage a trois between
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sylvia Plath, and Eeyore." Mired catalogs her "museum of emotional failures," the latest entry to
which is her boyfriend Derek, an auto mechanic (whose body may or may not be infested with termites), who loses his cool
carrying her up the stairs to their apartment.
Joshua Mohr is the author of
Some Things That Meant the World to Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus (forthcoming October 2011).
He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
Additional Reviews
"Explodes with pyrotechnic prose. Termite Parade flaunts the big burning heart on Mohr's sleeve, wildly tossing
it about to light the way in a relentless search for answers to the unanswerable."
-Adam Hall, Rain Taxi
"Mohr writes like John Milton living in a garbage dump, and always infuses a tiny thread of what might be hope."
-Kel Munger, Sacramento Bee
"An entertaining romp through the minds of three seemingly sadistic nobodies as they each attempt to exonerate themselves for
their parts in a twisted story. The book is similar to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: the most crucial action
serves as a portal to and wellspring for the various psychologies of its characters. But Mohr's storytelling is so absorbing
that Termite Parade does not read like an analytical rumination; if he is examining the very nature of these characters under
a microscope, he at least lets the specimens speak for themselves."
-Evan Karp, San Francisco Chronicle
"Written with as much heart as brawn, Termite Parade is a sucker punch to literary complacency, without a hint
of authorial self-absorption. Mohr is a post-millennial Bukowski with a dash of Hubert Selby, Jr. thrown in for good
measure, and with only two published novels under his belt, he is rapidly becoming one of my favorite American novelists."
-Gerry Donaghy, Powell's Review-A-Day
"Mohr's energetic, almost frenetic prose grab[s] readers by the shirt and [doesn't] let go."
-Kevin Nolan, The Rumpus
"[The] delicate combination of vulnerability and sliminess, Mohr's specialty, is fascinating."
-Gabriel Blackwell, The Collagist
"One of the year's most thrilling works of literary fiction."
-David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"With his second novel, Termite Parade, Joshua Mohr sounds the depths of the space between human decency and indecency;
he does so to striking, engaging effect."
-Darby M. Dixon III, Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks
"Mohr's prose strikes a delicate balance between revulsion and beauty. Termite Parade is a treat, an unlikely
redemption story with a distinctly San Francisco flavor."
-San Francisco Magazine
"A fresh take on the Bukowskian milieu of dirtbags, drunks, and drifters. [Mohr's] language is propulsive, raw, and
sympathetic without being overly sentimental. Mohr's insistent prose propels the novel's surreal investigation of
guilt, love, and duplicity."
-San Francisco Weekly
"Joshua [Mohr] is one of those writers I like best because he writes stuff I would never write. Approaches narratives
in a way I wouldn’t approach them. Pushes himself (and me) out of his comfort zone. That excites me. Josh’s characters
rescue burnt sofas. Push their lovers down stairwells. Wallow in dumpsters. And his language never ceases to surprise."
-Jonathan Evison, Three Guys One Book
"The story is a veritable microscope of humanity at its worst (and maybe a glimpse of it near its best), it examines both our
motives and the consequences of our actions in a very readable fashion."
-Campus Circle
"The prose is oddly lovely [with] a frenzied climax that calls for a tumbler of whiskey."
-Publishers Weekly
"A humorous little ditty involving twins, domestic violence, and lots of drinking."
-Black Book
-
1940
by Jay Neugeboren
$15, ISBN 978-0-9763895-6-9, 274 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15
"Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of our most
honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction. This new book is, at once, a beautifully realized work of
imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively
readable story. Neugeboren is marvelous. Part of the power of this intelligently and finely wrought novel is that...
thoughts and questions arise unforced from the story, as though from life itself."
-Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
Set on the eve of America's entry into World War Two and built around a fascinating historical figure, Dr. Eduard Bloch,
an Austrian doctor who was the only Jew for whom Hitler
ever personally arranged departure from Europe.
1940 focuses on Dr. Bloch's relationship with Elizabeth Rofman, a medical illustrator who has come to New York
to visit her father, only to find that he has, mysteriously, disappeared.
The story grows more complex when Elizabeth's son Daniel, a disturbed young adolescent, escapes from the institution
in Maryland where his parents have committed him.
Jay Neugeboren is the author of fifteen books, including
two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began), two award-winning books of non-fiction
(Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and three collections of award-winning stories. He has won six
consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. He lives in New York City.
Additional Reviews
"Intelligent and absorbing . . . subtle and affecting."
-Tova Reich, Washington Post
"The wisdom of Neugeboren's novel comes from its recognition that final solutions evade without answering questions. Bloch
rejects facile attempts to explain Hitler and subdue Daniel. The advice he quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke, "to have patience
with everything unresolved and to try to love the questions themselves," is as valuable in 2008 as it is in 1940."
-Steven G. Kellman, The Huffington Post
"Jay Neugeboren's 1940 is a taut, nuanced, beautifully written novel that captures an anxious and uncertain time in
ways that a straight rendering of facts and dates could never achieve. Neugeboren casts a spell on the first page of his novel
that never goes away. This memorable work of historical fiction is to be contemplated as well as savored."
-Commonweal
"This tautly constructed, utterly readable book raises questions the reader must answer. Highly recommended."
-Library Journal, Starred Review
"Jay Neugeboren has performed an astounding feat of literary alchemy, effortlessly blending science, history, religion, art,
biography and psychiatry into a haunting tale that is at once a love story and a suspense novel."
-Hadassah Magazine
"Neugeboren's first novel in 20 years presents a fictional account of an obscure historical figure in this intelligent,
densely layered novel. Neugeboren's characters are nuanced and complex, especially the strong-willed Elisabeth... the great
characters and the author's thoughtful examination of good and evil pack a cerebral punch."
-Publishers Weekly
"A compelling read on many levels, offering personal reflection, historical speculation, and mystery."
-Kirkus Reviews
"There is plenty of imagination exercised in 1940. This strange story, encompassing several mysteries and theological
reflection, has a curious power and pull."
-Gerald Sorin, Haaretz
"1940 is simultaneously a psychological thriller and a love story, and am impressive blending of research and the imagination.
Neugeboren's novel is a page turner, and better yet, a chance to meet, up close and personal, a largely unknown figure: Hitler's
childhood physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch."
-Sanford Pinsker, JBooks.com
"Neugeboren's 1940 is clever in all the right ways and in none of the wrong ways - intricate, impeccably researched, but
never pretentious, didactic, or self-indulgent. It is also never dull; though brimming with ideas, many of them disquieting,
it is a highly engrossing read. We read, and re-read, 1940, though, not for these gifts, welcome as they are, but for its
engagement with some of the deepest issues of our time and, in its grappling with the enigmas of the human soul, of all time.
Neugeboren has started with the impropable and produced something indelible."
-Joseph Triebwasser, Midstream
-
The Other Side of the World
by Jay Neugeboren
$16.50, ISBN 978-0-9826848-8-7, 276 pages
* ORDER FOR $16
"Epic... The Other Side of the World can charm you with its grace, intelligence and scope
... [An] inventive novel.”
-Mark Athitakis, Washington Post
Charlie Eisner is a journeyman whose friend Nick convinces him to move to Singapore,
where he falls in love with the vibrant and endangered world of nearby Borneo. One night, at
a party in Nick’s Singapore apartment, Nick dies mysteriously, prompting Charlie to return to New
England, where he discovers that Seana O’Sullivan has moved in with his father, Max, a retired
professor with a beguiling and antic disposition. Seana, one of his father’s former students,
is a wildly successful and provocative writer who is equally wild and provocative in life.
Together, she and Charlie set out on a road trip, first to pay respects to Nick’s parents, and then on a
journey where “weird things happen if you make room for them.”
From the lush forests of Borneo to the mean streets of Brooklyn and the haunting towns
of coastal Maine, The Other Side of the World is a grand, episodic novel and yet another virtuoso
performance by one of America’s most revered living writers.
Jay Neugeboren is the author of sixteen books, including
two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began), two award-winning books of non-fiction
(Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and four collections of award-winning stories. He has won six
consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. He lives in New York City.
Additional Reviews
"Neugeboren presents a meditation on life, love, art and family relationships that's reminiscent of the
best of John Updike.”
-Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"A successful novel of literary asides, broken families, exotic travel and Auden's "vague, quasi-mystical
experience called 'falling in love.'”
-Shelf Awareness
"A story of life, living, and learning, The Other Side of the World is an enticing and
literary work of fiction.”
-Midwest Book Review
"Great in scope, a thoughtful and provocative examination of relationships in all their forms.”
-Largehearted Boy
-
You Are My Heart and Other Stories
by Jay Neugeboren
$16, 180 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9826848-8-7, eISBN 9780983247166
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
"[Neugeboren] might not be as famous as some of his compeers, like Philip Roth or John Updike, but it's becoming
increasingly harder to argue that he's any less talented. Neugeboren's new short story collection serves as a
convincing piece of evidence of the author's rare talent... dazzlingly smart and deeply felt... Jay Neugeboren is
music to our ears."
-Michael Schaub, Kirkus Reviews
From the secluded villages in the south of France, to the cattle crawl in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa, to
the hard-knock adolescent streets of Brooklyn, Jay Neugeboren examines the great mysteries and complexities that unsettle
and comprise human relationships.
Jay Neugeboren is the author of fifteen books, including
two prize-winning novels (The Stolen Jew, Before My Life Began), two award-winning books of non-fiction
(Imagining Robert, Transforming Madness), and three collections of award-winning stories. He has won six
consecutive Syndicated Fiction Prizes. He lives in New York City.
Additional Reviews
"Jay Neugeboren’s You Are My Heart is an object lesson in imaginative empathy and observational intelligence.
His fiction for years now has had the courage to be quiet and careful and comprehensively humane, but it’s in no way slight.
One of his great subjects has been the damage that even the most caring and thoughtful can inflict, and though these stories
take place all over the world, they’re at heart about the difference between the America to which we aspire and the America
in which we live."
-Jim Shepard
"While fascinations resurface - Schubert's B-Flat Trio, the Irishness of Henry James - what unites
these stories is fighting: in the ring, in the pacific, and inside the bottle. Neugeboren's
heroes fight disease, intolerance, and, yes, the ones they love the most."
-The Rumpus
"Neugeboren's stories have a quiet intensity that resonates long after the final paragraph.
You Are My Heart makes it clear that Neugeboren, now in his seventies, is still very much
at the top of his game."
-Hadassah Magazine
"These stories span the globe, from France, to South Africa, and back to Brooklyn, mimicking
Neugeboren's wide range of mastery. A splendid volume by a writer whose indefagitable curiosity
continues to produce insightful and illuminating fictions."
-Notre Dame Review
"The stories are beautifully written, and Neugebroen's characters are utterly human, unable to
suppress their darkest urges."
-Columbia Magazine
"Perhaps it's doomed glory, more than boomers in France or young men in fifties America, where Neugeboren
seems most comfortable of all."
-Ploughshares
"In its explorations of faith, Brooklyn, medicine, and politics... the tone is elevated, and the voice confident."
-Publishers Weekly
"The stories in Jay Neugeboren's new collection are astonishingly good,
each one fresh, startling, sometimes shocking in its originality - with
a complex and subtle substructure binding the whole group together."
-Madison Smartt Bell
-
Crust
by Lawrence Shainberg
$15, ISBN 978-0-9763895-8-3, 219 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15
"The Great American Nose-Picking Novel. A witty, erudite and gleefully gross-out satire of our information-clogged
and techno-bananas age. An energetic and thrillingly modern romp."
-Stuart Hammond, Dazed & Confused
Walker Linchuk is an aged writer and author of the Complete Series (The Complete Book of Aids, 9/11, Terrorism)
whose name has often been discussed as a strong possibility for the Nobel Prize, suffering from a seven month plague of writer's
block that New York Magazine says, "for candor and anguish, surpasses any we have on record." One morning Linchuk
wakes to find a crust in his nose - the "definitive crust of his life" - that awakens him to a new world of desire and
enlightenment.
Lawrence Shainberg is the author of two novels —
One on One and Memories of Amnesia — and the non-fiction books Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World
and Ambivalent Zen. His fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York
Times Magazine. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for a monograph on Samuel Beckett, published in The Paris
Review.
Additional Reviews
"[A] Vonnegut-worthy satire."
-Joshua Glenn, Boston Globe
"Filled with pop-cultural references and technology gone wild."
-Publishers Weekly
"There's something to offend everybody and entertain many in this engagingly subversive novel from the resolutely
quirky author... Among the most amusing fiction picks for fall."
-Kirkus Reviews
"A postmodern examination of the self that teases the very idea of postmodernism... that rare bit of lampoonery that
is both humorous and smart."
-Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[Crust] ridicules our culture's obsession wtih the search for Truth, as well as our reliance on Google as the
gatekeeper to our every question. In between cringing and laughing, you're bound to feel a touch more enlightened
about contemporary culture."
-Jessica Herman, Time Out Chicago
"Half DeLillo's Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill, and half Christopher Hitchens,
Linchak is a model pundit for a post-9/11 age: death-obsessed, long-winded, addicted to Googling himself, and,
on the sly, an inveterate nose-picker. Crust is about mindless compulsion, or the digital stretch for oblivion,
or a comment on the jaded habits of a citizenry that's had its private domain annexed by omnipotent admen."
-Zach Baron, Village Voice
-
The Drummer
by Anthony Neil Smith
$14, ISBN 978-0-9763895-2-1, 228 pages
* ORDER FOR $14
* January Magazine Notable Book of 2006.
"Smith writes with force and clarity."
-Chicago Tribune
80's hair metal band Savage Night is living the rockstar fantasy. All that changes when the band
learns they owe more money than they have. The Drummer chooses to shave his head,
take the next flight back to the States, torch the mansion that his stripper ex-girlfriend designed, and fake his own death.
15 years after their tragic collapse, the Singer of Savage Night has tracked down the Drummer in hopes of convincing
him to come out of hiding for a reunion tour and second shot at glory. The chase is on, as the press, the Feds, and former
bandmates hunt the Drummer down the streets of New Orleans. A novel soaked in sex, drugs, and tequila, The Drummer is a
stiff cocktail of crotch-grabbing hair-metal and New Orleans noir.
Anthony Neil Smith is the author of
Psychosomatic, Yellow Medicine, and Hogdoggin, and for five years was the co-editor of
Plots With Guns.
-
How To Get Into the Twin Palms
by Karolina Waclawiak
$16, 200 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9832471-8-0, eISBN 9781937512057
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16
* ORDER AN EPUB EBOOK FOR $9.99
* ORDER A MOBI EBOOK FOR $9.99
* BOOK TRAILER
* Salon's What to Read Awards: 'Most Overlooked Book of the Year'
"Waclawiak's novel reinvents the immigration story. How to Get Into the Twin Palms
movingly portrays a protagonist intent on both creating and destroying herself, on burning brightly even
as she goes up in smoke."
-Abigail Deutsch, New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
How To Get Into the Twin Palms is the story of Anya, a young woman living in a Russian neighborhood in
Los Angeles, who struggles between retaining her parents' Polish culture and trying to assimilate into her adopted
community. She lusts after Lev, a Russian man who frequents the Twin Palms nightclub down the block from Anya's apartment.
It is Anya's wish to gain entrance to this seeminly exclusive club. How To Get Into the Twin Palms is a really funny
and often moving book that provides a unique twist on the immigrant story, and provides a credible portrait of the city of Los Angeles,
literally burning to the ground.
"It was a strange choice to decide to pass as a Russian. But it was a question of proximity and level of allure.
Russians were everywhere in Los Angeles, especially in my neighborhood and held a certain sense of mystery. I had long
attempted to inhabit my Polish skin and was happy to finally crawl out of it. I would never tell my mother. She only
thought of them as crooks and beneath us. They felt the same about us, we were beneath them. It had always been a
question of who was under whom."
Karolina Waclawiak
received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is the Deputy Editor of The Believer
and lives and writes in Brooklyn.
Additional Reviews
"The novel is beautifully written and so suffused with loneliness it makes you ache. Not only is
How to Get into the Twin Palms about the overwhelming state that is displacement, it's about what
happens when loneliness becomes unbearable. Waclawiak writes through these tensions so elegantly,
so tenderly, that How to Get Into the Twin Palms is, by far,
one of my favorite books this year."
-Roxane Gay, The Rumpus
"Excellent... Waclawiak's book turns the traditional immigrant novel on its head, or maybe turns
it inside out, or maybe just dyes its hair a nice shade of 'Black Stilettos,' turning its
ears black in the process.”
-Flavorwire
Author of the Week.
"Karolina Waclawiak has upended the immigrant's tale."
-The Week
"Waclawiak writes about loneliness, isolation, and determination in a refreshing and quirky way.”
-Vulture
"Waclawiak writes of Anya's struggle to belong with wit and sensitive insight...[a] fantastic debut.”
-Shelf Awareness
"Masked by scenes of schmancy nightlife is a story about an immigrant wanting to belong. Barely
getting by in LA on bingo-calling, Anya reinvents herself. With hair dye and a push-up bra, she
tries to gain entry into the Twin Palms nightclub.”
-Marie Claire
"Sex-crazed, surreal, dreamy, violent, escapist, and always searching for some kind of truth.
The book makes me think of questions I ask myself all the time. How can you separate yourself
from the generations of women that have come before you? Is it even possible? Do you like
these ancient parts of yourself? Are you proud of them or ashamed?”
-HTML Giant
"Karolina Waclawiak's debut novel, How to Get Into the Twin Palms, presents a vividly drawn
portrait of Los Angeles inhabited by alienated immigrants, Russian gangsters, and
sex-starved bingo-addicted octogenarians -- all enveloped by smoldering fires
that threaten to burn the city down.”
-Christine Schutt, Poets & Writers
"Comical, but the story is deep, as Anya bumps up against the world in an attempt to define her identity
as both an immigrant and a woman.”
-Shelf Unbound Magazine
"A taut debut... [that] strikes with the creeping suddenness of a brush fire."
-Publishers Weekly (*Starred*)
"Waclawiak takes the immigrant novel and spins it on its head. A great addition to 1.5 generation literature,
beautifully written, funny and touching.”
-Gary Shteyngart
-
The Drop Edge of Yonder
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
$15, 274 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9763895-5-2, eISBN 9780982684818
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15
* Time Out New York's #1 Best Book of 2008.
* ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal for Literary Fiction.
"The most hallucinogenic western you'll ever catch in the movie
house of your mind's eye. What results is a genre farce with oracular power - a Queen of Hearts sutra, a court jester's
Blood Meridian. With Drop Edge, Wurlitzer has
considerably raised the stakes."
-Erik Davis, Bookforum
The Drop Edge of Yonder begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest,
a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up
the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields. Along the trail, Zebulon becomes involved in a series
of tragic love triangles, witnesses the death of his mother and father, and confronts the age-old questions of life,
love, and death.
Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels
Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
He has written numerous screenplays, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker.
Additional Reviews
"A picaresque American Book of the Dead... in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut and Terry Southern."
-David Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] funny, inquisitive novel [that] asks readers to re-examine their ideas of the Western frontier and personal freedom."
-Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal
"Wurlitzer delivers a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. This furiously told legend weaves
history and myth into a riotous tale."
-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"There's a bawdy, lunatic thrill to the tale that seems somehow radical. It's the kind of book someone will stick in a
back pocket before heading out on the trail into the unknown."
-Nathan Ihara, LA Weekly
"Drop Edge occupies a space between the whimsical and the mystical, the silly and the sublime. Wurlitzer’s philosophical,
humorous, and visionary yarn guides the reader into a landscape in which to wander around and get lost, a West that leads
into the numinous terra incognita between sleep and waking, life and death, and toward the contemplation of what it means
to cross a frontier."
-Anthony Miller, LA CityBeat
"In his hero, Zebulon Shook, Wurlitzer has invented a funny, acerbic, hugely compelling representative of American heroism.
This is that rare story that improves as it expands, not unlike another rambling picaresque, Don Quixote."
-Mark Athitakis, Washington City Paper
"Wurlitzer's most satisfying read to date... should be as well known as anything by Cormac McCarthy, Steve Erickson,
or Jim Harrison. A pure blast of vituoso storytelling. [Drop Edge] is a book that shows us our own reflection at this
exact moment in our history - America as a flailing, undomesticated, wild-eyed, hairy brawler, with a big, confused heart
in rebellion against the coarse exigencies of existence and civilization."
-Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review
"An epic Western and a summation of all that's great about Wurlitzer's novels and film scripts... an old hand laying down
what may well be the best piece of writing he's ever done."
-Arthur Magazine
"Mesmerizing. A Western as Celine might have written one."
-Michael Greenberg, Times Literary Supplement of London
",i>The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer's first novel in 24 years, is his best to date. It's the rare book that possesses not
just big ideas, but the daring cleverness to pull them off." 5/6 Stars
-Michael Miller, Time Out New York
"An epic Western that merges the unique narrative invention of [Wurlitzer's] early novels with the cinematic drift of his
best scripts."
-Dazed & Confused
"[A] psychedelic adventure... Ruminative and rip-roaring at once."
-Entertainment Weekly
"[Wurlitzer's] vivid language has a poetic, almost magical, intensity. An atmospheric work that fuses the road novel
and the western. [A] western [that] beautifully captures the glimmering maya of a gold-and-gun-and-sex-crazed frontier."
-Brooklyn Rail
"Simply the most wonderful book I have read all year."
-Largehearted Boy
"Wurlitzer opens up his cold-blooded prose veins with the blade of the western genre, and something sinister and mystically
unsettling gushes out."
-Baltimore City Paper
-
Flats / Quake
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
$17, ISBN 978-0-9820151-4-8, 240 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT FROM FLATS
* READ AN EXCERPT FROM QUAKE
* READ MICHAEL GREENBERG'S INTRODUCTION
* ORDER FOR $17
"Push aside Brautigan and Ginsberg and make room in the curriculum for Wurlitzer as an overlooked and undervalued
voice of the counterculture of the '60s and '70s, wedged comfortably between the collected works of Willam S.
Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson."
-Rodger Jacobs, PopMatters.com
Flats is a post-apocalyptic exploration of the human self. Submerged amidst a cast of faceless characters
named after ruined American cities who compete over a shrinking fringe of space, Flats is a modern masterpiece of
the counterculture.
Quake chronicles the unraveling of society after an earthquake strikes ’60s Los Angeles. By painting a
bleak picture of what people are capable of doing to one another in extreme circumstances, Quake is nihilistic and
haunting, as well as uncomfortably foreboding. And more relevant than ever.
Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels
Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
He has written numerous screenplays, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker.
Additional Reviews
"Each book is short, but dense and trippy. If you want to know what it felt like to be a reader in the late 60's and
early 70's, when so many new experimental works were put out by mainstream publishers, these books are great places
to start. Nog even had a blurb from Thomas Pynchon ("the novel of bullshit is dead!"), Flats wore its Samuel Beckett
influence proudly on its sleeve, Quake took us through a slo mo pomo earthquake in L.A. Together they provide a tour
of the dissolution of identity that was daily life in the late sixties."
-Michael Silverblatt, KCRW
"Reading Rudolph Wurlitzer's novels is like watching a road movie backward. In his 1969 underground classic, Nog,
the narrator drifts across an amorphous terrain on which his shifting identity molds itself like soft clay. Flats
and Quake mine much the same territory, a post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling has been blown to
bits. Quake reads like a mash-up of On the Road and Waiting for Godot. For the first time in more than three decades,
it's possible to investigate the interplay between Wurlitzer's novels and his screenplays, the way his radical experiments
in one informed his canny deconstruction of the other."
-Sam Adams, Los Angeles Times
"The reader, the writer, and the denizens of [Flats] all get taken for a ride here, then are set down, slightly more
cracked than they were before. [Quake] is Wurlitzer at his most Pynchonian. The frontier - alluded to in Flats,
deconstructed in Wurlitzer's 1973 screenplay for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and played for laughs in last year's
Drop Edge of Yonder - is again the subject [in Quake], posited this time as the place where humans turn back into
whatever they turn back into when the marijuana and Social Security run out."
-Zach Baron, Village Voice
-
Nog
by Rudolph Wurlitzer
$15.50, ISBN 978-0-9820151-2-4, 141 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15.50
"[Nog's] combo of Samuel Beckett syntax and hippie-era freakiness mapped out new literary territory for generations
to come."
-Michael Miller, Time Out New York
In Wurlitzer’s signature hypnotic and haunting voice, Nog tells the tale of a man adrift through the American
West, armed with nothing more than his own three pencil-thin memories and an octopus in a bathysphere.
Rudolph Wurlitzer is the author of the novels
Nog, Flats, Quake, and Slow Fade, and a non-fiction book, Hard Travel to Sacred Places.
He has written numerous screenplays, including Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Two Lane Blacktop, and Walker.
Additional Reviews
"There is so much momentum toward the future in this cross-country journey that a reader could easily feel as though the author
had pulled out the stopper to let the past and the present go rushing down the drain. In other words, the scary parts are
when it starts to make sense. There is tripping, there are tattoos, there is sex with multiple partners (arms, legs, all
very loving). Go West! Go East! Cowboys, Buddhists and cowboy Buddhists abound. A bit of Jack Kerouac, a bit of James Joyce
in the moments of revelation when the clouds part... This is not the '60s of sweet kids and folk music; nor is it sinister
and doomed to an irrelevant old age. The trippiness contains an Ariadne's thread to something older and more meaningful:
an effort to break free, a hero's tale."
-Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"The revival of Rudy Wurlitzer's first novel, Nog, with a fresh introduction by Erik Davis, introduces a lucky
new generation of readers to an essential piece of '60s literature that remains as crunchy and toothsome yet
unsettling a nonpareil as it registered upon its debut. Nog's capricious West Coast encounters with a host of
American purebreds, from the hippies Lockett and Meridith to the right-wing gun nut Bench, all couched in droll
vernacular, provides a constant impetus to turn page after page in this surreal California phantasmagoria."
-Paul DiFilippo, Barnes & Noble Review
Summer Book Pick: "Nog - part quest novel, part Western, part artifact of late-'60s acid culture - pushes the
boundaries of selfhood in a highly readable and often hilarious way."
-Jed Lipinski, Village Voice
"Wurlitzer is working on some strange, big stuff that only novelists in the '60s - and Denis Johnson - were allowed to do.
One can't ever be sure of anything in Nog, except that the delirium has aged well."
-Jonathan Messinger, Time Out Chicago
"Nog is no airport novel. Nog is a subtle and nomadic book, a great counterforce to the loud,
sentimental, novels of bullshit that take up so much space in today's literary landscape."
-Matt McGregor, The Rumpus
"A successful and haunting piece of experimental fiction, and a reader who has enjoyed it will press it upon others."
-Jeremy Hatch, The Quarterly Conversation
"Wurlitzer is a true American master of literary form. If all art is at once surface and symbol, as Oscar Wilde suggests
in the preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, then Wurlitzer's 1969 debut novel is the ultimate expression of that statement,
a writhing copperhead snake that is difficult to hold onto but spellbinding to observe in its raw, natural beauty."
-Rodger Jacobs, PopMatters.com
"Reading Nog is akin to reading other counterculture books of the era, particularly the works of Richard Brautigan.
That Nog continues to endure is a sign that the novel transcends its existence as a cultural artifact to emerge as a
work of continuing resonance."
-Gerry Donaghy, Powells.com
-
The Cave Man
by Xiaoda Xiao
$15.50, 184 pages,
ISBN 978-0-9820151-3-1, eISBN 9780982684856
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $15.50
"As a parable of modern China, [The Cave Man] is chilling."
-Barbara Fisher, The Boston Globe
Ja Feng is contained within a three-foot by four-and-one-half-foot solitary confinement cell in a prison camp. He has
survived this punishment for a miraculous nine months, a period of time that has forced him to question his most basic
thoughts and perceptions.
The Cave Man follows Ja Feng once he is released from his solitary confinement, as he is forced to integrate
with fellow prisoners who view his skeletal figure and erratic screaming fits as freakish, and his heartbreaking attempts
to assimilate into Chinese culture, to reestablish familial bonds and to seek out an ordinary human experience.
Xiaoda Xiao has published stories based on his
prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in China in various magazines, including
The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of the memoir-in-stories The Visiting Suit.
Additional Reviews
"[A] powerful book, bringing to the forefront the awful grace of man's will to survive, no matter what.
A moving story and an important book that sheds light not only on historical events but present ones."
-Kassie Rose, WOSU
"When it comes to prison literature, China remains a great enigma. Whereas the Soviet Union gave us Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, China has, of yet, produced no such comparable international voice in the modern age. Xiaoda Xiao's
The Cave Man is... a small start... a compelling look at Mao's forced labor prisons."
-Laurel Maury, The Los Angeles Times
"Like Kafka's fiction, Xiaoda's novel illustrates an individual's powerlessness in the face of a pitiless bureaucracy.
But he blends that familiar predicament with a more specifically Chinese tragedy, in which the same individual fails
to re-integrate into a culture that is nothing if not inexorably collective. Xiaoda's storytelling has plenty of
antic vigor for all its grimness, fueled by an activist's anger."
-Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post
"In The Cave Man, Xiao displays a splendid voice, one all his own. Like Solzhenitsyn, he has transformed his camp
experience into sublimely vivid fiction. And like Kafka, Xiao memorably conjures a mad, surreal world, along with
its potential both for cruelty and for kindness. A masterful storyteller, Xiao offers us a gorgeously crafted,
haunting tale rich in narrative invention as well as character. The Cave Man is as luminous as it is severe, and
it will have a transformative effect on those fortunate enough to read it.”
-Jay Neugeboren, Bookforum
"It is the victors who write history. But sometimes the survivors of oppression are able to speak up, to slip in a story
or two of their own. The Cave Man by Xiaoda Xiao is one of those stories. The Cave Man is not an easy book to forget...
a heartbreaking story of the struggle of an individual trying to assimilate back into a society that should welcome his
willingness to conform, but instead forces him again and again back into isolation.”
-Brock Kingsley, The Brooklyn Rail
"Hair-raising. Xiao's literary ancestors include Kafka and Solzhenitsyn."
-Charles R. Larson, CounterPunch
"The prose is gritty and dreamlike, and commentators have mentioned Kafka, which is fair enough."
-The Hudson Review
"Xiao's novel has more in common with Kafka's novels than the larger body of gulag literature that The Cave Man
is a part of. Ja Feng's crimes seem to be less about a challenge to the system than about the machinations of fate on
the "common" man. It's about starting over, becoming a whole man again after being branded a political prisoner."
-The Quarterly Conversation
"Xiao has a skill for lining up his characters on trajectories that play on our need for narrative cohesion, only to pull
the rug out from under his reader by moving along, as life does, to a new chapter. In the end, success, love and geography
are all just illusions, or feel that way, compared to the reality of remembered pain."
-Robert Kotyk, The Dominion
"[A] crushing debut. The book meanders through years and across continents in a life that is heroic in its resiliency.
It's an excellent and moving novel.”
-Publishers Weekly
"A fine and intriguing read ... The Cave Man is a very psychological and entertaining novel."
-Midwest Book Review
"In The Cave Man, Xiaoda Xiao has made a stark and unforgettable contribution to the literature of imprisonment and survival.
The Cave Man is sometimes dreamlike, sometimes as stinging and frank as a slap in the face, but no matter where this remarkable
novel takes you it never loosens its grip on you, nor does it for a moment surrender its power to astonish, illuminate, and,
against all odds, tenderly touch the reader’s heart.”
-Scott Spencer
-
The Visiting Suit: Stories From My Prison Life
by Xiaoda Xiao
$16.50, ISBN 978-0-9820151-7-9, 263 pages
* READ AN EXCERPT
* ORDER FOR $16.50
"These stories personify the compassion, humor, and dignity inherent not just in survival but in triumphing over despair."
-O: The Oprah Magazine
The Visiting Suit chronicles Xiao’s arrest through his release from the labor prison five years later. he tore a poster of Chairman Mao while inebriated. Several months later,
Xiao was arrested in order to fulfill an absurd quota and, without trial, declared a counterrevolutionary. He was
sent to a labor prison on an island in Taihu Lake, where he worked in a stone quarry.
Xiaoda Xiao has published stories based on his
prison experience during the last years of Mao’s regime in China in various magazines, including
The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of the novel The Cave Man.
Additional Reviews
"Xiao's literary accompishment [is that] after several well-crafted chapters of prison prose, he holds up a piece
of cloth that would have meant little at the beginning of the narrative and shows it as a symbol of unity, beauty, and hope."
-Egor Lazebnik, The Fanzine
"[Xiao] recount[s] his struggle in sometimes unexpectedly lovely detail. Against great odds, in the grimmest of
settings, he manages to find good in the darkness."
-Lori Soderlind, New York Times Book Review
"These stark, unadorned stories have a simple immediacy, composed with natural, everyday language for only one purpose:
to tell you exactly what it was like."
-Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness
"Compelling... The standout tale 'Li Minchu - The Cost Of A Dream' exemplifies the kind of inadvertent surrealism
totalitarian regimes produce. [Xiao] lets the details do the talking; his book is better for it." B+
-Vadim Rizov, The Onion A.V. Club
"Xiaoda does not linger on the injustice or bitterness of his plight. Instead he gives us stories of people surviving
and interacting under difficult situations, with camaraderie that fills the void between cruelty and violence. It
is the world of the camp’s newspaper wall, rice powder thefts, and bedding dragged out to the sunny yard that stay
with you after reading this book."
-Gro Flatebo, The Collagist
"Xiao tells his tale with a guileless tongue, revealing a prison system in China that no other author writing
in English has yet so deftly exposed, and it is a necessary exposure. With a keen eye for intimate observation
and an uncanny ability to create dream-like melancholy from forthright prose, Xiao has given his readers an
important and rare glimpse into a world too few of us understand."
-Sachiko Hart, The Global Journal
"A thoughtful piece of history and fine addition to any historical memoir collection about one of the twentieth
century's great atrocities."
-Midwest Book Review
"Searing."
-W Magazine
