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ARAOP on Barrelhouse's Best Of

I've been waiting all year to be on a Best Of list, and voila, Barrelhouse has given Robison the honor on its list of Best Poetry Debuts 2010. And what an honor to be listed with Paul Killebrew, whose poem "Upon Us" was one of my top five favorite poems this year, and Elisa Gabbert, who is on 93.65% of Best Of lists.

Also, don't forget to vote for ARAOP in the Goodreads contest for which it was nominated.

SWEATPANTS

December 17, 2010, live at the Hexagon

Photo by Chris Henry.

Mark Wallace on ARob & Other Poems

Mark Wallace, at Facebook:

With its not-at-all-as-dumb-as-I-sound slang, all elbows humor, and pseudo-historical research, Adam Robinson's Adam Robinson and Other Poems is as fun a book of poetry as I’ve read in awhile. A big plus: it has the first poem I’ve ever seen about Judas Priest.

check out more at the book's website.

Book Bundle: Easter Rabbit and Sasquatch Stories: $15.

Easter Rabbit and Sasquatch Stories: buy them together for $15 (shipping included).

Shipping Location

USA $15.00 Canada $16.00 Elsewhere $21.00

Read more about the offer here.

**Easter Rabbit versus Sasquatch Stories Get Both for $15**

**This post ends with an offer to get both these books for $15. You should read the post though so you know what crazy books you're getting.**

I received the reprint of Easter Rabbit and the new version of Sasquatch Stories over the Christmas weekend. Here they are:

I love all PG books equally, but in different ways. Like children, each book develops with its own experiences, so it takes on a personality (to me) that is separate from the book's personality as literature. So, for instance, while Mairéad Byrne's book, The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven is very funny, I think of it as serious and challenging because of how difficult it was to design. And while Words by Andy Devine is a severe and complicated book, I view it as a breeze because of how easy it was to work with Michael Kimball and Justin Sirois (who did the design).

Another book that makes my heart swell is Joseph Young's Easter Rabbit. One astounding and gratifying milestone for this book is that it received Baltimore's City Paper award for best book by a local author. Another neat thing is that we sold through its first print run of 300 copies in less than six months. But what really makes me proudest of ER is what the book is and what it means for literature. I believe it is the ground that all microfiction walks on. It is the beginning and the ending of flash. Or, to put it in tamer words, it is the best book of very short stories that exists today. Hint fiction is cool. Twitter fiction is whatever. Flash fiction is constantly seeking definition. But I am convinced that ER is great because it is so confident about what it is. It answers questions about itself even though it is a book of ambiguous plots. It stands up to scrutiny but defies systematization. I have always been proud of this book as a foundation for a genre. Now that the second edition has finally been printed, I sure hope to sell a couple.


I also hope to sell a bunch more copies of Sasquatch Stories by Mike Topp. This book resides at the other end of ER's teeter-tauter. Where ER is elegant and restrained (?), giving (?), patient (?), delicate (?), Sasquatch Stories is tricky and goofy (?), inane (?), frantic (?), disturbing (?) -- but both are significantly more enriching then their word count suggests. When ER was first released, I issued a challenge that anyone who could read the whole book (of only 3000 words) in one sitting, could have their money back. Two people did it. One live-blogged his attempt and concluded that by the end, he didn't know the words he was processing.

I won't offer this contest for Sasquatch Stories, though, because I think if people can't read the entire thing in one sitting, probably in less than 15 minutes, they're making something out of it that isn't there. BUT! I defy anyone to put the book down after that first read and not think about the book very soon (and for a long time) afterward. It invokes a definite and lasting wonderment about its stories and jokes and poems -- or whatever these things are that Mike Topp writes. In fact, they work in a very similar way to Joe's stories in that they often end before you begin to wonder about them. As Gary Lutz blurbed, Topp is "a miniaturist of nervous precisions, our supreme abridger of metropolitan startlement and inner fidgetry." These apt characterizations are borne out in the short book.

Another "bet-you-can't-eat-just-one" effect of reading Sasquatch Stories, I think, is that after you finish it, you won't be able to resist showing it to friends. You're going to need their help, like, "Carl, what the heck, help, let me show you this book, is this poetry?" That's something you'll say indignantly while jabbing the open pages with your index finger. "How do you explain this, Carl?"

One fear I have with this book is that people will think it's an indictment of literature. With ER, I think befuddled people can write the stories off as poetry they don't get, but something about Sasquatch Stories points a finger at regular literature and says, "What's your problem?" Take the story "Survey," from page 11:

SURVEY
Do you ever eat other people's food from the office refrigerator?

Can this story be taken seriously? Do you like it? Why or why not? Does it ask a question about "what is literature?" Is it really a survey question? Where do you fill in your answer? In what way is this titled interrogatory sentence amusing? Other things in this book are funny, so is this also meant to be funny? Is literature meant to be amusing? What percentage of people do steal food from the office fridge? There's another survey question in Section Four:

SURVEY
In a milk drinking contest, is it okay if one of the contestants drinks chocolate milk? 

Is this one funny? Is Mike Topp trying to be difficult? Was he mad about something when he wrote this story? There I go calling it a story again; what is a better word for it? Topp doesn't even call blog posts "Blog Posts," he calls it a "Plog Bost":

 

Oh yes, this is a funny book. When Joe saw it, he called it a "hefty piece of art" or something like that. He used the word "hefty," I'm pretty sure. It meant a lot, coming from him, you know? And I'm pretty sure he wasn't just referring to the Tao Lin cover art. 

Yes, they are strange brothers. As different as night and day, but they play together so nicely. Now, for a limited time, get both books for $15, with free shipping.

Shipping Location

USA $15.00 Canada $16.00 Elsewhere $21.00

She does write like a muthatrucker

Tim Howard praised Rachel B. Glaser's Pee On Water saying,

I read a fair bit of American "indie" fiction this year. There's a lot of good stuff, a lot more bad stuff (to be expected, cf. Sturgeon's Law), and the occasional slice of greatness. Rachel Glaser's stories are "odd' and "offbeat" in the accepted manner, but they feel more thought out and necessary than most. Apart from anything else, Glaser can write like a muthatrucker.

And at another year-end faves list, Dennis Cooper loved the books of Youngs, Joseph and Mike, as well as Everyday Genius.

Find all of this at www.publishinggenius.com.

Status Report

For a good time here's a video by Mike Topp

More info about Mike Topp and his new book from Publishing Genius.

Announcing the re-release of Easter Rabbit

 

 

Publishing Genius is happy to announce the re-release of Joseph Young's Easter Rabbit, a collection of  microfiction. The re-release features a new painting by Christine Sajecki, the book's original cover artist, plus an additional section called "Stories Around People."

More info.

Back Up Plan

I made an epic video in my Michael Keaton sequence:



The first one I made, for the indie lit roadshow, is below the fold.

This Sunday, Dec 12: Booksale and Reading

As part of the National Indie Lit Roadshow, come to 24 East Mount Vernon Place between 11 and 8 for great book shopping, drinks, poker, and a couple reading samplers (at 2pm and 7pm).

Email, Goodreads 2010

(I just posted this in Google Reader in response to this comic)

I used to marvel at how bad managerial emails were, in terms of brevity and incompleteness (you know, where I would ask two questions and they would write back saying, "Yes," or "Sound good" [sic]), but I think in 2011 I am going to fully embrace that technique. I haven't yet because I expect 98% of people in the world won't understand that I'm doing it on purpose. But if they don't like me because I'm a bad emailer, then they probably weren't my friends in the first place.

This reminds me of a great poem by Mairéad Byrne in BOWLOH, called "How to Say Thanks When You Really Mean it But Don't Have Time Right Now" -- it reads, in its entirety:

              THNAKS!

I like this "probably weren't my friends in the first place" reasoning and will probably use it a lot going forward.

My book, Adam Robison and Other Poems, has been nominated for a Goodreads 2010 Best Book Award somehow. I'll take that. Will you vote for me, PLEASE? Click here to vote. If you don't vote for me, no problem, you probably weren't really my friend in the first place. If you do, THNAKS!

Ron Diorio on Stephanie Barber's "bust chance"

Ron Diorio's review of Stephanie Barber's "bust chance," shown at the 2010 NY Film Festival:

The third consecutive Barber piece in the program and clocking only seven minutes bust chance didn’t have me checking my watch. This was a smart use of someone else’s footage and added manipulated audience reaction soundtrack. If I put aside “razor’s edge” Ms. Barber is one of favorite artists to discover here and one that I will seek out seeing more of.

Read about razor's edge here.

Check out Stephanie's book and DVD of her films here.

Stephanie Barber and Xav Leplae's razor's edge

From Reverse Shot, a review of the New York Film Festival's screening:

. . . afflicted by the traumas of war, though at a far remove, was Stephanie Barber and Xav LePlae’s razor’s edge (2010), a dramatization of the Somerset Maugham novel The Razor’s Edge. Maugham’s story of postwar dissolution is only vaguely remembered in Barber and LePlae’s escapade, more an occasion of the friends’ reconnection after long years of absence than any kind of adaptation, and the film could be understood as the wild, unpredictable flowering that grows from the settling of things past. As the pair dances in an extreme wide shot on a downtown Baltimore rooftop, or passes an invisible mass of energy back and forth in the background of a Korean restaurant, their melodramatic theatrics are met with quizzical looks from bystanders. They are misunderstood by the world around them, and probably a fair number of people in the audience, yet however removed or inscrutable the creative logic underpinning their collaboration, it’s impossible to miss the film’s effervescent sense of joy. Stuffed in a too-tight leisure suit, LePlae fumbles with the objects in a barbershop, while Barber, dressed in a mustard yellow evening gown, stumbles drunk across the front of an abandoned grocery store. Like a pair of silent film comedians, they move gleefully against the rhythms of the city, and in the process they create their own intrepid and improbable itinerary through Baltimore’s empty lots and the pages of Maugham’s book. . . .

Bjork Diddy

via JGP

Awkwardness by Adam Kotsko

Is THIS the most important book since On Bullshit? I'm reading it now and I'll let you know, okay guys?  (Lately I think "guys" is one of the most awkward referents, at least when written.)

Mark Twain

I don't know if I want to read his autobiography in hardcopy or eBook.

Also, oops, Overlook overlooked the eBook of True Grit.

Everyday Genius Since October 1

Chloé Cooper Jones is the editor of Everyday Genius for this month. I am excited about that. I first met Chloé when she came to visit Baltimore this summer and we all got stoop-ed on Alec Niedenthal's porch. Sometimes you meet a writer and things just click; it's easy talking about the business of literature and the crafting of it and how we deal with submitting and critiques and so on -- that's how it was, plus with Natty Boh. Chloé said she doesn't submit a piece anywhere till she knows it's good, and I thought: yep. I knew she would manage the month well, and from the way things look, I was right.

And it's been a couple months since I did a roundup of Everyday Genius. November was the 4 Year Commemorative Edition of the daily journal, and I marked the occasion all month by publishing work from its archives as well as from IsReads, Chapbook Genius and with excerpts from some of PGP's books. Like, remember "Pocketfinger," that awesome story by Ryan Call which his sister illustrated? Now you can read it all at EG. And here's an excerpt from Kathryn Regina's awesome chapbook As I Said. I liked using the month to highlight other Everyday Genius posts, too, like this hilarious head scratcher from Theresa Columbus and Aaron Burch's Best of the Web-winning instruction. Then, more than just re-"printing" old work, it was nice to check in on Jen Michalski in a sort of "where are they now" interview (A: alive and well), to hear a new musical, uh, thing from Ric Royer, and to see a portion of Stephanie Barber's audience-favored laugh-riot. It was cool.

Back in October things were pretty cool, too. I took editorial duties for the first time in a while, and Matt Walker was kind enough to match each post with one of his amazing photos. It was great to take the reins again, to get into reading submissions and to work at crafting the month. Sometimes I feel like my role with Everyday Genius is really big-picture, to step back and by choosing good editors and interesting projects (like May's Weekly Genius thing), to try to shape the journal's identity as a whole. Obviously, this is a lot different than editing the writing for one month. It's also different than editing Publishing Genius as a whole, from providing feedback on accepted manuscripts to (still) reading manuscripts submitted during April's open submissions to working with designers on layout, and so on. Editing EG is like surgery. Running the press is like building a skyscraper. Both are awesome.

What else is awesome? The work from October, with Sommer Browning, A D Jameson and Brandon Shimoda just to highlight three great pieces among many more. Stay tuned for December and beyond.