Joseph Young’s ‘Easter Rabbit’
I am mad excited for:
Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young
Easter Rabbit is a collection of microfictions.
100pp
perfect bound
cover art by Christine Sajecki
Pre-order cost includes shipping.
Pre-orders will ship Oct 15.
Book available in wide release on Dec 15.
FIREWHEEL CONTEST
complete information after break.
Win Joanna Ruocco’s The Mothering Coven
I received an extra copy of the wonderful Joanna Ruocco’s new novel The Mothering Coven, which has just been released from Ellipsis Press.
Robert Coover said, “Ruocco’s Coven is an engagingly whimsical tale, graceful and inventive, with its own distinctive lexicon, reminiscent of the works of such writers as Ronald Firbank or Coleman Dowell. It toys with language and knowledge somewhat like an emerald-eyed black cat in the book toys with a large bird. Batting it about playfully. Coaxing something new out of it.” Nice. Having read Joanna’s work in many other places, and thrilled by it, I couldn’t be much more excited to dig into this.
On page 22 of the book, there is this sentence: “Neck pimples,” yells Ms. Kidney.
Ms. Kidney seems to me a great character name. Nothing like a good character name, don’t you think?
Leave a comment on this post with your favorite or one of your favorite character names, from any book ever. The name that tickles best, to me, will win a copy of Joanna’s radical new book. Contest goes till Friday morning. Thanks!
In the meantime, you can still buy Joanna’s book, along with the new title from Norman Lock, and the amazing two first releases by Ellipsis (Eugene Marten and Eugene Lim!), each individually, or for a limited time all together for $40, shipping included. Too good.
That’s a Wilde form for a novel
[Via The Book Design Review]
This is the cover of a new version of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by Four Corners Books in London. It’s published like a magazine, I guess cuz first it was published in a magazine. Any good books coming out in magazines nowadays? Is everybody enjoying Shya Scanlon’s “book,” Forecast? (Speaking of nice design and serialized novels?)
I mean, get outta town, that’s the cover of the book. It’s got a nasty font and a word-
break and it don’t got the title or author or nothing.
Fn-A right, that’s pretty dang wapow. (Even it was reviewed in Financial Times.) I gotta go back to school.
I checked out Four Corners. They have other awesome looking books.
2 New Titles from Ellipsis Press: Lock and Ruocco
Two new titles from the incredible Ellipsis Press are now on presale. After their first two titles by Eugene Marten and Eugene Lim being two of my favorite new releases last year, Ellipsis is already a monolith, and I’ve been drooling for these both since they were announced. For those that for some reason did not pick up the first two, you can get the entire set of 4 Ellipsis titles together in a bundle for $40, a ridiculously nice and limited-time deal. Shit, I’m doing the package just to be able to give the first two as gifts. I guarantee it is worth twice as much in mind. They are also all available individually, and shipping soon.
Here are their two latest titles:
Shadowplay by Norman Lock
In Java, a master of the shadow-puppet theater seeks to possess—by his art—a woman, who perishes as though by the contagion of his unnatural desire. Shadowplay is a meditation on story-telling as an act of seizure, a parable of obsession and of the danger of confounding the real with its representations.
“Stories compensate for lives unlived. They are what Norman Lock, or his avatar Guntur, calls shadows, negative reflections on a backlit screen, comprising, through artistry and brief illumination, ghosts. Lock’s teller is imprisoned by darkness, captivated by warriors and princesses no longer, if ever, living. Death becomes a distance from which the voices of these unliving return. It is a journey as delicious as it is threatening.” —R.M. Berry
TripleQuick Fiction
Featherproof is creating an iPhone app for flash called “TripleQuick Fiction.” Each story will be 333 words long or fewer, and from looking at the part of the image underneath Shane Jones’s barrelchest, I gather that readers can vote on each piece’s quality by choosing either “Good Egg” or “Rotten Egg.” To me that’s the coolest thing about the idea. Let’s let the techie dudes have a say in what works for li’l lit.
You heard it at the Examiner first, with this keen and clunky description of short fiction: “Because the stories are so short they may seem simple and disposable but writing good flash fiction is challenging because you only have so few words–333 in this case–to create, or at least suggest, a world, to take the reader there and let her experience it.” Now with mobile technology, you can let TripleQuick take you to one world while the bus takes you to work.
I’m really excited about this, even though I don’t have an iPhone. I have a G1. What are the chances some ebookish developer gets motivated enough to set this up for Android? What about people with just regular cell phones, the kind with the hinge? Are they gonna get illiterate?
What’s next? What the hell is going to happen next?
FENCES by BEN BROOKS
ben brooks wrote a book called FENCES. fugue state press published it. james chapman (editor) mailed it to me recently. it is fucking righteous. i read it in like two hours. i couldnt stop. most important to me was my ability to concentrate on it. lately i have a bad attention span but this book booted that lack in the throat. FENCES contains some of the strongest lines i have read in a while. it’s not a book for someone looking for a traditional story or anything. it’s more like a somewhat-narrative poem. but for real, it’s so well done. you can feel the filth of solitude from the very beginning where the narrator is “in a hole” where “nicotine eyes” stare at him. the book then seems to progress by branching off endlessly into different tracts of hopeless love, self-hatred and general dismay. this book is the message left by a burning tree blowing ash against the side of a garage where inside a man huffs gas to feel like a king. the biggest success of this book to me was how disconnected it was while remaining engaging. fuck. good job ben. don’t kill yourself yet.
Free Tarot Reading/Dream Interpretation with Purchase
No Tell Books is offering a psychic special this weekend. Buy a title from No Tell Books and with proof of purchase, receive a Tarot reading or interpretation of your dream from editor/publisher Reb Livingston.
Buy one No Tell Books title between now and Sunday, August 9, 2009 and receive a FREE tarot reading or dream interpretation! (One free reading or interpretation per customer)
If you buy a No Tell title this weekend, not only do you receive a stellar collection of poetry, you also receive FREE PSYCHIC ADVICE from me, poet and editor, Reb Livingston. This psychic advice will be dispensed via either a tarot reading or dream interpretation. BUT WAIT, THAT’S NOT ALL, if I receive any clairvoyant nuggets while I’m doing your reading or interpretation, I will share them with you AT NO EXTRA COST.
Been having a recurring dream that’s been worrying you? Then you might want to take advantage of this offer. Oh, and books and stuff.
Interview with The Cupboard
To celebrate their first year of publishing, I sent some questions to Adam Peterson and Dave Madden, the masterminds behind The Cupboard (a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose), and they were game to retort.
[interview after the jump]