Adam Robinson—
The Outsider Writers Collective is holding a fundraiser auction. They’re selling all 5 of their titles in a pretty cool, handmade slipcase. Bidding starts at $27: dirt cheap for this much goodness. Check it out.
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New Pony is Coming!
Including work by Erik Anderson, Cynthia Arrieu-King & Kristi Maxwell, Sarah Bartlett & Emily Kendal Frey, Eric Baus & Seth Perlow, Sommer Browning & Brandon Shimoda, Adam Clay, Gary L. McDowell, and Brandon Shimoda, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina, Thomas Cook & Nate Slawson, Bruce Covey & Terita Heath-Wlaz, MTC Cronin & Peter Boyle, Mark DeCarteret, DZ Delgado & Sandy Florian, Jennifer K. Dick, Camille Dungy & Ravi Shankar, Annie Finch & Erika Howsare, Shawn Huelle & Jess Wigent, Kirk Keen, The Pines, Seth Perlow & Catherine Theis, Dani Rado, Andrea Rexilius & Susan Scarlata, Kate Schapira, Paul Siegell, Justin Taylor & Bill Hayward, and William Walsh.
Learn about horse less press here.
To celebrate, The Dead Weather cover Bob Dylan’s “New Pony” on what seems to be French television:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7qZPJG-sjA
Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish
Wow. Forthcoming from OR Books. [via Clusterflock]
In literary America, to utter the name Gordon Lish in a conversation is like adding hot sauce to a meal. You either enjoy the zesty experience, one that pushes your limits or you prefer to stay away. Its Lish who, first as fiction editor at Esquire magazine (where he earned the nickname Captain Fiction) and then at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, shaped the work of many of the country’s foremost writers, from Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah to Amy Hempel and Lily Tuck.
And as a writer himself, Lish’s stripped-down, brutally spare style earns accolades in increasing numbers. His oeuvre is coming to be recognized as among the most significant of the period that spans the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews wrote of his last collection that “Lish…is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist.”
This definitive collection of Lishs short work includes a new foreword by the author and 106 stories, many of which Lish has revised exclusively for this edition. His observations are in turn achingly sad and wryly funny as they spark recognition of our common, clumsy humanity. There are no heroes here, except, perhaps, for all of us, as we muddle our way through life: they are stories of unfaithful husbands, inadequate fathers, restless children and writing teachers, men lost in their middle age: more often than not first-person tales narrated by one “Gordon Lish.” The take on life is bemused, satirical, and relentlessly accurate; the language unadorned: the result is a model of modernist prose and a volume of enduring literary craftsmanship.
Publication April 30, 2010 546 pages
Paperback $17 Ebook $10
Paperback and ebook $22
powerHouse Gets Random (House’d)
Here’s a piece of industry news. Brooklyn-based powerHouse Books (a publisher of visual arts books, as well as a bookstore/event space) is “going to Random House,” according to a press release I just got from them. The letter begins, “Dear powerHouse follower– You are, with any luck, a retailer, a reviewer, a promoter, or just someone vigorously involved in the visual arts…” Well, yes and no, but I am a guy with an INBOX, and apparently, plenty of free time on a Wednesday. The full announcement is copied below.
Flesh Eating Poems
Cannibal books is offering a chance to subscribe for 2010. If you were a subscriber this past year, you would’ve received chapbooks by Claire Donato, Shane Jones, Keith Newton, Carolyn Guinzio, Amish Trivedi, Patrick Morissey, Thomas Hummel, as well as the the mighty NARWAL ( A collection of 7 chapbooks by Kazim Ali, Maureen Alsop, Sommer Browning, Karla Kelsey, Laura Goode, Kate Schapira, and Jared White).
This year, for the low blow of $75, you will get
- Allyssa Wolf’s second full-length collection, Sister.
- Chapbooks by Kevin Holden, Ben Mazer, Tim Van Dyke, Dot Devota, Adam Roberts, and Tom Andes.
- Mini-chapbooks from our Boundless Books Series.
- Cannibal: Issue Five, featuring poems by Carrie Olivia Adams, Samuel Amadon, Susan Briante, Lily Brown, Adam Clay, CAConrad, Kate Dougherty, Farrah Field, Laura Goode, Kate Greenstreet, Jane Gregory, Whit Griffin, Melanie Hubbard, Andrew Hughes, M.C. Hyland, Grant Jenkins, Jeff T. Johnson, Jon Leon, Sam Lohmann, Sara Mumulo, Hoa Nguyen, Danielle Pafunda, Alison Palmer, Kyle Schlesinger, Cedar Sigo, Sandra Simonds, Nate Slawson, Tony Tost, Steven Toussaint, Amish Trivedi, G.C. Waldrep, & Joseph Wood.
- Anything other books and broadsides we make before the New Year.
- The unparalleled sense of supporting one of the most aggressively productive and self-sufficient book arts poetry presses around.
We can handle only a limited number of subscribers and will take this post down once we have enough money to help finance our busiest time of year (the next two months). Immense thanks to everyone who subscribed last year and in advance to our subscribers this year. We could not keep the press running without you.
Green Lantern Press
Green Lantern Press is simply making some of the most beautiful, singular limited run book objects of anybody in the pack. If you haven’t browsed their catalog recently, it’s overflowing: such a wide range of things to dig in, from new translation of Rimbaud, to art space phone books, to indexes and collection, so on.
In particular, I’ve been trying to write a review of THE NORTH GEORGIA GAZETTE AND WINTER CHRONICLE by William Edward Parry and the crews of the Hecla and Griper for about six months now, (“An annotated transcription of the 1821 newspaper, The North Georgia Gazette. The newspaper, written and published aboard an English ship trapped in the Arctic, was an attempt by the captain to lessen the boredom of a long, isolated winter.”) and every time I pick up the book to dig further, I get so consumed in a single page that reading the book as a whole could conceivably go on forever. More on this hopefully sometime soon, but in the meantime: revel in some of this.
The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven
Mairéad Byrne made a survey. I took it. Is it scientific research? Is it a poem? Is it a joke? Is it about couches? Or comfort or people? She wrote a poem in 2006 called “The Good News” that says, like, “The cross between a poem & a carrot is a poem./The cross between a poem & a forklift truck is a poem” — so I guess the survey is a poem. I like to think of it that way as much as I like to think of it as research or a joke. READ MORE >
Liquidated Calamari
Calamari Press is having a relocation liquidation sale, including all 24 titles they’ve released for $100, all back issues of the amazing Third Bed for $40, buy one get one free, and various other ridiculously cheap package deals. Grabbit.
Kevin Sampsell Week (6): Future Tense
[In closing out Kevin Sampsell week, Kevin gave us the inside track for the next two releases of his press Future Tense Books. If you aren’t familiar by now, give it a peek: Kevin truly makes releases that are unlike any other press around. – BB]
From the desk of Kevin Sampsell (Portland, OR)
As many of you know, we’re on the brink of releasing the poetry collaboration, OK, Goodnight, by Zachary Schomburg and Emily Kendal Frey (March 2010), but I’ve also been poring over manuscripts to figure out what other treasures Future Tense can deliver this year. This week we were excited to acquire two books that will come out this summer and fall.
In June, we will release a chapbook called Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor. I’ve been buttering up this hot young Canadian for a while now. I’ve sent him knitted hats and coffee-flavoured chocolates. I’ve spelled words like colour and favourite with the extra u in it. Finally, he sent a batch of story-type things. Ventriloquism features works that do that wondrous thing I love so much–when a piece of writing feels so fresh and original that you’re not sure if it’s prose poetry or flash fiction. It’s beautifully uncategorizable, with body parts flitting their way through deeper emotions that Lor’s language tries to dissect with grace and force and unexpected humour. It reminds me a little bit of my all-time favorite story writer, Gary Lutz.
Prathna Lor lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Links: http://prathnalor.bearcreekfeed.com / http://prathnalor.blogspot.com
In November, we will release a paperback book tentatively titled The Book of Freaks by Jamie Iredell. This is another book that seems so fresh and weird and laugh-out-loud funny, I’m tempted to compare it to modern cult classics like Letters to Wendy’s and The Age of Wire and String. The story about discovering this book is a recent and happy accident. While in Seattle just two weekends ago, I saw that Blake Butler and Jamie Iredell were reading at a place called Neptune Coffee. I was excited to meet Blake for the first time and hear him read. I was not familiar with this Iredell dude. At the reading, Jamie read a few parts from his great new book, Prose. Poems. A Novel. And then he read parts of this Freaks project. There was unexpected laughter. There was surprise. There was sheer uncut artistry at work. A few days later, he sent me the manuscript. A few days later, I wallpapered my bathroom with it so that I could always have it near. Sometimes, magic happens fast when true talent is involved.
Jamie Iredell lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Link: http://jamieiredell.blogspot.com
We’re thrilled to be publishing these two brilliant writers later this year. Both of their books display an effortless and immense kind of entertainment value that we feel is both accessible and revolutionary. Thank you for reading. Please stay tuned to futuretensebooks.com and/or email me to get on our email list: info@futuretensebooks.com
Kevin Sampsell
editor & publisher
(along with Frayn Masters and Bryan Coffelt)
If You Like It Naughty
Poetry. The anthology GURLESQUE: THE NEW GRRLY, GROTESQUE, BURLESQUE POETICS brings together eighteen poets of wide-ranging backgrounds, united in their ability to push the aesthetic envelope through radical, femme, Third Wave strategies, and pairs them with visual artists who do the same. At the turn of the millennium, we are witnessing the emergence of a vital–perhaps viral–new strain of female poetics: the “Gurlesque,” a term that describes writers who perform femininity in their poems in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking the grotesque to shake the foundations of acceptable female behavior and language. Built from the bric-a-brac of girl culture, these works charm and repel: this work is fun, subversive, and important. (New Release — order from SPD)