Rust Belt Bindery of Moorehead, MN has just produced a limited edition, illustrated chapbook of DSM 14 contributor Blake Kimzey’s story “Up and Away,” a story from the same series as his excellent “A Family Among Us.”

The story is accompanied by three original paintings, all inspired by the story. It is a first edition of 75 and is being bound at Rust Belt. Each copy is an original work of art, meticulously hand-bound, and costs $14 (including shipping).

I’m pleased to announce that this year’s Dark Sky Books Poetry Contest is now accepting submissions!

The contest will be judged by award-winning poet Ed Skoog, author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press), and the winner will sign a book contract and have his/her manuscript published by Dark Sky Books.

Additionally, two runners up will have selections from their manuscripts published in Dark Sky Magazine. All three winners receive a signed copy of Mister Skylight.

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GUIDELINES

* Dates: December 28, 2011 – March 30, 2012

* Fee: $12

* Manuscripts: Previously unpublished; 45 pages or more

* Contest open to anyone writing in English

* No translations

* Individual poems may be previously published

* Simultaneous submissions are permitted

* Results: Winners will be announced in late June 2012

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SUBMISSIONS

* Please send manuscripts (attached as a Word Document) to EDITOR@DARKSKYBOOKS.COM with the subject heading POETRY CONTEST.

* Manuscripts must include two cover pages, the first with the Title and the second with the Title, Author, and Contact Information.

* If applicable, include an acknowledgements page for previously published poems.

* Biographical notes and cover letters are optional.

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CONTEST FEE

* To enter, please process your $12 payment at DARK SKY’S ONLINE STORE.

* This contest fee is used to offset printing, marketing, and other production costs.

* Please note: submissions received without payment will not be considered.

Thanks for your interest. Good luck!

I’ve had Derek McCormack’s The Show that Smells lurking on my shelves for years. It’s a selection from Dennis Cooper’s “Little House on the Bowery” series. I can’t heavily recommend it, but it’s interesting.

The dubious deal with this text is it presents itself as a vampire movie, and there are too many characters and too many tricks.

There’s great energy to the prose, some great tongue-in-cheek gaffes and some interesting experimentation with representative symbols.

It’s extremely minimal. The whole thing takes place in a mirror maze. In an area the size of (what felt like) a two-car garage.

Here’s how it opens:

Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers. Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers in a Mirror Maze.

Whenever a character is introduced into this book/movie/play thing, they appear thusly. There are some interesting uses of this technique, as when a vampire in bat form emerges:

V.

Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers.

V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V. Carrie Rodgers. V.

Carrie Rodgers and a bat and me in a Mirror Maze. The bat becomes Schiaperelli. Her blouse is batwinged. Becoming!

But at 108 pages, with a word count probably shy of 17,000, there seemed to be a lot of such entrances. I didn’t count them, but there were at least twenty. And while the first instance of it was quite humorous, it became a thing to glaze over.

Actually, I glazed over quite a bit of this. It makes me feel bad. I’d go back, try again. There were probably too many characters. Too many super-minor people, completely undeveloped. That’s an MFA type word, right there. I feel like an ass typing it, but it’s really all you can say.

The book is told in the first person (?). I didn’t really understand who the narrator was until he raped a guy very late in the book.

The villain here is a woman vampire named Schiaparelli who make perfume, clothes and takes the soul of Carrie Rodgers in exchange for saving Jimmie Rodgers who has Tiberculosis and who is also a carnival singer—hillbilly music.

These are sequins:

(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

These are crystals:

*******************************************

These are bats:

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV

Here’s a joke from the book:

What do you call a pervert vampire in makeup? Mascary!

The design on this book is remarkable. The premise is interesting. The prose is energetic and, for a spell, engaging, but for so slim a book it felt I had to labor through.

I don’t know much about Akashic or the project they had with Dennis Cooper. I’ve only read one Cooper book. Closer.Well. I think I started it, couldn’t get through. Made it ten or so pages in.

Maybe I’ll let that be tomorrow’s book.

This one – The Show that Smells (a reference to what carnies call animal shows) — felt too quirky, too bent on textural innovation.

At what point does innovation become laziness? I mean, this book is a Vampire Movie. That’s the claim. It’s got a cast of characters in the pre-pages. There’s a director names — Tod Browning. Browning, of course, died in 1962. I don’t know, maybe he was too dead to do a real solid job on this one. Like, maybe his death made it hard to give direction. Maybe, because he’s dead, he had a hard time knowing when to yell action, when to yell cut. This book came out in 2007. Most likely it came together in 2006. Forty four years of death could definitely dismantle one’s mechanics with celluloid storytelling.

Also, the last film Browning did was Miracles for Sale, in 1939. That was nearly 70 years before this feature, and on that gem, he had the pleasure of working with Robert Young and Florence Rice.

If you read the cast of characters he had for this outing, you begin to sympathize:

Jimmie Rodgers – Himself

Carrie Rodgers – Joan Crawford

The Reporter – Derek McCormack

The Carter Family – Themselves

Coco Chanel – Herself

Renfield – Lon Chaney

The Vogue Vampire – ?

That’s tough right there. Not only did he have the author portraying a character from his own script (can you imagine the arguments that ensued in terms of vision?), but the majority of his cast was representing themselves, and only masters such as John Malkovich can pull of that kind of artistry, and theses folks (Jimmie Rodgers specifically) are not John Malkovich. Sure, there’s Joan Crawford, but she had a good thirty years of dead on her too, and hadn’t made a public appearance since Mommie Dearest, so she had a lot riding on her for this one.

All that aside, I will be interested in seeing what McCormack cooks up next. There’s a lot of good things going for him. He’s got good presence.

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I got I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur in the mail a few months ago, and I’ve picked it up a few times, restlessly leafed through it, and I initially found it enjoyable. I just finished reading it for real though, and it’s a great and odd little book.

It’s built around a systematic conceit, which, by now, has been highly discussed in various venues. Svalina tells us of 44 businesses his narrator has started and exactly what those businesses did.

The functions of these businesses are generally absurd/surreal/non-realistic. The most realistic of these businesses was a pencil store.

(Though I say that and simultaneously realize the most well known entrepreneur in recent history is Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook isn’t much less surreal than the businesses proposed by Svalina’s narrator).

The crux of this work is the logic employed, the aphorisms introduced and the humor that builds throughout. The narrator stays nearly a stranger to us, except through his reactions. Not much action, most everything is driven through analyses, explanations.

Here are a few of Svalina’s great one liners:

[W]hat is the function of the human super-organism other than the extension of the few, lucky, brutal vanities?

What form of cannibalism is this urge toward equality?

[B]eauty was not the result but the mechanism.

Without a middle, we would never be able to perceive that which could not exist.

What a perfect commodity is mystery!

The descriptions of the many companies’ different clienteles also proved wonderfully entertaining.

Here’s who bought “the opposite of blinders:”

Our first customer, fabulously wealthy adventurers, men who’d flown hot air balloons through hurricanes & swallowed live scorpions by the dozen simply to impress their cabdrivers. . .

And here’s the discussion of the type of money wealthy patrons used to purchase stars:

What else do we make the money for? Not the money that feeds the children or the money that makes you feel good as you mail it to charity. That’s simply lifeblood. I mean the money that is like the ambient guts of the universe, suspended in the absolute zero of digital savings. This money does not want to be used. It wants to present with explosion & continue into the slavering ineptitude of timelessness.

But alongside the wit Svalina buries tragedies. At one point the narrator reveals:

[W]hat I can’t stop thinking about is how the more you need something the more you are unable to see it. I used to love my son so much. & now that he is dead I am not sure what it is that I love when I love him.

There is only one other mention of this son. I think I might have hoped for this relationship to be further revealed, but that is most likely due to my intense love of narrative and my semi-maudlin respect for emotion. I don’t mind crying.

Still, it’s puzzling why Svalina would allow his narrator to break form the few times he does without giving us closure in this regard. Perhaps, however, Svalina’s reluctance to do so is in good form. Is it better that I’m curious about the son, or would it be better for me to know specifics about him? Which approach would allow the son to continue to live in me? If I knew why he died, where he was when he died? The business started just before his death? The business started afterwards? What he smelled like? The color of his eyes?

Which way makes him more real to me?

Aside from this human intrusion, where the narrator discusses the boy, he tells us once of a sexual escapade, his father’s death, and once, while on vacation, when he almost died. There is also one or two odd divulgences that sort of got me head scratching.

When the narrator discusses the business “that made music that nobody knew was music” he claims “Before Brian Eno was born, everyone wanted to be Brian Eno. Now that Justin Taylor is about to be born, everyone wants to be Justin Taylor.” I have no idea what Justin Taylor he is talking about.

I think the greatness of this book is best represented in these two juxtaposed businesses.

I started this one business that employed generous looking, kind-hearted looking people to walk by you & smile warmly at the exact moment when all you can think about when you see a building is how tall it would have to be to ensure that the fall would kill you.

I started this one business that took photographs of hamburgers & gave them out to hungry people in war-torn, famine-struck parts of the world.

That kind of back and forth makes this slim beast a bright read.

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1/31/12

At some point in time a friend of mine, who I haven’t spoken to in person for nearly a decade, gave me a copy of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur and told me it was amazing. I think was twenty three. I picked up the book about a dozen times in the span of a year, but I couldn’t enter it correctly. There is a blatant allusion to Guy de Maupassant’s “The Piece of String” in the introductory scene, and it enraged me. I picked up the book, read a few pages of the syrupy prose, set it down as if hassled to have held it. I shelved it. It stayed shelved. For years.

The first time I heard Fugazi I fell in love. The first time I heard Elliott Smith, the same. The first time I saw My Name is Nobody, The Princess Bride. The first time I read Burroughs’ Junky, I was smitten. The first time I read “By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast—a cold wind.” I nearly shit my pants with joy.

I’ve noticed I have two modes when exposed to new art: intense, wild, beautiful infatuation or extreme distaste, hatred that the thing exists.

Rarely do I allow something to exist without my loving or hating it.

But the strangest thing. . .

About three years ago (or seven or fifteen, I have a two-year-old daughter and since her birth, life is hard to keep compartmentalized) I picked The Voyeur back up. I don’t know what spell encouraged me to do so. I saw it’s blue binding perched on the shelf. It seemed to need me to hold it, and I obliged.

I’ve read the book only once, but I now know it to be miraculous. It’s an odd semi-Faulknerian telling of a murder mystery in a small town. The central suspect is a stranger. A man who has picked a bit of string from the ground. If you know the Maupassant story, you assume the tale will end in the stranger’s wrongful accusation of theft and subsequent death with grief. That’s not how The Voyeur ends. This, along with the prose, which is hallucinatory good, make the book genius. The allusion, which immediately soured my opinion of the text, became the fulcrum that the grandiosity of the story was hoisted against.

I was wrong. I so often am.

There are other books out there which I’ve had the same fate with. Most recently, I picked up The Confederacy of Dunces after giving it a few paltry attempts, and I think it might be the funniest book I’ve ever read.

There are also books out there that I currently can’t stand, but I’m afraid to form opinions of. I’ve tried Infinite Jest a handful of times and think it’s garbage. . . but is it? I mean, will it always be? To me?

This uncertainty of my initial response makes me less than willing to write many reviews (I’m also highly passive aggressive, and I’m always putting off my own self-imposed deadlines just to prove to myself that I’m not the kind of fucker that would allow me to give myself orders: it’s beyond the last visible dog).

I’ve only written one semi-negative review. I reviewed Magdalena Zurawski’s The Bruise for American Book Review, and while I concluded the review by saying the book was award worthy (it was the Ronald Sukenick Prize Winner), I said that much of the book was boring. There was an internet stink over it.

Weird thing is, if I read that book now, I would like it more than I did then. But, by reviewing it, I constructed my only allowable opinion. I have to hold dear to that opinion forever, or so I’m told.

Truthfully, I don’t like reviews. I’m a bigger fan of questions than answers. The whole premise of a review is: what did you think of it? Necessarily there must be, at some point, at least a shadow of a thesis. The whole thing seems very five paragraphs long. And while I understand the necessity of it, and even love when my own writing gets reviewed, and have been wooed to books by good reviewers, I’m not a big fan of actually reviewing.

That being said, I’ve given myself a ridiculous assignment: during the month of February, in the year 2012, I will read a book every weekday and write a kind of review of them.

My mission in this is two-fold: 1) It give me a great excuse to read a lot; 2) I’m hoping it teaches me to better train my initial-response reflex. Of course, I’m not certain that any of this will work.

I will also, most likely, revisit a few books to discuss my initial and latter opinions of the texts.

We’ll see how it goes.

Howdy, February.

If you’re in Philadelphia or Brooklyn this Thursday or Friday with an open schedule, or if you are looking to get out of a previous engagement for something better to do, go listen to Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca read from Morocco. Listening to them read from the book is the best way to absorb the poems. They attach themselves to past moments between Kendra and Matthew and plant you in the same bathroom line where Malone punched Savoca in the bladder and everybody can laugh about it.

Thursday, February 2
What: Tire Fire Reading Series
Where: Tattooed Mom (530 South St., Philadelphia, PA)
When: 7:00 pm
Who Else: Scott McClanahan and Kirsten Kaschock

Friday, February 3
What: The Multifarious Array Poetry Series
Where: Pete’s Candy Store (709 Lorimer St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn)
When: 7:00 pm

Matthew Vollmer’s essay “epitaph 45″ appears in Issue 15 of the magazine. Matthew sat down to answer a handful of questions about the essay and the meaning of orangutans pissing in their own mouths.

Who died?

On one level, a version of myself. On another level, nobody. Yet. The epitaph could be read as one penned for the future occasion of my passing. But that sounds pretentious. Which is why I wrote these in third person. I needed distance. I needed not to say “I” or “my.”

Who do you imagine wrote the epitaph?

A recording angel.

I’m intrigued by epitaphs. What made you decide to write these, and only in one long sentence?

I started writing epitaphs sometime last spring. I can’t even remember why or where the idea came from. But I was immediately drawn to some of the tensions between conventional epitaphs (which are short and pithy and frequently attempt to describe, in elevated language, the best version of the person who is now dead) and my own, which go on and on and focus on specific anecdotes or particular observations, and often catalogue the speaker’s anxieties, obsessions, and shortcomings.

To answer the second part of your question, it’s pretty simple: I’m a huge fan of long sentences. I enjoy reading a sentence that seems afraid of what will happen when it reaches a period. And, more often than not, a long sentence seems more capable of capturing the epic thought-stream that is human consciousness. (Not that we actually think in sentences. At least I don’t.) A long sentence, deployed properly (see the work of Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard), is an event–a comet made of language.

As I’ve pointed out, the conventional epitaph is usually compressed, and often not even a full sentence (after all, it has to fit on a tombstone), and so writing a long-winded epitaph — one that could be two to three to five pages long — is clearly absurd. And so, this defying of sense and convention, I think, ends up generating a certain amount of structural tension, which, I think, is essential. But it also poses unique challenges to me as a writer: make this all one thing, keep it connected, make it work. Which means I have to ask questions like: How do I begin the sentence? How do I sustain it? How can I employ (and avoid) repetition? How can I ensure that the rhythm of the piece maintains its integrity? And how the heck am I supposed to end this thing?

What is the deceased’s conflict with “… staring into screens watching fat guys lip synch to Moldavian songs and busty babes biting their lips and orangutans peeing into their own mouths?”

I guess there I’m trying to capture the absurdity of what it’s like to surf the internet — i.e., to own this super-powerful machine (one that would have been impossible to conceive of in my youth) that allows a person unlimited access to knowledge and information, but which the user, more often than not often pilots into the realms of utter superficiality and base humor. Also, this particular epitaph is, in part, an elegy for the deceased’s son’s youth. And the epiphany here, I guess, is that the speaker’s realizing that he’s probably spent more time with this machine than his own son, which then snowballs into a list of all the things he should have or could have been doing, had he been a more responsible father.

Also, I wrote this after having a realization of my own: that of what my son is most likely to remember about me, when he thinks of what I do for work. I imagine most people have memories of trying to get their parents’ attention. If I think about this, I remember my mom in the kitchen, saying, “Just a minute.” I remember my father stacking or cutting wood, or leaning over the head of one of his dental patients. So what will my son remember about his mother and me, two people who are both writers and educators? That we spent a LOT of time staring into our machines.

Is everybody in the 21st century neurotic and conflicted like the deceased?

Neurotic? Probably. Conflicted? I dunno. I think most people are too oppressed to feel all that conflicted. Feeling conflicted, now that I think about it, is probably some kind of luxury.

Glenn Blake’s Return Fire is set, like his first collection, Drowned Moon, along the rivers and bayous of east Texas, where families, legends, memories, and entire neighborhoods sink into the subsiding land and rising waters of natural and man-made disasters. “Who in his right mind would’ve settled here?” Bobby Dean thinks.

In “Return Fire,” Bobby Dean, a widower, exacts a precise revenge on one of two neighboring teenagers whose trigger-happy, sunset antics shatter his wife’s bird feeder and a bottle of mescal and kills one of neighbor-Gladys’s goats and set in motion events that do not end with the last paragraph or line of the story. The widower and sheriff, his dead wife’s brother, know who will come calling from across the river, and what that visit from “old man Budd” will mean. The widower is not only prepared for the worst — he welcomes it. “Everything has a way of working itself out,” Bobby Dean tells his brother-in-law. “In this life, we get what we deserve.”

In “Degüello,” the nameless narrator takes a ferryboat across a stygian East Texas channel to a neighborhood of the same name abandoned to the waters of subsidence, like the battleground where “the bodies lay. . . turning to skeletons which grazing cattle chewed for their salt,” like the 200 year old town New Washington that “slid into the bay. The ferry captain tells the narrator Degüello means “sweet revenge — something like that” for what Mexicans did at the Alamo, but now no one lives there any more, “no one in his right mind.” Given by the captain a last chance to return –”You won’t like what you find! . . . Do you know what’s waiting for you! Do you know what’s over there!”— the narrator says, “Home.”The reader senses the traveler going home again knows degüello means not only decapitation, but a last stand.

In “How Far Are We from the Water?”— in these compact and powerful stories, never very far — we find Ryne, in the middle of a divorce, at the end of a date with a nameless divorcee, when her ex-husband Mason returns to what is now her house. Ryne, in a gesture of quiet surprise and menace, refuses to leave.

In “Shooting Stars,” the narrator and his little sister climb out of her bedroom window late at night when “the quiet one” —the father, the ghost of their father? — comes scratching at her screen, shirtless, rifle in hand. On warm blacktop, under a night sky, “a winged thing, with a thousand eyes,” the sister looks for a star to shoot, with a gun that will make for her shooting stars, unaware “there is no fire,” that what they see is light from stars long dead, “like a memory of someone who has passed away.”

A story that begins with warm familial sentiment ends on a note of dread and sorrow. A poignant, comi-tragic story, “Thanksgiving” is told by Sherwood, “Woody,” who acts as a kind of kid stage manager for a family holiday farce. Between dealing with his slowwitted brother Squirt, his grandmother, his drunk mother —”When shes awake, THERES HELL TO PAY — and a perpetually enraged, knock-the kid-down father — “Gotdamn Thanksgiving,” he says — the house catches on fire, “the turkey looks like a burnt football” and is sent crashing through a window, and Squirt for his own safety is left in a river duck blind among the cattails, with “buzzards flying in circles above the bay.” Not even the fish in Sherwood’s aquarium escape the mayhem, one out of the water leaving a trail, “trying to get to my secret passage way, and if he got that far, he could escape.” But there is no escape. He tells Squirt, “Its a game. A mean game.” His father says, “YOU STAND YOUR GOTDAM GROUND. YOU TAKE WHATS COMING TO YOU,” a weird combination of battle cry and stoicism, as the father wallops the kid for his own incompetence.

In “The Old and the Lost,” perhaps the finest story in this collection, reminiscent of Peter Taylor, the narrator returns to East Texas in the aftermath of a hurricane to find a relative, only to discover a rest home without electricity deep in floodwaters. In a counterpoint memory, “fifty years later,” the narrator stands on the lawn of a house where “royalty. . . the king and queen of Sour Lake” lived with their two children, one who “wore braces on her teeth” and the other who wore “a brace on his leg.” One of them “disappeared into the Spanish Moss,” like some of the residents of the rest home, both reclaimed by the sinking land and rising water.

In “When the Gods Want to Punish You” — a comic masterpiece — fire does indeed return, but in a way that is as catastrophic as floods and hurricanes. There is a classical, stoic fatalism to Blake’s characters. There is no escape. If they don’t know it yet, they will. They accept it and wait for it, like Bobby Dean. They see it like we imagine Squirt does, as buzzards circling the sky. They get what’s worse than not getting what you wish for. They ask the gods for a catastrophe, and the gods return fire to the rivers and bayous with an apocalyptic power that sends the narrator of “When the Gods Want to Punish You” off a truck bed “higher and higher. . . until I can see flames on both horizons.” A variation of the phrase “stand your ground” is used in several stories, but it is a recurring motif in all of them. But standing that last ground is as futile as “shooting into the sun” and will likely get one killed as not. And if returning fire is a way of standing one’s ground, the ground itself is sinking into the rivers and bayous. In this life, you get what’s coming to you. But it is, after all, only death.

Richard Wilbur wrote, “Limitation makes for power; the strength of the genie comes from his being confined in the bottle.” The strength of these six stories lies in a similar gift of compression, Bobby Dean’s shattered bottle of mescal notwithstanding. Knowing what lies ahead, Bobby Dean pours another drink and waits.

***

George Williams is the author of Degenerate and Gardens of Earthly Delight.  His stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, and The Hopkins Review, among others.  He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship and a grant from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He teaches at Savannah College of Art and Design and works as a consultant and writer for Corra Films.

Did you read this NYT piece when it came out last month? I’m surprised I’m still thinking about it these weeks later.

It’s a year-end retrospective on how bad big-label rock was in 2011, and it’s just awful. Not because it’s wrong — of course it’s too bad that Sublime with Rome is filling the airwaves with Sublime-lite filler, and of course it would likely be difficult to listen to the new Nickelback album from start to finish. But who with a vested interest in music in 2012 would have the bad sense to check in with Nickelback to see how they’re getting along?

The author cites “bands well past their sell-by date” like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Limp Bizkit, R.E.M., and Sum 41, as further evidence of the decline, forgetting that expired bands have been with us forever, and we have been ignoring them for just as long.

As Dan from Brussels puts it, “This year gave us terrific records from Wilco, the Decemberists, Radiohead, Adele, Bon Iver, M83, Cee-Lo, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z & Kanye among many, many others — and you’re sitting here bemoaning the fact that Nickelback and friends are making boring music? Please.”

“Yes, the center is rotting,” Elizabeth from Illinois says. “But the fringes are increasingly important in the world of rock music. In a world of globalization, the internet, and the arguable decline of major labels, is it wise to dismiss alternative and indie music as the fringe? In my eyes, ‘fringe’ artists ARE the new center.” Should Elizabeth really have to say this as if the year is 1999?

One of the easiest things a struggling newspaper (every newspaper) can do is hire good critics who are paying close attention to culture. Not radio culture — actual culture. They will do it for cheap or for free, just for the cred. The Times is better than this.

If you’re in New York City and looking to enrich a night of imbibing, go to KGB Bar (85 E 4th St) this Saturday, January 21, at 7:00 pm for A New York Tyrant party featuring readings by Michael Bible (Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City), Daniel Long, and Chiara Barzini. Also, Giancarlo DiTrapano and Tao Lin will be doing a one-time reading of “Andrew: A Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kidness” from Vice Magazine, which catalogues the drug-induced text correspondence between DiTrapano and Lin from July 2010 to June 2011.

Mud Luscious Press is no stranger to the seductive art of the bundle.

$40 gets you the 2012 subscription bundle: Gregory Sherl’s The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby, Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, & Robert Kloss’s The Alligators of Abraham.

I love this design of the reissue of Dad.

Not being much for gossip, I found it strange that I wanted to talk with my endodontist and his assistant yesterday morning. But, while the two of them worked on my root canal, they discussed a certain type of dog that I know a thing or two about (Springer Spaniel — I own one) and I kept trying to add to their conversation. Alas, as I was unable to speak, I was left to my own thoughts, which led me to thinking about thinkers. What does a philosopher look like? (good question) How well is Don DeLillo’s book of short stories doing? (Story Prize finalist) How abusive was Ernest Hemingway? (gin soaked) Who is the next author to be published by Amazon? (a librarian)  And what’s up with the Obamas? (why not?)