Book and Beer: Pabst Blue Ribbon and Tongue Party
Whether corporeal or euphemism or just name for a Tuesday evening out with some new friends, Tongue Party is something you would want to attend. It is also a book by Sarah Rose Etter. It is the winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. To glow this award is a good thing, and when Deb Olin Underth is the judge, I’d go ahead and say great thing. Also has anyone else noticed Caketrain’s chapbooks look and feel better than a lot of people’s book books? Just saying.
Pabst Blue Ribbon is a beer from Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a town where people will stab you in the back as you are climbing a ladder. PBR has a taste sort of like rain, rain gutter, corn and a hint of pale malted irony. Develops a bit of a yeast flavor as it warms. What is irony? I’m not totally sure but Kenneth Rexroth’s third wife left him for their marriage counselor. Bon Jovi plays the radio. A bird hunter pal of mine asked a bird watching pal of mine for advice on binoculars. In the last 5 years PBR has ironically doubled in price. Etc.
I was wondering if Sarah Rose Etter was being ironic in her opening of the first story, Koala Tide, as she seemed to mimic certain Hemingway devices, especially the use of the word “very.”
“The sun was very big and very hot that day.”
“The sky was very blue.”
“Fred wore blue swim trunks and had a very hairy chest.”
But then Etter took us away from this tone, spun us into something detached, this Koala Tide, tide of actual Koalas or again a euphemism or local jargon or objective correlative or perceptive lens of a child during that age, that Bildungsromanian blur, where childhood bleeds [emphasis on bleeds] into adulthood, where pain is introduced as possibility, where we learn not only are adults not Gods, they are slow, aging, stupid, stumbling sub-gods, mumbling who-knows-what into their lipsticked cans of warming beer? This story is evocative and disturbing and badass. You can read it here, and should.
SALTGRASS 6
I’m pleased to announce that the new issue (#6) of Saltgrass is available, starring these lovely contributors:
Cynthia Arrieu-King, Anselm Berrigan, Justin Carrol, Tina Brown Celona, J’Lyn Chapman, Cathy Linh Che, Sandra Doller, Brian Foley, John Gallaher, Anne Cecelia Holmes, Lily Ladewig, Heather Monley, GC Waldrep
What!
So you can order a print copy on our website: www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com
Only $5!
Please help us support our contributors and spread the word.
We will have an open reading month this June. We hope you submit.
Thanks,
Julia Cohen & Brian Foley
Editors, Saltgrass
www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com
Take two for wanting
1. Beecher’s Magazine is now available. Look at the list of contributors. I like how they show what’s poetry and what’s fiction.
2. Feast your eyes on the cover of Heather Christle’s new book, which will be available July 1:
Forthcoming from Future Tense: Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell
Future Tense has announced their first title for 2012—Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell.
Legs Get Led Astray is a full-length collection of creative non-fiction. The connective threads throughout the book are love, relationships, obsession. The title alludes to getting lost looking for something that doesn’t exist: the perfect place to live, the perfect desk to write at, the perfect person to love, the perfect person to sleep with. There is no perfect anything and this compilation is about Caldwell coming to these realizations.
Pre-orders start at the end of the year but it is never too early to get excited about an interesting young writer. A couple excerpts from the book are below and you might also enjoy Chloe’s essay, at The Rumpus, a really moving piece about where she writes.
The Milan Review
This mag looks gorgeous. The Milan Review is new and the first issue is packing: stories by Dave Cull, Jonathan Dixon, Glen Hirschberg, Noy Holland, Jonathon Keats, Tao Lin, Clancy Martin, E.C. Osondu, Dawn Raffel, Nelly Reifler, Rebecca Rosenblum, Deb Olin Unferth, Corinna Vallianatos and Brent Van Horne and illustrations by Matt Furie and Maison Du Crac. Click through for more pictures and order info. Italy makes fetishworthy objects.
Forthcoming from Featherproof: Tim Kinsella
If you were in your teens or twenties in the 00s and like weirdy pop music, you probably will at least be like, whoa, what? to the announcement of Featherproof’s next forthcoming title: Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
From what I’ve heard, this thing is as nuts as you’d expect.
Dennis Cooper says, “For all this novel’s depth of story, and that story’s grip and wealthy undercurrents, Tim Kinsella’s rushing, trippily meticulous prose is so exciting to follow that the story seems as much the novel’s soundtrack and topography as it is the point. A thorough and wildly distinctive read.”
I’m ready.
Available for preorder now.
Michael Kimball’s US [Tyrant Books, 2011]
At last in its U.S. edition, Tyrant Books makes their third release in the form of Michael Kimball’s gorgeous US (formerly released in a different version overseas as How Much of Us There Was).
This is one of like three books ever that made me cry. I read it in a bathtub, all in one go. It is essentially the story of a old man losing his wife to sickness, but rendered in a way that only Michael Kimball knows. You should find out.
Shipping now from Tyrant Books.
Dzanc rEprints
Random House found their start with a reprint series when they acquired the Modern Library classics. Now we know them as one of the biggest book companies in the world. Today, Dzanc Books announced their rEprint Series. Can we expect similar growth?
With the new line, Dzanc — who’s always out front on the technical aspects of publishing (see, for example their eBook Club or the Best of the Web which I’m particularly fond of) — will release eBook versions of literary fiction that’s recently gone out of print. That is, they aren’t just reprinting their own backlist digitally, but actively bringing in titles from major publishers like Knopf.
On the forthcoming list are books by HTMLGiant faves like Noy Holland, Michael Martone (3 books) and Ted Pelton. The books will be available for every digital format. The current list can be seen here, though the press release says hundreds more titles are on the way.
I asked Dan Wickett how big he sees this new series being for Dzanc, in relation to Random House’s reprint series 80+ years ago. “No idea to tell you the truth,” he said. “It fits into our mission of advancing great writing and championing such writers. We obviously hope that it brings their work to a large new readership.” Spoken like a CEO. And other professional attributes of the project, which anyone familiar with Dzanc has come to expect, include higher than standard author royalties (in this case, paying 50% cover on sales) and books designed for each platform, not just converted from previous files.
Dzanc isn’t just raising the bar for small presses; they’re changing the game across every level. I’m glad they’re out there, forging a path through the digital landscape.
Theater-State by Jack Boettcher
Brand new for preorder pending a later summer release is Jack Boettcher’s Theater-State, a book I’ve been hearing about and anticipating for quite some time. The second book from the NYC/Atlanta based Blue Square Press, this is one you should support early and pregrab a copy of: the quality of their first release, and the subsequent word on Jack’s book guarantees it’s going to shred. Check it:
“Theater State reveals the panopticon not as an instrument of surveillance but as a mesmerizing holograph from which we prisoners of “reality” (and of high school) cannot tear our eyes. In this inside-out world, violence is an encircling Megahighway and the center mutable, vulnerable, and virtual, always flowing somewhere else. As young Janus negotiates the heights and sinkholes of adolescence, including an affair with a regional pop-avatar, servitude to a morphing, megalomaniacal principal, and a class project managing a convulsive neocolony, Jack Boettcher’s reticulated sentences themselves contract and unfurl with sometimes enticing, sometimes ensnaring beauty. As the civics teacher Ms. Denton TX threatens: “Learning is an adventure.””
–Joyelle McSweeney, author of Nylund, the Sarcographer, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems
“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar – terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus…when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around…and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.”
–Matthew Rohrer, author of Destroyer and Preserver, Rise up, and A Green Light
An excerpt from the book and preorder info are available here.